chris@canootervalve.com

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Jun 062012

Absolutely no beer in this park. Except maybe a little beer. Or a lot, depending.

Responses to my question, “Would you move to an 11-tooth mountain cassette that let you go single ring up front if it meant having to buy a new rear hub or entire rear wheel, new derailleur and new shifter?” continue to arrive in my email, and all I can say is that we’re all wafflers. We hate that system, unless it’s cool, in which case we like it. Or vice versa. To be fair, a few of you have gone bold and declared SRAM’s 1×11 system utterly undesirable. Very few have felt they must have it at all costs. But most of you just sort of might use it, if the price is right. You could go either way on 11-speed mountain.

I sympathize. There are a lot of things about which I’ve gone back and forth over and over again and always feel like I just need more information. One of those things for me is advertising. Unless Google went out of business, you’re probably seeing some form of add there on the right. Maybe it’s a group of ads and maybe it’s a single animated one. I have no idea, because Google tailors whatever ad is over there not just to the content in my post (which should be pretty interesting), but also to you–to all the other data Google has on you. It occurred to me the other day that I should mess around with that. Particularly if there’s a chance I can generate about $8 a week, which is the approximate cost of the beer that makes this blog possible. Mostly, though, I just wanted to see what Google would put there.

I’ve set up some AdWords accounts in my day and was recently asked about setting up another. Retailers all have to contend with AdWords as a necessity, but for a lot of manufacturing and distribution businesses, AdWords is still just some mysterious way Google generates greater income than a majority of the countries in the world. The whole point of AdWords is driving people to your ecommerce site with a single mission: buy. Buy that widget you just searched for. You know you want it, and now we know you want it, and Google sent you to us, so let’s just do this thing already.

But brands without any direct call to action–like Coca Cola–what’s in it for them? Go ahead and Google “coca cola,” and I promise Coke’s paying mad money to show up at the very top of a list of organic search results that are all about their company anyway. If the whole page is results that point to your product anyway, why the hell pay to compete with yourself?

The prevailing theory here seems to be that companies like to control their message. They like to own their content. When people search for Coke, Coke wants to get in front of that search result, instead of, say, “Coke Plus Mentos Makes Boy’s Stomach Explode.”

But by all accounts Google’s algorithms also factor in what I guess we’d call “gravity.” Spend a million bucks on ads to get people to your site, and your site is going to have residual life to it even after you stop paying. Just like having money makes money, having traffic makes traffic. But frankly there’s a lot of weird shit about how Google does stuff that I know absolutely nothing about. There are a lot of people who’ll tell you they do, and that they can make you buckets of money based on this great Search Engine Optimization system they’ve developed.

It’s been my experience that few of these people have divine knowledge, and the majority of them are engaged in business practices that are “ambitious” at best, “fraudulent” at worst. I just can’t bare to listen to SEO wonks prattle on about “synergizing” this and “value adding” that, and “creating multi-platform relationship” and stuff. These are basically all the things that anyone who isn’t a complete asshole does to grow a business anyway. Give people a reason to find you, and once they do, make it so they want to come back.

So few articles about SEO I find to read online are of any real value. Usually I just want to find the douchebag who wrote the article and beat him to death with his own leg. Hence my experiment. Based on the stuff I write about here, what ads will Google deliver to this page.

So far, I’ve seen one for ESPN’s coverage of the NBA Playoffs. What in the hell made Google place that here, I don’t know, given that I’ve never mentioned basketball . . . until now. Damn, you’re good, Google.

But the interesting part for a guy who’s about to build yet another AdWords campaign is to go back to my older posts and see what Google thinks they should be selling. The SRAM post I’d written on 1×11 seems to’ve gotten Google infatuated with “Needle Valves” and no fewer than two ads for needle vales are showing up for me on that page. One of the many joys of having a blog called “canootervalve” is all the plumbers my ads are bound to attract. There’s also an ad for AdWords (oh, Google, you are so meta). Oh, and there’s a Zoosk ad asking if you want to “meet a real girl for free.” Google’s ability to tailor ads to you, my audience of five guys, is uncanny.

