From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXVIII

Introduction

This is the twenty-eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, and Volume XXVII is here. I never expected my collection to be so, well, voluminous, but here we are.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the closest thing to tweets or X posts you’ll ever get on albertnet, in that they’re rather short bulletins. But then, they’re nowhere nearly as short as the original 140 characters of SMS and Twitter updates. (In fact, today’s post might include one of my longest-ever Bits—or is it a Bob?— at over 500 words.) These are excerpts from letters or emails to friends and family, which I’ve decided ought to be amusing to a much wider audience (i.e., all 6 billion users of the Internet).

Since many of my friends and family probably ignored these bulletins originally, you may be the very first living human to pay them any attention! Read them all at once; one at a time over days or weeks; randomly; sequentially; capriciously; deliberately; repeatedly; not at all; or according to your own scheme that I haven’t even thought of. For each dispatch the date is provided and where I was living.

April 5, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I showed up late to my English final, and started in on the first part, which was looking at ten quotes from stuff we’d read, and identifying the work and the character quoted. Assuming (for some reason) that the exam was open-book, I started flipping through one of my books. The professor said, “Dana … what are you doing?” I was like, “Uh, just looking up one of the quotes.” The prof stated, “The identification section of this exam is not open-book.” The entire class started laughing. I said, “Uh ... sorry.” Then the whole class was on the floor. “You’ll go far in life, I can tell,” said the prof.

April 12, 1989 – Santa Barbara

Today I gave a pal a ride home from the cycling team meeting. He’s big for a cyclist—over 175 pounds, looks a bit like Bob Roll—and he was sitting on the handlebars of my mountain bike. I had the tires (Farmer John’s Cousins) at real low pressure because of an incident I suffered a couple of days ago. But that’s another story. A good one, though, so I’ll share it with you. 

It all started when I went to visit Geoff [in San Luis Obispo] for spring break and took my Tioga City Slicker tires with me. Why, you ask? Well, we held the first SLO Parking Garage Invitational Midnight Criterium last week. The parking garage, a brand new building that has received harsh criticism for its avant-garde architecture, has five, count ‘em five, floors, with hairpin turns all the way down—perfect for testing people’s bike handling skills. If you take the turns too wide, which can happen when a competitor forces you out, you hit these six-inch-high domes of painted cement. Gnarly! It was a total blast. 

Anyhow, when I returned to Isla Vista, I forgot to bring the City Slicker tires back with me, and had to mount up the Farmer Johns. They were really old, had been sitting around a good while. Well, on Monday I was just riding along, minding my own business, on the celebrated UCSB bike path when all of a sudden . . . BLAM! The rear tire just blew clean off the rim. Everybody in the vicinity jumped about three feet in the air. Being late as usual, I had to just keep riding the dang thing. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, upon careful inspection when I got home, I noticed that about a four-inch section of the rear tire had a severely damaged bead. I should have replaced the tire altogether but don’t have the time or the money, so I’ve continued to ride that baby, just at real low pressure. 

Which returns us to my original story. So I’m giving this guy a ride on my handlebars; the bike’s squirming around everywhere due to the low tire pressure; I can hardly see around the guy; I can hardly reach the brake levers; his full backpack is smashing into my face; it’s dark; and we’re wearing sunglasses. (Okay, it wasn’t dark and we weren’t wearing sunglasses … just couldn’t resist the “Blues Brothers” reference.) But hey, none of this is any problem because I’m a bike racer, right? We crash up and down off the bike path a number of times, narrowly missing other bikers and pedestrians, wobble quite a bit during slowdowns, and I actually enjoy some success in creating the illusion that I’m in control. That is, until we come within a block of [my apartment building] La Loma and a tiny Chicano kid, a toddler really, rides right out in front of us on his tiny bike. 

