Pictures on your bike tires - Using the phenomenon of persistence of vision, these guys sell a kit that makes images on your bike spokes when the wheels turn.
I find the Pac-Man demonstration particularly fun.
This entire week has been an atrocity. Busy everytime I turn around, the time I’m taking to write this right now is borrowed from a lab that I got time off from (it’s also my lunch time). That said, I was unlocking my bike yesterday to race to a workout and couldn’t help but notice a Rice Crispies bar lodged between my front reflector and tire. My first reaction to the foreign substance on my bike was anger - it was an inconvenience to kick the dang thing off. A moment or two later, though, I looked at the bar on the ground (it had a bite out of it) and the humor sunk in. I mean … there’s a Rice Crispies bar wedged into my bike. That’s funny. Try to make an argument against the humor there. I could just imagine some guy (I’m assuming it was a guy … do you know girls who litter desserts?) walking up to my bike and taking the time to carefully set the bar in there so it fit just so. As Daniel Bogan would say, “People can be so damn strange sometimes.”
When I say I ran into my English teacher today, I do almost mean it in the literal sense. I was biking and he was driving, the corner was rather blind, and we both swerved and braked in emergency avoidance maneuvers. We casually chatted afterwards, but I the pounding heart-rates of both parties precluded the pretenses most people usually observe in polite conversation. I guess I am a bit socially awkward, not really in a debilitating sense, but still an inconvenience I could do without. My mantra is and almost always has been, be yourself. You can turn up the volume and turn down the volume on the traits, characteristics, and actions that make you as the situation dictates, but you should always go with being you. “Me,” as I currently stand, is a little bit awkward. The price of sincerity, I guess.
Yesterday, while biking at a furious pace to check-out a book and photocopy it in time for a noon deadline, I found myself skidding almost completely sideways for 20 feet at 19 miles an hour. My bike tilted from the normal 90 degrees to the ground in slow motion. 80 degrees. 70 degrees. As it did so, my brain managed to register the high pitch squealing coming from my tires, a squeal which was abruptly stopped when my pedal slammed into the ground and bounced me back to a normal, upright riding position. I laughed nervously, and continued biking.
For some reason, this picture makes me laugh. I see a first-person video with a bike as the protagonist in the works.
I hate the fact that the grass beside our sidewalks is not at the same level as the concrete. When one is on a bike and veers off the path to avoid rear ending pedestrians, this drop down is not a problem. However, when one tries to get back on the path from the grass and doesn’t take the extra effort to pull the front tire up, then one is found in the unfortunate situation of having their tire’s sidewall skittering along the concrete sidewalk, tipping the bike over. In this case, one might end up in an agonizingly slow tip, moving forward a bit faster than walking pace, continually stomping the ground with one foot like one who is trying to kill some imaginary bee on the ground. After a couple of these manic stomps, one has attracted the attention of everyone in the area, and realizes that being able to ride a bike in college is generally required and not optional. One can feel the hot gaze of peer rejection piercing through one’s neck, and realizes that something has to be done soon. With a final hard stomp, the tire comes up over the concrete lip, and one might laugh out loud to acknowledge full understanding of the absurdity of one’s incompetence.
I left the athletic building and went to unlock my bike today. It’s a Mongoose mountain bike of some sort - not flashy enough to attract the attention of thieves, but certainly rugged enough to bike around town and traverse the occassional rock garden. Regardless, I did a double take when I went to unlock my trusty bike from the bike rack today.
