No.7 2019 Late March
I was going about 3mph on a slippery trail at night and crashed. Photo taken with flashlight in the other hand. It seems to show the buried brake lever at an odd angle, but I assure you, it's right where it's supposed to be.
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THE CLEM H DEAL has worked, the deals have been gotten, and rather than cut you off cold, we're modifying it this way: Buy a CLEM H complete and get $250 in store credit. The $750 credit before was to unplug a hole in our cash flow stoppage, but it was never sustainable, and may you find comfort knowing that the current $250 is less (but still a little) unsustainable. We can handle ten more at that price, and then everything goes back to normal.
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This is a happier story, good for parents of young children and maybe expecting parents, too. Here.
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Charles Munger commencement address is HERE.
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Near a trailhead in Marin, Mt. Tamalpais, a men's morning pre-yoga session with a stretching-breathing warmup thing going on. You could hear the breathing from afar, but to be fair, what I heard may have been half-chant.
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This was a trial shot in a style we're not gonna use, but I like it. It's Will with the Billie Bar (named for his grandmother). Shot with Olympus OM-1 with 185mm lens, red filter. At f4, 1/500th. Focus on the
curve of the bar, as you can see if you look and see his face isn't all that sharp. Not sharp is not bad, it's just not sharp.
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Call me a sucker for a surprising gift of a bizarre patch—Iyam what Iyam, or however Popeye spelled it. I got this bad oscar in the mail last week, in an interesting envelope with a mysterious note. It's modeled after a sardine can lid, but since the patch isn't actually as large as the top of a sardine can, the Sharpie is there for scale. Patch makers generally require runs of 50 at least, but I don't know the story there. I'm going to sew it on something.
The whale in the patch is calling to me to link to this sad whale tale. The only happy whale stories you hear are like when somebody jumps in and cuts one free of a strangling net or something. The happiest ones don't involve people (how could they?). I'll try to keep things not so sad, but here we are on earth, and as unhelpful as general awareness is directly, it can lead to microscopic personal movements that, if they were followed all over, might help. SORRY ABOUT THIS
Our bikes come wrapped in protective foam and plastic. In the olde dayes it was cardboard. All those Bridgestones, here and in Japan—cardboard. We're asking for it back, and we'll pay more if it costs more. I've asked as of now. We DO reuse it, when we pack and ship things, but that's not the ideal solution. It just puts it on your plate. Eventually it gets tossed, and presumably not sent to the Philippines, but still.
Some of our other packing materials are kind of a neat foam that makes superbe preemptive saddle protectors. You'll think, easy for you to say, but where does Joe Blow get that stuff? You can do it with pool noodles, sold at target. But you buy a noodle and use a tenth of it and then what? Send it to the ocean? I don't know a perfect solution, but when you see HOW it's done, you can probably come up with a perfectly good substitute. If we had a tone of this around, I'd slice it into right-sized rectangles and sell them for $10 each, a super healthy profit, but also cheap preemptive saddle protection, right?
Note the Sharpie for size. This Sharpie has a blunt "chisel" tip, by the way.
Use a long knife. A breadknife is good, and this is not one.
It's a little indulgent to show every step, but decades ago I skipped what I felt was an obvious next step in some process, and a guy called me an idiot.
Here's the shape you're after.
There's a lot of imagery here. T-Rex...a toothy antelope half smiling/have sneering at the cell phone...the black thing is its nose, and the eyes are kind of blocked out by the saddle rails, but they're there, clear as a bell. The important thing is, this saddle will never cave in, and the foam won't end up in the ocean in the next couple of decades.
Do you know what the whale's genetically closest living relative is? Hippo. Picture a fast-forward movie of a hippo getting too stout for land mobility,wading into the ocean and finding relief from gravity, and over the next billions of months, legs turn to flippers, the nostrils turned in the blowhole, and the rest is history. But also, remember, need doesn't drive evolution. It's more of a genetic selection process, and if the genes don't contribute, the thing dies out, right?
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Yesterday Jay Ritchey came by, former employee, all-time friend who now calls Atlanta home, and he and Dan and I went for a ride. On his first try he made it up the second hardest hill in Briones Park:
He later rode up the hardest one, but no video, just grainy black and white, to be seen later.
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The caption contest winner and possibly winners will be picked NOT BY US SO DON'T GET MAD next Monday. You'll be contacted that week. Be emotionally prepared for anything.
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