Well, his reflexes obviously haven’t developed yet, and ours are severely limited, and we’re on a collision course! I don’t know which way to go around him because I can’t predict what he’s gonna do, I mean it could be anything, or nothing. So my friend and I both begin yelling, like the two convicts in “Raising Arizona” when they realize they have left a man behind: “AAAAAAAAAUGH!” After narrowly averting disaster through my expert bike handling and our ability to remain cool in a pinch (well, okay, maybe it was just luck), we look over at the parents of the kid, expecting them to be super pissed, ready to kill us for recklessly endangering their child. But instead they’re laughing. Laughing! Cripes, don’t these parents know danger when they see it? They certainly wouldn’t have been laughing if little Junior had been trampled into the asphalt by over 350 pounds of man and bike, the unmistakable tread of the Tioga Farmer John’s Cousin embedded in his face!

October 12, 1991 – Berkeley

I need to find a dentist out here. I’ve asked my pals for recommendations and usually get kind of a blank look. But a guy at the bike shop, B—, who looks and acts like Bill or Ted from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” did give me the name of his guy. I think I’ve mentioned B— to you before, he’s the guy who separated his shoulder mountain biking and then sold all his prescription Vicodin so he could buy ganja. Anyhow, he said his dentist is “totally kickback” to the point that B— talked the guy into dispensing unnecessary laughing gas, just for the hell of it, and for free no less. (B— is quite the salesman.) That doesn’t seem entirely professional to me. And then, as if an afterthought, B— told me about the last time he had a cavity filled. He’d had all this Novocain, of course, and then afterward he decided to smoke some weed, which of course gave him the munchies, so he went and bought this big sandwich, and he was eating away on it and then something seemed wrong and he looked closely and the sandwich was all covered in blood. Turns out he’d been chewing on his tongue because he couldn’t feel it! Daaaaamn!

March 13, 1992 - Berkeley

A couple of my roommates and I have a Thursday tradition of boys’ night out. (Not like there are any girls in our lives to exclude from these outings, of course, and if there were girls in our lives, we’d surely bring them along, or more to the point they’d bring us along … but I digress.) We sometimes start at the Come Back Inn, which is a barebones place, not much furniture, mainly linoleum, and I think their name is based on how they routinely get shut down for serving alcohol to minors, and then they do their time and re-open. It’s not uncommon to stand around there with a pitcher of beer since there’s no place to set it down. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen dudes drinking right out of the pitcher. But we also like the more upscale places, Henry’s and Raleigh’s. My roommates are always hoping to hit it off with some hot coed, and they have this theory that if they pump iron right before we go, their muscles will look bigger and they’ll become irresistible to women. (They have a home weight set, including  a bench press.) That strategy just might work for them one of these times, but as you know I don’t have any musculature to speak of and if I tried to pump iron I’d just injure myself.

So anyway, we were at the pub and E— was scoping out the babes, kind of like a lion surveying the savanna deciding what prey to go after, and finally decided on this cute blonde. He caught his reflection in a mirrored beer ad, checked his hair, straightened his red Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, shot us a quick look as if to say, “Watch this,” and set out to start a conversation. He headed over and exchanged what couldn’t have been more than a few words before turning away and walking back to us, tail between his legs. Man, he was pissed. “NorCal sucks,” he said. “In L.A. and San Diego women were actually cool, they’d give you the time of day. But you get a chick up here who’s even halfway good-looking and she’s totally stuck up.” M— and I gave him a hard time for getting shut down so hard, but we held back a bit as he was clearly smarting.

Well, then he spotted some other young beauty but speculated that she’d be just as snooty, even though her blond hair was obviously dyed. Somehow we got to daring each other to go ask her what color her hair really was. We all liked the idea in principle but nobody was volunteering, so we ended up doing roshambo (i.e., rock-paper-scissors) and of course I lost. So I went over, sat next to her at the bar, said hi, took a few moments and a few sips to get my courage up, and then—looking her right in the eye—popped the question: “What color is your hair, really?” She said, “Oh, this is my natural color.” What could I say? Looking at her dark eyebrows, I said, “Well, what about your eyebrows, then?” Without missing a beat she said, “Oh, I dye those.” Wow. I was impressed. Such quick thinking, totally unrattled, and best of all not hostile! I replied, “Well, you did a great job. I never would have guessed.” 

