Showers

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Nov 202012
 

While I’m by no means a 10-level bike commuting master, riding to work regularly in Portland once the rainy season’s started has taught me a few things about myself and my ability to operate a bicycle at night in the rain. Honestly, it’s not really a terrible exerience. In fact, any parallels I’m drawing here between riding at night in the rain and becoming and/or being attacked by a serial killer are almost entirely exaggerated.

Anyway, I made a mental list of observations on my ride home from work last night.

  • The grass is always greener. Figuratively, I mean, not because of all the rain (though it is pretty freakin’ green). I mean that on those days I crack and use the car to get to work, I miss the bike horribly. It doesn’t help that I save only ten to fifteen minutes on my 13-mile trip. The only upside is really that I get to listen to NPR on the radio. Conversely, I’d be lying if there weren’t nights, like last night, when a car would be genuinely swell. My car isn’t currently what one could describe as “waterproof,” though, so I guess it makes the bike seem not so bad.
  • I suck at riding a bike. Particularly one that’s partially submerged. I thought I’d developed decent skills finding paths through fairly ugly rock gardens and stuff on a mountain bike back East, but riding in the dark at night in a downpour with headlights and stuff ricocheting off everything is a whole different sack of rabid ferrets. My route has some of the best urban bike infrastructure ever built, and still, in a strong downpour it’s pretty clear that bike lanes are the part of roads that used to be called “gutters.” The water itself isn’t bad; it’s all the shit under the water. Everything I take pains to avoid riding over in better conditions becomes pretty unavoidable when it’s submerged in three or four inches of black water. My neck was killing me tonight from riding “strong like bull” over a section of submerged chicken nugget-sized stones on asphalt that make holding a line particularly interesting.
  • I’m prone to whimsy, or maybe just hallucinations. Passing certain backlit porch railings in the rain at night causes me to see weird animations. Like those flip-books, you know? Something fixed in position behind the railings tends to look like it’s moving when glimpsed through the slats of the railings as you pass. In some cases, it’s enough to cause me to unconsciously gear up, a Pavlovian response to “dog running off porch” situations that I must’ve developed at some point.
  • Rain pants are awesome until they become totally not awesome. Depending on the downpour, after about the first hour, rain pants magically transform from a really great idea into riding inside someone’s skin that’s just slightly larger than you. Try not to remember this the next time you’re wearing rain pants in a downpour for an hour.
  • It’s all about establishing your humanity. Briefly covering your headlight with your hand is the quickest signal to an oncoming car that you, like any other human, dislike high beams in your face. Seriously. Any action you can do while riding to help establish your humanity helps. Just read a great article that talked about staring right into the goddamn soul of the lady in that SUV who’s about to turn into you as you cross an intersection. Same rules apply at night. Quick cover and release of your headlamp says you are not, in fact, a mere flickering blog of obliteratable light floating in the inky blackness. You are a thinking, feeling human being.

Even in rainpants.

The Other Side

 Bikes, Swine  Comments Off on The Other Side
Feb 062012
 

Position Available, Leicestershire, UK

After reading Friday’s bit about Trek’s tapered steerer tube patent, friends kindly reminded me about the past decade. It seems that somehow I’d misplaced any recollection of the bike industry from the Y2K crisis to year 2010, including Trek’s tapered head tube and fork development. Josh, in particular helped me face apparently repressed memories about Trek’s E1 and E2 head tube standards, and how they have, in fact, maintained that as an open standard.

Somewhere inside that moment where the gears began to engage and my brain’s sad, cheese-clogged synapes started to fire again, this occurred to me: they really have let others use this.

In light the way Specialized recently attacked Volagi, ostensibly for making a carbon fiber bicycle frame that may or may not be painted red (the Volagi frame shape certainly bore no resemblance to anything Specialized had ever made), not to mention the many, many absolute bullshit patents protecting highly dubious claims, Trek’s benevolent stance here seems genuinely nice. Sure, it was a tactical decision to help ensure the design was adopted by fork manufacturers and stuff, and plenty of companies immediately rush to use any perceived intellectual property advantage to cut off development, only to find they’ve painted themselves into a corner. But, still. Trek could have probably been dicks about this, and they weren’t. I think that’s nice of them.

Probably just me, though. A complicated and prolonged search for new employment has me all emotional. I’m currently leaning toward “hearse driver,” provided I can learn to ride on the wrong side of the road and eat .

Yes, self-declared physically unfit British owner of a tandem bike hearse, Reverend Paul Sinclair, recently famous and somewhat , is looking for someone to pedal the recently deceased to their final resting places.

As a naturally morbid personality and recovering Roman Catholic who feels guilty about riding a bike unless it’s also, technically, considered “work,” this would be my dream job, were it not for two things.

First, I find the Queen such a distractingly handsome woman that I have no idea how anyone in the UK manages to concentrate on anything. Just knowing she was near–with that weirdly conspiratorial and overbitey grin of hers–would render me incapable of even making toast correctly.

