Winston writes asking for a shameless plug, and here it is:
Rollapaluza XI - Kingspin - is taking place on Friday 8th August at the (rather excellent) Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, WC1. £7.50 entry with DJs, a bar until 3am, cut price bowling, food and underground stewarded bike parking. Better polish up those Deep Vs and proofide that Swallow Classic lest the stewards should look upon your ride in shame.
For those actually interested in the racing, qualification is between 7-9pm with individual knockout and team rounds continuing until 1am. There are £2000 worth of prizes to be won including goodies from Swrve, Madison and Condor.
This video on creating a mobile phone activated stun gun was posted as a follow up to the anti-theft Instructable. It works by attaching the stun gun battery connectors to the phone’s vibrate function thus triggering the shock by calling the phone.
The inventor (titter ye not, he’s only naked from the waist up) proposes waiting until your bike is stolen before giving the thief a little more than he bargained for (presumably first waiting for him to get stuck at traffic lights and put his foot down for maximum effect).
I’d take it a little further and try to hook it up to something with a motion sensor - an iPhone or the like should do the trick, that way you can shock the perp automatically and get it to text you when the bike stops moving.
Of course, anyone nudging your bike while it’s locked up would get shocked too, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
Fixed gear riders advocate fixed gear bicycles as a method of this, that they are somehow more secure because they are harder to ride. They are forgetting that due to the unbearable popularity of fixed gear bikes, they have become incredibly attractive targets for theft.
The accompanying picture is of a Bianchi Douchebag Pista with chopped flat bars. The author says:
I love the reflectors on the pedals, by the way. Nice, really nice.
Step 10 advocates ratting your bike to make it look ugly.
even major bike manufacturers have taken to making intensionally ugly bicycles. Please, a bicycle should be a thing of beauty, make the madness stop.
The accompanying picture? A particularly nasty specimen of the Langster, London Edition.
So while finding distractions from Actually Setting Up A Business, I’ve discovered Yehuda Moon, an online cartoon about a couple of guys who run a small bike shop in the middle of a small town in the U.S. - some amusing stuff from both sides of the counter:
Well we’ve just got back from a tour of the Annapurna circuit, a commonly walked, but rarely cycled route through the Himalayas in Nepal. And no, of course I didn’t do it on a singlespeed, don’t be daft. The route is nowadays ridden as an annual race called the Yak Attack, but we were there as tourists. Despite falling ill, falling off the bike, smashing my rear derailleur clean off on a rock (an instant reminder of why singlespeeding is so great) and some altitude-related unpleasantness, the trip was unbelievable and I would highly recommend it to anyone. There’s a lot of un-rideable sections, mostly very steep rough staircases cut into the mountains, but when it’s rideable, it’s breathtaking. Despite mountain bikes and components being impossibly expensive in Nepal the country has some very skilled, and very strong mountain bikers, so if you ever go, expect to be humbled by the locals.
Marco crosses the landslide on the way to Tilicho Lake, the highest lake in the world:
Tenzing and Marco wait to cross the Thorung pass - 5416 metres above sea level:
Marco, Calden and Tenzing descend from the Thorung pass:
Check the London Singlespeed Flickr account for some more photos from the trip and if you want to know a bit more about it, do get in touch.
