On This Day In History, August 5th: Tullio Campagnolo Invents The Helment Mirror

Big news out of Bloomfield Hills:

Note the unpaved road surface:

If only people back then had had access to dedicated gravel bikes, then perhaps they wouldn't have needed cars and bicycles would be the dominant form of private transportation in America today.

Meanwhile, here in New York City, David Dubinsky's bicycle was stolen, which will greatly complicate his gefilte fish runs:

I wonder if he had a handmade artisanal gefilte fish porteur rack.  Probably not.  See, things were simpler back then (at least I'm assuming the were, since I wasn't even remotely alive yet), when the hot topic was "three-speed gears and scissor brakes," and when "post-ride recovery" meant slurping down a bowl of won ton soup:

But besides shopping for his wife, Mr. Dubinsky likes to cycle from his lower Fifth Avenue residence to Central Park on sundays to rendezvous with other bicycle enthusiasts.  They discuss such things as three-speed gears and scissor brakes, and then Mr. Dubinsky pedals homeward, usually with a stop for a bowl of won ton soup.

Also, as I understand it, in those days you had these things called "neighborhoods" where different kinds of people lived, and if you wanted to eat a certain kind of food you went to that neighborhood and bought it from them.  Now, all the neighborhoods are indistinguishable from each other thanks to rampant gentrification, and your biggest decision is essentially which irreverently painted food truck to patronize:

There's a lot to love about Brooklyn, but perhaps its greatest strength is its growing cultural diversity.

By the way, nothing brightens my day like a new
time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork Bret sighting, such as this one recently forwarded to me by a reader:

(Bret breathing down your neck.)

But the next person who emails me to tell me that Bret makes an ironic cameo in the Workcycles ad in the right hand margin is getting kicked in the scranus:

It shouldn't bother me so much that people don't think I'm in on the joke, but it does.

Anyway, back to the food trucks.  Let's say you and your date want to ride your bike to a food truck so the people you priced out of the neighborhood can serve you their local cuisine.  And let's just say your date doesn't own a bike because all the local bike shop carried was gravel bikes, and there's no bike share program  in your neighborhood because rabid Dorothy Rabinowitz types have successfully cowed your local all-powerful bike lobby away with their vagina dentatas (or vaginae dentatum, or whatever the correct plural of vagina dentata is).  

Well, now there's the Companion Bike Seat, the seat for people who like to ride their bikes with companions:

The inventors of the Companion Bike Seat asked me to share it with you, and that's what I'm doing.  However, I'm doing it only for two reasons: 1) I like the video, and 2) I want to totally piss off the King of Park Slope, who scoffs at the Companion Bike Seat because he doesn't need any special equipment to portage not one but two fetching nonprofit attorneys back to his cooperative apartment for a nightcap:

What followed this ride was a night of wine, spooning, and spirited conversation about the pros and cons of rent regulation that none of them will soon forget.

Lastly, American bicycle advocates are always looking to Amsterdam and Copenhagen for inspiration, but perhaps we should now look to Penang, where they've unveiled a bike lane that stretches for almost one hundred feet:



Presumably they'll follow this with a bike share system that allows you to use the bikes for 30 seconds at a time.