Second, the hatred for cyclists in the UK is so much more refined than it is in the states, that I’m not sure how one survives there without maybe a bandoleer of Grey Poupon to hurl at passing “lorries.” Case in point, one Andrew Grimes, a writer for The Manchester Evening News, who believes:

It is seldom a good idea to get on yer bike. Hail a taxi. Catch a bus. Drive a car. Walk. Each of these alternatives offers the likeliest chance of completing a journey through a British city without winding up at the undertakers.

Cycling is a relic of cosy, Edwardian rurality, when one could take one’s chances in contest with a lumbering horse and cart. Nobody got his or her skull crushed under the hooves of a farmer’s shire.

But that was then.

Today is the 21st century, burnt tyre rubber time, with a bloke in a tall cabin unable to see the assiduous helmet crouched nose-down on aluminium handlebars, sidling alongside his fuel-stashed juggernaut.

Yet the cycling lobby won’t give up. It never ceases to campaign for more road space – which means clearing goods lorries, buses and motor cars off great swathing widths of our arterial highways—to make way for its insane multitudes of pedalling romantics.”

While I take issue with the Dickensianly be-monikered “Mr. Grimes” regarding the general use of bicycles and his belief that cyclists should stop trying to be so bloody special and just drive a car like any sensible person, I can not fault his prose, which can only be described as the aural equivalent of inserting Jonathan Swift into the arse of William Shakespeare and baking for twelve to fourteen hours at 400-degrees. Fahrenheit, of course.

Even if one dared mount a response to the twisted logic that claims to advocate for the health of cyclists by making them no longer cyclists, phrases like “fuel-stashed juggernaut” overwhelm the reader’s senses with such a flamboyant display of bad poetry as to be almost disorienting. Is fuel actually “hidden” within vehicles, and is the presence of the fuel somehow relevant to the author’s point? Having neither driven nor ridden in London proper, I concede my ignorance in the matter. Perhaps even the slightest brush with a cyclist frequently causes cars in the UK to explode spectacularly. Having located the steering wheel on the wrong side of the vehicle, it’s certainly possible the petrol tanks are somehow located in the side view mirrors.

At any rate, it appears the UK has a a unique strain of an otherwise American disorder, a condition that causes the infected to reduce those with different viewpoints to idealistic children, while they, the clear-minded adults, endeavor to explain How Life Works. One grows up, of course, and learns not to ride bicycles, because riding bicycles is generally very good (it doesn’t pollute and it makes for a healthier population) and because riding a bicycle makes people happy.

And that just won’t do.

Like any truly gifted writer, Mr. Grimes has an innate grasp of the ironic, burying his criticism of less “up-to-date” modes of transportation being pedaled around by “romantics” inside his own peculiarly ancient prose.

It is not safe to ride a bike through high-cabined convoys of juggernauts. To pretend that it is, is to ignore the emergence of all mechanised locomotion since 1912 . . . . I think that all cycling on major arterial roads, especially at peak periods, should be outlawed on pain of jail, apart from in places without traffic lights and where the motorised speed limit has been brought down to 12 miles an hour. At the same time, I am not completely heartless. Obviously, cycling on pavements should be encouraged.”

Yes, “on pain of jail,” cycling should be outlawed in order to save cyclists from themselves–and by “themselves” Grimes of course means their habit of trying to share the road with “juggernauts.” I would submit to the people of London that any man who uses the word “juggernaut” to describe a motor vehicle more than once within the same article, should be driven from the city proper, “on pain of jail,” as a man unfit to process life in the 21st Century. Yes, it’s clearly the cyclists of London who have fallen behind the times, dangerously unaware of the dangers posed by the great, steam-powered juggernauts all around them.

I encourage everyone to read the article, preferably with the following image in mind as narrator.

And yes, Mr. Grimes does indeed conclude with a concession. He is not, “completely heartless,” and suggests cyclists should make use of “pavements,” or, in the slightly less obtuse American vernacular, “sidewalks,” where, he assures us, “granny with her groceries is usually nippy enough to dodge a two- wheeled obstacle crawling past the shop window, even if she cannot always bring herself to knock him down.” I suspect Mr. Grimes himself ultimately lacks the ballsballocks to actually affect cycling in London, or anywhere else, but, should anyone cycling on the streets of London encounter the gentleman making his way along a “pavement,” I suggest you heed his advice, get your ass on his nice, safe sidewalk, and make sure he’s feeling sufficiently “nippy.”

Mr. Corporation’s Dope Tweets

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Oct 122011
 

By now, if you don’t know a war has begun between all things cycling and ward of the state General Motors, it’s probably because you’ve been watching a guy on a mountain bike getting t-boned by an antelope over and over all day.

Basically, GM released this shitty ad targeting college students, claiming you’re a loser if you ride a bike.

BikePortland.org had what’s become the definitive reaction, and everyone else has weighed in with an opinion about how completely inexcusable it is, but what I found the strangest about all of this–and the least frequently mentioned–is that the whole concept behind the ad is way beyond just uninspired.

