Walkabout
Oh hey there, I didn’t hear you come in. I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be back to posting regularly here again very soon. I took an unplanned sabbatical. Very unplanned. Kind of half-sabbatical and half-walkabout. What have I been doing? Well, verbs that include skiing, camping, biking around Portland, and doing a lot more running than usual. I’m on a training regiment for a summit climb I’m tackling in August. It’s been tremendous to be outside so much lately, and it has recharged my work batteries. Stay tuned because I’m ready to roll.
The Punisher — Part I
This post is part of a series titled ‘Piece by Piece’ about building up a bike from scratch and sharing what I learn as I go.
The first acquisition for the new bike is a leather saddle by English saddle-maker Brooks. The model is a B17 Narrow which is an entry-point into the Brooks product line and the one I see on most of the bikes in my neighborhood. I went with the narrow version not because the standard model is too wide, but because the underlying philosophy of this bike is to be as compact and simple as possible; less of everything. A narrow saddle seems to be a good fit for that philosophy. However, I know that I’m sacrificing a great deal of comfort in exchange for a smaller saddle. In fact, the ride might prove to be surprisingly uncomfortable. When I described my seat-purchase choice to the shop man, he said ‘oh I see, so you’re looking for a punisher.’ I hope not. Really. But what lets me feel pretty confident about this is that no seat could be worse than the torture device on my current bike and, as bad as it is, it isn’t really as uncomfortable as it looks. So, we’ll see.
Part II of this post will examine the ownership of leather goods in these modern times.
#pdxboom
Last night I was on my sofa, working on work, headphones on, when a tweet from my friends Gavin and Liz popped up saying:
scriptandseal:
An earthquake/explosion just happened somewhere in Portland. very weird.
Weird right? I didn’t hear anything or feel any shaking so I kept on working. Then minutes later, this…
kmcdade:
Portland is so beautifully geeky. We now have a hashtag, a triangulation map, and a stream graph for #pdxboom
pdxboom? related? I search…yes, related. The Oregonian reports that moments ago a large unexplained explosion was heard in Southeast Portland (where I live). The second unexplained explosion in two weeks in the neighborhood. It was so powerful that it shook windows on both occasions.
The #pdxboom tweets were now beginning to roll in from all over Portland.
Okay, now I need to know what’s going on. As @kmcdade had pointed out in her tweet, within minutes of the explosion, Portlanders had established this Google Map to try to triangulate the origin of the event (image above).
I followed the event for a while online until the general consensus became that the origin was a sonic boom from an overhead plane. Ok, that’s pretty harmless. As long as nobody is getting hurt make all the booms you want then.
This morning I awoke to find that the authorities had determined that the cause of the blast was a pipe bomb detonated along the bank of the Willamette River. Ok, well, that’s not too cool but whatever. At least the source of it’s being tracked down.
And so I got on with my day.
At about midday, I dropped Kate off at the Land gallery so that she could work on the installation of her upcoming show. I was driving back home, through the Southeast turning onto Sandy at Ash when an explosion rocked my car and white light filled my car. This all happened in the snap of a finger. The blast was loud as if a shotgun had been fired from the backseat of my car while I was driving. I didn’t so much hear it as felt it move through the core of me and the vehicle. Big sparks were now sliding down the outside of my windshield.
The worst part about this is that I couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. I was looking around me and over both shoulders but it seemed to be coming from above where I couldn’t see through because of the roof of my car. I just drove forward hoping that was the right way to go. Not that I had much choice. There weren’t many cars on Sandy, at this point I noticed that the ones that I could see had come to a full stop in the street. I stopped too. I was in a calm state of WTF.
At this point, and this is like five seconds after the event, with #pdxboom fresh in my mind, my thought was that this was pipe bomb #3. Then, as I stepped out of my car to make sure that it wasn’t on fire, I saw the cause of the explosion, a transformer had exploded directly above where I was as I drove underneath it. Live power-lines were now dangling and falling all over the road making electrical sounds and causing quite a lot of noxious smoke.
Thirty to forty people had now gathered on the sidewalks to investigate what they had heard. They were asking if I was alright. That was the first I had thought of it. I checked my body, no bleeding, no pain; thumbs up. Recently I read that Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria (commonly known as Sisi) was walking along Lake Geneva when she was accosted by anarchist Luigi Lucheni. He was subdued, and she continued along. A short time later it was discovered that she was bleeding. She had been stabbed in the heart. Her corset had compressed the wound. When it was loosened, she bled profusely and died. When I read that I wondered how she didn’t feel the pain of the wound. But in the moments after my strange experience today, though not nearly as severe of course, I was able to empathize with the strange concentrated daze we find ourselves in when confronted with a sudden and violent jolt from our daily routine.
As I stood on the sidewalk watching the power-lines electrify the wet cement, the firetrucks began to arrive. I went home glad that neither I nor anybody else was hurt in this, my tiny sequel to the #pdxboom.
Update: New York Times coverage of #pdxboom is here.
Update: Photos are up at Blogtown PDX
In which I build up a bike from scratch
Today marks the beginning of a new series of posts at cliftonburt.com, Piece by Piece, in which I will be documenting the process of building up my newest bike from scratch. I’m starting with only a frame (from Nada Bike). The end result will be a single-speed bike comprised of parts new and old acquired along the way. I haven’t done this before and I don’t have any special expertise at bike mechanics. What I do have is the desire to learn about building-up a bike and the micro-decisions make up that process.
This is not a tutorial, it’s more of a travelogue. So don’t look to this for definitive answers. Perhaps by the end I’ll have learned enough to provide some sort of definitive resource. I guess we’ll see.
Timeline:
I’m not in a big hurry. I’m more interested in understanding the options of each bike piece (gear ratios, braking, etc). On the other hand, spring is in the air and I’m looking forward to putting my new bike to work here on the streets of Portland. So, I’ll roughly say a month will be my deadline.
Let’s do this.
Thursday
The image above is Nietzsche Family Circus #5 from Achilles in the Alleyway
An update: remember those images of crystals that I posted up a few days ago? I thought they were photographs, they’re not, their paintings. Wow. Meighan O’Toole pointed out that they originate from the talents of Carly Waito. Amazing stuff.
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The funniest thing I’ve seen in quite a while is this video of a person improvising songs whilst Chatrouletting. A quick backgrounder: Chatroulette is a fairly new website that connects video-chat users to each other randomly. There’s been some debate about whether the guy at the piano is or is not Ben Folds. And it’s looking like it isn’t. Either way, I love it and I’m looking forward to more videos of his adventures on Chatroulette.
Here’s a direct link to the video.
Update: Here’s Ben Folds performing his homage to Merton.