As someone who’s always been on the other side of Google advertising, though–making ads and trying to generate return on investment through them–I’m fascinated to see how long it takes Google to figure out what it is I’m really writing about.

Then, ideally, they can tell me.

Golf Carts and Recycling Launch My Campaign to End Air in Tires

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Jun 052012

You might’ve noticed I’ve gotten rid of the email form that used to live over there on the right of Cannotervalve.com. As with most things in life, some asshole spoils an otherwise good time, and for me, spam has ruined the direct line of communication I used to offer here, so I had to lose the Submitatron 4000 and replace it with the decidedly less high-tech:

chris at canootervalve dot com

That’s where you can email me from now on, and any psychiatrists out there may see today’s post as a golden opportunity. Here’s my attempt to document the creative process or something. To describe an idea as it occurred to me, at any rate, whatever you want to consider that. So I had this idea today, and here’s how it went.

I’ve had about a beer a day since arriving in Portland and have heard a great deal about Oregon’s bottle recycling centers. One takes one’s beer bottles to a grocery store recycling center–which I’ve heard alternately described as a cross between the DMV and a dentist, or a really swell place, depending on the describer. At any rate, word is twenty bottles will net your lucky ass a voucher for something like one U.S. dollar worth of groceries, so merely setting bottles out for the recycling guy to pick up–it’s been made clear to me–is Mitt Romney behavior. Nevertheless, the Safeway where I shop didn’t seem to have one of these recycle areas, so I waited, figuring one day I’d fine one while slowly accumulating enough beer bottles to build my own bio-dome.

Today was the day.

Today I happened to roll up to a WinCo grocery store, and there it was, a line of people with shopping carts filled with crap to recycle. Finally, the giant bag of empty beer bottles I’d been keeping in my car (driving around for a month with empties was generally frowned upon back in Pennsylvania) was going to pay off. As I was waiting to recycle my bottles and feeling the bottoms of my shoes slowly adhering to the ground just outside the bottle return, I noticed the scene captured at the beginning of this post. It’s a perplexing tableau, so I’ll explain: there’s a very large man in that thing; that thing is a golf cart; he’s using it to retrieve the shopping carts.

OK, so here’s the part where I attempt to explain the carefully synchronized firing of my addled, little synapses. I am watching a woman deposit what I’d conservatively estimate to be $45,000 worth of plastic bottles in a recycling machine, when I turn to see this guy driving the golf cart while towing a row of shopping carts. His golf cart has those overly wide swamp-buggy-style low-impact pneumatic tires like all golf carts.

And I think, “Why do we still have air in our bike tires?”

I remembered having seen a honey-comb airless wheel design somewhere before (think I even posted a picture in an old post)–which turned out to be the Bridgestone version of the more common Michelin “Tweel”.

Tough to say what caused that serious of connections to get me thinking about airless bicycle wheels. Something I’d eaten, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten, maybe. Excitement over the eighty cents I was about to make feeding Rogue and Deschuttes bottles into a machine. There’s a lot going on with my suspension system right now, and bike design is on a kind of tape loop in the back of my mind all the time anyway, but the plastic bottles plus absurdly un-green method of shopping cart retrieval somehow equated to an intense desire to see a bicycle version of this,

That’s Resilent Technologies’ airless tire, and I want some for my Independent Fabrication single-speed.

http://youtu.be/4jYcX_D09ig

High Life Haircuts and Schwindelhauers

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Jun 042012

Portland is a place that brings otherwise different things together: office buildings and mountains; personal independence and community spirit; bright green hair and middle age. But the most interesting combination I’ve seen has to be beer and haircuts. Bishops on Mississippi not only serves Miller Lite with their haircuts; they stay open until 9:00pm on Saturdays and 7:00pm on Sundays. I’d argue that no other place in the world would think to combine the convenience of sitting around drinking all day with the practicality of cutting hair while sitting around drinking all day. And lest the ladies be left out, apparently many of the hair salons in this same part of the city serve wine, regardless of the time of day. It’s an innovative kind of place.

