I don't know s--t about bicycle saddles

The Specialized BG2 saddle I bought for my road bike is no longer available. I’m looking for its replacement (I’m always looking for the next everything; it’s not that I’m going to actually DO anything about replacing it, but I like to know what’s out there), and I’ve realized I don’t know anything about bike saddles.

Hear me out on this: When I bought this saddle to replace the saddle that came stock on my first road bike, I was about 200 lbs, and I was looking for a saddle with a channel because of the irritation that the stock saddle was causing in my perineum (and let me tell you, I didn’t ever want to know I even HAD a perineum until the pain got too great to ignore it). Out of dumb luck, I bought the BG2, and it felt fine. It felt fine when I was up at 220 lbs. Last summer, when I was at 170 lbs., it felt fine, and it felt fine last week when I rode at 175 lbs.

I tried an inexpensive saddle from Nashbar, and it just didn’t feel right: too hard, and the channel wasn’t right. I’ve heard that the gel saddles are initially seductive, but not really comfortable after hours of riding (makes sense), so I thought that the problem was the inflexibility of the Nashbar F1 (the plastic frame of the BG2 flexes in my hands with moderate effort).

There’s evidently an international manufacturing standard for bicycle saddles (although I can’t find a direct link) that says the saddle has to function for a 100-kilo rider, which translates to about 220 lbs. on this side of the Atlantic. Now, I’ve been up around that weight. In fact, I’ve been everywhere between about 77 kilos and 100 kilos in the past two years… and my Specialized BG2 has been comfortable for all that time, at all those weights. So the issue is not just the amount of flex.

I’ve been looking at the Brooks B17 Narrow, the B17 Narrow Imperial, and the Team Pro Classic. I’ve also looked at saddles by Selle Italia and others. And I just realized that I don’t know anything about saddles; my experience at all these weights has told me that. I guess the saddle is something you’ve really got to go in and try out… or risk buying something you later find isn’t right.

Sigh. I hate going to stores; I’d much rather buy online. But I suspect that saddles are like shoes or eyeglasses: the price savings and convenience of the online shopping is more than offset by the risk of the wrong fit.

another right winger of questionable veracity

James O'Keefe is a right-wing videographer.

He's probably best known for the sting that took down the Acorn organization, where his tactics were questionable.

He was arrested for a Senate phone scam.

After his video of an NPR fundraising executive was released, it was found to be questionable.

Teabagger-darling Glenn Beck, of all people, is distancing himself from O'Keefe.

I have two questions:

1. Why do we still believe anything Mr. O'Keefe says? Why don't we attack his lies with all the vigor of the truth, rather than lying down and whimpering in front of him?
   
2. And where are the attack dogs on the left? Why isn't blood running down the legs of the intolerant and the greedy?

on friends & heroes

I'm not good at keeping friends.

It's partly because I have this "out of sight, out of mind" thing about people; I tend to forget about people whom I don't see regularly. It's partly because I tend to smother people in whom I'm interested with attention. It's partly because if I think someone thinks ill of me, I let it upset me, frequently out of all proportion to my actual relationship to the person in question.

Because I'm not good at keeping friends, I've set myself a task of doing two things per week to maintain friendships. It can be stuff like writing a letter or an email, going to Quaker Meeting (see links to the right), or visiting someone.

I think I've learned something recently about keeping friends, though.

I've got a habit of being helpful. I have computer knowledge, tool skills, some specialized knowledge in my career field; I volunteer; I've donated blood about 160 times (and if a blood donation is a pint, that means 20 gallons!). One of the things I'm NOT good at is asking for help or accepting it. (I think this is a guy thing; I think many of my male compatriots are similarly inept, if you will.)

People who help others, but never need help themselves, are heroes, maybe. But they're not friends.

Now, as part of the Anchor House Ride I'm doing this summer, I'm asking people for donations. I'll admit, I wimped out on it, a lot. I sent out an email to about 60 recipients. The one actual "ask" I did was an announcement at the end of Quaker Meeting last week (yes, I'm an atheist who goes to Quaker Meeting; we're not all that rare).

I've had over $400 in donations so far. I've heard from some people I hear from only rarely, and I've even re-established one or two dormant relationships. Asking for these donations has done a lot to maintain some of these old friendships.

I don't know if these people will be willing to donate again if I go again next year. I only know that this has been healthy for the social part of my life.

