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Sunday, May 22 2016
I now own a Pilen Lyx. It's a big, robust city bicycle, designed by Swedes, made with modern components, but decidedly old school.
For some years now I've been gravitating towards old-fashioned bicycles intended for commuting at low speeds in your work clothes. I like the upright posture: you can see more, and you're more visible to drivers. I don't mind the weight: yes, it's harder to get going, but once you're going, who cares? I find the ride quality of classic style steel frames and curvy front forks delightful.
When I first reached this conclusion I started out with a customised Linus. Since then I have also acquired an elderly single speed Rudge of uncertain age and a 1950s 3-speed Raleigh Sport. The Rudge is fun but ramshackle, and now awaits conversion and stripping down to path racer style. The Raleigh is a joyous ride, but is in such good nick with its original paint that I don't want to ride it every day, especially not when it might get wet. And the Linus has been great as my main commuting bike, yet after almost 6 years it's showing a lot of wear and the issues with build quality are becoming apparent: the paint is soft, the chrome is thin, and maybe wedging an 8 speed Nexus into the rear forks was ambitious (the back wheel has a distinct tendency to slip forward in the dropouts over time no matter how tight the nuts).
What I wanted was a bike that felt like the Raleigh -- upright riding posture, good handling, solid -- but made with modern technology. The Pilen fits the bill. Shimano 8 speed rear hub, dynamo front hub, integrated roller brakes. Welded (beautifully so) frame. Chain guard, stainless mudguards, LED light, carrier that you could safely give your mate a double on. 28 inch wheels that smooth out the rough road surfaces of post-quake Christchurch.
A friend of mine works at Bicycle Junction in Wellington, and he told me they had a sale on. I was visiting Wellington anyway and got a test ride, and I was sold.
My one has a fancy Brooks saddle, and I got Dan to change the tires to something narrower because I don't like fat tires. He delivered it free to Back Alley Bikes in Addington and Rufus set it up for me. There was a comical initial teething problem, where somehow the front brake lever was electrically connected to the dynamo, in such a way that when the light was on, you would get electric shocks through the brake lever, but Dan took my unlikely story seriously, sent down a new cable and light and all was well.
I've been riding this bike around for a few days now. I still feel good about it. I am oddly reminded of the experience of driving a large powerful car with power steering.
Here's the verdict.
COST: $1700-ish for this model, including the Brooks saddle, free delivery to Christchurch, $50-ish assembly/setup costs.
GOOD:
- Great ride quality. Handles smoothly, glides over bumps.
- Beautiful paintwork ("Durablue" is a dark rich sparkly blue).
- Super strong carrier with super strong springloaded trappy thingies (what are they called?)
- Built-in lock for when you nip inside a shop for 5 minutes.
- It's a big bike, you sit up tall on it and you sail around, master or mistress of all you survey.
- Lumotec LED light is bright and focussed.
- Chainguard means a chap can bike in office clothes without a trouser clip.
- Generally solid feel and finish: it's easy to believe the "rustproof" claims and trust it will still be good in 20 years.
- Good solid kickstand.
- Roller brakes are sealed and need next to no servicing.
- 8 speed hub likewise.
BAD:
- If you are short, this will not be a good bike for you. Big frame, big wheels, wide handlebars.
- If your daily ride has steep hills in it, they are going to be a lot of work.
- The front light does not have a capacitor or battery to provide current when not in motion. Considering that such lights are only US$10 more than ones without, feels a bit mingy at this price point. I am dealing with this presently by using a little Lezyne as an auxiliary light on the handlebar. I may yet cave and get a mail-order light that stays on after you stop.
- The builtin rear light has only one LED and no obvious way to change the batteries without unscrewing the cover. Hard to understand why this isn't dynamo driven. I foresee replacing this in due course too.
- The brake and gear cables are fitted with plastic clips. Again, at this price and given the other fittings, you'd kind of expect shiny metal.
- The bell is pretty but not loud, and jingles slightly as you ride which I find intensely annoying. I immediately replaced it with my favourite Crane bell.
VERDICT:
- A lovely bike to ride for the person who wants a bomb-proof, stylish commuting bike and doesn't care about weight. Minor niggles can be fixed easily. It will probably still be in good shape when you die of old age or the apocalypse comes, whichever arrives first.
If you want this kind of ride but don't want to spend heaps, best start haunting TradeMe for one of those big old English bikes that come up every so often. There are plenty of them around in Canterbury that will be a good ride if you give them the love.
