R O T H A R . C O M

Say Mr Brown and it might invoke all sorts of  thoughts and memories. Some one you knew in your childhood, a former colleague, a friend, a song by Bob Marley, etc. Maybe it makes you think about lots of those things. Say Sheldon Brown and then you’ve probably narrowed that thinking process to a very specific point. I’m guessing that Sheldon Brown is a fairly unique name. Certainly more unique than John Smith, David Williams or Robert Johnson. Ask a cyclist about Sheldon Brown and you’ll probably get a further polarised answer. If you were in the minority in web-savvy bike world who’d never heard of him, then you can read more at his website.

Sheldon passed away on Monday this week and the chances are that you probably know this already from having read about this sad news on different cycling sites. Sheldon didn’t have a big impact on my life. I can’t say I visited his website very often. Some of the bikes that he featured on his site like this Phil Wood Piss Off were interesting to say the least. Yet none of that really matters. He was a helpful forum regular. His website was a catalogue of facts and information that shop staff could fall back on when facing a difficult question about flange grommet diameters or the internal gearing ratios in a Sturmey Archer three speed hub. The fact that he took time to put this stuff on the web made a difference for a lot of people. His legacy is the kind of Internet work that puts sites like this in their proper context.

So I’ve been a bit slow in paying any homage to Sheldon Brown. BSNYC has said this which covers some of what I think:

Only the strongest personalities can infuse inanimate objects with life, and Sheldon Brown did that. Just go to his website and look at his personal bikes. As much as we all love bikes, I think we all know they’re just things. Sheldon’s bikes are things too, but they have a signature exuberance; they are simultaneously absurd and practical. In a subculture that obsessively categorizes everything, they defy categorization. When you reach a certain familiarity with bicycles they can sometimes speak to you about their owners, and Sheldon’s bikes speak with irreverence. They sing and tell jokes, and they have a Thelonious Monk-like ugly beauty. When you have as much knowledge and creativity as Sheldon did, you can build bikes that follow no template except your own.

There’s little danger that cyclists will forget Sheldon Brown. I doubt that there’s any cyclist who hasn’t consulted his site, or who doesn’t still. And as the architect of the cycling canon he’s done more for cycling than any pro cyclist, or critical mass, or white bike, or orange bike ever has. No matter what you ride, how you ride, how long you ride, or how long you’ve been riding, you’re a fan of Sheldon Brown.

On Monday I wrote elsewhere that I suspect he’s not going to be forgotten about any time soon. He was a legend.

I’ve notice that the grumpy* security guru known as Samuri has been using a nifty Google Maps Application recently to plot maps of his riding routes. I’ve been quite please with the simplicity of Gmaps-pedometer for sharing my recent local route exploration, but having just had to put something together for a website demonstration I’m giving tomorrow, I’m tempted to try Map My Ride out on here with a report on my next foray into the unknown.

*Jon’s quite justified in being grumpy. People in cars trying to kill you generally induces negativity even in the nicest of people. The people of Leigh seem to have developed a new sport that involves trying to take out cyclists (maybe they’ve watched Death Race 2000 too many times) or it might just be that they’re trying to tell him that he doesn’t fit in. Leigh: a local town. For local people.

When I had my S-Works steel back in the late 90s, I always used to swap between rigid forks in the winter and suspension forks in summer. It made a huge amount of sense then and as I’m now facing a big bill for a new crown/steerer assembly for a pair of Fox Vanilla Forx to go on the singlespeed, I’ve decided that the best solution is to save them from the worst of the winter from now on by swapping to something that is more suitable for the winter grime. I’ve managed to get my hands on some of the last of these bad boys:

Not madly keen on the graphics , so I’m not sure how long they’ll be left on but they’re pretty sure to knock about two and a half pounds of weight off the Deluxe while I decide whether to keep the old suspension forks going or get a new pair… Finally, Si sent this in. I suspect that it wasn’t a news item that made it into The Independent or The Guardian. Still newsworthy material you have to agree:

An old friend of mine who I used to ride with and is now an internationally traveled and almost stereotypical surfer once said to me, you’re either an ocean person or a mountain person. It’s not until you’ve experienced the best and worst of the realities of both environments that you find which is the one for you. It took years to really understand what this meant, but I think he’s right. You can enjoy both, but you only feel truly comfortable or at home in one place. I know that I’m a mountain person. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most amazing golden sandy beach with equatorial warm ocean water and offshore reefs awash with aquatic wildlife. There is no contest to the mountains in my book.

In my visit to the RGS in October, I borrowed a copy of Imagining Tibet from the Library. It’s an academic text, so it’s not really one of those books that is difficult to put down, it actually quite hard to get into the right frame of mind to absorb it. I chose it because Tibet is one of those places I would really love to go and ride a mountain bike. When people talk about traveling in Asia, I don’t think about Bali or Hong Kong, I’m thinking of the ceiling of the world, the big mountains and plateaus. In the book there is a chapter by Jamyang Norbu, called Behind the Lost Horizons which other than making me think of the music from an album by Lemon Jelly, contains a paragraph of text that I think is very accurate. Although not rewritten word for word, it essentially states:

The desire to maintain the cultural purity of such Shangri-la-like societies as Tibet and Ladakh or certain Amazon Indian tribes seems to necessitate cocooning them against the realities of the outside world, especially politics, commerce, and technology. Development for such societies is only deemed appropriate when it is nonmilitary, nonindustrial, and environmentally friendly in nature. Such considerations are probably well meant and sincere, but often ignore society’s own changing history, its role (however humble) in geopolitical strategies and even in the desires of its people, who may be seeking change for their own reasons. When Claude Levi-Strauss said that anthropology is the handmaiden of colonialism, he was probably not envisioning the kind of “New Age” colonialism that the few surviving ancient cultures in this world have to put up with.

So if and when I go to Tibet I want to remember this. I want to be able to focus on the natural landscape that has drawn me there, not the fact that I am privileged to have flown half way around the world to be able to take it all in. I am not going there hoping for a cultural or religious life changing experience. As Norbu writes, however hopeless their cause or marginal their survival, Tibetans are better off living their own reality than being typecast in ethereal roles in the fantasies of the West. In my mind no matter how wonderful the people of Tibet are and irrespective of how jaw-droppingly beautiful its environment, it is not going to save our materialistic and self-destructive consumerist society.

“You’re scum and you’re too poor to have a car and you don’t pay road tax”.

Remarks like this are an unfortunately too frequent retort from some motorists when you pull them up for driving like a crack addict looking for their next fix. So should cyclists pay road tax? Well the brief answer is “no” because a bike is not a motor vehicle, but below is a report by Howard Peel on the subject as originally featured at Bikezone.

Continue reading “Tax”

I’ve changed offices at work. I now look out over Manchester towards Calderdale and the moors. That’s the summit of Knowl Moor (419m) above Rochdale nestling under the clouds. There’s a trig point up there too. It’d be interesting to go up the top and see what Manchester looks like from there.

The waters have subsided and this morning I saw my nemesis from last week for the first time. It’s a huge pothole, probably 18 inches in diameter and a good six inches deep. I’ll get the camera out and try and get some photos of it tomorrow. With that monster lurking underground, some one had better get some photographic evidence before someone has a really nasty off or some Mercedes owner bends an AMG alloy in it.

Updated 17th January:

It’s been lurking under water for a few days, but here’s the beast…