Humanize the Earth!

Gimme Some Truth

Give a listen to some of John Lennon’s words from mousemusings:

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just Gimme Some Truth (mp3 by Craig)

Freak bikes in Chicago Tribune

Korn on Tall Bike (c) Chicago Tribune
Not sure how long this link will last so copied the whole article, including references to two members of the Hub Housing Cooperative, Dan Korn in the photo and Sam Van Dellen, quoted.

Chicago Tribune | Freak bikes!
For these alley cats, recycled cycles only way to ride

By Trine Tsouderos
Tribune staff reporter
Published May 19, 2005

John Edel likes bicycles so much he rides two of them.

They’re welded together, one old Schwinn perched on top of a Raleigh connected by a long greasy chain and topped with a seat that rides five feet off the ground.

The guy can see over the top of Cadillacs. Heck, he’s practically level with a Hummer.

Edel’s not your typical cyclist out for a Sunday ride. He’s a bike freak, one of a core of ‘kustom’ bike enthusiasts across the state who live, breathe and dream about bikes to the extent that a simple bicycle won’t do.

So they build and change them, welding bits of one to another, inventing new ways to steer or brake or haul stuff and creating bikes that look unrideable and sometimes are.

They either work alone in their garages, or in groups like the Rat Patrol (led by The Rat King) or the Scallywags, a local Christian freakbike gang that favors tallbikes and is known to ride around in jackets emblazoned with the words ‘Jesus Is Lord.’

Some of these bike freaks spend thousands of dollars on custom parts. But others, like the Rat Patrollers, pedal through alleys late at night, scouring dumpsters for parts in order to turn yesterday’s Huffy into today’s Franken-bike.

‘I think people are far more satisfied with things they create than things they consume,’ said Alex Wilson, 34, founder of West Town Bikes on North Avenue and the owner of multiple ratbikes.

‘Things you create are personal to you. They show who you are and what you are about. With bikes, you can create this crazy contraption and it works. And you have this audience out there.’

At his home in Logan Square, Edel, a 35-year-old set designer for TV, has a bunch of homemade bikes that look like they pedaled out of someone’s nightmare. There’s ‘Snugglebunch,’ which he made out of a woman’s 10-speed FreeSpirit, a chunk of gas pipe and a lawnmower. ‘FunTime,’ which he welded together using two bikes, including a little girl’s, is virtually impossible to steer.

‘In our world, easy to ride is not necessarily a virtue,’ said Edel, a tall guy who looks like he ought to be riding a tallbike. ‘We like bikes that are more difficult to master . . . There are a lot of different things you can do to a bike that can make it more fun.’

Edel and his friends once moved a piano on a bike with a trailer and at other times hauled 500 pounds of bricks, a queen-sized bed, an apple tree and a three-piece band–with the accordion player pedaling from the back.

Motorists tend to give people riding these cycles a lot of room–which is good, because some, especially tallbikes, don’t have brakes.

‘People freak out,’ said Sam Van Dellen, 25, a bike mechanic who builds both gorgeous custom road bikes and trashbikes in his spare time and who has been known to ride a homemade tallbike-for-two solo. ‘It gets annoying when people say the same things: `How’s the weather up there?’ `How do you stop?’ A million questions. Of course, if you didn’t want the attention, you wouldn’t be riding the bike.’

Nobody knows exactly when people began modifying their bikes, but experts agree that it probably happened about the same time people began pedaling them.

‘Humans aren’t really content with what they get,’ said Jim Wilson, founder of Bike Rod & Kustom, a Webzine (bikerodnkustom.homestead.com) dedicated to customized bicycles that gets 45,000 to 60,000 hits per issue. ‘When I was a kid in the ’50s, I customized my bicycles. Everyone sort of did that.’

Over the years in Chicago, which was once to bikes what Detroit was to cars, newspapers have featured weird bikes people built as much as a century ago.

Sixty years ago, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran numerous photos of silly-looking bikes built by the Steinlauf family, including a bike made from an old iron bedframe, a bike with spikes on its tires to ride on the ice and most gloriously, a bike made by Charles Steinlauf to carry himself, his daughter, his son and his wife, who sewed on a sewing machine installed on the vehicle, all at once.

‘You see,’ Charles’ brother Joe told the Daily News in 1947, ‘no matter what happens, we make a bicycle out of it!’

In recent years, freakbiker clubs have popped up in cities throughout the U.S., from Portland to Minneapolis to New York City, in part thanks to the Internet, which has helped connect people with the same, slightly eccentric, interest, said Wilson.”

It doesn’t hurt that America is awash in abandoned Huffys, Schwinns, Treks and Raleighs waiting for new life as parts of Franken-bikes.

“You can go to any junkyard and it is amazing the stuff that is in there,” said Leon Dixon, a bike historian who founded the Santa Ana, Calif.-based National Bicycle History Archive of America. “People in the rest of the earth would go to these places and they would be mesmerized. And this is stuff we are throwing away.”

