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.
about that bent crank...is it the crank or the pedal? I have a Raleigh Twenty (two..three of them actually) and one rides like it has a bent crank, swapped the pedals and voila, it rides more or less normally.
ReplyDeleteWhich crank arm is it?
Aaron