July Blahg , even tho it's Aug 2

=the Bob Gazette was all over the map, here's some other stuff in it. The song-quiz thing was: I picked a pop song that most people back then had heard of or should have, and changed one word in it's title to a bicycle part or reference. Then you had to name the original song and the bike part reference. Not sure if you had to name the artist, too. I cut off the 2 in the 243, which was a perfect score:

This was the last BOB GAZETTE, I wrote it in September 1994, and Bstone closed for good on Sept. 30.

======

This is not Roger Federer's commencement speech at Dartmouth, but it's a story about it. Short & fun.

======

Two speed world relief may be fine, who'm I 2 say? I don't know how necessary the two separate cogs requiring two separate chains is. Seems suspiciously patentable.

-----

I'm sure the people behind this are fine, and this is just part of doing business, but when bicycle business do this kind of b*llshit, I get bummed. The phallic imagery has nothing to do with it:

"Limited special edition" means what? That they'll stop making them if they sell out?   "aesthetic" is unnecessary; let the viewer decide. "Lightning green" is nonsense. "Futuristic and stylish touch" for an orange you can't see  inside the tire and a green you can see only when the bike is parked is a stretch. Is this really an expression of somebody's personality, and an absolute must?    

I know I don't have to point any of that out. A curse of being me is that I harp on things that others ignore. I'll work on that.

=====

FUN TIME! In last month's BLAHG I solicited anagrams of ROSCO BUBBE for possible, not promised, use as a name for a future bicycle that, if it happens, will be a de-detailed (plainer) version of the Susie W. Longbolts/Wolbis Slugstone. I picked ROSCO BUBBE as the anagram starting point because we have tons of Rosco Bubbe head badges, and I thought anagraming that name would be the only way to justify using them. That sort of stretch doesn't make a lot of sense. It's hard to justify, but the badges are terrific (designed by Olivier):

This one was flattend with a rubber mallet so we could stick it to a door.

In any case, we got fewer entries than I'd anticipated, a bit of a bummer there, but as you'll see, there are lots of fun ones. "Fun ones" doesn't mean they'd clear my personal hurdle for a bike name. I know we have unusual names, but none of them are pure jokes or head-shakers. The thing is, with the combination of letters available, the fun quotient of the list is really high--regardless of their suitability.

We/I was hoping we'd get one that would make a good name for a model in development, but not quite. Lots of fun names here, and my vote would've been for Borus O'Cebb, but I dunno.

====

Here's a thing.

Businesses get desperate when sales are flat, there’s lots of competition, and they’re still trying to grow. It doesn’t matter whether they’re making kitchen gadgets, cars, music-playing devices, computers, sling shots, backpacking stoves, running shoes, fly-fishing and fly-tying gear, cell phones, pocket knives, bows and arrows, or bicycles. When there’s more demand than supply, they don’t invest in changes; they sell what’s working—like in the pickleball explosion (which is may be a response to declining sales of tennis rackets, the cost of lessons, and bickering over public court space).

In the bicycle industry, when sales slow down and the trick is to get current participants to replace their perfectly bicycles, one- to thirty-years old, or persuade walkers and motored wheelers to take up the sport . . . the sales staff screams, “more technology!”

That’s predictable. Modern technologies, mostly electric and electronic, make our lives easier and better so often that we’re caught with our pants down and don’t even notice when they shove us aside like a bossy robot and makes our skills irrelevant. We still inject it into even the simple, refined, beautiful things that have been essentially perfect for decades or a century, and call them upgrades. Look at the inside of your car. Could a car thief in the winter find your wipers? Could you, easily, on a rental?

The best technologies give more than they take, but they all take something. New technologies pass from culture to culture all the time, and often replace old ones, with mixed results. The Lakota Indian’s experience in the mid-1800s at Wyoming’s Fort Laramie is an example. The fort was built in 1834 to re-supply the westward-ho land seekers, gold miners, and Mormons*, and protect them from the indigenous people who saw them as treaty-breakers, trespassers and buffalo slaughterers.

There was a trading post on the fort, where the Lakota went to trade pelts, hides, and buffalo robes for beads, tobacco, whiskey, and matches. The beads spruced up their ceremonial wear, and the tobacco and whiskey got them hooked and coming back. The matches were such a hit that the next generation never learned to start fires the way prehistoric people had for almost 2 million years, and their indigenous ancestors had for at least 15,000 years. Tweens in 2045 might not know how to strike a match, and by 2065, some won’t know what a match was. They won’t need to.