Several months ago, I signed up for a daily email from The Art of Worldly Wisdom a book of 300 aphorisms on living by the 17th-century Jesuit, Baltasar Gracian (you can get .epub & .pdf versions of his book here). I don't remember seeing in it (yet) about allowing other people to help you. But that's just become one of my aphorisms for worldly living - because it certainly is making a difference for me.

on the importance of comedy

Bear with me on the provenance of this: I subscribe to a daily newsletter called A Word A Day, which provides an email every Monday through Friday with an interesting word. Many are obscure; some are polysyllabic (and many aren't); most weeks the wards are related, and it's the relationship that is highlighted and celebrated. I enjoy it, and the price is right.

Anu Garg, the guy who makes it up, includes a quote of the day. He's one of the small number of people in the universe who's more left-wing than I, so even on days when I'm not that impressed by the word, I look for the quote.

Today's was from Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame, about the importance of comedy to a culture:

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted. -Eric Idle, comedian, actor, and author

Makes sense to me. It also helps clarify that unease and discomfort I get when somebody says something is too sacred to make jokes about.

shameless merchandising

The folks over at World's Best Bike Stickers are having a promotion where if you give 'em a link, they'll send you ten stickers. This is too good to miss. And, frankly, their stuff is good enough to promote even if the ten-stickers-free promotion turns out to be bogus.

I found 'em when I was looking for ways to fix the decals on my titanium frame. I used to carry the bike on a car rack when I would go to group rides, and I had a couple of disagreements with a bungee cord; the hook took it out on one of the downtube decals. When I found their site, the first sticker that caught my eye was this one:

I want two for my road bike.

Then I looked at the rest of the bike stickers. Much of their art has a pleasantly hippie-esque look:

... and there's a lot of political, anti-car stuff:

and if I ever get completely sick of the Habanero stuff, this lovely Art-Nouveau silhouette might be my next stick-on head badge:

World's Best Bike Stickers. Go check 'em out.

climbing the coppermine

I'm off every other Wednesday, and when I can, I like to ride with this group of mostly-retired guys that ride together every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. An email from their ride leader said it was too cold for them to be out today, so in the afternoon, I decided to go out on my own.

From my garage door to Coppermine Road in Griggstown, NJ, is about 7-8 miles, a nice bike ride, because a good deal of it is on Canal Road along the old D&R canal. When you turn onto Coppermine, you then get to climb almost 400 feet in about 8/10 of a mile (Coppermine Road has the nickname, "The Wall" among some local cyclists; a few months ago I found an elevation diagram online, but I can't find it today). You can then come down Old Georges Road to Canal Road again, and if you turn around when you get to County 518, it's a 21-mile loop round-trip to the garage with a memorable climb in the middle.

Now, I built my bike to be a long-distance and climbing machine, and I'm training for the Anchor House Ride. I rode with the Hill Slugs this past weekend, and I was cranking up the hills... so I decided it was time to test my bike and my legs, and climb the Coppermine today.

The good news is that I made it up with energy to spare; with a rest (like a few miles of a flat ride without too much headwind), I could have done it again (despite the cold; it was a windy low-40's today). The bad news is that my average speed for the ride was only 17.31, and that includes a top speed of 33.6 on the downhill. In mitigation, I'm claiming the cold, the earliness in the season, and the almost constant headwind all the way back. (Whine, whine, whine...)

Nonetheless, I've now got over 150 miles of the 1000 recommended for training, and I'm in pretty good riding shape for the season already. I should be ready to do some good riding in May, and 500 miles for Anchor House in July should be no problem. (Now it's time to reel in some more donations!)

no longer left vs right?

I've seen a few web articles recently saying that the divide in this country is no longer over left vs. right or conservative vs. liberal, but rather corporate vs. individual.

I need to think some more about this (it sounds oversimplified to me), but I suspect there is some truth to it. I've had more experience of being screwed by corporations than by government, and we're moving to a political sphere in which corporations - legal fictions - have more rights than individuals, as the Citizens United decision suggests (and have you looked into the possibility of individual bankruptcy recently?).

I also remember hearing that some of the staunchest opponents of taxing the rich and corporations are the people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Although this seems counterintuitive, to me it makes sense. I work with welfare clients, and most people on welfare don't stay on welfare; instead, they get jobs. And it's not impossible for a person starting at a minimum-wage job to see his or her salary double in two years.

Now, as I've argued before, humans are pattern-finders. And if one's salary has doubled in two years, it's conceivable that it could double again. And again. In fact, given enough time and luck, it's conceivable that the minimum-wage-job holder could be one of those rich people who's getting taxed to death, at some time in the future... after all, didn't he just go from no job to a doubled salary in two years?

