"I'm a bicycle owner!" Part 2

Nowadays, the three types of two-wheeled human-powered machines are: recumbent, prone, and upright. Upright is what the meat of this, and the last post have been about.

I mentioned in the last sentence of the last post about the roadster. A roadster bicycle and a road bike are different in minor design ways, but these design differences make all the world of difference for the riding experience. On both, roadster and road, the center bar is parallel with the ground. In road bikes, the angle of the rake of the seat pole and the front wheel fork are steeper that in their roadster cousins, making for a more of a hunched, ass in the air ride.

Bikes that used to be called "ladies bikes" are now known as "step-through" frames, and there are two main types. The first type has the center pole at an angle and meeting the seat pole half-way down. This is a popular and comfortable design, but tends to be heavier due to the fact that the design is inherently weaker than the parallel center pole and must be made with thicker steel. The other main step-through type is called a "mixte" frame, and consists of two thin poles leading from the handle bar all the way to the rear axle, connecting with the seat pole along the way.

This is the kind of bike Corrie found:



She's quite lucky to have found this Peugeot Mixte in such good condition, considering it's from 1974. Peugeot, in classic French form, came up with the dual braking system that's so recognizable today. Before it, brakes were either of the back-pedal kind or single pads on each wheel. Corrie's bike has the original brakes, which themselves would cost quite a bundle.

After the stock market crash, bicycle sales came to a near stand still. Seen as a luxury, bikes weren't something regular people spent hard earned money on. Schwinn, trying to start a little something, constructed a children's bike that resembled a motorcycle, fitted it with large balloon tires and the cruiser was born. Cruisers reached their height of popularity in the fifties, and then the English roadsters made their way to America, and their relative lightness and comfort strangled the cruiser's market. (The roadster, being produced in mass quantities in China and India for the African and Asian markets, is considered the most abundant bike in the world today.)

In the seventies, in Marin County, a group of enthusiasts began racing their bikes down the rugged mountain hills. The terrain would occasionally crumble their street bike frames. Eventually these enthusiasts began buying up old cruiser frames at yard sales, outfitting them with hefty wheels and motorcycle brakes, and the basic mountain bike was formed. Today, a characteristic of mountain bikes is the raked center pole and heavy duty wheels, a vestige of their cruiser origins.

"Comfort" bikes and "hybrid" bikes are almost like mountain bike frames that have been de-fitted and dialed back to a kind of road bike style, usually absent of suspension. Poorly made hybrids are bad on your posture and knees, while the best of this kind, comforts, aren't so bad.

When I was in the market for a bike, before doing all of this research, I went to places and rode prospective bikes. Finally, I rode a bike that was affordable, and it was comfortable and smooth, and I bought it:



It's exactly what I originally told myself I didn't want. The company, 3G, is a local cruiser bike designer and manufacturer, which was a draw. The bike is awesome, but heavy.

Here're some badge shots:




Now, we're not quite done with the bike thing...we'd like to have a few more bikes on hand for when we have the rare visitor over. Personally I'm interested in those roadsters. There are some companies that make very nice, very beautiful roadsters: Pashley, from England and Velorbis, from the Netherlands, but their bikes run in the $1200 range. The next step is to purchase a bike from the period of the fifties to the late seventies and either fix it up or have it fixed up.

So, along with researching what cameras we're looking at, I've actually found an old English Raleigh from the seventies that I plan on picking up (on the cheap), and teaching myself how to fix it up. I like the idea of making myself more mechanically advanced.

Here're some parting shots of our bikes:

"I'm a bicycle owner!" Part 1

That's what Corrie said as we stopped at a stoplight, mere minutes after she picked up her new bike. She turned to me with a goofy grin and enthusiastically uttered that phrase. Her bike, while new to her, was not a brand new bicycle.

The first two wheeled contraption was made of wood and steel and powered by a Fred Flintstone-like foot-power. It was French, like many of the subsequent bicycle innovations throughout the years.

A few years later, the first real two wheeled machine with pedals designed for mass production was introduced, and left lots to be desired. It was called then, and still known today as, the "boneshaker". It had a hard wood seat, pedals on the front wheel, and both wheels were made of cast iron, mimicking a train. Imagine how light and fun that would have been to ride.