Technology is best when it shortens mind-numbing tasks, like hundreds of calculations, and when it allows precision views and cuts in medical care, like MRIs and arthroscopic surgery. Shifting gears on a well-tuned mechanical bicycle isn’t in either of those categories. Maybe it’s satisfying, maybe it’s too challenging, maybe it’s fun, but it’s definitely optional. It takes practice to do it well, but hardly any practice to do acceptably. Shifting gears on a bicycle is improved by electronics only if you consider the less you matter, the better; and that on a scale from zero to 100, results matter 100 and skill matters zero. Like in surgery (apologies to skilled surgeons everywhere).

No matter what your age or physical condition, it’s fun to fiddle effectively with gadgets that require more than pushing buttons that trigger electronic movements. It’s fun to shift a bicycle mechanically, and there’s no shame in flubbing. Just the opposite: Your flubs are proof that you haven’t thrown in the towel. The point of so much bicycle technology is to get you to lose that fun, and reduce bicycle riding to purely physical extreme, large muscle aerobics, with no fiddling skill require.

Bicycle makers promote technology in a way that makes you feel that anything less than the most and latest technology is holding you back, and people who don’t blindly embrace new technology are often labeled Luddites. Sometimes hippies wear that label as an honor—“proud Luddites,” and that perpetuates an error. Ned Ludd’s squawk wasn’t with progress. It was with machinery replacing people and making dangerous working conditions—chopped hands, toxic fumes—for those, including young children, who operated them fourteen hours a day. Today, Ned Ludd would be a human rights advocate, and “Luddite” would be a compliment. 

For most bicycle riders there’s a sweet spot between a bike that’s frustrating to operate and one that is so technologically advance that they don’t matter. Maybe your is to the left of mine, maybe to the right. It doesn’t matter. You probably like using some skill to control your bicycle. That option’s disappearing.

Electric and electronic parts are winning not because they’re better, but because they’re cheaper to make and customers will always pay more for boxes with buttons and hidden magic inside than they’ll pay for visible mechanical movements.

The current bicycle market isn’t big enough to sustain the growth that big companies require, so manufacturers use the most, and the most advanced technologies to eliminate all barriers to attracting new riders. They use professional and other high-profile riders to promote these technologies, so current riders will want to replace their metal, mechanical parts that often have a realistic useful life of thirty years.

 

*The Mormon Trail, as you may not know, connected Ft. Laramie with Salt Lake City

=====

These are all over Japan. Neat story. In the early '90s they were $150.

=======

Cartoon by Ian Boothby and Pia Guerra. From The New Yorker:

=======

Here's a fortune my son-in-law got a few weeks ago. 

I am familiar with the history of the fortune cookie, how it was invented in Japan around 1870, then made it to the U.S. and was still being made by Japanese people until we put them into concentration camps during World War II, and while they were there, Chinese people took over production. I would love to meet and interview the person who wrote this one.

=======

I am either predictiing or just telling you that my world-view of small things is changing. That's a bad sentence, but what I mean is that the way I am responding to small things in the world, or in my world, are more intensified than they were even a year ago. Small things are more important. Things that were always in the background, as "important or significant and worth exploring, but who's got the time for that right now?" are surfacing to me. I think this must be a common thing, but it's just coming on for me, and there's a big difference between getting washed over by this kind of clarification that's demanding I act on things that have been under-prioritized long enough.

Age (I just turned 70) and being a grandparent (she is 21 months old) are the main factors, I think. I want to be healthy long enough to see my granddaughter graduate from college (or, as my daughter says, "maybe trade school, she may be a bricklayer, let her be her.") She lives, with her mom and dad, in the backyard in a small house. Not a tiny house, but a 750-square footer. 

"You've thrown the worse fear that can ever be hurled—

Fear to bring children   into the world"

is a line from Bob Dylan's Masters of War, and it is what I think about when I think about current politics.

Anyway, this is a personal concern, maybe too much for here.

There are business concerns, which for me are just another kind of personal.  I talk about it internally constantly, so it's kind of a blur between what I say at work here and what I've said in the Blahg here...but I really want to get our own, independent sources for those reverse-action derailers, which are purely, absolutely, I will hear no arguments to the contrary, the best idea in rear derailer movements ever. Shimano knows that but caved in to the market's unacceptance of them when they were current options, from about 1999 to 2005. 

