Sheldon Brown

I fired up my blog reader tonight to hear from six different bike-blogging heroes across the country that Sheldon Brown has died - the gleeful know-it-all, tinkerer, bike mechanic extraordinaire, and keeper of the esoterica at sheldonbrown.com. Even though I never met him, I'm feeling, like a lot of people are I'm sure, like I've lost a teacher.

He taught me, among other things I can think of off the top of my head - how to turn a 10-speed into a fixie, how to overhaul a headset, how to lace and build a wheel, how to lace a wheel four leading four trailing, how to lace a wheel half-radial, what parts would fit my wacky old french bike, why i needed to to put a un-72 bottom bracket into phil retaining rings to keep my old Raleigh going, how to pull my stronglight cranks, how to unstick a stuck bottom bracket fixed cup with just a carriage bolt and some nuts, how to figure out bike gearing in gear inches or in gain ratios....

And his umpteen personal bikes are an inspiration for tinkerers and why-the-hell-notters of all stripes everywhere. In high school, I stuck two bikes together into a tandem with some rope, but that didn't work, so I found somebody with a welding torch. I set this one up as a three-speed fixed gear, and I put the crank on goofyfoot, just because. This one has fifty-seven speeds. This one has two sets of handlebars, with brakes on each. Yes, do try this at home!

The world will be smaller without him.

Belated Hooray for Doris

I finally got around to watching the youtube of Doris Lessing learning she'd won the Nobel prize. "oh, christ!" and plonk go the shopping bags. I'm still too technically inept to embed video here, but here's the link. If she weren't already my hero for writing such awesome, honest, emotionally frank novels and managing to maintain and hone her trademark, new-to-the-world shock at the varieties of human cruelty, she would be just for her response to this befuddled BBC fellow.

Update 12-18: Enthusia has posted the text of Doris's acceptance speech - read it here.