Saucy Sandy

Picante Ground Zero

The chile pepper harvest has been accelerated this year by Hurricane Sandy. I usually wait until just a bit later in the year to take the last fruits — usually on the evening before the first real freeze of the season I find myself out picking the last of the green peppers with frozen fingers and steamy breath — but this year I was assured by the National Weather Service that the end was nigh; that Sandy’s fury would descend with darkened skies and howling winds and we would be lucky to survive the deluge even in our snug little brick house; so what chance could my poor tropical capsicum plants have out in the open? Consequently, in an uncharacteristic display of good sense, I harvested peppers before Sandy had a chance to gobble them up.

Habaneros - Yucatan green

So this year there will be lots more green sauce than usual. That should be a nice change from the sweeter sauce I’m used to focusing on. The green keeps that spicy vegetal character, the spicy bell pepper quality. So as we hunkered down over the last two days to wait for the end of the world, at least I had the warming company of some delightful Yucatan sunshine to see me through. I got through a couple of dozen 5 ounce bottles yesterday and hope to put by another couple of dozen in the next few days. Then there’s just labeling, packing and world-wide distribution.  

After the storm

Sandy seems to really enjoy carbs.

Day 2: Supplies are dwindling - especially milk and toilet paper - but the East Bethesda Command Center still has power so spirits remain high. Still no federal government, no schools and no public transportation. But no herds of marauding looters have appeared yet. So far anarchy doesn't seem so bad. We will probably be able to stave off the need to resort to cannibalism for at least another couple of days.

The good news is that the scale model of Devil's Tower I am building is coming along well (constructed from papier-mâché made of milk and toilet paper). Another day and it should be complete.

Governor O'Malley has once again reached out to me and asked that I remain hunkered down in place. As always, I will abide. We will continue to monitor events from the Command Center and will send out notifications in the event of any zombie sightings or foreign invasions.

Krödspeed to you all.

Back to the farm

Farmland, horses, apples, and wineries. What else could you want?

Saturday the Baltimore Bicycling Club (BCC) hosted an unsupported version of the MontgomeryCounty Farm Tour (and picnic) that Potomac Pedalers puts on in September. I had missed the ride in September so I made it a point to make it this time. And a great time it was.

The weather was uncharacteristically warm and sunny, so the riding was especially pleasant out in MontgomeryCounty’s Agricultural Reserve. Leaves are just starting to turn and you can smell the smoke of fireplaces and brush piles as you roll along the rural roads past horse and dairy farms, around the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, right past the winery at its base, filled this weekend with the hoi polloi sipping wine in the autumn air. A really special opportunity, given that it’s only about forty minutes from the DC line.

I did the 55 mile route, though 75 and 35 mile variants were also available. BCC seems to have a lot of tandem riders, and they were out in force on Saturday. I'm not entirely sure why any able bodied person would want to ride such a contraption, but to each their own, I guess. I suppose it helps husbands and wives avoid the inevitable grumbling. I can't help but think that the site of my ass cleavage would overcome any perceived advantage The Managing Partner might derive from going the same speed all day, but again, who am I to say?

There were opportunities for rest stops at Homestead Farm in Poolesville and Kingsbury’s Orchard in Dickerson, Md., both of which had shelves brimming with freshly picked fruit straight out of the trees. Apples always taste best at mile fifty.

Now the hurricane is blowing in and it’s time to hide down in the root cellar for a couple of days before coming up to survey the devastation. Keep your heads down and stay safe.

Acorns in Autumn

So you’re going out for a ride Saturday morning with some friends. You reckon you’ll be out for around three hours or so. When you start temperatures are going to be in the low fifties and when you finish they’ll be in the mid seventies. So where you gonna put your stuff? You know, your arm warmers, your leg warmers, your knee warmers, your wrist warmers, your neck gaiter, your thermal beanie, your long-fingered gloves, your energy bars, your gels, your electrolyte capsules, your hydration tablets, your cell phone, your keys, your lip balm – you know, your stuff.

Well, the roadies will of course stuff it all into those three pockets on the back of their Italian made jerseys and make like a domestique with a shirt full of bottles for the team. Their stuff isn’t very voluminous anyway, since they’re all on strict calory-free diets and all their clothing is purpose built with only the latest fly weight hi-tech fabrics by Italian artisans in a small factory just outside of Milan. Either that or they just stuff a newspaper down the front of their jerseys and toss it when they get too hot. And of course their team cars will be along any minute now to collect their surplus stuff anyway.