Speaking of innovative, I was also recently invited to one of those incredibly exclusive private sales web sites, TouchOfModern.com. Actually, I was following a link to a particularly hip-looking bike and decided it looked silly enough to warrant giving the ultra-exclusive sale club site my email address so I could see it. It immediately asked for me to give it the email addresses of three friends. Unable to quickly think of three friends I disliked, I tried to back my browser out of the whole sordid mess and assumed my sign up to be a total failure. But they got me.

Now I can’t seem to escape TouchOfModern.com, which keeps showing up in my email at all hours of the night like some digital F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, asking me to just come out for one more drink and to maybe see a chrome lamp with tassels that’s 40% off this week only. But when it comes to online shopping, I prefer to drink alone, or while having my hair cut.

But the bike I was hoping to learn more about–and for which I have polluted my email for some time to come–is this, the Schindelhauer Viktor.

Exclusive at it is, even you can visit Schindelhauer’s site to check out the Viktor for youself. Especially powerful is the one-sentence manifesto Schindelhauer includes in the brief description of the bike: “Waiver of all superfluous details is the ideology of the hard-minded purist.”

Damn straight. But you pay a premium to be deprived of conveniences these days. The Viktor–a 6061 aluminum frame with a Kalloy post and equally regal shit components everywhere else, all whitewashed the obligatory “Urban White,” will set you back just under $1700 by my Euro conversion calculations. More if you want fenders. You could, for a few hundred bucks less, get something like a Focus Urban 8 with gears and disc brakes and a seat post clamping system that didn’t die out with Czech-made track frames of the ’80s, but where would the style be in that? How hard would your mind be then?

I, of course, can get a Viktor for only $1525, plus $20 shipping and a strict no returns policy, because I have been invited to TouchOfModern.com, though I can’t remember my password.

The Schindelhauer’s Viktor was also apparently the recipient of a prestigious “Red Dot Design Award,” which I’d naively assumed to be presented by a paint company, given the quantity of paint used on the Viktor. But, no, Red Dot is the real deal, an organization that helps mankind discern the subtle differences between a wrench and “an elegant tool with completely new characteristics.” For my part–and getting in on the spirit of things–I would like to award the first ever Canootervalve Divine Excellence in Dramatic Copy Writing Fortitude award to Red Dot, for their other-worldly attempt at explaining the existence of wrenches.

In the world of manual work there are many areas and work steps in which by now age-old tools such as the wrench are essential.”

Ah, yes. That world of manual work is always using age-old wrenches. For a second there, I was worried the entire design industry had lost sight of function completely and was just glorifying anything more mechanically complex than a pet rock. Clearly, though, this is proof they still understand what’s going on out there in the world of manual work.

I think I need another haircut.

Eleven-speeds of Hate and Beyond 9000

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Jun 012012

Barely have we had time to process the deranged majesty of SRAM’s 1×11 drivetrain and freakishly large 42t cog, when already 2013 Shimano Dura Ace Di2 is upon us. While all the social media channels were lighting up with links to “sneak peeks” of the new stuff, I was quietly trudging through a few of the several hundred pieces of product copy I’m working on these days and just so happened to have Shimano’s web site open in a separate window. There, not particularly concealed, was a big graphic with a link to 2013 Dura Ace Di2 11-speed–studio photographs and product information and all.

I admit, viewing everything in glorious detail right there on the manufacturer’s site felt a little stale and lacked the excitement of seeing it covered in black tape or dirty and logoless on a test bike, but it was pretty useful from a “Hey look, here’s detailed photos and text about new Dura Ace” standpoint. If you haven’t seen it yet and are interested, you can check it out on the Dura Ace site. I’ve only skimmed the details, but what I saw suggested Dura Ace was following in the steps of Ultegra with more of a “junction box” and separate individual wires model. Looks like Shimano’s 11-speed chain–like Campy’s had before it–loses some of the cut-outs and stuff once it narrows to 11-speed. Otherwise, it’s an 11-speed.

