Humans Weren't Meant To Travel Long Distances Over Short Amounts Of Time

Sleep is like money.  When you're getting plenty, you feel great and do stuff like wave to strangers and sing for no reason.  But when you're running low, you feel cranky and desperate and YOU WANT TO FREAKING KILL SOMEBODY.

I haven't had any sleep, because I'm jetlagged, and the reason I'm jetlagged is because some moron put Australia all the way on the other side of the planet.

Jerkface.

So yeah, I'm in rough shape.  In fact, I almost got arrested in the supermarket this morning:



The only reason I know the above movie exists is that the exchange at 1:53 is sampled on this record album:

My friend brought it back from England for me back in the day and it immediately became one of my prized possessions.  I tried to find the song complete with the sample on YouTube, but while the song is there the sample is not, so I can only assume that at some point Extreme Noise Terror were forced to re-release the album without all the (presumably) uncleared movie samples, which totally undermines my faith in the punk movement.

Another symptom of sleep deprivation is tangents.

Anyway.

What?

So yeah, you'll have to excuse me if I'm not taking things in stride today.  Take my Big Dummy for example:

Above is my Big Dummy, pictured near my home, which as you can see is located on the Street That Time Forgot.  The relative obscurity of my street is a good thing, since my seventeen (17) children can do wholesome stuff like play in the middle of it and subsist on grubs and feral cats during our many "outdoor survival nights."  (I sleep inside.  They only way they're going to learn is if they're out there by themselves.)  It also means I can generally lock my Big Dummy outside without worrying too much about it.  In fact, our Electra Amsterdam was parked outside for over two (2) weeks before I noticed we had completely forgotten to lock it.

The thing is, outdoor parking combined with my general aversion to performing routine maintenance means the first thing to go on the Big Dummy is the shifting.  And when your shifting goes, the way it happens is that the rear derailleur is happy to make its way up the cassette to the big cogs, because the cable is pulling the derailleur (unless it's "rapid rise" or whatever, I don't even know if that's still a thing, I'm old and I can't keep track of this crap anymore), but then when you try to shift back down the cog the derailleur won't go because your cable and housing are all sticky and the cable won't release and so the head of the cable just starts poking out of the shifter instead.

So when you live on the side of a big hill like I do, and you put one of your seventeen (17) children on your bike to take him to survival camp to learn how to eat grubs and skin cats, everything's fine as you climb the hill, downshifting and downshifting until you're in your very biggest cog.  But then you get to the top of the hill and try to upshift, and it's not happening, and you realize you've only got one gear (or technically three if the front's still shifting) and you're going to have to frantically spin the whole rest of the way like a complete idiot.

That's what happened this morning, and I wasn't in the mood.

And before you say it, yes, I know, Di2 shifting on my Big Dummy would totally solve all my problems.

I'm going to get right on that.

In the meantime though, that little malfunction has completely fucked up my Strava times.

Oh, here's the helment I bought in Australia:

I removed the visor before wearing it of course, leaving three conspicuously unattractive holes in the front.

But as cranky and disoriented as I am, I've got nothing on this guy, who had to be pulled off the Brooklyn Bridge when he accidentally tried to cross with the cars on a Citi Bike:


Man tries to Citi Bike Across Brooklyn Bridge... in the car lane from Gothamist on Vimeo.

My helment is off to him, because that's not an easy mistake to make.

Anyway, the rider was fine, but three people were treated for hernias after lifting the Citi Bike.

In other news, acolytes of the Lone Wolf:

Will be pleased to know that a friend of a reader has scored an impromptu interview from the man himself:


Interview with the Lone Wolf from Gary Cziko on Vimeo.

I was a little disappointed to see him straighten the USA wheels as soon as the camera was trained on his bike, because I had always just assumed the fact they are always this way in photos was a by-product of his Cosmic Alignment:

Though I was fascinated to learn that the Lone Wolf's bike is now bedazzled with 160,000 crystals and is the product of nine hours of painstaking labor a day, three to four days a week, for three to four months.

That's more time than I've spent to date on blogging, parenting, and routine bike maintenance combined.

Best of all, he put the crystals right over Lance Armstrong's and Taylor Phinney's autographs, bedazzling them both right into obscurity.

Speaking of labor, the people at Velocity USA want you to see how they build their wheels, so here you go, because I live for videos of people twiddling nipples:


The Wheel Department in August from Velocity USA on Vimeo.

I guess they're pretty efficient when it comes to building wheels, but I'd like to know how quickly they could bedazzle a bike.

Lastly, because you're deeply interested in physics, I present to you this video I received from Stefane in Munich:


I'd make an animated GIF if only I knew how...