Nowhere is that more clear than at Working Bikes Cooperative on South Western Avenue, a freakbiker haven with a sea of old bikes that have been either donated or pulled out of garbage bins, landfills and alleys. The non-profit has so many Chicago-made Schwinn Varsities that staffers have dubbed their pile of them “Mount Varsity.”

Many run-of-the-mill bikers would dismiss the Varsities as too heavy and clumsy. But to freakbikers, the tangle of cheap, indestructible bikes is the means to fulfill their cycling dreams.

One warm May morning in a Logan Square alley, Edel and some friends gathered to show off the bikes they had made. Edel pulled out a three-wheeled contraption he designed to steer with gear shifters called “The Lawnmower,” which looks more like a mutant wheelchair than a bike.

“It didn’t work,” Edel said. “That’s fine too. It was a lot of fun.”

As Edel fiddled with a loose wheel on “The Lawnmower,” Gareth Newfield, 43, a software programmer, tooled around on “Pixie,” his tiny pink child’s bike that tows a tiny, shiny, black homemade trailer. Wheeling around them was Kevin Womac, 31, owner of Logan Square’s Boulevard Bikes, who zipped about on “Cocktail” built in part from a kid’s bike.

All three are bike fanatics, occasional Rat Patrollers and neighbors.

After about an hour, Edel announced he had to head to work. He grabbed his tallbike, a cycle with only a front brake that leaves observers scratching their heads in wonder: How do people get up on those things? Do they have ladders? Platforms? Does someone hold the bike as the rider climbs on?

The reality is much simpler, and more impressive. After strapping on his bike helmet, Edel planted a foot on a pedal, pushed off and swung his body five feet over the seat in one swift and graceful movement, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Now if only stopping were as easy.

- - -

5 ways to go `kustom’

Want to build your first tallbike? Here, five ways to venture into the world of “kustom” rides:

Get dirty: Not sure how your gears work? Take a class and learn to repair your bike, a good first step to building one. Freakbikers like West Town Bikes, 2418 W. North Ave..

Hang out at trashbike central: Working Bikes Cooperative. Most of the staff at this non-profit, used bike seller are ratbikers eager to share their knowledge and happy to find cheap two-wheelers for your mutant creations. Better yet, volunteer at the organization and become an expert yourself. Working Bikes, 1125 S. Western Ave., 312 421-5048.

Get friendly with the Rat Patrol: A loose pack of likeminded bikers who love riding through Chicago’s alleys and building bikes out of trash, the Rat Patrol regularly meets to ride their gonzo cycles through the city, and occasionally gathers to build bikes together. .

Join a Chicago Critical Mass ride: A good place to meet fellow ratbikers, Critical Mass rides often crawl with people pedaling homemade bicycles. Rides start at 5:30 p.m. from Daley Plaza on the last Friday of every month. The next ride is May 27. www.chicagocriticalmass.org.

Start messing with old bikes: The best way to learn, bike fanatics agree, is to just begin playing around. Change the tires. Screw in some weird handlebars. Buy a hacksaw and chop off the forks. Learn some basic welding. Start scheming new ways to steer, brake and pedal. Bounce ideas off your new biking friends and finally, take your new set of wheels out for a spin along the lakefront.

bike commuting

From Google Blog:

Google is a huge supporter of bike commuting. . . . But it doesn’t matter what or how far you ride. Biking to work is a great way to get some exercise, save some gas, improve the environment, and most importantly of all, have fun!

Couldn’t have said it better myself. So I won’t.

how Critical Mass has changed my life

I submitted the following for the May issue of the Derailleur, the un-official publication of Chicago Critical Mass.

For years before finding Critical Mass I aspired to be a cyclist. As a car-owner, however, there was always the auto-pull that I found very difficult to resist without support from others. In 2002, I somehow found out about and turned up at the Car Show Protest ride, which was the first time I’d ever ridden in a group. That ride down Wabash was truly inspiring, with car-related businesses on both sides, but the street belonging to bikes.

That same spring I joined I-Go car-sharing service which helped me
overcome my fear of not having a car of my own. Riding in the Mass every month (starting with the May Day ride to the Hideout) helped me to see that I could do it. My rides for errands got longer and longer and soon I saw myself as car-free. I only used the I-Go car once or twice because the bike and/or public transportation always just made more sense.

Then about a year and a half ago, I found out about the demise of the Edgewood and an effort just begun to start a bikey housing cooperative. After more than a year working with dozens of other cyclists learning about neighborhoods, looking at properties, designing a process for working together and making decisions, I’m now living (as a shareholder) at the Hub Housing Cooperative. We’re doing remodeling and maintenance now and when we’re finished will have 5 units, 8 people and no cars.

So thanks to Critical Mass I’m not only car-free myself but am living in the kind of community that I’ve always wanted. Live life as if the world you wanted to live in already exists.

compost update

Until this week I’d never taken anything out of the bin (about 22 months since I started putting stuff in), but now that we have a bit of yard (mostly concrete, but do have a tree with dirt around it and some space between the building and the street and has really poor soil) and the bin was mostly full, I decided to sort through it and bury some of the stuff that was close to finished.

