There’s are lots of great little bike movies about Amsterdam, Copenhagen and other cycle-mad cities. They’re inspiring, something to aim that, something to show to politicians to demonstrate a bicycle-friendly city is a civilised, modern, cool city.
Some of these movies are on YouTube, simply search on some obvious keywords to find them.
But here’s a 15-minute video from 2004 that hasn’t been on YouTube, until now. It’s from the Netherlands-based Interface for Cycling Expertise. I-CE for short. The video is available as a stonking-great, 156meg download from the I-CE website but it’s in Quicktime format. Not every computer has Quicktime installed but most can play YouTube’s Flash movies.
I was given permission to place the movie on YouTube. As well as roving around the Netherlands and Denmark, the movie includes footage from Bogota, Columbia. Got a video iPod and/or Apple TV? Subscribe to the to get this movie on your hi-def plasma TV.
The movies was scripted by Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota, who used the Dutch and Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I got hooked up to a penile oxygen flow meter in the home town of William Shakespeare. This test - developed in Germany - has helped Specialized tweak its Body Geometry line of saddles to make them more ergo than ever.
I wasn’t the only one to volunteer to be hooked up. Mark Alker, one of the editors at Singletrack magazine, also put his “pound of flesh” into the hands of Specialized’s scientists. This video shows how he got on:
In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Shylock demands a “pound of flesh” from Antonio. In Shakespeare’s day, ‘flesh’ was a euphemism for penis. If bikes were around at the time, no doubt Will would have ridden one and he would have penned a sonnet or two about saddles and their impact, ahem, on men’s fleshy parts.
Had Will suffered any cycling-induced Erectile Dysfunction (ED), maybe an Elizabethan bike shop would have directed him to get a proper bike fit, to ride often on the pedals, not always the seat, and to fit an ergo saddle to protect his “pizzle” (another euphemism for you-know-what)?
At an event last year it was my pizzle on the line. It was wired up for science in Stratford upon Avon, birthplace of the bike-less bard. I was at a dealer training event for UK stockists of Specialized bikes and equipment. Specialized had flown in medical experts from the US and Germany to demonstrate why the company’s Body Geometry products - shoes, mitts, bar tape, saddles aren’t much ado about nothing, they can be proven to be effective in live lab tests.
Since 1998, Specialized has sold more than 2 million ergo saddles featuring the ‘Minkow wedge’, a design said to maintain blood flow Read the rest of this entry »
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