The urban, fixie hipsters can keep their stuff in one of those huge, formless messenger bags with the seatbelt for a shoulder strap. The bong and stash shouldn't be taking up that much space in there, so there should be plenty of room.  

The tourers will no doubt pack it all into one of the voluminous panniers adorning their rig. Or on their bike trailer, somewhere between the tent, the sleeping bags, cook stove and toilet paper.

The jaunty CycloChics have the delightful, flower festooned baskets on their retro mixtes, brimming with bottles of wine, loaves of French bread and hunks of cheese in which to store their goodies. Not to mention the handbag strewn over their shoulder and the pockets of their trendy cycling jackets. 

The mountain bikers have all those pockets and bungee cords on their gigantic hydration backpacks.

The Acorn Boxy Rando mounted on the '86 Fuji Allegro

But I have recently gone in a different direction. I have recently come under the spell of the old, the vintage, le retro.  I’ve started seeing the randonneurs out of the corner of my eye, and have a strong attraction to their aesthetic. It’s got a kind of Steam Punk / Victorian thing going on that speaks of whacky British explorers and faraway lands. And there’s something these randonneurs all seem to love – French Handlbar bags. After seeing a few of them around town, I simply had to have one. 

Now the classic French bags are Gilles Berthoud bags, but I have a bit of a buy American (if at all practicable) thing, so I searched around a bit to see if I couldn’t find something made by folks a little closer to home. And sure enough, there are several makers out there producing this style of bag. Most seem closer to bespoke mom-n-pop shops, and that suits me just fine. 

The one I ultimately chose is by Acorn Bags, a small two-person, husband and wife shop in Southern California. They make so few products, you have to get on a waiting list to be notified when the small batches go on sale. So you get an e-mail on Sunday night that says, “Tomorrow a batch of bags in [one of three colors offered] will go on sale starting at 9:00 AM, Pacific Time.” Then, when you go to the site, you have about 20 seconds from the time it becomes available to put the item in your cart or they will be sold out. I got lucky on my first try and scored a Boxy Rando in Saddle Tan. 

There is no denying the attraction. These boxy bags, made from waxed cotton with leather and brass, nestle neatly between the handlebar drops. Contrary to what the name might imply, they don’t actually hang from the handlebars, but are propped on a small rack above the front wheel right where you can reach it while you’re riding. And because it doesn’t hang from the bars, the bag doesn’t impede the placement of your hands near the stem. Brilliant, intuitive design, obviously honed over years of practical experience, these bags have pockets on the rider’s side, and a top flap that opens toward the rider with a map case built in. Good design is simply eternal. 

I’m currently riding it without a decaleur, the metal stabilizer typically mounted to the stem or head set with these types of bags. It seems pretty stable, but the bag only just fits between my extremely narrow handlebars (the bike, an ’86 Fuji came with 40cm Nitto bars, typical of the era) and stabilized only by the cords attached to the d-rings on the sides, the bag kind of crowds my thumbs when I round corners.  I’m still fiddling with it and will write a follow-up report as I either figure it out or get exasperated by it. 

Related reading:

http://lovelybike.blogspot.com/2010/09/allure-of-handlebar-bag.html 

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell/PBP1975.html

Rope-a-dope

In 2004 I went to Belgium to watch a certain man from Texas ride around Europe in his tights. I saw the first five stages of that year’s Tour de France. I watched the prologue in Liege from a bridge over the Meuse river. Do you recall who won that prologue? An obscure young racer called Fabian Cancellara. That’s right - Spartacus hisself! But as we now know, nobody actually won the race that year. Interestingly, nobody won second in the Mountains classification or eighth in the Points classification either.

There has always been cheating in cycling and there always will be. Right from the very first Tour. Hell, doping predates the Tour. It's one of the most venerable traditions in the sport! And the youngsters these days have no imagination at all, what with their vampiric transfusions and the E-P-O. 

Was there a rule against putting your bike on a train?

Now everything in the sport hangs by a thread. Money will abandon the teams (Rabobank already gone!) and the riders will all be suspected of doping. Perhaps professional cycling will somehow rise again from the ashes after several years of mea culpas in the wilderness. I don’t know.

Maybe we will forget again. Maybe we will stop caring. In the coming days of gene doping we will look back on the era of blood doping and EPO as quaint. I don’t know what can be done about it all.

