Late Nov BLAHG
Not so sure this'll work, but what a link it is:
=================
Three similarly interesting quotes:
Without contraries there is no progression. (Wlliam Blake, 1790-93)
Without eccentricity there is no progression. (Joseph Andrews, 1930s?)
Nothing was ever done which someone was not the first to do. (John Stuart Mill, 1859)
The dates weren't the lifetimes of the authors, but when they wrote them. I wonder if Joseph Andrews wrote that with italics on eccentricity, or whether he didn't feel the need to, or whether he'd even heard of the contraries variant. Italics would have meant he was referencing something else, specifically the William Blake quote, and maybe even that he trusted the reader would have picked up on that. It doesn't matter. The Nothing was ever done quote sounds smarter when you read it as kind of a source of inspiration, and not plain-word-literally. I find.
Another related one I read somewhere else 30 years ago--that isn't a guiding light, but I always keep it in mind:
If it's a good idea, it's too late.
=====
This is a good one, you'll be glad you read it, it'll take five minutes.
======
Let me be clear: I know NOTHING about music, but it is still interesting to me. I am, at the level I can be, fascinated with it. The writing and making of it, the "friction shiftingness" of the instruments. Two people (Ted and Henk) have told me that the French horn is the hardest instrument to play, but they're all hard to me. I am ashamed to say, but not to the point of being afraid to admit it, that to a large extent, all classical music sounds the same to me. Don't dislike me for it. It's OK to disrespect me for it.
Two days ago, in the Nov 12 NYT, there was this, which is right up my alley.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/arts/music/chopin-waltz-discovery.html
I'm not going all-highbrow on you, or pretending to be more well-rounded than I am, which isn't much, and I'm OK with that. I wish I could draw, I wish I could read and play music. I can memorize poems like there's no tomorrow, though, and that's something non-bicycley.
====
Remember this from the last Blahg?
It's this guy. Clark. He does this. I find this fascinating.
I really enjoy his description of the requirements for submission. Well-written, exacting, humorous. That's probably a misuse of "exacting." "Specific" is lower-risk there, but exacting sounds better to me for what it is.
======
Many of you have this poster:
Here's some background on the fellow who made it.
=====
Bike are getting scientific:
I KNOW the good intention behind it. Mfr don't trust bike shop people to know how to do stuff. Many bicycle buyers trust this kind of science and precisionism more than they trust their own experience. They can't SAY (I won't believe them if they say) that it's just a guide, a starting point, and OF COURSE the rider and fitter have input. People trust numbers, and one problem with numbers is that they have too much clout with people who don't know how to interpret them, thru no fault of their own. Also, this is a monetizable service. It's a way of elevating the status of Local Bicycle Shop A over Local Bicycle Shop B.
They say this device is "indispensable," but how have we gotten by without it up to now? From a purely nit-picky English usage point of view, the explanation of BRP comes after its third use, and should be after its first use.
(BRP to us used to mean Black Reparations Pricing; now it means Bicycles R Fun.)
I was hoping that "anthropometric" was a made up word, but it's a real word and refers to the study of human proportions. There's something more charming or less dependent, more normal, about just trying a few saddles to determine which works for you. Like tasting different breads or colas or salsas, rather than looking for scores online, etc. I know numbers can matter, and they're another way to study something (like bicycles). We live by certain numbers here: 254, 263, and 282; 67 and 80; 9.9 to 10.4; 69.5 to 72.5 and 59 to 64.
(V-brake boss locations from axle, drop, Muller Factor, head tube angles, trail.)
-======-
I encouraged a lot of Riv emps to watch this on company time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Vd2aPkC9w
We've gone back and forth with organic cotton. ALL of the organic cotton T-shirt sources I'm aware of do some kind of unisex thing to the necks and arms and cuts, and I don't like that. Organic cotton pocket-Ts are especially hard to get. And long-sleeved ones? Yikes.
And some of the organic cotton T-shirt brands, on top of that, have what I kind of ranks as cruddy customer service and policies. The vibe is that they're millenials who rely on rigid policies and algorithms, rather than just being normal human hippies.
