Posts Tagged ‘bicycles’
“The loving and lasting solution for your mechanical bereavement”…
An eccentric side project born out of too many sleepless nights at the Royal College of Art and a homesickness for the rugged Highlands. Bicycle Taxidermy first began on a couple of memento mori for my father’s once prized but long discarded mountain and road bikes.
A somewhat sentimental take on a mass produced object becoming defunct, the handlebars are given the care and craft of a preserved family pet(!) The bikes have now been re-appropriated as a family heirloom.
Crafted in London; the taxidermy service mounts a client’s steed on a scorched or bleached European oak plaque made by Mick, a local joiner. Chrome mounting brackets fix the stem above a stainless steel epitaph etched in Argyll, Scotland, the plaque denotes the horned beasts model, pet name, dates ridden and a commemorative verse. Just fill in the epitaph field on the site and I’ll get it engraved and send out the plaque for you to mount yourself…
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As we get on with our grieving, we might send a metrical birthday message to Muriel Rukeyser; she was born on this date in 1913. A novelist, playwright, memoirist, reporter, and social activist, Rukeyser is best remembered as a poet– the greatest poet of her generation, as judged by Kenneth Rexroth.
Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting: we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body’s action or the mind’s repose.– from “Metaphor to Action”
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Fitness for the rest of us…
“All you need is a chair and two paper plates…”
[TotH to Everlasting Blort]
As we commit ourselves to continuous improvement, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that C.A. Parker (Harvard, Class of 1880) won the first American bicycle race, run at Beacon Trotting Park in Allston (Massachusetts), a half-mile course designed for sulky racing. A Doubletree Hotel currently stands on the spot.
Your favorite star of yore…
… Rides a Bike.
Whoever that star is… many, many others at Rides a Bike. (Readers interested in emulation of the most stylish sort, click here for Public Bikes and here for the Public blog.)
As we jingle our bells, we might recall that this is an anniversary with multiple significance for other forms of transportation…
This is the birthday (1743) of John Fitch– who, though little remembered– created serviceable steamboats before Robert Fulton did.
It was on this date in 1954 that the first atomic submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Connecticut.
Then, on this date in 1970 the first wide-body jet went into service, when a Pan American Airways Boeing 747 flew its virgin flight between from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and Heathrow Airport in London, England.
And on this date in 1976, the supersonic Concorde, developed in a joint venture between the French and the English, was put into service; the first two Concordes with commercial passengers simultaneously left London’s Heathrow Airport (for Bahrain) and Orly Airport outside Paris (for Rio de Janeiro via Senegal).
Stop, Thief!…
A total of 23,748 bikes were reported stolen in London in its 2009-10 fiscal year– up 27.8 per cent from the previous year– though police believe that the true figure could be double that. Kevin Scott, a 21 year-old designer, has an answer: a new variety of folding bike…
Read the full story (and see more pix) at Daily Mail. (Readers who value fine design, but have tastes that are less experimental, might check out the rides at Public Bikes.)
As we search our closets for those pedal-pushers, we might bake a dome-shaped birthday cake for inventor, educator, author, philosopher, engineer and architect R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller; he was born on this date in 1895. “Bucky” most famously developed the geodesic dome, the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions (i.e., beyond which the structural strength must be insufficient); but he was sufficiently prolific to have held over 2000 patents.
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