I don't have experimental data to support this, and I'm hypothesizing wildly*, but I suspect this is part of the reason we see support for corporations among the people who are getting the worst deal from them.

*And don't get me started on the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. Oh, please.

sound bites & bumper stickers

As I was driving to Meeting yesterday, I noticed some bumper stickers, license plate frame tags, and suchlike. A few related thoughts;

• If a sentiment is short enough to put on your bumper, it's probably not complex enough to contain your whole life.
  
• Do you think that anybody ever changed a closely held point of view based on a bumper sticker? I don't. I think that one of the purposes of bumper stickers is to tell other people what team you support. "It's not a choice, it's a baby", "Go Giants", and that Darwin fish thingy (and the many permutations thereof) are all saying the same thing: "These are the people I want to be associated with."
  
• Another purpose of bumper stickers is to show off how humorous and edgy (or straight edge and middle-of-the-road) one is. Or that one has knowledge of esoterica. (It's not strictly a bumper sticker, but I love the door mats that make reference to 127.0.0.1, because I know what the reference is. In fact, I remember that I always thought the cartoons in French magazines were funnier, when I got them in high-school French class, but that was probably just snobbery that I got the jokes. But that's not really about bumper stickers or sound-bite philosophy, is it?)
  

Quaker meeting parking lots are full of bumper stickers (earnest ones, I'm afraid; not usually witty or snarky ones -- although there are often esoteric ones; the Quakes attract a certain set of intellectual snobs, of which I am one). Twelve-step folks also tended to do a lot of bumper stickers in the 80's & early 90's (& may still, but I no longer have the depth of experience I did then). I suspect that quantity of bumper stickers (or message t-shirts, or suchlike stuff) is directly proportional to some kinds of social needs. I have problems with attachment, and no bumper stickers, and the only place I wear message t-shirts is to bed, in lieu of pajamas.

(This was going to be a Jennings quote, but it got too long.)

when a driver complains

I was Stumbling around the internet at 2:something this morning (well, staying in bed wasn't an option), and came across this bit of wonderfulness:



... which appears to be a reaction to, and expansion of, this:



Last year, I was involved in a road-rage incident against a fellow rider, who was hurt when the driver of a Ford SUV slammed on his brakes less than three feet in front of the cyclist. I saw the ineffectual reaction of the local police. Yesterday, I was out on a group ride, and saw riders refuse to get to the right when a car was behind.

There is fault, and intolerance on both sides. However, riders can't just condemn drivers, nor vice versa. I loved the cartoonist's advocacy for kindness and nonsense.

And now I even like the phrase, "kindness and nonsense."

everybody else already knew...

I was listening to a This American Life podcast on kids & politics while I was exercising this morning, and I realized that, if you're in the minority, democracy is as tyrannical as any other form of government.

And then I realized that everybody else but me probably already knows this.

pre-flight checklist mnemonic

I've been re-reading Joseph Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes, and one of the things he points out is that pilots have been effective in reducing errors by using such things as pre-flight checklists. I've had a couple of embarrassments on the bike that might have responded well to a pre-flight checklist... but I'm also not geeky enough to actually use a clipboard before I jump on the saddle.

I am, however, geeky enough to develop a mnemonic to remind me to do some checks before I pedal away. As I thought about "incidents" from the past year, and how I could remember to forestall them, I came up with W, A, A again, B, S... and I thought, "OK, my mnemonic will be WASABI":

W: Water. Take the bottles out of the car and put 'em on the bike. (When I transport the bike in the car, the bike is on its side flat, and the bottles would leak out into the car, so I don't put 'em into the cages until I'm at the start point. Sometimes, they don't get into the cages at all...)
A: Axle. Check the quick releases; is either one loose?
S: Speedo. Reset the computer.
A: Air. Make sure the tire pressure is OK. Got tubes, pump, CO2, patch kit?
B: Brake. When I transport the bike, I take the front wheel off, and I have to release the front brake. It would be a good idea if I reset it before pedaling away - and especially before that looooong downhill!
I: I haven't got anything for the "I" yet, but I suspect something will turn up. And I couldn't "backronym-up" anything else.

Sheesh. There is no bottom to my geekiness. I suspect in about three weeks I will be running around the bike with a clipboard.

another problem with science

Another from Calamities of Nature:



What does it say about me that so much of my world view is described in webcomics?