http://www.momentumplanet.com/features/my-dream-bike-city

Holy crap.

Anyone in the cycling community feel like buying this bad boy for me? mmmm....


I think as for me, to be the "ultimate city bike" I'd keep the 650b tires, but go with the Grand Bois Hetre tires (50mm) in red, steel frame, 8 speed IGH, dynamo lighting front and back, Randonneur style rack on the back, flat rack up front (with integrated lighting, of course), and fenders just like on the bike above. Someday maybe I'll be able to afford a custom built Shamrock Cycle like that...

Bent crank, new sports car, and coaster brakes, yippee!

Well, Last Monday, I made the g/f a new bike - a Schwinn Le Tour Mixte. Bright. fricking. yellow. But, it's comfy, reliable, and pretty quick. Plus with steel rims and a bulletproof drivetrain I've thrown on a couple bikes so far, I won't have to worry about her when she goes out for a ride. She's been riding the Raleigh Sports - it'll be fun to see her face when she can cruise faster than 10 mph :) So now she's got the Cadillac (her Sports) and her MG (Le Tour)

Relatedly (is that even a word?) every time I ride her Sports, it drives me INSANE because one of the cranks is bent. I just tried to straighten it at the local car garage (as my tools are at my house 80 miles away) and it didn't seem to be doing anything. I doubt it's the bottom bracket, as the other crank doesn't do anything, but who knows?

Final bike-related tidbit - I stripped down the Pug and put 32-590 coaster rims on it. I LOVE it! It's quick enough to keep up with traffic (52X19 gearing), but is torquey enough to go up hills with abandon, and I don't need brake levers! It's really clean looking. I"m really tempted to get a pair of 650b rims built up around a Bendix kick-back to throw some wide shoes on.

So, on to more serious stuff - Monday, before I went to the co-op, I was walking down an alley and I saw, spray painted on the wall, "This world is shit." Now, I've seen this before, but it truly made me think this time around - is this world all that bad? I mean, I look at the wars going on, the hunger and poverty, and the idiocy that has been running the US government for years on end now, and I think to myself that, yeah, there are quite a few things that could be fixed about the world as I see it, but to call it shit? I don't know about that. Any world where you can walk or bike down a country lane and see all the leaves changing colors, and listen to the shushing of leaves under your feet? Not such a terrible place.

It kinda reminds me of that scene in Good Morning, Vietnam (I think) where they're showing all the destruction, fires, and death, while Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" is playing, covering up all the sounds of mayhem that one might have been able to otherwise hear. Powerful stuff. In my humble opinion, a world that brought us Brother Iz, Mark Twain, hot cider on a cool fall day, Louis Armstrong, and love cannot be, as one says, "shit."

In school, we're getting ready to start Holocaust stuff in 8th and 10th grade (because, apparently, everyone needs to be so utterly inundated with Holocaust stuff that they don't know US history), and we're getting into Macbeth in senior lit. Frankly, I'm about ready to wet myself over Macbeth, but as far as Anne Frank and Night? Meh. Is it important to know about the Holocaust? Yeah, but honestly, shouldn't students be worried more about modern atrocities? You know, something that someone can stop? I was thinking the other day, if a kid, in 1944, faked his birth certificate and got into the army at the age of 16, he'd now be 81 years old. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't WWII vets still alive (heck, I just read in Men's Health that Britain's last surviving WWI vet just died at 111 years old), but at this point, there doesn't seem to be anything that one can do to change the past. We can change the future which is my goal as a teacher. I mean, think about it. For better or worse, every student is going to change the world that he or she lives in. Someone was Bill Gates' math teacher. Someone taught Shakespeare iambic pentameter, and taught Van Gogh culinary skills (boo...bad joke). But seriously, why not me? The way I see it, if I can have just one student make something of themselves like those individuals, I'd be doing better than the billions of other teachers that came before me and that are teaching now.

So a couple days ago, I got the Sackville Saddlesack from Rivendell. Does it fit the "style" of my bike? no. Does it look good, work amazingly and fit under my Brooks perfectly? Of course...

In a word, I fricking love the thing. The only thing that makes me sad is when I get my medium saddlesack to carry stuff to school in, I won't be able to put this on the front of the Uni - the front brake wire gets in the way.