The chance NOW for them to make a comback is...non-existent, unless we do it. The movement is to electronics and electric, and beautiful, genius, logical, mechanical designs have no place. We've been working on our comeback model for about seven years, and it's been kept alive by stubbornness and naivete,    Another is a redo of V-brakes. Current models are, to use an expression my youngest daughter came up with in a different context, "fine, not great." They are the best brakes out there, but they all suffer from a design flaw that was solved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but has since disappeared--mainly, I am sure, because the industry doesn't care about rim brakes anymore. So the capable brake makers of the world, who COULD redesign and fix this LITERALLY in an hour, are not doing it...because they're more sales-focused than design-focused. That is reality, but it also sucks for the kind of progress we'd like to see... The best designed V-brakes ever, my opinion (shared by everybody here who's seen them) are these:

 

 Don't look at the nicely curved arms or the overall aesthetic. That's important but it comes last and it's superficial. It's even distracting. I've talked to Tom about these. He doesn't have the tooling or designs. He's moved on. One thing about Tom Ritchey that maybe you know or realize and maybe you don't, is that — how do I say this most respectfully? It's hard but that's how I mean it it — when he has wanted to, and at his core, he is a genius artist designer. Current market realities don't require that, and I'd even say wouldn't respect it. But I've known him since 1980 and have seen what he has done and is capable of, and it doesn't make SENSE for these abilities of his to have a place in the modern bicycle market. There are parallels in other fields, fields that you're intimately familiar with, come up with them on your own. 

But back to these brakes. Will bought a single arm from eBay, It's all he could find, but it was brand new, $15, sold "for parts only." Here are some photos that still don't reveal the single most important feature of it, but show, at least, some stuff:

 

 

 

 

 

These here have 95mm tall arms, which might mean nothing to you right now, but a normal modern V-brake has arms between 111mm and 116mm, which fit fatter tires better, and make it easier to fit fenders and racks. This brake works fine with no racks or fenders and tires up to maybe 2-inches. If we used this brake and some of its features, we'd change a few things to make it work better with our-and-most other fattish-tire bikes that may or may not have venders or racks. This is a "before I die" project, but I'd like it to happen 15 or 20 years before that day. Twenty.

=====

This is the current state of innovation in the bicycle industry:

 ====

I have a friend, a fly-fishing, rod-building-plein-air watercolor-painter friend, whose skills in all of those things are way more than admirable, and I have a few of his watercolors of my favorite place on earth, a river that I have a long history with, but there was a 40-year gap while I got married, had a family, made a living...and didn't fish and didn't know  him. I met him on the river, and people who have bamboo rods generally talk to other people who have them, too, and in this case he started the conversation, and things developed from there. He's 84, and I've known him for slightly less than a year. 

One thing I want to work on, especially with him, is how to express friendship and let him know how much I appreciate his and him, without coming off like either (1) My friendship is a compliment; or (2) He's old, so I should blurt something out before he dies. He seems healthy. If I'd known him for years it would be less awkward, but I haven't. I've been to his house (near the river) twice, for several hours each time. I call him and he calls me and we talk for 15 minutes to almost an hour. We're both comfortable rambling and going on tangents, and there are topics and sub-topics related to fishing and painting and families and mutual friends that we can talk about. It probably isn't important that I express any more than that, but I still wish I knew how to.

 Here's his favorite painter.

 ======

Is Japan becoming Americanized?

A father-son team were flying Delta some place and the flight was delayed. Flights GET delayed, but apparently Delta has had more than its share of delays. The F/S team got mad, said the delay cost them $1,000. With I guess no other recourse, they went to the Delta lounge, presumably with other delayed passengers. They lounge had free food and wine, and the two of them extracted more that their "lost" $1,000 in chow and refreshments. Of course they couldn't eat and drink that much, so they wasted a lot of it. The made a video of it, posted it on TicToc and got nothing but praise--for their creative solution, sticking it to the man, and so on. No doubt they'll inspire others, which we should all find depressing. Sorry to even bring it up.

====

Oh, the Olympics. Time for nervousness all around, time for four to 20 years of practice to go dissolve into disappointment. This is a Blahg, not an editorial in the New York Times. I have competed, I grew up competing, all thru high school. I won three Punt, Pass, and Kick contests in a row--if you remember them. I batted .538 my last year in Little League. I wrestled and played baseball thru high school, and wanted to be a pro baseball player. I raced bicycles competitively for six year. I have not had a BAD experience in any competitive sport, but for decades now I have (personally) been against competition. I don't think it trains success in life. I think a lot of the time it's parents living thru their kids. I think it's a distraction from more important things. I don't like that the proportion of losers and also-rans to winners is so high. But I like to watch running events, pro basketball, baseball, football. I don't watch much, I'm too busy, but for downtime, sure. I'm inconsistent. I like how sports can train skills and bodies and are generally healthy, except for things like boxing and football. I like to see people who've put a lot of work into a sport do well in it. This is just me, not me telling you anything of value. If you or your child got something good out of sports (as I think I did), GREAT. I know they CAN do good, I just don't like to see people lose and get sad and think less of themselves for it.

