Joe's blog

Up in Washington state there lives a man, by the name of Ed Orcutt.  By some miraculous chain of events he holds public office, and yet he believes a bicyclist burns just as much CO2 as someone driving a car.  This story brings together everything that is wrong with transportation policy in America.  The story was first broke by the Seattle bike blog.  Ed made the clam in an email exchange with a local bike shop owner, who opposed a new bike tax in Washington's transportation budget.

Front Derailleurs are probably the most annoying part of any bike. They never quite work right and if you don't know how to adjust them you can get yourself in trouble if you try to. If there was any part of the bike that was ripe for some kind of innovation, the front derailleur would be it!

And now it's finally happenend thanks to a small polish company called Efneo.  Check out the videos.  It's a pretty amazing product that I would love to have on my bike.  It eliminates a lot of issues caused by the front chain rings and derailleur like:

Nobody ever gets bike lights quite right.  Seriously, I'm not sure who is running these bike accessory departments, but they definitely must not actually ride their bike.  And I don't care how many kickstarter bike light projects there are, most leave some important element out. I'd say there are a few very important characteristics a bike light MUST have:

• Compact
• Bright
• Efficient Battery
• Rechareable Battery
• Removeable
• Reasonable Price
• Simple attachment mechanism
• 1 or 2 modes, I DON'T need 5 blinky modes!!!!!!
• Durable i.e. Drop Proof & Water Proof

 

I've participated in a few Critical Masses in my day. I did my first one in Madison, WI back in the booze infused glory days of college. It was a pretty small affair with a dense concentration of hippies. After moving to San Francisco I got to experience the event in its purest and orignal form. And on September 28th of 2012 the event will be celebrating its 20th anniversary, complete with a week of events and awesome promotional material like the attached poster, designed by local illustrator and muralist, Mona Caron. She also designed the 15th anniversary poster, which got a boatload of attention and it seems like she went with the same theme for the 20th design.

It is HARD to find a good bicycle light. You don't want to spend too much money because it might get stolen. The lights in this video are pretty awesome, nice cinematography too.

Ok, so I know I have ripped on electric bikes in the past, but this is kind of cool. If something like this is going to get more people on bikes, the I'm all for it.

Mark Ronson & The Business INTL: "The Bike Song" from Warren Fu on Vimeo.

Verse:

I can't understand it, but I can't really can't stand them

Girls love cars, cars cause harm to the planet

Don't you wanna take a joyride on my tandem?

Huffy on a Huffy, don't I look so handsome.

Bikes suffice, they're so nice like priceless

Working on my calves to triceps to biceps

Bypass the gas, stop the traffic lights

I get a round, round, without a drivers license.

Hello are you walking? Farwell, I'm off then.

And I whip it through the city with a 40 and a 50

Party popping on my wheelie.

I dig this track and thought it had an apropos message on election day. Get Ready It's a New Day, so Get out and VOTE! Also it is totally bike related because Ash Roth is rocking a fixie in the video.  A slightly undersized fixie, cmon prop wranglers, get your shit together (or they just took it from the only hipster they could find)!

I really want to believe Ash Roth is legit as balls, but there are a few caveats that makes me doubt his is his commitment to bicycle riding.

This is one of them. Although, I question the girl's ability to actually ride this bicycle without her onesie/sweater or whatever the hell she's got on falling off. Not that I would object to such a thing, but there might be children around. 

And secondly, it would be difficult to ride through brush.  Seriously who rides their bicycle through the Australian outback?  (not 100% sure that is where this is)  I mean why not have her pose with a kangaroo or dingo or something?  Looks like they applied a nice retro photoshop filter too.

Not sure what kind of bike she's rocking.  Looks like it could have been a quick pickup from Goodwill by the prop wrangler for this photoshoot...  

Do you need a good reason to bike? After reading this article I never want to buy another drop of gasoline again. Check it out here: How America is being bought by Middle Eastern Sovereign Wealth Funds! It was written by Matt Taibbi, a journalist for Rolling Stone, and probably one of the journalists I trust most at the moment.  It's kind of depressing when the state of the media is so bad that the people I trust most are Rolling Stone and Comedy Central.