======
I "have a thing" for super extreme dumb television commercials.
The guy in the tub. We're supposed to think, "I wish I was in his place?" The costumes, who are these people?
=======
Buy me some peanuts and CrackerJack--from the song--always struck me as superfluous, even before I knew what the word meant. CrackerJack already has peanuts, so why waste the second option on peanuts. Unless peanuts are your main squeeze. But the topic here is CrackerJack, and so...click HERE.
This is how we know we're "living in interesting times."
======
Before you read this next thing, know that horology is about time and making clocks and watches.
Neat story by David Owen, Published in a recent New Yorker.
The Manhattan organization with the coolest name, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, also has the coolest motto, which it shares with the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths: “By hammer and hand all arts do stand.”
The society was founded, in 1785, by twenty-two local craftsmen, whose trades included tanning, silversmithing, ship-joining, stonecutting, coach-making, and chandlery. Since 1899, its headquarters have been at 20 West Forty-fourth Street, in a building that had previously been a school for boys. Not long ago, Victoria Dengel, the executive director, pointed to a large leaded-glass arched window above the entrance and said, “We restored the building’s façade a few years ago, and the Rambusch Decorating Company, which was founded in 1898, took that window completely apart and re-leaded it.” The society’s library is the city’s second oldest. Its stacks rise four stories alongside a cavernous central atrium, and it’s an ideal resource for anyone who has questions about concrete-making, corrosion prevention, tunnel digging, or hundreds of other subjects, as well as for anyone who needs a break from the stuffed animal heads on the walls of the Harvard Club, across the street.
Dengel started at the society as a volunteer, and, ten years ago, became the boss. “I’ve been coming here since I was eleven years old,” she said. “My dad was a Local 14 operating engineer. He was the president in 1982, and he definitely impressed upon us how important the society’s work was.” It conducts a landmark- and labor-related lecture series, which began as a nineteenth-century equivalent to TED talks, and it holds free classes for people who work in building trades. It also rents office space to a number of compatible organizations, among them the Horological Society of New York, the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, and the Society of Mayflower Descendants.
“These are our presidents since the time of photography,” Dengel said, referring to a series of portraits. “On this wall, they’re all deceased.” Her office looks roughly as it must have in the eighteen-nineties. Its furnishings include sternum-height wooden wainscoting and a Seth Thomas pendulum calendar clock, patented in 1876, which was designed to keep track of the month, date, and day of the week, in addition to the time. “This is a bust of Brother Andrew Carnegie, who joined in 1903,” she said. When Carnegie signed the membership register, he listed his trade not as “millionaire philanthropist” but as “cotton spinner,” his first job after immigrating to the United States, in 1848, when he was twelve. An open hallway outside Dengel’s office overlooks the library’s main floor and is flanked by an ornate brass railing. “I love this view, and I just appreciate it every day,” she said. If her office were your office, you would never work from home.
Among the society’s many treasures is the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, which includes more than three hundred and fifty locks, keys, and safes, most of them from between 1850 and 1912, a robust period for bank robbing. Mossman was born in 1846. His parents were Scottish immigrants, as Carnegie’s were, and, like Carnegie, he went to work at twelve, in his father’s safe-and-lock business on West Broadway. His specialties eventually included time locks, whose intricate mechanical workings prevented tellers from opening safes outside of banking hours, even if they knew the combination and had a gun at their head. Mossman became one of his trade’s most avid historians, and, in 1903, he donated his collection to the society. “People come from all over the world to see it,” Dengel said.
Ryan Krakowsky recently became the curator in charge of the lock collection. He studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the nineties, and, after graduation, talked his way into a job as a locksmith’s apprentice in Providence. For the past five years, he has been one of eleven full-time locksmiths at Harvard University, which owns five hundred or so lockable structures in and around Cambridge. He visits the General Society when he can, and recently straightened out some mislabelled locks in several of its display cases.