I like that Shimano has quit screwing around with “7900” mechanical Dura Ace numbering and went straight into the 9000s for 2013 Dura Ace Di2. Suggests a lot of confidence on their part that this might be the last gruppo they’ll need to design for a while. Or that the Mayans are right. I’d post a questionnaire on here to ask how many of you plan to switch to 11-speed or electronics, but I’m pretty I know the adoption rate there would be in the negative numbers (indicating a half dozen of you will be driven to become permanent single-speed riders only).

Anyway, general consensus on the SRAM 11-speed was definitely “depends on what it costs,” though there were some solid haters out there, too. By definition, if you follow this blog, you’re probably a little salty and prone to be critical anyway, so tough to say what kind of focus group we represent. There’s at least some chance the industry would do well to read my posts and just do the exact opposite of everything I write.

Me, though, I would use that. I would use the shit out of that 1×11, though I’d be sad to find we have a new cassette body standard and probably a wheel with even worse triangulation than what we already have. But I suspect that if I could run a 37 or 39-tooth chainring and still have less than a 1:1 ratio I’d be pretty happy. Oh, and the chainring would also have to be quiet. If I need a noisy guide on there or anything, then I’d rather just forget it.

Speaking of forgetting things, I got to see a very old friend last night, and a very nice couple was staying with him after just arriving (literally a few hours before I got there) from a 1,000-mile ride up to Portland from San Francisco. Bill, who owns BikeFlights.com now, had worked with me long, long ago, and the couple had been Speedgoat customers. So here was a bunch of old Pennsylvania bicycle folk gathered in a home in Portland, talking bikes, and out comes this, fresh from a 1,000-mile ride up the coast.

Yes, that is a Cannondale jacket, still functional, back from when Cannondale clothing–like everything Cannondale–was made in the U.S.. These are different times, but economies are always changing. Maybe we’ll see something like the original Cannondale again one day. And who knows what happens once Shimano hits five-digit model numbers.

Changing Gears

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May 312012

I’m still getting used to the weird habit the big mountains out here have of disappearing for months at a time, only to show up again so impossibly large and nearby-looking as soon as we have a clear day that you can’t imagine not seeing them. My wife was in Portland and Washington for a week to help with the house hunt, and never once saw Mt. Hood or Mt. Saint Helens. The day after she left that felt crazy. You could practically feel Mt. Hood looking on your window at night, as if all of Portland were one of those tiny Alpine villages in the immediate shadow of the mountain.

Today I managed to catch Hood sort of half visible and half not, directly ahead of me on Washington 14 East, running right along the Columbia. In the photo up there, it’s just about to fade into the clouds and vanish.

Speaking of the ephemeral, did you see those 2013 Dura Ace photos Bikerumor posted?

Yes, it’s 11-speed, and yes, the arms are all funkily asymmetric and stuff, but for my money the really interesting thing going on here is the near infinite gearing options. Because Shimano has effectively made their big ring the actual spider onto which the small ring mounts (notice how small the actual crank arm spider is?), they’ll be able to offer chainring sets in pretty much any big-ring, little-ring pairing that’s within about 16-teeth of each other.

A different path toward the same near gearing has already been blazed at Campagnolo. You can see their 2013 cranksets over at Bikeradar. Though they don’t look quite as unique as the Dura Ace, Campy’s chainrings have been changing, too, and everyone is curious to see if their 52/36t combination is going to shift. If it does, that may become the new compact gearing of choice. I can’t claim to understand why Campy seems hell-bent on resurrecting the very nearly dead road triple, though. It’s like those labs that keep potentially devastating viruses around for research purposes. All you can do is hope they never get out.

It looks like some form of really wide-range gearing may be upon us, though. If it shifts, it’ll be a net positive thing. If it doesn’t it won’t. Between electronics and entirely new ratios from and back, though, it looks like we’ll be seeing some very different things happening with drivetrains, and I hope to focus a on new products here as we head toward 2013.

