The mad lazer pointer skillz

After my trip to Iowa to give my chinese bike talk, I got a nice little package of comic zines from Cody. Elena and I spend an enjoyable lunch eating fried tacos and reading Cody's Awkwardly Put zine. I am very honored to have been immortalized as follows:


Awesome! If you want some contact her and maybe get some comic zine goodness yourself you can email her at :awkwardlyput: at :gmail: dot :com:

Visit her blog too which is updated more than sporadically, guaranteed!

Rest of the photos from Iowa

Are over at Target Salad on Flikr



I took lots, go check em out.



Chinese bike resources in the works, pesky real life gets in the way...

DesMoines Schwinns

The Schwinn hunting was good in Iowa.

The coveted Town and Country Trike outside the home of the broken Kim. Whats going on with the seatpost there Kim? Are you secretly that tall? Or is the seattube filled with ice which is pushing the seatpost out....


clickus bigus


Spotted in Chad's bike room, the Schwinn mini cruiser. I kept finding these in trashpiles in Oakland with broken seat tubes. I don't think they make the transition from kid bike to adult jumping bike very well. His daughter learned to ride on this one, which is an admirable thing for any bike to achieve.


click for big


There were rumors of more schwinns and cruisers in the basements in both houses, but I never ventured into cold dank basement hell. The surface level stuff was good enough.

Back from Des Moines

I had a great weekend in Iowa. I met many a good person and gave a very well received Chinese Bike Talk at the Iowa Bike Coalition's Bike Night fund raiser. There were about 100 give or take a dozen at the talk, which is at least twice crowd I have ever spoken too. I spent a couple of hours hitting the Iowa Bike Summit and was really impressed with how well developed the bike advocacy is and how well organized things were. Good stuff from Iowa. They even had a full day of talks for city planners and traffic engineers to help make sure facilities are designed appropriately for cyclists.

It was COLD. It was even colder than Los Alamos was last week and it prevented much of the planned outdoor activities. I got a brief hike in and a 10 mile single speed ride around downtown on Sunday. But It was hovering about zero F plus or minus a few degrees all weekend. Sheesh. Lots of time for yakking and drinking epic amounts of coffee, dude.

I will post more this week. i am pooped thanks to spending an unexpected night in Denver on the way home. I will also post some chinese bike resources for those who are interested, probably tomorrow.

I want to thank Mark Wyatt and the rest of the board of the Iowa Bike Coalition for inviting me out and I really want to thank my hosts who helped ferry me around, put me up and feed me all weekend. It was great to meet everyone.

my hosts


From left to right:
Kim Clavicle, Cody and G-Pickle, Bike Iowa's Jen, and Chad VanDenLooeyNyjsVelde. not pictured is Chad's generous wife Dorothy, who was really nice too, but was rocking out at band practice when the photo took place...

Thats some good facial hair there gentlemen.

Iowa bound

Just in case you are in Iowa and don't know yet, I am the featured speaker at the Iowa Bike coalitions Bike Night on January 19th in Des Moines. I will be giving my (soon to be famous in two states) chinese bicycle talk. Details here. If you are going to be there please say hi.