A Questionable Decision

I'm not trying to knock on religion in general here, but it seems to me that if people are going to argue in favor of the intelligent design thing, they should have to explain why birds are unable to stop compulsively crapping every 15 minutes. Better yet they should have to explain it to my arm, which has its own counter bird-crap story to tell as of today.

The big clear thing in front

of your car is for looking out of. Its really hot now and people have started using those metallic shade things in their parked cars to help keep the temperature down. Apparently it's even so hot that people are starting to think that driving around with the shade still deployed is a capital idea. Anyhow, I actually witnessed this. And lived.



"Well, you should be aware of the cars, and you should know that many of them are driven by people so stupid they can barely operate them..." -Bikesnob

Taking the Lane - a theory

If you as a cyclist find yourself on a multi-lane road with no suitable shoulder or bike path to ride in, good sense and self-preservation demand that you "take the lane," which is basically to own the rightmost lane and ride in the center of it. The law backs this up, in fact. While it is tempting to ride as far to the side as you can, this risks getting doored, and more importantly, encourages slack-jawed fools to try to wedge by you in the same lane. And you don't really trust your life to the spatial judgment of slack-jawed fools, do you?

In the downtown area, essentially all of the streets without bike lanes are one-way, three lanes, 25mph posted limit. Assuming drivers keep it under thirty, the speed differential between a motorist and a cyclist (the kind with the confidence to ride in traffic) shouldn't really be all that great. If you're in a hurry, change into one of the other two lanes and go around. If there's so much traffic that it's actually a pain to change lanes, the cyclist is probably going to outpace the traffic anyhow.

So easy in practice, yet so seldom done. Why? Because driving, at least in a non grand-prix sense, is a lazy activity which seldom requires any exertion on the part of the operator. Looking left and rotating the wheel that you're already holding slightly is cake. There's no way that if you sat a test subject in a laboratory chair, put a wheel in front of them, and asked them to perform this task, they'd ever in a million years rate it as difficult. But when a person possesses some sense of entitlement that says they shouldn't be required to work at all aside from sitting in a padded chair and moving a foot once in a while, turning your head to check and see where the next gap in traffic is becomes this huge thing. It's like settling in to watch a movie and then being asked to actually get up and walk to the television to adjust the volume. Walking 8 feet is no big thing, but now you're all grumpy. Look how many people can't be bothered to use turn signals. You know I'm right.

Stripped!

We've all seen the bike carcass still partly locked up to a rack somewhere but minus a wheel or the seat or something. Sure, it sucks when it happens, but it's common enough that you don't normally take a second glance when you walk by a half-stolen bike. Usually, though, you only see bikes missing parts that are easy to pull in a few seconds, often without tools. Quick release seatpost clamps and wheel skewers are great for quick adjustments, but they all but gift-wrap the parts for thieves. And as if things weren't easy enough to steal, incompetent lock usage factors in. Way too prominently, I might add.


I came across a few carcasses that gave me pause the other day. These things hadn't just been mugged for a few parts, they'd been picked completely clean. And of course, all three were located outside the engineering buildings. Beware the kids with wrenches, for they may actually know how to steal your front dérailleur and put it to use.

Exhibit A: stolen bits include the usual seatpost and rear wheel, plus the rear derailleur and brake, the chain, and the entire front end from the stem forward. AND this one had two different locks on it.

Exhibit B: We might as well count what's left of this one. Locked wheel and frame, seat and seatpost, stem, headset, fork, bottom bracket, lock holder, and a rock. Both derailleurs are gone, shifters are awol, brakes peaced out, handlebars invisible, even the chain is absent. At least somebody at the bike auction will convert this into one major eyesore of a fixed gear.

Exhibit C doesn't look quite as crud-coverd as Exhibit B, but it's just as thoroughly picked. Somebody bothered to take the stem and the rear brake as well as the seatpost and surprsingly the chain (again!). As with Exhibit B, cranks are gone too, which is no mean feat. Hah. feat. Bike.

Just to check my 'engineers are the piranhas of bike theft' hypothesis, I went for a ride around campus. Checked outside the quad, the lunch place, the bookstore, both gyms, some assorted dorms, and most of the academic buildings on campus. Saw probably several thousand bikes, and the award for cleanest picked still goes to Engineering, hands down. The only semi-competition was found outside the Life Sciences building, where somebody evidently stole the tube and tire from a completely unlocked POS mountain bike but left everything else. I don't know how to interpret that at all. Whatever, my engineering guys are making me proud.

Stairs

It bugs me a little bit when a staircase has an odd number of stairs, particularly when I'm taking them in twos. What really gets me, though, is having a staircase with a landing area in the middle and an even number of steps on one section and an odd number on the next. That's ankle-breaking territory. When the revolution comes houses will only be built in integer stair quanta.

Jerseys

I should probably point out that mostly I mean while on an actual field



I figure it becomes funny again right around semi-pro.

I am some sort of cycling beast!

...and so is anyone else, with a 14:1 mechanical advantage.

I busted my bottom bracket bearing cage yesterday. Here it is in all its semi-catastrophic failure:

The Evils of the Kickstand

Ah, beautiful order.


So you have a kickstand on your fancy little bicycle, and that's cool. Lets you prop up the bike and all. The thing is, it lets your prop it up just about anywhere, free standing. Why would you want to do that? Bikes locked to just themselves get stolen, friend. The 1950's phoned up, and they sound pissed. I think they want their trust in their fellow man back.

More importantly, sometimes people don't know what's good for them. Or maybe it's that they don't know what's good for other people. Or more likely, they're just being inconsiderate. The second problem with being able to deploy a kickstand is that people tend to leave their bikes right smack in the middle of things and clog up the works. Bike racks (and I work on a biking campus, there are thousands and thousands of bike racks) are formed in nice little lines that would please the fire marshal if ever there were some sort of crazy outdoor bicycle parking fire. Even if there are no racks handy, there's nothing wrong with leaning your bike up against a wall or a tree. Not only do you eliminate 2 lbs of unnecessary metal from your ride, but leaning your bike against existing objects helps keep it out of major pathways.

This all sounds very authoritarian, I'm sure. However, people have proved to me time and again that they can't be trusted to do it right, at least not on this score. Here are a few instances, just in the space near my office:



Nice choice of location jacktard.


200 bikes, and 2 idiots blocking access to all of them.

.
This is about as thoroughly in the middle of nowhere as it gets.

My first solution to this was to disallow the use of kickstands on campus, or at least in areas where there are available bike racks. This is pretty much everywhere, as it turns out. Alternatively, we could treat the symptom rather than the ability to park stupidly by just removing bikes parked in dumb areas. This requires a lot more case-by-case enforcement, though. There's also that pesky issue of policing people's personal property when they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, ie saying you can't have a kickstand when in fact you are one of the many responsible bike parkers around.

Fair enough, policy isn't really my style anyway. I'm much more of a vigilante justice kind of kid. And I know how to use JB-kwik. Henceforth, repeat offenders will have their kickstands welded into the 'up' position, or will be simply relocated to better commune with the local flora depending on how I am feeling and how well prepared I am.

Guilty!