I received a bunch of responses to my SRAM 1×11 question, but feel free to share your opinion, if you haven’t yet. I’ll let you know the general consensus tomorrow.

B. Rose-Colored Glasses

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May 302012

It’s not your fault if the title seems to make no sense. Today’s post ended up seeming like an ideal kind tribute to a fine man and icon of the bike community, a guy who’s keeping it real in a virtual world.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a badass new computer virus doing the rounds out there. It’s called Flame. Don’t panic yet. According to NPR’s Marketplace, it’s so far only located in the Middle East. It is however, a little interesting, in that it can steal pretty much all the information on your computer. That means keystrokes, screen captures–it can even listen in on your microphone and detect Bluetooth devices near your computer.

Pretty spooky, but it pales in comparison to the personal information gathering virus spreading through the outdoor community. It’s called Strava, and it wants to know how much you rode today.

Strava is far and away the most popular of a new group of physical performance social networks and data gathering applications. Using smartphones and Garmins, Strava records the data on your rides–distance, elevation, etc.–then lets you see just how much you suck compared to the really fast people out there.

It’s actually extremely cool–a social network that involves doing something more than just sitting in front of your computer. What’s always seemed a little odd to me, though, is that we often tend to be OK with volunteering personal information we’d otherwise think twice about giving away if asked. In nerd-speak the term for encouraging people to do something in exchange for some perceived reward is called “gamification.” Really, it means taking the mechanics of a video game and applying it to social interactions and real life, whatever the hell that is.

It has a lot of interesting potential–and some weird examples, like Zombies, Run! an iPhone app (arrives on Android June 14th), that encourages you along on your training runs by, well, telling you brain-thirsty zombies are chasing you.

Between the social element of apps like Strava and the interactive element of apps like Zombies, Run!, it seems like maybe I won’t be telling my grandkids to turn off the video games and go outside; I’ll be telling them to take the dumbass goggles off and just ride their bikes.

Google, in fact, is already building those virtual reality goggles. If you’ve not yet seen the glasses that can take photos and shoot video and do smartphony sorts of things, you should check them out.

Here’s what they look like on you if you’re a model:

And here’s what they look like on you if you’re not:

And here’s how rad your life looks while wearing them:

Have you ever noticed that Google’s a little like the world’s first Giant Spoiled Multinational Corporate Seven-year-old Suburban Kid. Apple has the iPhone and a viable retail manufacturing business, so Google wants virtual reality glasses and a viable retail manufacturing business. Thing is, this is good business practice in the tech sector in 2012. There are no more small innovations left. Everything from here on out will be a game-changer. Until nobody knows what the game is anymore.

For my part, I hope you can ride your bike while being chased by zombies and shooting eyeball laser beams at virtual riders just in front of you on the trail, obliterating their record breaking times and making a little pop-up appear on their own Google glasses to let them know they’ve just been vaporized.

More than likely, though, I’d be one of the last people riding a bike without any of that stuff, swerving around a trailhead full of dudes making “bweeel, bweeel!” laser beam shooting sounds and screaming “No, no!” at imaginary zombies. But I guess witnessing that would be way better than virtual reality anyway.

Looking Forward to the Past

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May 292012

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I’d noticed the Bikerumor coverage of Kabush’s Scott bike with the Di2 battery-powered fork and rear shock lockout that are the exact patent I’d posted a while back. Lest we wonder that that says about the increasingly cozy relationship between Shimano and Fox, let’s consider that Shimano’s literally plugging its Di2 battery into Fox’s products. By some standards, you have to be married to do that.

Whatever the working relationship between the two companies, they sure are interested in making our bikes more complicated. I read with great interest the Bikerumor article itself, and then the comments that following. Having ridden one of those bikes with the Girven/Noleen piston-velocity-sensing forks my own self like 180 years ago, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say the only thing Foxmano’s NASA-level shit has in common with the 9-volt battery sucking ancient Noleen is that both products were in some way attached to bicycles. I don’t doubt the quality of the Di2 battery-powered lockout system going on there on the Kabushmobile, but I do have to wonder what the market is for such a thing.