Regardless, it's a fantastic bag - I'd recommend it to anyone who needs a relatively small, yet still holds a bunch, but is kinda cheap saddle bag while there are still bags to be had.

Anyway, I just went from 28c's back to 38's - it's like riding on pillows, and it doesn't slow me down much. They do allow me to hit a bunch of roads I'd otherwise have missed - which I did on my trip tonight. Pretty amazing stuff I saw. For instance:














Fricking awesome.

Anyway, this bike is breaking in more and more as I go along (now about 500 miles into my B17, and about 200 miles into my new drop bars) and it is getting just more and more comfy. Matter of fact, with a couple of solutions (i.e. tightening the perpetually loosening BB) I could see myself taking this thing on rather long trips.


Completely unrelated - check this out:
Witnesses: Fleeing man run over by cop cruiser
Officer also fired Taser from car

A Pensacola police officer was placed on administrative leave Saturday after his cruiser ran over and killed a young man in Brownsville.

Pensacola Police Department Chief John W. Mathis said Officer Jerald Ard, 35, had been placed on administrative leave pending the results of an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

"It's obviously a very tragic and unfortunate incident," Mathis said. "My heart goes out to the subject in this case and his family. We'll just have to see how this plays out."

Ard saw a suspicious man at a construction site about 1:50 a.m. Saturday while he was on routine patrol near Cervantes and T streets, a police department news release said.

The man left the scene on a bicycle and Ard pursued, attempting to stop him by using verbal commands and his vehicle's blue lights, the release said.

The officer also tried to shock the fleeing man with a Taser stun gun, according to the release.
After the Taser was fired, the man turned into the parking lot of a vacant business near R Street, crashed his bicycle, and was run over by the pursuing police car, according to the release.
The man, who remained unidentified Saturday evening, was pinned beneath the car and later pronounced dead at the scene.

Kristen Perezluha, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said investigators were not ready to release additional details about the death.

Perezluha said her agency will handle the "use-of-force" aspect of the case, and the Florida Highway Patrol will investigate the incident.

"We're handling it the same way we handle officer-involved shootings," she said. "Generally, we complete our investigation and turn the information over to the State Attorney's Office."

Investigation continues
Assistant State Attorney Greg Marcille said his office was contacted Saturday morning and will await the results of the investigation before deciding whether charges should be filed against Ard.
For more than four hours Saturday morning, investigators took photographs and measurements and placed small cones along the road and the grass to mark the paths taken by the bicyclist and the police cruiser.

As many as a half dozen patrons attending a concert across the street at Sluggo's said they saw Ard pursuing a young black man with dreadlocks on a bicycle eastbound on Cervantes Street shortly before 2 a.m.

Witnesses said they saw Ard fire a stun gun out the window of his moving cruiser at the fleeing suspect immediately before the incident.

Jamison Boler was seated outside with at least seven friends when they saw the blue lights of the police car, then noticed the man on a bike heading east, toward the Pace Boulevard intersection.
"The man on the bike was on the sidewalk, boogeying down, trying to get away," Boler said. "The policeman fired a Taser out the window. The guy (on the bike) made a U-turn and ditched the bicycle and kind of did a somersault on the ground.

"Not two seconds later, the cop car just ran over him," Boler said. "The cop ran up on the curb and hopped out of the car and said, 'Where are you at?' The guy was still underneath his car. You can still see his red shoe sticking out."

Disputing reports
Another witness, David Taylor, 25, said the bicyclist, who appeared to be a teenager, was dragged after being stuck beneath the police car. His account differed from the police news release, which stated that Ard fired the Taser but did not hit the man. He also said Ard had not activated his siren. Taylor also said he never heard Ard shouting at the man.

"The kid fell off the bike (after being shocked with a stun gun) and then was stumbling because of the momentum," Taylor said. "It was probably about 10 to 15 feet that the man was drug."

The police car came to a stop about 35 feet from the man's bicycle. The victim remained pinned beneath the car for more than three hours before the vehicle was removed and his body was taken away.

Police cordoned off the block of Cervantes as a crowd of concertgoers and passersby looked on.
The police later moved the crime scene tape farther from the street because they said the onlookers were hampering the investigation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsAKfcsF4do

unbelievable.