I was kind of pleased with myself for not seizing up completely at her retort. And since she was pretty fly to begin with, it seemed well worth trying to turn this into an actual conversation. So I tried, and I’d say I lasted at least another 90 seconds before completely running out of things to say. I suppose I felt like how a rodeo rider must feel, where every second he stays on the bucking bronco grows his achievement. It didn’t even occur to me to buy her a drink, which would have bought me at least a few more minutes. But what can I say? I got no game, and eventually I wandered back over to my pals. “Well, you didn’t strike out as fast as E— anyway,” M— remarked. Gloating just a bit (I have to admit), I tried to deploy some swagger: “You know, that’s actually a pretty good pickup line. At least it was novel. I’m gonna use that again. I totally could have gotten her number, if I’d wanted.” Of course my pals just laughed in my face. That’s what friends are for, right?

July 15, 1997 – San Francisco

For my birthday E— bought me this cool a magic lamp thingy. It’s is a cube-shaped wooden frame, open at the top and bottom, with rice paper for walls. Inside is a cylinder of thin paper with figures cut out of it, with colored cellophane covering the cutouts. The cylinder’s roof is a paper pinwheel, and the center of it is a tiny glass dome that sits on a little needle, to form a bearing. Beneath this there’s a little light bulb. Heat from the bulb is turns the pinwheel, and thus the cylinder, so that the figures of colored cellophane are projected on the rice paper walls. The effect is a moving picture of the figures (dancers, animals, etc.) that seem to dance across the rice paper, seeming to grow in size as they near the edges. I guess this would typically be a nightlight for a kid’s room. We’d seen it in a shop window in the Marina when we were out for a walk and E— noticed that I liked it, so she sneaked back there and bought it. Anyhow, we had a friend over who just stared at it, perplexed, trying to understand the point. Finally her eyebrows went up like she’d had an “aha!” moment and she said, “Oh, I get it! It’s because you guys don’t have a TV!” Um… right. That’s it.

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Ask Dr. Tyre

NOTE:  This post is rater R for mild strong language.

Dear Dr. Tyre,

I’m trying to decide between the Continental 4000S and the Vredestein TriComp.  The reviews are totally confusing.  One guy says the Vredesteins “go square quite quickly” while the Continentals “wear like steel,” but another guys says the Vreddies’ durability is “on par with Gatorskins and better than Conti 4000.”  I find similarly conflicting info on the ride quality. One guy says the Vreddies “have a more 'foamy' feel than a 'balloony' feel,” and are more “supple and grippy” than the Contis.  Another guy says that compared to the Contis the Vreddies “felt slow,” and yet another guy says the Conti is more like “the proverbial Magic Carpet Ride.”  I’m so confused … please help!

Rudy P, Madison, WI

Dear Rudy,

Let me start by saying you should work for the Zagat guide, because your little snippets of quotation would fit right in.

I suppose I could wonder why your road tire smackdown is between these two, since there are countless other good tires out there.  But since they’re both popular tires, I’ll continue.  It’s tempting to believe that the conflicting reviews are a simple matter of cognitive dissonance:  people will praise whatever they shelled out money for.  But actually, I think comparisons in ride quality will always favor the most recent tire purchased.  Why?  Because almost nobody replaces tires until they’re worn out, and a new tire will always give a nicer ride than a worn-out one.  I recently bought some Vredestein TriComps, and though they felt slightly better than my Conti 4Ks, I realized I hadn’t had such a welcome feeling of increased luxury since I originally installed the 4Ks, which replaced—guess what?—a worn-out but otherwise identical pair of 4Ks.

