Ubikequitous 12,Trammell Whitaker Tandem

Trammell's in my Hall of Fame. Get your own Hall of Fame. There's a statue with him on a tandem bike with Lou Whitaker, and it's near the food court.

From a Grant Brisbee Sb Nation article, "Renaming the 'Ultimate Grand Slam'"

Ubikequitous 11, Cosmos on a Bike

Sort of related to my last post, uh...

Neil deGrasse Tyson rides a bike.

or at least uses it on cosmos to start to explain relativity and the speed of light.

Sort of related: Niels Bohr, crypto-cylocrosser

Ubikequitous 10, Fat Bike Yoga Pants Shootout!!!

Everyone favorite battling purveyors of yoga and sporty gear for women both featured Pugsleys in their latest catalogs.

From Top, cover of Title 9 catalog, back page of Athleta catalog

From Top, innards of Athleta catalog, innards of Title 9 catalog

Clearly Title 9 is the victor as they have a cooler schwinn and the cover model actually riding the bike (the catalog also has a lemond city bike and a generic stepthrough in other photos). But well done to both catalogs in capturing the fat bike zeitgeist.

I do have to admit being very nostalgic for the Title 9 catalogs of 10 years ago or so which used to feature what I called the "Title 9 Barbies" (ironically, see below) who usually were shown surfing or skateboarding or gardening their organic farms or building a school for impoverished children with descriptions such as "working on her third PhD, raising her 4 adopted children on her organic turkey farm, still finds time to shred the morning break" or "built her own wooden yacht and sailed around the world in between her career as pro kiteboarder and her current job as CTO of a biotech startup". There was one page of the catalog I used to carry around in my lab book for inspiration when I was working on my dissertation, I can't find that page anymore, but I figured if she could look great in yoga pants and get her PhD while she was skateboarding/surfing/alpacafarming, well then, I could finish my dissertation while living by myself and riding my bikes a whole bunch, with little pressure to look great in yoga pants (even though I could totally rock those if I wanted to). I used to call them the barbies as those were the type of barbies I would like my future daughter to play with, alas, now that I actually have a daughter, the current Title 9 catalogs have dispensed with the awe inspiring overachievers for less impressive and breezy descriptions of the models.

Ubikequitous 9, the Airport MacAskill

There I am waiting for my mignight luggage to come out at baggage claim when I hear a very familiar song, that Jezabels song from the Danny MacAskill video. I look around, and sure enough there is Danny flipping around on the flatscreen above the baggage carousel. Somewhat hilariously they have recut the "way back home" video so it shows only tricks and all out of order, presumably to catch the gnattish attention of the jaded traveler. Thing was, it was working. As I scanned the crowd, half the people were watching the video, and people were talking excitedly about it. I was overwhelmed with bikey pride, then I collected my luggage (including my folding bike) and spend 40 bucks on a taxi to get to my hotel.

Here is the original, watch it again and again and again...

Ubikequitous 8, Bamboo

In the midst of the fairly awful cat and the hat cartoon, a song about the many uses of bamboo, there appears a bamboo bike. Damn hipster pandas and their homemade bikes.

Ubikequitous 7: Salinger

From this weeks new yorker, 2/8/10






J.D. Salinger and family on Moultons in central park.
source

Fantastic.

RIP

Ubikequitous 6, Tolstoy

It was also during his sixties that Tolstoy learned how to ride a bicycle. He took his first lesson exactly one month after the death of his and Sonya’s beloved youngest son. Both the bicycle and an introductory lesson were a gift from the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers. One can only guess how Sonya felt, in her mourning, to see her husband pedaling along the garden paths. “Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle,” Chertkov noted at that time. “Is this not inconsis-tent with Christian ideals?”
Elif Batuman, The murder of Leo Tolstoy:
A forensic investigation Harper's Feb. 2009.

Ridiculous and very enjoyable tale of attending an international Tolstoy conference in Russia.