The real innovation here was the pedals. That moved the motion of propelling to a central position. A hand brake, also designed from a railroad background, made stopping at least an idea.

Those "old timey" bikes that we think of fondly, the penny-farthings, with the very large front wheel and tiny rear wheel, were a welcomed replacement. Again, pedals adorned the front wheel, which had a tire made of hard rubber. These bikes became extremely popular, and were the first things actually called "bicycles". The large front wheel, while silly looking by today's standards, serves a very real purpose: because there were no chains or gears, the larger the power gear--in this case the front wheel--the faster you could go. The large front wheel made greater speeds available. In bikes with gears and chains, the smallest sprocket is the fastest gear because of the ratio of the diameters.

What we consider "bikes" today were originally called "safety bikes", in opposition to the penny-farthings, because riding them reduced the chances of having a header. Riders of retronymed "ordinary bikes" had a propensity for flying over the handle bars and cracking their skulls on the ground, an action that earned the name "header".

Safety bikes got chains, and later gears, again innovations from France.

In 2003, when Corrie was living in Chicago before leaving for SF and then overseas, I bought a Raleigh SC 40. I believe the SC meant Sport Comfort. In any case, the bike had a mildly raked center bar. In road bikes, the center bar is generally parallel to the ground. The bike I bought had a center bar at a slight angle. It was a wonderfully comfortable bike that I used a commuter and my main transportation in San Luis Obispo during my last few years of college and living there. It was worn out (I crashed it pretty bad one time) and needed lots of attention, and I gave it away to a neighbor before leaving for New York (limited space).

Since then, I've been wanting a bicycle. We never made it happen in Brooklyn, or Austin, but we have since we returned to California. I wasn't sure what I wanted, except that I didn't want a heavy, single geared cruiser. I got varying advice from people before doing my own research. I was pretty sure I didn't want real road bike, with my ass in the air and back hunched over. After renting a bike from a company, I figured that I may not really want a hybrid, since it was hell on my knees, and I still wasn't sure what a "hybrid" was. I wasn't sure how much riding through the mountains I'd be doing, and full suspension I wasn't really sure I needed either, especially if I was going to be touring through Long Beach and the other LA beach communities, so that made me go easy on looking at mountain bikes.

What does that leave? I found out that the answer is actually known as a roadster bike, but that's for later.

Happening Again

As a New Yorker, or as someone living in New York, a person gets used to seeing movies and TV shows being filmed as well as photo-shoots commencing. Since living in New York puts a person in a perpetual hurry, these things are ignored.

Also, living in New York gives a person the ability to identify places throughout the City in films, television, and print ads and associate their own experiences with those places. A particular type of knowledge grows: the power of recognition, like the ability to see a filmed Manhattan skyline and be able to tell if was shot from Brooklyn Heights or Greenpoint or West New York. Or a scene in the Robert DeNiro/James Franco's The City by the Sea, where DeNiro goes into a building in Tribeca. Seconds later they show his window and fire escape, with Manhattan in the background, in a perspective that's definitely from Brooklyn. This mashes of two separate neighborhoods a few miles apart that New Yorkers would recognize.

One more scene I'd like to mention: in the opening episode of Season 9 of The Simpsons, one of the funniest episodes in their canon, "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson" ends with Homer driving the family over a bridge, ostensibly out of the city. The bridge is designed to look like the Brooklyn Bridge, but the background silhouette of the City places the actual bridge that was used for the visual aspect of the background as the Williamsburg Bridge, which means they're leaving the City for respite in Long Island.

Basically, living there makes a person used to seeing locations they recognize from everyday life all over the place in print, television, and films.

Since LA is mostly comprised of a patchwork of urban blight, I never expected to see this, when I opened one of my newly arrived magazines:



This is the Broadlind Hotel behind the Jeep, a spot I'm going to put up a post about later and that's right around the corner and down the way from us. Here's my mock up of the same photo with less airbrushing and a less awesome camera.



It's been a while since noticing a national advertising campaign that has landmarks I deal with in everyday life.

From Latvia

The Baltic country of Latvia was visited by my mom recently, and among the things she brought back was this:



It's popular in Eastern Europe and Russian Europe as a mix between candy and a health bar. It developed as a sweet flavored nutritional supplement--a way to get kids to eat their supplements.