Only yesterday, I’d asked if you’d be willing to buy all the new stuff necessary to convert to a SRAM 1×11 system, but in light of what Fox and Shimano are trying to bring to market, buying a new rear wheel, shifter, cassette and rear derailleur seems pretty basic and plain. Sure, there’s a parallel between the two–both address age old issues in fresh ways–but why do I expect electronic suspension will be tougher to sell?

Stigma, for one thing. There’s always going to be some kid who thinks the customer base for gadgets like this is made up of fat old men who like overpriced bikes that do all the thinking, because they can’t pick a line for shit. Haters gonna hate, for sure. But when that kid is motoring away from your electronic wonder bike on his rigid, steel 29er, you have to at least regard his bad attitude as constructive criticism. If you think you’re going to haul ass like Kabush once you’re wired up, the bad news I bring you is that no electronic suspension system is going to help you. It’s like the winter I was living in Atlanta during a freak snowstorm and watched somebody repeatedly gun the engine and plow his BMW into the center barrier again and again and again, thinking, presumably, that his “driving machine” would translate his incompetent spasms into some sort of positive outcome. There’s only so much the machine can do for you. For most of us, Mert Lawwill himself could be operating our suspension via remote control, and we’re still not going to be able to pick a line for shit.

Kabush, it seems unnecessary to point out, is simply hauling ass this year. You could tie him to a tandem with Oprah, and the boy would still be winning, so don’t let’s read too much into wires and servers as relates to victory just yet. I don’t know if people want all this stuff on their bikes. Probably they’ll accept it, but that’s not what I asked. What I asked is did they want it? Because bringing products to market that no one asked for really only seems to work if you’re Apple.

In contrast to the Inspector Gadget approach, consider the weirdly simple Magura fork Bikerumor and MTBR and everyone else just convered.

I have to tell you, I think I have a crush on this weird neo-retro Magura 29er fork, the TS8. For starters, nobody in Germany got the memo that any product is supposed to have an “X” in it. “TS8” sounds like an elite group of airport security people who appear from out of nowhere whenever there’s a potential problem, staring holes straight through you while they pull on a rubber glove.

So not sure about the name, but the c-clip in the bottom of the stanchion warms my heart. That’s how we used to do it. And really ditto on everything else about this fork, from simple-ass air chamber and piston (which is going to need 5cc of RockShox RedRum on top of it, I all but guarantee) to the cartoonish elastomer stack negative spring, to the ability to futz with oil viscosity to change compression damping.

If the Foxmano Di2-powered Lockout-o-matic is the suspension of the future, the Magura TS8 is the suspension of the past, only seemingly very well executed and using much better materials. So I should be far more interested in the groundbreaking Fox forks, but I find I’m actually much more intrigued by the simple Magura, particularly the idea that I can mess with oil weights again and really change the feel of the fork. The Fox post had over 10,000 views; the Magura about 2,400, so I suspect I’m firmly in the minority on this one, but I can’t help it. The simple but easy to tear down and customize Magura looks far more interesting to me right now. Maybe if I owned an X-box I’d feel differently.

Do You Go to 11?

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May 282012

Sure, I veered off bikes a fair amount last week. I guess I was waiting for somebody to invent a new rear axle or bottom bracket standard, but SRAM trumped all that with those spy photos of a prototype 1×11 drivetrain that showed up on BikeRadar, and ignited a shitstorm of speculation and armchair product managing across the Interwebs.

As evidenced by the condition I’m in after last Saturday’s ride with the Portland Velo crew, I am old. I am, in fact, old enough to remember the invention of the “cassette body,” not to mention the shitstorm that was the eventual transition to a new, wider cassette body. Ah, the good ol’ seven and eight-speed days, a special time when there were still genuine freewheel mountain bike hubs out there, mingling freely with the chaos of different hub flange spacing and cassette body widths. Or something like that. I’ve repressed most of it successfully.