Responses: No comments Tags: cycling ⋅ bicycles ⋅ happiness ⋅ transport ⋅ review ⋅ Pilen
Saturday, May 21 2016
Ingredients
1 onion
1 t cumin
0.5 cup lentils
2.5 cup water
0.5 cup rice
As much flat leaf parsley as you think good (I like lots)
Olive oil
Juice of half a lemon.
Salt and pepper ad lib
Optional: cubed feta, toasted pine nuts, whatever
Method
Slice the onions and start browning in a pan with oil. They should end up dark and near crisp. Towards the end of the browning, add the cumin so it toasts a bit.
Meanwhile, rinse the lentils, pick out stones, bring water to boil. Tip in lentils and simmer for 15 minutes. Then add rice, bring back to boil, then simmer for another 10-15 minutes with lid on, until water is absorbed.
Dress with olive oil, lemon juice, chopped parsley. Stir through half the onion, and put the other half on top. If feeling fancy, stir through nuggets of other things. Also a good idea to reserve said nuggets to sprinkle on top: looks nice, helps stop the good bits accumulating on the bottom.
Serves 2-4 depending on appetite and whether it's a side or the whole deal.
"Average" because having tried numerous variations on this theme from different recipes and regions, this is what I can remember without checking.
Responses: No comments Tags: food ⋅ recipes
Sunday, March 13 2016
A couple of weeks ago I was idly perusing my Twitter feed, as one does, and someone retweeted a tweet with this image and an anodyne, uninformative caption:
I was entranced, and immediately decided this one was going straight to the profile page.
Then a Twitter friend said "what a mensch", and I realised I had to find out more. Here is what I have learned.
The artist is Yehuda Pen. Pen was an artist who grew up in the Russian Empire, survived the revolution, and eventually was murdered, possibly for political reasons. He came from exactly the same kind of background as my mother's family, namely Litvak Jews.
The Wikipedia page gives a little summary of his life and some examples of his work. There is a far more extended bio at this site dedicated to Jews of Belarus (where he moved). He taught Chagall, among others.
Looking at his paintings, the people remind me strongly of the oldest family photographs we have, and even now, my relatives and their circles look like those people. I should say my surviving relatives: my maternal grandparents' families left Kovno (Kaunas) and Riga in the last years of the 19th century, probably because of the pogroms and increasing persecution, and made it to the UK, where they settled in Leeds. There is a little collection of postcards and letters that made their way to England but ceased by the 1930s. As far as we know, not one of those who remained in Europe survived.
The paper the sitter is reading is Der Fraynd (The Friend). It was one of many that started in the late 19th century but did not survive past 1912 when the Tsarist censors killed it.
It took me a while to puzzle this out because I am utterly useless at reading Hebrew letters, not having been brought up properly, and then my Yiddish dictionary uses standard YIVO spelling, and the masthead is spelled differently. Spelling didn't really standardise until the 1920s. But come on, the resh and the daled look almost the same...
People who aren't Ashkenazi Jews are often a bit confused about Yiddish. It is written with Hebrew letters, but it is not Hebrew. It split from German in the middle ages, but is not a German dialect. (The old gag "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is so famous it now has its own Wikipedia page where you can read about how it was popularised by Yiddish linguist, Max Weinreich: "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot".) Yiddish was its own thing, a Middle High German structure stuffed with Hebraisms and as time went on, more and more words from the surrounding Slavic languages. Jews who struck out from the Rhine area for further east took the German they had learned with them and then theirlanguage went its own way. Why people who had systematically adopted others' languages as they moved stuck with the German and built on it instead of taking up Polish or Russian is a matter of dispute.
Anyway, these newspapers were part of an emerging secular literary culture that got utterly smashed by the 1-2 punch of the Russian Revolution and then the Holocaust. Any native speakers you meet now are from tiny hardcore sects who are ultra-religious and won't be reading or writing secular stuff -- actually, you won't meet them, they don't mingle with other Jews, let alone gentiles. So now, that culture is an object of study, and I guess you might read Isaac Bashevis Singer in translation in some anthology or other, but that's it. Not quite a dead language, but the literature is dead. Hence why I wrote Yiddish was. I have a little bit, my daughter has none.
The other big cultural clue here is that the guy is drinking tea in a glass, just as my great grandparents might have. I wish I could explain the bag of white stuff, or the background, but I can't.
So this painting, this guy in the painting, I look at him, and I see not just a judicious student of the news, tranquil, with a smoke and a nice glass of tea. He's an ancestral figure, and yet someone who left no descendants.