I think I’ll just go ride my bike.

Choices & Voices

I watched the presidential debate last night, and though I don’t feel as though I learned anything, I don’t necessarily think it did me any harm either. Maybe a little shoulder pain from cringing, but I’m confident I haven’t suffered any lasting damage. At first I just didn’t understand how this exercise could be useful in any way. I mean if you don’t know who you’re going to vote for by now, there’s nothing either of these yutzes are going to say in this stilted, awkward forum that could possibly make any difference is there?

Would you buy a used nation state from either of these guys?

Maybe there is. After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me that the real problem with the debates isn’t the more or less complete lack of useful information, or the obnoxious, condescending tone on these faces of our prospective leaders. It’s not that there’s too much show biz and not enough substance.  Au contraire!  It’s that there’s too much substance and not enough show biz. 

C’mon, today the average American would never be able to survive, much less stay awake for even a single Lincoln-Douglas debate; forget the seven 3-hour yak fests. We just couldn’t handle it. Our ADD addled brains, coursing as they are with a colloidal mélange of high fructose corn syrup and McCuisine are just no longer capable of concentrating on complex issues or analyzing long-term strategy any more. Hell, it’s a wonder we’re even able to get dressed, feed ourselves and get to our spirit-crushing cubes at our soul-destroying jobs each day, given what mindless automatons our electors seem to think we are, based on the way the talk to us. 

Debates are a quaint, 19^th century idea that just doesn’t seem relevant in the digital age. If it wasn’t for the ability to be distracted by tweets during the debates, I doubt anyone under 40 would even bother. Just over half of us even rouse ourselves off the sofa long enough to vote. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We could jazz the whole thing up - make it appeal to contemporary sensibilities. It seems to me the electoral system ought to think about other ways Americans make choices and follow that model. I’m thinking reality TV, of course. You know, Survivor: Youngstown. So You Think You Don’t Suck. That sort of thing. Let people choose their representatives by texting their vote. Let Simon Cowell have some part in it. Could it really be much worse than it already is?

Nobody wins

Well there it is. Nobody won the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005

Intercooperability

2002 Shimano Ultegra Brifters

I love my Shimano brifters. I have two sets, 105ST-R600 3/9 on my old aluminum Trek2000 and Ultegra6700 2/10 on my newer Madone. And when The Managing Partner went to buy a road bike, I strongly advised going with Ultegra (6600 era). I love having the ability to shift without removing my hands from the hoods. So I was really pissed when recently The Managing Partner’s shifters starting acting up. Hard to push up to the top chain ring. It happened on a century and the on-site mechanic did a little fiddling before declaring there was nothing he could do. 

A couple days later the bike was taken into the shop where the tech did some more fiddling which seems to have made at least a modest improvement. But he pointed out that Shimano shifters are basically designed to be disposable, unlike Campagnolo and SRAM; they basically can’t be overhauled or repaired. I was shocked to find when asked what it would cost to replace the errant shifter, that newer versions of Ultegra aren’t backward compatible either. The only option is to replace the Ultegra shifters with Tiagra or Sora. Tiagra! Either that or we have to replace the entire drive train. 

1986 Suntour Friction Shifters

Newer Ultegra shifters just aren’t backward compatible. Holy crap! Not repairable. Not interoperable. Not backward compatible. I understand Bic pens being disposable, but shifters are something akin to a durable good. I would think they ought to last a little longer than ten years before you are forced to just throw them away and replace them. Unfortunately, I suspect that modern manufacturers think of the entire bicycle in much the same way. 

As Grant Says… 

Grant Petersen is of the opinion that carbon forks are unsafe and that even a carbon frame becomes unsafe after ten years of exposure to light. And he’s not alone. Hmmm… My ’86 Fuji still has all the original low-end drive train parts, including the friction shifters, which still work just fine. And even today there are replacement parts being made by several companies (implying intercompatibility). Why have we come to accept bikes that cost more than cars but don’t last as long as a pair of sneakers? Grant would say it’s because we revere racers and buy the products they use rather than choosing sensible, practical, durable stuff that balances performance and value.

What’s weird is that I thought of Ultegra as the practical middle ground in shifters, providing all the benefits of modern design and technology without the likely touchiness of the elite level racing products. I guess I was wrong. 

