journal features

more bike problems

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2018.05.29

I blew a tube tonight, it went off like a gunshot. The tube was an old one, and the tire (which had a torn seam along the bead) was also on its last legs. I'd foreseen the possibility that the tube wouldn't get me home, so I'd detoured about 2km to a bike shop to pick up some tubes. Replacing the tube after the blow-up, I limped along on low pressure until the next bike shop (two in one night) to replace the torn tire.

I rode the rest of the way with filthy hands and shaking my head at how much wear and tear a bike suffers when you ride 20+ km a day.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)