This Wednesday's Post Is Printed On 100% Post-Consumer Waste Paper Stock (Assuming You Have Printed It Out On 100% Post-Consumer Waste Paper Stock)

Some emails are spam.  Other emails are important.  And then once in a very great awhile comes a life-changing email that totally blows your mind, like the one I just received from someone who's "invented a new gear shifting system:"



As soon as I heard the portentous music and that cutting-edge test bike entered the frame, I knew I was bearing witness to greatness:

Behold...Wavetrans:

Which is not a spinoff of the critically-acclaimed sitcom starring Jeffrey Tambor.

So what is it?

Well, it's...something:

Something that appears to have been made from a Target bike and a repurposed Nintendo Game Boy:

If you're smelling something right now, that's the sound of the people at Shimano soiling their pants in fear.

Speaking of fear, I had to make a choice when deciding on my bicycling route this morning.  Should I take the route where the wild police chase ended in death a few weeks ago?

Police confirmed that shortly after 4 p.m., officers pursued a stolen van whose occupants were allegedly trying to break into a parking meter on Schroeder Street from North Broadway to Warburton, just south of Odell Avenue and the Greystone train station. The chase ended when the van, traveling northbound, struck a sedan traveling southbound.

(Yes, according to the journalistic standards of this particular newspaper, when teenagers who are too young to drive kill someone with a stolen van while fleeing police it's still an "accident.")

Or should I take the route where the wild police chase ended in death just yesterday?

That's a rather click-baity headline for the Times.  I realize we don't have all the facts on this one, but when you're DRIVING THE WRONG WAY ON THE FREAKING PARKWAY, isn't it at least fair to say you're armed with a car?

When they spotted the Nissan again, it was coming back toward them, going against traffic and heading southbound on the northbound side of the roadway, the officials said. It passed them, they said, then crashed into a median and three other vehicles a short distance away.

By the way, the fun started a mere bidon's throw from my home:

The police chase began shortly before noon, when two officers from the 50th Precinct in the Bronx, on patrol in a marked car, saw a gray 2009 Nissan Z driving erratically and began to follow it. The officers tried to pull the car over at 242nd Street and Broadway; instead it was driven off at high speed, officials said. The officers followed the car but lost sight of it on the parkway, just over the border in Westchester County.

He must have been driving beyond erratically if the police actually bothered to follow him, because erratic driving is business as usual at that intersection, where motorists do their best to murder pedestrians as they wait for buses or attempt to cross Broadway and reach Van Cortlandt Park on the other side.  (Most large New York City parks are surrounded by streets that are nearly impossible to cross, the thinking being that you'll appreciate them more if you need to risk death in order to access them.)

Anyway, after careful deliberation I chose the latter route:

The appearance of the thin ice rescue ladders in the park means winter is coming, but you wouldn't know it from the unseasonably warm temperatures we've been experiencing.  (Global warming, we're all gonna die, yadda yadda and so forth.)

After using the ladder to climb a tree and throw things at passing runners for awhile, I got back on my bike and continued north, and it wasn't long before I saw this:

After wrecking his car on the parkway the driver fled on foot, so maybe the smashed fence and tire tracks are from the police driving onto the bike path in pursuit:

Either way, a short while later I came upon what I'm assuming is the scene of the fatal shooting:

Riding through the scene of an ongoing investigation didn't seem like it would go very well for me, and so I backtracked a bit and took what turned out to be an enjoyable little detour:

I even got to check in with what appears to be the abode of one Mr. or Mrs. "Hot Cheeks:"

Hot Cheeks naturally put me in mind of "beefy" bottom brackets, and so I paused to admire my own:

Yes, this is what a bottom bracket should look like.  Dirty, yes, but more importantly threaded.  Press-fit bottom brackets are an abomination, which is why we're now reading about "solutions" like the T47 bottom bracket shell, when the real solution is to just go back to "regular" bottom bracket shells:

Companies that have long touted press-fit systems as desirable features would face an even bigger hurdle by switching to T47: the tacit admission that the designs they’d previously claimed as superior are no longer so. 

I take great pleasure in reading about the hole the Fred-biking industry has dug for itself with these stupid bottom brackets, and the bike reviewers who are finally getting around to admitting that they suck have nobody to blame but themselves.

Meanwhile, on the same website, I also noticed this:

Tested by David Millar?  How did it handle being tossed?


 That's when both weight and aerodynamics really come into play.