No. 16: Late March
Rivendell rider Nicholas E. took this film photo with a Canon A-1. It's in the Santa Cruz mountains, about 70 miles south of here:
With Kodak iso 200 film (popular in convenience stores in the '80s and '90s). That's a bike portrait. The Joe Appaloosa looks as natural as a mechanical object can be in that scene. Good job, Nicholas!
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Last Sunday Dan and I rode on Mt. Diablo with Sofia, and she used her Fuji digital camera to shoot this photo thru my 35mm Olympus camera with a 50mm lens and a red filter on it, and it came out super neat in a different way. The circle in the middle is the focus ring in my viewfinder.
The smokey magma-like riverish thing is the trail she'd just come down. This image was squared and cropped, but no Photoshop trickery was applied. It makes me jump for joy. The fact that she even thought to do it. I'm speechless with admiration.
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I've been working on a brochure that'll include this, which is almost forty years too late to do mass good, but I hadn't inner-articulated it until a few months ago, so there's that excuse:
There's an extra comma, and the photos could use a big circled 1 and 2, "monkey" is spelled wrong, and ideally we'd show this happening on a moving bike so you couldn't see the left leg balancing it, but we're mucking along here as we can, and this is where it is now.
This is Will proofreading the texxt. He needs a quiet space to do that:
Not landfill yet. In the future, we're all going to be that, right?
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What's going on here? Maybe it's obvious, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's so obvious that the question throws you off; maybe it's not.
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The program/flyer for the Sea Otter Race/bike extravaganza had this press release kind of thing. I understand zero percent of it.
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The same program had this:
There are two things to note. Two things I noticed, anyway. The price and the model name. They're naming a cassette after a confederate general? Were all other possible names taken? Do the non-black cogs that seem to fence in the black ones represent non-black people enslaving black people? That would be an insane suggestion without the General Lee model name, but with it--hey, who knows? It's possible that it's a Chinese general, or even Lee Majors, but if so, there was some U.S. history homework that wasn't done--and it's made in Italy, anyway. Let's baffle The People! As far as I can see, I mean, on the surface, it seems like the bicycle component for extremely wealthy techy racists. I'm sure there's a good explanation. Don't yell at the company and tell them you found out from us, please.
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The landlord wants us to sign a 5-year lease. Will settle for a 3-year lease. It all makes me sick to my stomach with nervousness. Business is rough. The "climate" is difficult? Is that how they say it? I don't know about that. We're not at all having an easy time of it. Buy what you can when you can.
I got scolded for "begging" by a guy who also scolded me for something else, I forget what. I think it was race-related. Four people have not liked that stuff.
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It's Will reading our 20th catalog, which was current 4 years ago but isn't anymore. It still has $10 worth of information in it, but you can buy it for $3.00. We used to give it away free, and considering that AND that it's out of date, buy it for a catalog collection and see how Nitto forged stems are made...and yes, there is other good info there, too.
Here's a LINK to the item on our site.
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We are pursuing Hat Perfection. This is not one of them, but it's closer than you think. Short brim. You have no idea how hard it is to get that, but we've found a supplier, and yes, MUSA.
Will is becoming a reluctant model. You can see it in his smirk there. But thanks, Will! You're a rescource, so there will be more, please.
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I don't get out much, but there was a window for the three women in my family to go to Morocco with some friends, and then to Paris (they saw Notre Dame a week before the fire). In Morocco there was this guy making wooden things on his lathe.
That's all for now. I tried to put a few more things in here, but this is still a variety pack. More next time. Thanks for wading thru it, if you did.
Grant