======

 I would LOVE a little money help with our derailer and brake projects. But that's not where people are  putting their money:

Note to Monte and Olaf:  $50,000 would go a long way here. Nobody would have to know. We'd pay you back in a year with 6 percent interest.

It's just that, do we need more sports nutrition? The hospital stuff, OK, but how complicated is that, really? 

This from today's (July 29) NYT:

I am not advocating chicken McNuggets, but still. I personally, still follow a low-carby thing, but whatever...the $22M "investment" in the sports nutrition thing, whew.

The thing with investors is: Then they feel they've earned the right to control the project. And maybe that's just how it works. But with the OM (opposite-movement/RapidRise) style derailer we're caring about, I can imagine what they'd say:

Are people WANTING them?

a: Yes, a few hundred people are.

A few hundred THOUSAND?

a. No, just a few hundred.

Then why not make the kind of derailers they want?

a. Shimano and SRAM are already doing that.

======

PENCIL

Olympics: I want Simone Biles to clean up again. She looks relieved, happy, grateful. Good comeback story. Sunisa Lee has maybe an even better one. Google that.

 

I know nothing about Snoop Dog...other than at one point he went by Snoopy Doggy Dog, I think.. and he's in a different world, but I like everything I see, all the stuff he does. I liked this story, and the 34:40 200meter he ran in Oregon isn't slouchy at all for a 52-year old guy.

======

But mainly, Kamala Harris.  She is the big news, and a fine alternative.

PENCIL

 ======

From the current issue of the bicycle industry's trade magazine, FYI:

 

 

"I'll wait and see...I'm a scorecard guy." 

I wonder how DT's scorecard is looking after this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3eCCbVr3EU

=====

 Here's one of about five projects we're working on:

 It's not an aesthetic masterpiece, and by 1970s thru 2009 standards, it's marginal at best, BUT the bar is really low for front derailers these years, and we've primped it up visually and mechanically in four places. The curved front outer cage, with cutouts. The inner and outer cages are separable, for easier dealing with chains. The lever arm is longer than the parallelogram arms, for lighter action without excess complication. The cable routing is, normal, direct, intuitive, the way all front derailers used to be until the uglifying complication.

 

===

We're continuing to work on and be frustrated with our rear derailer, V-brake, and a centerpull. The brakes will get there; the rear derailer is more iffy, but we have plans B and C for it, in case Plan A fails.

======

 

Customer Tom, 75, former college wrestler and weight lifter and you should see his calvesl, and in the image below, you kind of can...anyway, he brought his 3-year old Clem in for a tune-up. He rides it every day or close to it, and he didn't notice the rear tire wear until about a month ago. He loves the bike, he's had it on tours and is planning another one on "the Mickelson trail," in South Dakota, which he expected me to have heard about, but I hadn't. Here are some photos before and after. 

 

I'd guess Tom could've eked out 500 to 1,000 more miles on this tire, but we gave him a new one and said we'd replace that one when it got well into the green, too. 

 ========

Fix For Olympic Swimming Events

I know this is not going to happen, I know it creates problems I can't anticipate, I know, at some level, it's stupid, but on another level I like the idea.

Swimming podium spots determined by fractions of a second are bogus. How about this: At the 400 meter mark, the usual ending for a 400 meter race, if one swimmer doesn't have a two-second lead over the next closest swimmer, then sound a high-tech underwater buzzer letting them know they gotta keep on going until there's a two-second (or 12 foot, or whatever arbitrary time-distance unit that makes sense) between the leader and the next guy.

In a 100m race, require a one-second lead. It may turn a 100 meter event into a 220 meter one, but more likely--based on the effort expended in basically a full-on sprint--it would end at 150 yards or so. But whatever the magic time or distance is, it should be the minimum to clearly define a winner, not some 1/100th second nonsense, where the winner is 6-inches taller anyway. Or measure actual speed in the water. Something. 

Only the top three swimmers count. Fourth at the end of the original distance may be 1/10th of a second behind Third, but that's the breaks. This is exactly why I need to stay in my tiny little wheelhouse.  But still...

=====

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

====