Many youngsters out there have no idea just how nice you’ve had it what with all these extra gears getting crammed onto cassettes without requiring entirely different cassette bodies and pushing the hub flanges even closer together.

But maybe it’s time. Like one of those B movies where someone can’t leave well enough alone and messes with a sacred tomb or something, SRAM may have unleashed all hell in their pursuit of the ultimate simple single chainring.

As someone who hates triples, I feel I owe SRAM a great debt for introducing 2×10 and forcing Shimano to get on board with doubles, too. Triple cranksets in any and all forms are the work of the devil.

But at what cost? If we really stand on the verge of a new hub “standard,” I’m afraid the whole universe might plunge hopelessly into chaos. Seriously. Wheelsets have been our sanity throughout all the headset and bottom bracket changes over the past few years. Sure, there are all those axle options now, but to their infinite credit, the wheelset manufacturers have done a great job of building adaptability into their hubs as quickly as possible. If DT really does already have a completely new cassette body in production and we’re going to see wider cassette bodies and new cassettes that won’t be compatible with any previous hub, it’s going to be really interesting to see how consumers react.

Would you move to an 11-tooth mountain cassette that let you go single ring up front if it meant having to buy a new rear hub or entire rear wheel, new derailleur and new shifter?

Keep Portland Car Washes Weird

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May 252012

My daughter is pretty amazing. I know every daughter everywhere is amazing, but in this case I mean pretty specifically amazing. When she was still very small, I used to take her for short drives on the gravel roads through the state park around our house to help her fall asleep, and for some reason (she was born on Shakespeare’s birthday) I taught her the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet. She memorized up to “and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and could recite it on her own with decent inflection, somehow, despite the deadpan delivery of my recitals. To die. To sleep. No more. She was a year old.

That same year the only babysitter we ever had who smoked (and always left the butts floating in the toilet) was taking my daughter on a walk on the dirt roads by our home and asked who lived in one of the neighbor’s houses.

“I don’t know,” my daughter told her, looking at little wooden sign in front of the house. “Says ‘Meyers.'”

On the phone the other day she told me that the teachers in pre-school used to annoy her a little, because they had these books you could look at while listening to headphones that read you the story, and the teachers would keep telling her to put the headphones back on making her turn the page when the beep went off, even though she hadn’t finished reading the page yet.

When you read that much, you end up a little precocious, a little wonderfully unique.

It’s been almost two months since I’ve seen my daughter, and I know moving here will be a big change for her, but the Northwest keeps doing things to cheer me up. Things that remind me of her.

About a week ago I was washing what’s left of my car when I noticed a potato, still in perfectly good shape, positioned with almost mathematical precision in the corner of the car wash bay–in the photo above, I’ve moved it a little to get enough light on it for the photo. I don’t know what about a perfectly good potato carefully positioned in a car wash bay should make me think of my daughter, but it did. She’d turned twelve a week after I left home, and she’s particularly intrigued by Portland’s “weird” factor.

Imagiine how overjoyed I was, then, to be putting my phone away after taking the potato photo to find a full-grown person riding into the same car wash bay on one of those tiny superbikes, like this:

Despite a bunch of obvious other ways around, including not going into a bay at all, which would have been quicker, he chose to ride right past me and then, worried he might’ve been intruding, stopped, flipped open the visor of his helmet, and said, “Is it OK to come through here?”

Absolutely.

How could I explain how happy I was to see him?

Daughter, it really is pretty weird here, and pretty wonderful.

Best Bike City

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May 242012

Having been slow to catch on to the whole 29er thing, many countries in Europe seem to be on high alert these days, determined not to let the next big idea pass them by. I can’t see any other way to explain the appearance of a second faithfully recreated pedal-powered supercar. This time, images of a Ferrari pedal bike are creeping around the Internet, begging the obvious question: when will we see a fake Ducati motorcycle converted to pedal power.