“I’m also a collector,” he said. “I have a basement full of stuff, and I have four or five safes right now in my dining room.” He’s especially interested in the work of George Damon, who was based in Boston in the late eighteen-hundreds and specialized in bank vaults and safes. Damon’s customers included the Boston Safe Deposit Company, the Bay State Trust Company, the Old Colony Trust Company, and the United States Treasury. “His attention to detail and his craftsmanship were amazing, even in parts you couldn’t see,” Krakowsky said. “His vault doors are basically works of art.” Modern locks are works of art, too, at least technologically—right?
“No, they’re really not,” Krakowsky said. “Unfortunately, they’re not.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 11, 2024, issue, with the headline “By Hammer and Hand.”
=========
This is a food thing. It's well-known in certain modern food circles, and half of you who read. it might wish you hadn't. I don't know. People don't like to read stuff like this, but I dig it.
======
We have lots of fun projects, leading to fun products, going on. We'll be getting more Sackville saks starting next week. Model by model, they'll trickle in. More pants, shorts, baggies (knickers). Working on two bikes, one to replace the NLA Susie, tragically stopped because they take too long to get. And another of a style we won't say yet.
We're INTERESTED in a 20-inch wheel kid's bike, but not a $500 job. Shooting for $320 max. By the time we get it a lot of kids between 7 and 10 will be riding electric devices, so I don't know how it'll go, but my granddaughter will have one in five years, and Sergio's son will, maybe in six years. They'll be generational bicycles, not high-tech kiddie bikes modeled after adult gravel or mtn bikes.
-----
We have paid our share of the tooling for our upcoming and finally OM-style rear derailer. Here's a brief review and some updated details:
We wanted a RapidRise rear derailer. Shimano made them from about 1999 to 2004. The market FOR THE MOST PART rejected them, so they quit. Any patents have expired by now. Shimano doesn't want to make them. I am thinking that back then when they were making them and the market was rejecting them, they must have been dumbfounded about how dumb everybody was. How stuck, how stubborn, how closed-minded. These were revolutionary and fantastic, but something about the timing and the state of the market made them fail.
We bought a ton of them and sold them. Ninety-nine percent of the riders who have one wish they were on all of their bikes. But well over ninety-nine percent of modern bicycle riders have never heard of them.
We wanted to "make" one, so we hired a local freelance super smart guy to dissect Shimano derailers and reverse engineer them. We've had a couple of prototypes machined, and they worked great, but there were little funky bugaboos that made them not ready for Prime Time. We persevered, and they went from 75 percent fine to 95 percent fine, but even 99 percent fine (which they never achieved) isn't good enough to sell.
So we begged Microshift to make one. Eleven months later they said Maybe. Six months ago they said PROBABLY; four months ago we settled on some details and they said YES. The derailer we'll get won't be our Cosmetic Dream, but it'll be maybe the best-looking modern-style derailer made, at least by our standards. More important by far, is that we know it'll work.
We were prepared to pay all of the tooling costs, but then, shock of all shocks, Microshift said they wanted to sell some, too, and if we agreed to that, they'd pay for half the tooling. (We'll get that amount in credit toward purchases, which is a better deal for them than cash, and is just as good for us.)
We went for that, and now they'll distribute their variants thru mainstream channels, and we'll have the exclusive on our groovier, classier variant. We don't have total control over the looks, but as I've said, it'll look plen-t-decent.
I wonder how microshift and its distributors will do with them. People with experience but no experience with opposite-moving OM (which I'm using instead of RR for RapidRise--since RR is Shimano's) won't have a reason to switch if they're already index shifting. They're already just pushing till it clicks, and what's easier than that? Dealers won't tout them, and who buys aftermarket derailers anymore, anyway? And YET--it's a great thing, for microshift to make them available way more widespreadedly than we can. OM derailers are fun to shift with. And it's easy to go back and forth btw normal and OM derailers. I do it all the time, several times a week. No sweat.
We hope to get samples by late March, and if they work like they're bound to, maybe production by September. Those months are guesses.
======
Last weekend's ride with Dan, lots of pushing:
Here's the Charlie I'm riding. I don't own it yet, it's free for anybody to ride. My PBH is 85 and this is a 61. It's classically too big, but i hav crotch clearance, and it's dreamy:
Grant