Longevity is hard to measure.  It has to do with road quality, season, and rider weight (which, particularly in my case, isn’t even a constant).  On an objective note, the Contis have a handy wear indicator, which is very useful.

Still another objective decision point is country of origin.  The Contis are made in Germany, the Vreddies in Thailand.  As an expression of appreciation for the all-together-now Global Village, I like to make my bike as international as possible.  My bike has components from Spain, Japan, France, Italy, Romania, Taiwan, China, and Thailand; I had Germany represented until I got these Vreddies.  (My inner tubes are Thai, which heritage is now redundant.)  Alas, my bike is completely un-American. 

One more thing.  If your bike has really short chainstays and clearance is an issue, be aware that the 4K is a very high-profile tire.  The TriComp offers better clearance.

Dear Dr. Tyre,

What is a “boot”?

Brad H, Austin, TX

Dear Brad,

Say you’re on a ride and something slices your tire.  BLAM—major blowout, and though you have a spare tube, it’ll balloon out of the gash in the tire, and explode, as soon as you bring it up to pressure.  How do you get home?  Well, ideally your tool kit includes a small section of sidewall cut from an old tire.  You put this between the tube and tire, right where the gash is, and it protects the tube so you can get home.  Note, in the following photo, how you can see the light-colored boot peeking out from behind the gash; note also the slight bulge in the sidewall from it.

But what if you don’t have a proper boot?  Well, that’s where you improvise.  I’ve used paper money and even a nice green leaf as a boot.  I solicited my bike club to find out what other creative solutions have been employed; the list includes Powerbar wrappers, duct tape, mylar, semi-rigid plastic product packaging, and gel wrappers (“I think that that little bit of sticky excess gel which leaks out can be a benefit in this scenario, keeping the boot positioned while you install and pump up the tube”). 

My friend Craig told me, “I’ve only used a Washington a few times, and in deference to our first president, I always have him face inward, you know, in case you run over dog shit or something.  I wish I could write about a MacGyver moment where I wove the fibers of a young bamboo plant into a cloth, tapped a rubber tree with a bic pen and vulcanized the rubber using heat generated by rotating my wheel while applying my brake, but (a) I’ve never biked in a Southeast Asian rainforest, and (b) I’m not that smart.”

Another inspired boot tale was from my friend Dave, a former US Marine: 

Mountain bike night ride.  Descending some wooded single-track that for legal reasons I can’t name.  One of the riders has a sidewall blowout/tear, probably three or four inches long.  When it blew I thought we were coming under sniper fire....  What do we do?  Lights all focused on the tear ... anyone have a water bottle? check ... a knife? check ... cut the top and bottom off the bottle, slice the water bottle down the side, and wrap the bottle boot around the tube in the location of the tear/blowout.  Worked like a champ!  This might even work for a serious road tire blowout ... but what road rider actually carries a knife ... they all should, dang it ... it’s war out there.

I’d like to think it was a big badass buck knife.  This would be easy enough to find out, but I’d rather assume wrong that find it out was a basic Swiss army knife or something.

Dear Dr. Tyre,

What, in your opinion, is the best bike tire of all time?

Raphael N, Great Neck, NY

Dear Raphael,

That’s a tough one.  The Continental Top Touring 26x1.95 is an amazing tire for longevity; I put over 5,000 miles on a pair while touring, on a bike so laden it weighed between 150 and 180 pounds, and the tires weren’t even half-gone by the end.  But the Top Tourings were heavy, slow tires and not in the least romantic.

My all-time favorites list also includes the Clément Criterium Seta Extra, because it had a silk casing and of course the specialness that “Extra” implies.  I never actually rode them but I just enjoyed basking in their cultural perfume.  For pure racing satisfaction I loved the Egyptian cotton Vittoria CX/CG combo, and would have belligerently defended their top-rank reputation had anybody ever challenged it, which nobody ever did.  It would be tough to narrow it down and give the “best ever” reward to either of them, though, because you had to run the CX on the front and the CG on the rear.  I never questioned this—it was just wisdom handed down through the ages.  I loved those tires like a woman.