I oughta have my head examined

Cyclechic Ferrara

Today I want to talk about bicycle helmets. Brain buckets. Skid lids. Cranium catchers. This Sunday past I spent a bit of time riding around the neighborhood dialing in a newly installed pair of Gran Compe 610’s. I was basically just tooling around, stopping to adjust, tooling some more, etc. As the point was not explicitly to go for a ride and as my average speed was likely to be (and in fact was) not more than 10 miles per hour, I didn’t bother with my special clickity shoes and my special stretchy clothes and my special cranial protection.

I zigged and zagged through the neighborhood, wending my leisurely way through the restaurant district, stopping at the art supply store to pick up a paint pen (I’m planning on pinstriping the lugs on the Fuji) past the school where the farmers market sets up, and out past the neighborhood where the One Percenters live. The brakes were now perfectly adjusted, the bike was riding smoothly, the weather was fine, and I was in a great mood. Remembering that I had promised the Managing Partner that I’d do a few things around the house before day’s end, I decided to take the bike path home. Not my favorite way to get around, but it draws a straight line back to the neighborhood and provides a tunneled crossing of Wisconsin Avenue. 

So it was that I came to a stop by the Barnes & Noble, waiting to cross at the light behind the mommy with the stroller and the elderly ladies on their beach cruisers, when a guy on a MuurMart mountain bike crossing in the opposite direction decided to call out to me, “you ought to be wearing a helmet.” What a your-favorite-curse-word-here-wad. I have ridden thousands of miles per year for over a decade. I own several bikes and several helmets. I belong and contribute to several bicycle advocacy organizations. I have read every book about practical cycling penned in the last forty years. I download (and actually read!) lots of those wonky papers about transportation and actually write a blog that’s mostly about bikes and cycling. 

And this t-shirt wearing weekender is gonna tell me to wear a helmet! Feckin’ douche. And I’m sure he congratulated himself for conscientiously educating the guy on the “old fashioned” bike about the need to wear a helmet. I don’t mind that he wanted me to understand the value of bicycle safety. I mind that the dipsh*t feels comfortable playing the nanny without actually having the first idea about bicycle safety.

And Numbnuts’ attitude is quite common. Think about the last time you saw a headline about a cyclist getting run down by a car. Every such article is sure to note, “the cyclist was/wasn’t wearing a helmet.” What the hell does that have to do with the fact that a car ran down a cyclist? Does not wearing a helmet mean I deserve to be run down by a car? No, it does not. It is an irrelevant fact used to dismiss the rights of cyclists. Note that Nanny didn’t tell the mommy pushing the baby stroller across the street while juggling a cell phone and a Vanilla Frappumochaccino to wear a helmet. 

Many European cities have vastly higher modal share for bicycles, as the transportation weenies say, than anyplace in the US. And you will almost never see a single helmet in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. I’ve personally been to several Italian cities where the share of trips by bike hovers near 30%, and never saw a single helmet on any of the senior citizens riding their bikes. 

But surely, given the accepted dogma that helmets save lives, the streets of Ferrara and Lucca must be strewn with the corpses of the bici-victims, right? No. Why? Because Europeans are used to seeing bikes. They have invested in bicycling infrastructure and have made a concerted effort to get people out of the cars that destroy the quality of life in their cities and cause the deaths of thousands of people per year. In 2010, over 30,000 people died in the U.S. because of cars. In the same year 618 cyclists died. So who should be wearing helmets?

There is even reason to believe that forcing people to wear helmets discourages them from riding bikes at all. Places with mandatory helmet laws have notably low ridership levels. But if you don’t believe me perhaps you will believe the New York Times. And with the massive success of Washington, DC's Capital Bike Share and hopefully others like it in cities around the country, we should expect to see a lot more helmetless heads on our streets. And when we do maybe we'll realize that bicycling is a safe, healthy way to get around, not a life threatening activity for which we need body armor. And maybe we'll start designing our communities on a human scale instead of being beholden to the mighty automobile, and then start holding cars responsible for sharing the road with cyclists and pedestrians.

Well, anyway, I’m not going to change anything here. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to wear a helmet, great. Strap one on. I usually do. But if you see a grown up tax-paying citizen riding his bike around town without a helmet, why don’t you just keep your righteousness to yourself. Go ahead and feel superior. Just keep that warm feeling inside. It might just be the case that other people are able to make informed choices for themselves without the benefit of your superhuman concern for our well being. 

Further Reading

http://chasingmailboxes.com/2012/10/10/you-wear-a-helmet-dont-you/

http://bicyclesafe.com/helmets.html