The ad itself is indicative of the kind of snarky, faux-hipster meanness that marks most corporations’ sorry attempts to reach consumers in the age of social media. “Look how edgy we are, kids,” it says. “Who just dropped the word ‘sucks’ in a print ad? We did, ’cause we be keeping in real.”

Yes. Oh look, GM isn’t afraid to make fun of people, even if they clearly suck at it. Aside from the fact that goofing on a guy for riding a bike to class is now akin to making fun of him because he doesn’t smoke, there’s still that cold fact that old corporations make tired jokes. Seriously, on most campuses in the real world circa 2011, the guy on the bike is laughing at the poor bastard trying to find a place to park his pickup truck. What’s next, GM? Maybe you could make fun of those hippies with their bell bottoms.

Thing is, I know we have to legally treat corporations as people now, but that doesn’t mean we have to like those people. And we don’t expect them to be our friends. In fact, we’d usually prefer it if they just stayed corporations. Sometimes, we’d rather just order the chicken for dinner without needing to know its name. Sometimes in the rush to “socialize” with us, big companies like GM seem to forget this.

Listen, GM, we’re not even back to the point were we can trust your cars not to drop an axle leaving the lot, burn a tank of gas a day, and kill us when their steering wheels fall off, so don’t let’s get all fancy trying to be “down” with us. Instead, tell you what: you make the fucking cars, and we’ll socialize and joke with one another. Speaking of which, here’s a good one that’s making the rounds right now: have you seen that dumbass GM ad? Let’s boycott that shit.

Helltown and Commuting Zombie Hoards

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Oct 052011
 

Given the news tonight of the passing of Steve Jobs, any rant bemoaning the death of innovation in America would seem to be overkill. Though certainly no devotee of the cult of Apple (briefly owned an iPhone before going permanently Android), even I have to admit we’ll likely not see another corporate figure with a personality so uniquely associated with “making stuff” (with the possible exception of this guy).

In the editorial spot normally reserved for my righteous indignation, then, I’d like to offer instead a commercial for beer.

Helltown Mischievous Brown Ale

A cycling friend of mine went out there and launched his own brewing company, Helltown Brewing, named after the original nickname for Mount Pleasant, PA, his location (once upon a time, nearly everything around here was shrouded in the Thick Black Fog of Industrial Revolution). Shawn bought multiple bikes from me, and Helltown is a labor of love for a really great group of guys who’ve either worked with me, ridden bikes with me, or worked at riding bikes with me. Here’s an interview he gave about the brewery and how it all began. Great story, great group of guys, and, as it turns out, some amazingly good beer. So far, I’ve only had the Mischievous Brown Ale, but it instantly ranks as one of the absolute best beers I’ve found. I’m drinking a mighty fine Rogue Dead Guy right now, but wishing I had more Helltown. It was very good.

If you’re in the general environs of Pittsburgh and the Eastern regions thereof, you can find an increasingly long list of places with Mischievous on tap on the Helltown news page. Or you can man up (like my wife did) and pick up a growler right from the source. Pretty freakin’ beautiful out here anyway right now, so consider making the trip. Tell Shawn that Chris sent you, and maybe he’ll hook me up with one of those kickass Helltown t-shirts.

That's Some Beautiful Beer Run Scenery

Meanwhile, back at the revolution . . . no, not that revolution–I mean, the big revolution, the one against cyclists: we have news now that Chicago is cracking down on the deadly menace of cycling while texting, a reckless activity that kills literally one tenth of one person a year.

Public Frenemy #1

It’s true. Thanks to a fledgling little smear campaign rearing its head out there, the unholy act of bicycle commuting is stealing some acid rain laced thunder from “the myth of global warming.” Think bicycle commuting is an unquestionably good thing? You poor bastard. How those godless Dutch and the liberal media have you brainwashed! In reality–or a variation currently being put forth by “certain interested parties”–riding your bicycle to work is roughly akin to burning 55-gallon oil drums in a school filled with puppies.

The Only Thing Worse than Texting While Riding in Chicago: Ordering Take-out While Playing Bike Polo

The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that new studies that “appear to expose cyclists as an urban menace” while simultaneously showing “2.3 times the black carbon, or soot, in their lungs” are factually flawed, at best, though this hasn’t kept them from being picked up by the media. It’s an amazing read, and one worth clicking through to check out. And to think you thought you were a semi-healthy, good person!

While the article goes a long way toward refuting the origins of the “studies” and questioning their motivations, I think it says a lot about the state of Things These Days that commuting by bicycle can–in any way–come under attack. One really has to question the motivations of any campaign that sets out in opposition to something as positive as riding a bike. Given what we know about obesity in America alone–never mind the entire energy crisis and snooze alarm we keep hitting on the death knell for the environment–it’s tough to comprehend an opposition to cycling. That such a campaign–regardless of how small–could even exist, is proof these are truly the end times, ladies and gentlemen.