Possibly similar posts:
Neils Bohr on a bicycle

previous ubikequiti

ubikequitous 5

Niels Bohr grew up absorbed in the natural history lessons taught by his biologist father and by various teachers and tutors, yet he was also interested in clocks and he became an accomplished bicycle mechanic.
Mark Fiege The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder, and the Bomb, Red Orbit,(redorbit.com), 9/6/2007.

Kind of an odd article, a bit forced, but no foolin? Niels Bohr bicycle mechanic?

Some diligence reveals the following:

click for e-source, from the book Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize.

Sweet! Neils Bohr cyclocross master!

I am so over Einstein on a bicycle, give me Niels Bohr master cyclecraftsman and besuited-crypto-cyclocrosser.



Or give me the curies tearing about the countryside on their safetybikes:

click for source


I reread the excellent graphic novel biography of Niels Bohr:Suspended In Language : Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, And The Century He Shaped, but no explicit mention of bicycles. A few drawings of him riding or pushing a bike, but mostly physics and the rest of his interesting life.

Ubikequitous 4

The farm lay strung along a narrow and pitted farm-to-market road, built in the nineteen-seventies, when Harouni still had influence in the Islamabad bureaucracy. Buff or saline-white desert dragged out between fields of sugarcane and cotton, mango orchards and clover and wheat, soaked daily by the tube wells that Nawabdin Electrician tended. Beginning the rounds of Nurpur Harouni on his itinerant mornings, summoned to a broken pump, Nawab and his bicycle bumped along, decorative plastic flowers swaying on wires sprouting from the frame. His tools, notably a three-pound ball-peen hammer, clanked in a greasy leather bag suspended from the handlebars. The farmhands and the manager waited in the cool of the banyans, planted years earlier to shade each of the tube wells. “No tea, no tea,” Nawab insisted, waving away the steaming cup.
Daniyal Mueenuddin, Nawabdin Electrician, New Yorker August 27, 2007

ubikequitous 3

So there it is: grace, alcohol, violence, music, sex , death, bohemianism, melancholy, strange ritual. I had a po'boy that day too, and I rode my black bike across the Marigny and the Bywater in the bottom of night. I admired the glow that bent over the levee from the unseen river. I wondered at the speed of the clouds. The wheels of my bicycle crunched over the remnants of all the old slate roofs now powdered and chipped and lying in the street. I thought I saw buds on the tulip magnolia outside my room when I got home. Darkness, clouds, flowers, fertility.


Duncan Murrell, In the year of the storm:
The topography of resurrection in New Orleans, Harpers Magazine, July 2007.

A terrible and fascinating exploration of post-Katrina New Orleans, often by bicycle.

ubikequitous 2

The inventor Frank Bowden, who founded the Raleigh Bicycle Company in 1888, took the arrangement to the next step. While playing around with alternatives to backpedalling as a means of slowing down, he devised hand brakes that transmitted force to the wheel rims through a set of stainless-steel wires sheathed in hollow tubes. These Bowden cables, as they are called today, offered the advantage of graduated feedback, affording riders greater control over their speed. Bowden cables were subsequently used in early airplanes, for controlling wing flaps, where such feedback is crucial. After the Second World War, Northrop Corporation, the aviation pioneer, put its aeronautical engineers to work on prosthetics and became an early builder of cable-operated arm systems. Cables replaced leather straps, and could be used reasonably well to manipulate spilt hooks, which provide a crude sort of opposable thumb.
Ben McGrath, Muscle Memory, the New Yorker, July 30, 2007.

Bowden Cables, eh? I had no idea.

ubikequitous 1

I read a bunch. I read lots of magazines, books, technical papers, etc. etc. I am always incommensurately delighted when there is a mention of bicycles in an setting where you would not expect it. So my idea is that I will relay to you, occasional readers, when I see something on bicycles that pleases me. Sound good? Well then, onward...

"Further to the east, Takayoshi Kano, of Kyoto University, in Japan, made a survey of bonobo habits on foot and on bicycle..."
from Ian Parker, "Swingers", the New Yorker, July 30, 2007