Wild In The Streets: Guns, Locks and Steel

Further to yesterday's post about my rusty bike, I had a brief correspondence with someone who seems to know about metal and chemistry and stuff, and the upshot is that my frame should have been "passivated" but wasn't--which is apparently why it looks like I had a bout of mid-ride diarrhea and never cleaned it.  (Hey, I hear triathletes do it all the time.)

Furthermore, according to the KVA site, my bike may be "contaminated," in which case it may need to be "pickled."

If corrosion staining is removed but returns rapidly (within a few days or weeks), it is likely that the surface has been contaminated with heavily embedded carbon steel or iron. These generally have to be removed by grinding and refinishing and/or by pickling. If welds have not been properly cleaned and heat tint was left on the surface, the welds will need to be ground and/or pickled to restore corrosion resistance. Information on restoring the corrosion resistance of a weld can be obtained from welding product suppliers or here: www.euro-inox.org

A pickled stainless steel bike?

Now that's artisanal.

And there I was thinking crabon was fussy.

But, you know, it "strikes like a Tai Chi master," so hopefully that doesn't refer to the moment when the frame falls apart as I approach Fred "Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!" speed:


What's with that fancy board, anyway?  Whatever happened to using wood?

What a total Tai Chi Fred.

I'd like to see him break a board that's been properly passivated.

In other news, Geoff the Reader tells me that Arnold Schwarzenegger was recently in Melbourne, where he rode around in flagrant violation of their draconian Helme(n)t Law(n)s--first on a bike share bike:

(Schwarzenegger is the fifth person to use the Melbourne Bike Share since it debuted in 2010.)

And then on a Specialized that may or may not have been pickled:

(Awww, look at the good little Melbournians with their poorly-fitted helments they might as well not be wearing anyway.)

I have difficulty believing that in 2015 children still know who Arnold Schwarzenegger is.  "Kindergarten Cop" came out twenty-five years ago for chrissakes!  If pop culture is that behind in Australia, I'd hate to be around when these poor kids find out Jim Varney died:

(A real standout in the "adult imbeciles going back to school" film canon.)

Anyway, it wasn't long before a helmentless Schwarzenegger felt the long arm of the law tapping him on his preternaturally muscular shoulder:

The Terminator and Predator star was wearing bike-matching blue shorts, but not a bicycle helmet.

It it compulsory to wear one in Victoria and failure to do so can result in a $146 fine.

This would seem to imply that both helments and matching your shorts to your bike are compulsory in Victoria, in which case I'm lucky I didn't land in jail while I was there--especially because I don't have Schwarzenegger's easy charm:

Senior Constable Gillson decided not to fine the action star, instead directing him to the nearest 7-Eleven to buy a helmet for $5.

"He was very likeable and very approachable," Senior Constable Gillson said.

"He stated that his father was a policeman, so there was very much mutual respect there.

Wow, really?  Did Schwarzenegger also happen to mention that, in addition to being a police officer, his father was a Nazi?

According to documents obtained in 2003 from the Austrian State Archives by the Los Angeles Times, which was after the expiration of a 30-year seal of his records under Austrian privacy law, Gustav Schwarzenegger voluntarily applied to join the Nazi Party on 1 March 1938, two weeks before the country was annexed. Austria became part of the German Reich through the Anschluss on 12 March 1938.[3] A separate record obtained by the Wiesenthal Center indicates he sought membership before the annexation but was only accepted in January, 1941. 

If I ever go back to Melbourne and they bust me for not wearing a helment I'm telling the cop all about my grandfather, commandant Röckmanstein, at which point I assume he'll tear up the ticket and buy me a Foster's.

[By the way, this is not an example of Godwin's Law.  Schwarzenegger's father was simply a Nazi, it's not like I'm making an analogy to further an argument.  If anything it's more like Six Degrees of Nazi Separation.]

Meanwhile, in Florida:

After speaking with a witness and reviewing security video from a nearby business, detectives determined Smith was riding his bike when a handgun in his jacket pocket discharged.

I wasn't even remotely surprised that someone carrying a firearm managed to accidentally shoot himself with it, but I was stunned that an American newspaper article about a dead cyclist didn't mention whether or not he had been wearing a helment.

Isn't that in the AP Stylebook?

Of course here in New York we have much stricter gun laws, which is why cyclists use bike locks instead:

Now I in no way condone striking anybody with a bike lock, but something's a little fishy about this story.  For example:

The cyclist cut off a Subaru at the corner of West 24th Street and Fifth Avenue about 5:40 p.m. on Monday, sparking a heated argument, police said.

The dispute turned violent when the cyclists slammed his bike into the car and smacked the 54-year-old driver in the face with his bike lock, police said.

The cyclist slammed his bike into the car, really?  Or did the driver hit the cyclist and then tell the police it was the other way around?  Because that's exactly what a driver did when she hit me from behind with her car some years back.

That's the beauty of driving a car.  You can tell the police anything you want.  Anything.

Also, this:

The victim was taken to Staten Island University North Hospital, where he had to get stitches, according to police.

So the driver, presumably bleeding from the face and in need of urgent care, "was taken" (like in an ambulance?) from Manhattan to a hospital...on Staten Island?  At 5:40pm on a Monday?!?  Is Beth Israel really that bad?  Because if you're unfamiliar with New York City geography and traffic, Staten Island at rush hour might as well be on the other side of the earth:

(Ignore the G**gle Maps travel time estimates, they're bullshit, this trip could take days.)

I'd take a u-lock to the face multiple times before attempting the BQE at that hour.

He's lucky he didn't bleed to death stuck in traffic on the Gowanus.

But as bad as road rage is, at least it's an emotion, and it's downright endearing compared to an utter lack of humanity:

(Via Stevil Kinevil)

Taron Stead, 17, who had just bought his new mountain bike after taking on an IT apprenticeship, was hit during the morning traffic on Crookes Valley Road, Sheffield, last Friday and left covered in blood and bruises.

The male driver of the silver car stopped and a woman got out of the passenger seat, according to Stead's mother Naomi Pickard. She proceeded to tell him that her kids were upset, and that they were late for school, and then drove off without giving her details, the Sheffield Star reported, publishing a picture of Stead's injuries.

And that's how you raise your children to be psychopaths.

Penultimately, I recently received an email from the inventor of this device:



It certainly seems nifty enough, but I'm not sure I'd sell it as a "pain free pump head:"

If your pump head is causing you pain then you're putting it in the wrong place--unless they're marketing it to Indian surgeons:

An Indian state has halted mass sterilisations at health camps after a doctor was found using a bicycle pump to inflate women's abdomens.

Ah, India--always doing right by women.

Lastly, I was looking up dirty words in the dictionary when I found this on the Merriam-Webster website:

If "fat bike" makes it into the dictionary before "scranus" then I'm giving up English and switching this blog to Aramaic.