Antiques Road(bike)show; Old Beat-Up Saddle Edition.

At an estate sale a week ago in the Spring Lake neighborhood of Shreveport I happened upon a bike saddle who's brand, Vetta, I was previously unfamiliar with. It had a pretty good shape and seemed reasonably cushioned so I decided to part with the two dollars listed on its price tag just in case I needed it for a later bike project.

The model is Carrera I've done no research as to its pedigree online, but I tried it out today and I was impressed. It is remarkably similar to the expensive ($100, but worth it) Selle San Marco Concor Super Corsa that I normally ride and adore.

I wish I could have seen the bike that it came off but there were no bikes at the sale; I may have gotten there too late. Now all I need is another road bike to put it on. On a side note, I haven't been lax; I am still hard at work on my bicycle helmet:

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Why I Can't Leave (a) Well-Enough (helmet) Alone.

As an individual I thrive on motion (which may very well be why I ride bikes). I cannot sleep in silence, dislike swimming in still water, and I cannot read/study without the boisterous activity and noise of a coffee shop around me. I think that it is these attributes that have left me with an aversion to monochromatic color schemes as well. Throughout the years whenever I obtain something new, if it has a solid uni-color surface on it, I have stenciled it: motorcycle helmets, cell-phones, a decorative wheelchair, skateboards, etc. Recently, as a gift, I received a bicycle helmet. I do not normally ride with a bicycle helmet, but many charity rides require that one wear them for insurance purposes and I've never seen fit to spend what little money I have on a helmet. So, for the sake of my inclusion in these rides it was a good gift but far too plain for my taste. It was all white and I set out almost instantly searching for stencils to my taste that I could deface it with. Almost immediately, while google searching for a Virgin de Guadalupe stencil, I somehow found this treasure:

Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. Though, I had been looking for a classic icon of The Virgin, I knew immediately that there was to be no better stencil for the back of my helmet than Leatherface's intimidating visage. I got to work.

And here was the end result:

I have been well pleased with the outcome. The painter's tape bled here and there a little but the overall effect was perfect. I do also have two other rather large areas to cover on the helmet (the temple areas of the head round about) before it is completely street ready. I spent over an hour trying to make a stencil of my own out of a photograph of the face of the Predator, but failed miserably. I also recommend Stencilry.org as a good resource for stencils of famous faces, various animals, and movies, etc as well as providing excellent how-to tutorials.

Ringing in the New Year in Glorious Monaural Sound.

I have not confessed this here before but I am a dedicated NPR listener. And somewhere buried deep amongst my life goals is the desire to one day have a story on This American Life; which is my favorite radio show (though I do also greatly enjoy Car Talk). I had been enjoying this pastime either listening in my truck or on a small digital Sony radio I had originally bought for the gym (it was also my sole means of news gathering in the days following hurricane Katrina which was a unique experience to share another day). Like all newer digital pocket radios it used the headphone wire as its antenna. Which for the TV FM-transmitters at the gym was just fine. For indoor talk radio listening, however, it was often too staticky and needed to be set at an unbearable volume to make any channel's speech intelligible. In search of better reception I spent an entire day researching antiquated radio technology and learned: that dipole antennas have the best FM reception but are apparently unavailable for pocket radios; that monaural radios are much better at reproducing speech than stereophonic ones; and also that I needed to invest either in a very expensive Sangean digital pocket radio or get a pocket radio with a better antenna (which in hind-site seems rather elementary). Then, I went shopping and found this amazing monoaural analog pocket radio still being made by Sony.

It was only $10 and with it's excellent reception, built in speaker and throwback style I have become quite enamored of it. I have not even bothered to listening to it by earphone yet as the built in speaker works so incredibly well. I just throw it in my shirt pocket and get on with my business. I have to also admit that even for music stations the monaural sound is wonderful, and for me a bit nostalgic. It reminds me of the radio in my first car a 1964 Mercury Comet, that was all mid-range. I do know that in many audiophile circles, where people still bother to listen to music on vinyl, monaural musical recordings are sworn by and I think now I know why. I was so taken with this radio that I wanted to protect it like the great consumers of old in our country. So I sought to make a carrying case for it like I had seen on transistor radios from many decades ago when they were so expensive they were expected to and needed to last. I bought some heavy vinyl fabric, made a template, and got down to it. Here is the end result:

I am not too ashamed of it as it is only my first try. I hope to improve upon it by switching to fabric snaps to fasten it rather than stitching it together and fastening it with a sewn on button as in this prototype. I also hope to fabricate more than one so that I may have some color/style to choose from. I will post any further accomplishment.

The Slow Boat to China; the long decline of the American small business.

This once proud edifice,

this eviscerated facade is but the latest casualty in America's century old psychomachia; the struggle between old wealth and small business ownership.

It was implied in the struggle of World War I. Most anyone fighting or losing a family in that struggle believing we only entered into it for economic reasons; to secure the return on loans that wealthy New York bankers (the House of Morgan) had made in Western Europe. It was on the lips of nearly everyone Jon Dos Passos interviewed on the home front during World War II for State of the Nation. Everyone at home in factories amping-up war production knew that the government, in its legislation of the day, was colluding to kill private business ownership. It was built into the very design of the interstate system; to bypass small towns and dry them up, to restrict gasoline sales to adjacent large corporate-owned  fuel stations, to concentrate wealth and main-line it back to a well established hierarchy (the 1% of our population who are obscenely rich). It is the contradictory truth to the deceit of Reaganonomics; that rather than the rich paying it back down when they get richer they merely consolidate it into larger estates and pass it on in trust funds to their descendants. It is the enormous unstopped drain known as Wal Mart preying on our rural communities and sending all their money in a flood back to Arkansas. It is within the bull-shit we're sold everyday on the news when we're shown the Wall Street indexes as the best indicator of the nation's economic health, rather than median income and employment rates. And within the self denial that let all of the middle class believe this past decade that since Wall Street was making a killing their standard of living must be going up in parallel (when in reality their income remained the same and they had only fictitiously increased their standard of living with credit). Our nation is (probably) irrevocably stratified economically and it is a structure only reinforced by our laws and government.

I have been friends for a long time with the family that owned Nanking. Their story is not completely tragic, as both of the family's daughters are grown and embarked on careers of their own and the parents have been ready to retire for a while. It had been managed by two generations already, but the daughters were not encouraged to carry it on. Which I believe is strongly indicative of the state of private business ownership in this country. I'm sure had it seemed like a healthy financial future one of the daughters would have ended up running the restaurant for several more decades. Still I can't help looking at the remnants of that building (which is supposed to be gone entirely by next week) and know that one more of our last, great hold outs against fast food chains and Big Business has died and I'll never have its delicious home-made bread again. And with that thought our community grows a little colder, a little more corporate.

The monster eating.