Walks Like A

Fortune Magazine Cover, March 1933

The Bicycle Is Art

Perfect to browse on a Sunday morning.

Edit. It seems I already posted about this. Ha! Well, I must like it. At least I used a different image.

Edward Hopper, Approaching a City, 1946

Here's an art chaser for that spam e-mail post. Info on the piece here.

Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve

Info here. Highly recommended.

Booted Bantams

From a recent trip to Julian.

Here's all you ever wanted to know about booted bantams (about 2/3 of the way down).

What's Your Bag?

I'm loving the 11-liter Zimbale saddle bag I have on my Peugeot. I use the bag with a ViVa saddle bag support, a small rack that attaches to the seat post and is designed specifically to support a largish saddle bag. If I get around to it, I'll post a more extensive review of the Zimbale bag and the ViVa support as a system, but for now, I'll just say that I absolutely love it and very much recommend it as a means to carry small loads around town or on longer day trips.

I especially like the extendable flap on the saddle bag, which allows for larger or bulkier loads in the main compartment and/or carrying bulky objects under the flap. That's a rolled up messenger bag under the flap in this photo, which I was going to use to carry home a small bag of cat food, but it turned out my saddle bag was large enough for both the cat food and the rolled up messenger bag, which was good, because I don't like carrying loads on my back when I ride.

PS. I was not compensated to say nice things about these products, I just like them.

Cheap Bike Art Experiment

This project was inspired by a vastly over-priced piece of bicycle kitsch I saw at a neighborhood shop. The piece was basically a large square board with beveled edges to which a low-quality printout of a diagram of a high-wheeled bicycle had been pasted and glazed over. "Hell, we can do that," I said to my wife. So we did, sort of.

We found four small wooden tiles at a local thrift shop, printed out some photos from the 1890s and early 1900s I found online, and glazed them onto the tiles with an acrylic matte medium. I used a bit too much medium, which produced some small wrinkles, and the hues I added digitally before printing streaked a bit when I brushed on the medium, but I actually like the effect it produced.

The whole project cost maybe $3.00 ($2.00 for the tiles, maybe a dollar's worth of paper, ink, and medium).

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers (1875)

Read more. This has been one of my favorites for a long time.

What's Up Louisville?

So here's a long shot. Any readers from and/or been to Louisville, Kentucky? I'll be spending some time in "The Possibility City" probably in late summer/early fall. I'll be there for a week, and although I'll be busy with research in the archives during the day, and likely drained of all ambition or energy in the evening, I'd like to know what's worth doing, where's a good place to eat -- you know, the usual stuff. I'm always in favor of weird, artsy, unusual, historical, or bike-related stuff. Whatcha got, Louisville?