How's everybody's Greek etymological root knowledge?

Hemoglobin comes from the same root, and what is hemoglobin in? Yup...blood. It's made from "coagulated bovine blood products".

These bars are blood candy/supplement bars. My mom brought all of her kids these blood bars, egging us on to eat them. She's like that.

In any case, I ate mine.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting. What it turned out to be was basically tootsie. That's all, a tootsie bar, that faux-chocolate waxy piece of candy.

I was doing research on tootsie for this post, but didn't too deep. What I found was that the tootsie roll candy became popular because it could withstand all types of weather (wouldn't melt, wouldn't freeze solid) and was incredibly affordable. It didn't really state the original recipe, which I'd hazard a guess contained coagulated blood products.

I wasn't a real big fan of the blood bar, but only because I can't eat tootsie faux-chocolate anymore (a tooth needs work).

Slow Motion Fireworks

On the Fourth of July this year, after picking Corrie up from the airport, we walked down the street to find a place to stand and watch the fireworks being launched off the Queen Mary. Since we're so close, we didn't have to walk too far to see the large crowds, and because of the crowds, we could only find some leaning space. But since we didn't need to drive, and park, then join the crowds, it was totally fine with us.

After the show, on the walk back to our place, we passed this particular palm variant:



Having just watched a fireworks show got me imaging this plant, how the stocks looked like the smoke trails and the green like the colorful explosions. I imagined a scenario where the full lifecycle of this palm, maybe twenty years, maybe eighty years, would be compressed and viewed in a time-frame of less than one second. Under those circumstances it would look like a firework had been launched.

Those fractaling patterns throughout nature (and the universe) may be a defining characteristic of the universe. The repeating patterns of the universe...how creamer swirls on coffee, how debris collects into rings around Saturn, how planets and debris collects into rings around the Sun, collecting similarly into galaxies.

It's made possible by relationships between matter that we call gravity and quantum mechanics. Patterns...sand gently sliding down a slope, avalanches, waterfalls...smoke in the air and dye in water...

It seems like there may just be patterns, scale differences, and governing relationships.

Useless Post about Current Writing Project

I mentioned recently about having material not-yet ready to send to an agent, or editor (my father or wife or both) in a post about Publish America. This "Useless Post" mentions that material briefly.

In a post I'm cooking up on bicycles, I came across the terms "recumbent" and "prone" as the first parts of compound nouns with "bikes" the second term.

Recumbent bikes I'd heard of before, and are popular in SLO. These are the sitting in a chair type, and are easy to remember in that riders look like they're reclining. Recumbent--reclining...it makes a certain sense.

Prone bikes, though, I'm not sure I'd heard of, but maybe I'd seen somewhere. These bikes have the rider in the prone position, lying down like Superman on a pad.

It looks pretty weird.

I mention it only because the novel I'm working on that's the farthest along in development sports a facsimile of my alma mater, Cal Poly. In reality Cal Poly is California Polytechnic State University; in my story I've changed it to California Prone Specificity State University, and have switched the easy moniker "Cal Poly" to "Cali Prone". I wanted a tri-syllabic phrase with one part having the hard E sound.

Oh shit...I may have said too much. I don't like discussing my fiction projects on this site.

Fatherly Comparisons

For guys who remember when their dads would wear dark socks and sandals, or other embarrassing things when we were young, there'll always be old photos to scour that might shed light on whether ultimately our fathers were cool before we came along.

When I started wearing Birkenstocks in high school and winter came, I wore socks and thought, well, utility and comfort win the day and maybe dad was on to something.

I've seen enough pictures of my dad to know that he wasn't a dork, like this one of him lounging in cut-offs:



Now, I did recently find a collection of pictures from a trip that Corrie and I took, pictures from a time where my dad and I are roughly the same age. I can imagine our kids looking at these and saying, Gah...what a dork!



Maybe I'm too hard on myself. That was from Europe, when my only other pair of pants was probably drying in some hostel bathroom. And those zipper-legged pants make anyone look ridiculous. Plus there are a few pictures, like this next one, where it works out a little better, and I look like just a hairy tourist.