Just a quick public service message, because I’m trying to listen to Pandora while I’m typing this–they just reported record ad sales, you know–and these fucking Miller Lite commercials keep playing, and I just want to say that if anyone out there is ever talking to me in person while drinking a Miller 64, and I slap it the fuck out of your fool hand without breaking eye contact or interrupting the conversation, it’s nothing personal. It’s just that I hate Miller and their pissy low-carb beach beer bullshit.

Anyway, despite an appalling lack of pedal-powered sports cars, Portland was recently awarded “Best Bike City” by Bicycling Magazine, an honor we wrested away from arch-nemesis, Minneapolis.

The thing is, having read Bicycling’s web article, if it’s OK with Minneapolis, I think maybe they should take it back. Here’s an excerpt from Bill Donahue’s article:

Some guy will roll up beside you, probably, on a lime-green-wheeled fixie. Here, now, is a stolid commuter in a yellow rain jacket, with all sorts of earnest straps lashed to her rack, and here is a mangy, helmetless youngster on a homemade tall bike, two normal frames welded together, so that he looms 6 feet above the melee, quietly plucking his nose ring.

There are, inevitably, subtle flickers of intratribal tension there by the bridge—in Portland, a mere raised eyebrow can convey a nuanced diss like, “Shimano 105 derailleurs? Really?” But there is also a deep—and, yes, smug—solidarity. Those of us who ride daily in Portland, we know. We know we are the vanguard of American cycling. No other city in the United States has more cyclists per capita, and no other town has a coffee shop like Fresh Pot, which boasts 25 chairs and parking for 26 bicycles. We have trains of elementary-school bike commuters, and we have Move By Bike, a relocation-company that trundles couches across town on overstacked bike trailers. Even our city’s noncycling Lotharios know it is a deal-killer to ask, at the end of a sprightly first date, ‘Can I throw your bike in my car and give you a lift home?'”

It certainly isn’t a lack of passion that makes the award seem perhaps misplaced–I mean, that guy can write, and I’m being serious. “Here, now, is a stolid commuter in a yellow rain jacket, with all sorts of earnest straps lashed to her rack . . .”? That’s some Herman-Mother-Fuckin-Melville all up in your eyeballs and synapses right there. In their wildest dreams, Charles Baudelaire and Pee Wee Herman, working in tandem, couldn’t have described “straps” as “earnest,” even with William S. Burroughs’ typewriter. But I get it. Sometimes when I ride a bike in Portland, I use this half-ass velcro pant leg strap that’s just so insincere and noncommittal it sort of makes me sick. And I know it sees me eyeing the genuine rawhide, woven hemp and repurposed surgical tubing in the window of one of the three boutique pantleg strap emporiums I pass here on my way to work. We like bicycles a lot here. Sometimes, it’s tough to describe. Bill seems like a nice guy and a gifted writer who’s swinging for the fences with this article. You have to admire that, even if it is the same thing you hear over and over again about Portland.

As a new guy here, the thing I have seen that I hadn’t expected–based on reading so many articles about how smug and self-absorbed everyone is in Portland–are people who aren’t quite so self-conscious about their bike riding. There does appear to be a misconception that everyone who rides a bike to work in Portland does so only after making sure all the neighbors will see. I’m sure there’s smugness afoot in Portland, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as prevalent as the national spotlight suggests. You don’t travel to the Netherlands and run around screaming, “Oh man, you’re all riding bikes–do you realize you’re all so bicycling?” Or maybe you do. I don’t know. I do know that riding to work on a bike with Shimano’s 105 group seems just fine in Portland.

So enthusiasm? Plenty in the article. But an award seems a little ostentatious. Having only been in town for six weeks, maybe that aspect will become clearer, but what I’ve seen so far is the quiet kind of humility that comes from just doing something, without expecting an award.

If I could give Portland an award it’d be for keeping it all low-key, and the trophy would be this sweet Girven fork in this Portland Cragslist ad:

Maybe engrave it with a quote from the ad: “WHAT U SEE IS WHAT U GET.”

Congratulations, Portland.

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