Responses: 2 comments Tags: yehuda pen ⋅ images ⋅ jews ⋅ news media
Thursday, February 11 2016
From some correspondence with a researcher at a survey firm today.
First message from me:
Some of your questions are themselves pretty loaded and full of
question begging. Eg, "Maori should not receive special treatment",
which implies that Maori already do receive special (and presumably
favourable) treatment -- this is itself opinion. In this way your
questions actually create some of the sentiment they supposedly
measure. Can't you think of other ways to phrase these questions that
don't assume opinion as fact?
And my reply to the reply:
On 10/02/16 08:01, XXX wrote:
The question was formulated in that manner specifically because it does not logically imply that Maori receive, or do not receive, special treatment. If the question were phrased as “Maori should no longer receive special treatment,” that would be a different matter. Hope that answers you question.
Thank you for taking the time to write back. I think the nub of the issue is the difference between logical implication, and what linguistics people or philosophers call implicatures (that which normal people infer even though it is not uttered), and the valence attached to "special treatment".
Imagine your HR department running a survey at your workplace, where one question was "Susan should not receive special treatment." I don't think you would feel very good about that, even though it does not logically imply that you receive special treatment.
This is what I am concerned about when I say this was a loaded question.
Having thought about what would be more constructive, I would prefer questions that were about already existing facts. For example: "The government should fund health programmes that target Maori health." This would still measure attitudes in a useful and interesting way, but it wouldn't reinforce a particular existing discourse about Maori the way that "special treatment" does.
Kind regards
Stephen
Responses: No comments Tags: implicatures ⋅ philosophy ⋅ politics ⋅ racism
Sunday, January 24 2016
I was mowing the lawn with my ancient push mower. "That's the way to do it", a guy walking down the street yelled. "How old is that mower?" "Older than I am", I yelled back. (I am 46, for the record).
It probably is too. I got it not long after we first moved to Christchurch, so maybe 4 years ago? I bought it from a funny little shop full of second hand mowers and other garden machinery which has since closed. The proprietor was gruff and swore freely.
I haven't sharpened it since, but it is running fine. I just got around to oiling it for the first time a few weeks ago. Our current place is about 750 square metres, and the previous one was even bigger. Not bad for a decades old hand mower.
I had owned a push mower before, but it was bullshit compared to the one I own now. Modern hand mowers are half plastic and the metal bits are thin cheap steel and they're good for nothing. My current one has solid iron wheels, in fact every part except for the wooden roller is iron.
In a flat city like Christchurch push mowers have a lot to recommend them. They cut more cleanly than rotary mowers. They provide incidental exercise. They have no running costs. And they are quiet. I spoke to three different people on the street while I was mowing the verge. You can't do that with a petrol mower. So while it is not exactly a convivial tool in the Illich sense, it does allow me to work with independent efficiency and participate in the community.
I paid $60 for this one. Keep an eye out, and you too can enjoy the simple pleasures of human power.
Responses: No comments Tags: happiness ⋅ gardening ⋅ technology ⋅ ivan illich ⋅ eutrapalia
Saturday, January 02 2016
A few weeks ago I spent some time in Vancouver visiting my sister's family, with a couple of side trips to Seattle, and I got back on December the 10th.
I spent a lot of time hanging out with my sister, which was great:
Even after years in Canada, my sister is still under the delusion that squirrels are our cute furry friends, and to be honest, so am I:
It was early winter in North America, and the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold in the manner of Christchurch midwinter.
To return to a Christchurch on the cusp of summer, already beginning the long slow glide to summer holidays, was really something.
I realised that I felt quite differently about my return to Christchurch this time around than I did in June 2014, when I came back from a similar trip to Canada. In 2014, I had just been in Vancouver and Montreal, two very different cities, but both with a strong civic culture, sense of self, and solid infrastructure. Christchurch was a wasteland. I drove home from my first day back at work along Bealey Avenue, cursing the rutted road, and my heart sank at the empty sections and demolition sites and the absence of any sign of human life.
This time was different. Of course the weather must have been part of it; I am definitely sadder on grey days. But there is more cause for optimism and more signs of life now. Not just cranes and construction sites. Lots of completed projects and new places to go and a definite spring in the step of many people I know. Anyone who knows me knows there is much I would have done differently if I were in charge around here, but things are happening nonetheless.
And so it was I found myself saying on Twitter: to be honest, I'm feeling the best about Christchurch I have since I got here. And I am. May 2016 justify this.
Responses: No comments Tags: christchurch ⋅ rebuild ⋅ happiness
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