And yet, when it really comes down to it, my favorite tire of all time was actually this bad boy:

It’s the Wolber Champion de France (you can still buy them, here).  I never actually rode them, because they were absolutely the most unreliable, wretched tires on the face of the Earth.  This was in 1986, when I was racing as a junior in Boulder, Colorado, and our local 7-Eleven junior team was sponsored by Wolber.  In every single race at least one of the Slurpees would puncture.  Since every rider on that team seemed to be their star rider, a puncture would throw their team tactics into chaos, giving the rest of us a slightly better chance in the race.  So it was thrilling and gratifying every time one of those guys—faster, stronger, better equipped, better-coached, and in most cases better-looking than us—got a flat.  You might say these tires provided a more level playing field.  (Not in the BS Lance Armstrong sense, since doping doesn’t level the playing field, because it confers a greater advantage on a) those who have a naturally lower hematocrit and thus more to gain from EPO, and b) those who have the money and savvy to dope more effectively, which makes the race all about doping instead of all about prowess, tenacity, skill, intelligence, and all the other great things about real cycling.  But I digress.)

Dear Dr. Tyre,

Why do you spell your name “Tyre,” not “Tire”?

Gertrude S, Spokane, WA

Dear Trudy,

You don’t mind if I call you Trudy, do you?  Anyway, I think I can spot a loaded question.  You probably think I spell it “tyre” to be more Euro, or perhaps as a shout-out to my British readers.  But actually, it’s simply because that’s my name.  This isn’t a fake advice column, my surname really is Tyre, and I really do have a doctorate (a Ph.D. in Socioeconomic Geology of Subterranean Puddles, which has more to do with tires than you might guess).

Dear Dr. Tyre,

I am a long-time mountain biker with a whole lot of experience, and I’ve tried pretty much every mainstream mountain bike tire on the market.  I also have a master’s degree in finite element analysis.  And yet when I give people advice about tires, they never seem to listen.  They just go buy whatever hyped-up fashionable tire they feel like.  And yet people listen to you … what’s your secret?

Michael D, New Haven, CT

Dear Michael,

What makes you think people take my advice?  Look, I get paid based on how many readers are assumed to read my column, whether not I have ever actually helped anybody.  This is true of all advice columns.  Who in history has ever checked up on Dear Abby’s readers to make sure they were well served?  Answer:  nobody.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t steps you could take to enhance your cred.  I hate to break it to you, but nobody cares about your master’s degree.  If you want people to pay attention, you’re going to have to kick all their asses on an actual ride.  (I’m guessing that you haven’t yet done that.)

This isn’t to say nobody is taken in by a really good stream of blather.  I worked at a bike shop with this young buck who really could talk the talk.  He could describe exactly how this or that tire would behave on the trail.  “The Panaracer Smoke is grippy, but the knobs are like this shelf and it’ll suddenly drop you off and you can lose control.  I prefer the good old Ground Control.  It’s not the tightest tire out there but it’s very predictable so you can just kind of ‘feather it’ at the very edge of traction.”  I was very impressed until I actually rode with the guy.  He descended off-road like a fricking grandma.  He could have gone that fast on slicks.

Dear Dr. Tyre,

I’ve been all over YouTube looking for a instructional video about how to use tire levers.  The way some of these brutes drag the lever along the tire bead is downright frightening.  Surely that can’t be the right way to do it, can it?  Can you point me to a video of proper technique?

Samantha K, Emeryville, CA

Dear Samantha,

You are right to be skeptical of that technique.  And you sound hot!  Are you currently seeing anybody?  (Joking!)

Click here for a video of the proper technique, given by Dr. Tyre himself.