Then the next day a neighbor and I dragged an old dresser in from the alley, took the drawers out, hammered out the seperations between the drawers, and put it on it’s back to be used as another compost bin. Then we went through the original bin by hand and took out what seemed to be finished compost and put it in the drawers to plant veggies in. The stuff that needed more time went into the dresser. We then covered the pile inside the dresser with a piece of old carpet to keep it warm and keep out the rain. The plastic bin we left about 10% filled and that’s where new material will go from all the households.

Critical Mass officially in the history books

Payton writes:

Chicago Critical Mass is now officially one for the history books! From the The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on bicycling, by Allyson Hobbs:

Bicycle advocacy groups including the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and Chicago Critical Mass have promoted the bicycle as a viable means of transportation. Since September 1997, Chicago Critical Mass has sponsored monthly rides from Daley Plaza to busy intersections and expressways in order to challenge “car culture” and to assert bicyclists’ right to the roads.

Categories: CriticalMass, Chicago, history, bicycle, transportation, CarCulture

My Vision of a Better World

The World We Want asks:

• What is your vision of a better world?
• What are the conditions needed to realize it?
• What are the obstacles?
• Based on your experience, what parts of the vision are realistic and what ideas, strategies and plans can make it so?

These are all questions about what it means to humanize the earth (the way I interpret “better world” in my life). A better world is one where the human being is the central value, more important than money, more important than power, more important than violence and more important than religion or any other institution.

This is a world where each human being has an identical opportunity to pursue a true meaning in life, a world where people are able to overcome their fear and actually connect with the best in themselves and thus are able to see and celebrate the best in each other.

The most important obstacles for me are the internal ones, my fear of failure, my fear of appearing foolish, my inability to articulate the deep meaning that I touch on every once in a while, my inability to touch on that deep meaning more than for a fleeting moment, my lack of connection with myself, etc. Of course there are also external obstacles as well, such as the American Dream, that tells people that if they’re unhappy it’s their own fault for not working harder, even when they’re working harder. This prevents people from working together as much as they might otherwise. There are lots of other external resistances as well, but the internal ones are the ones I can do something about.

Realistic? Well, none of it is actually realistic, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary, or in fact mandatory, for me to keep working in this direction. It’s my meaning in life, after all. How to go about it? Well, it’s about this blog, it’s about connecting with the people I live with and the people I meet, it’s about continuing to invite people to my weekly meeting on Thursdays at my house and a periodic conference call for those not able to meet in person, it’s about intentionality.

I invite you to intentionalize your own vision of a better world, especially what you can do today. And tomorrow.

Other responses: Scratchings | bmoPHAT | Gerry | Tom Matrullo | Tracy Gary | Martin Kearns | The Happy Tutor | Juke Moran

Chicago Conference 2005 Invite

(re-post)

Please join us for a three-day event of, by and for the Omidyar.net community and friends — to build our capacity to make good things happen.

What: Discovering Our Power to Make Good Things Happen
When: July 29-31, 2005
Where: Carleton Hotel, Oak Park (Chicago), IL, USA

Who We Are: Omidyar.net is a new, growing online community. We believe every individual has the power to make a difference. We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen. If you have not joined this community yet, you can go to http://www.omidyar.net/home and check it out.*

You’re Invited: This conference is for Omidyar.net members, friends and other curious do-gooders to come together, make connections, have fun, do as much good work as each and every one of us can… and then go home, more connected, energized and capable of doing more and more of whatever we call good in the world. Come join a good party getting better! …and bring your good friends, too!:

If you are reading this invitation, it is because someone thought you might be interested in joining this work. Please join us to make good things happen!

• What kind of good things are happening because of the work you are doing in the world?
• What do you need to do in order for more good things to happen as a result of the work you really want to do?
• What skills, resources, gifts and connections do you have to share?
• What would happen if you could grow and get and share?

Come to Oak Park, Chicago and find out!

Be Prepared: We are opening this space for meeting, for learning, for connecting, for acting, and for good. We don’t know what is going to happen. We are imposing no limits, no agendas — only the charge to come and learn and contribute as much as you can. Be prepared to be surprised by the results!

Agenda: Any issue of real importance to you can be added to the agenda. It will be discussed and addressed to the greatest extent possible. All of the key points and next steps will be captured and offered online, so that more good people can be invited into more and more good action.

Spirit: We invite your presence, onsite and/OR online. Please pass this invitation on to others you see leading and doing good work. We need you to add your spirit to the many many connections that are happening now. Online or onsite, please bring the stories of your progress, your skills and insights, and your passion for what can happen next. Be ready to make more good things happen.

Format: This gathering is the product of many actions and connections. This space is an invitation to make more of them, and more of us, flow more together, to the good. The format will be a rich mix of personal storytelling and powerful self-organization, informed directly by the practices of Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology. The participants will be smart, caring, creative and connected leaders, organizers, activists and instigators. Beyond this, the space will be wide open for us to make good things happen.

Registration and Payment: details here

We are looking forward to meeting and working with you in July, to make good things happen!

TedErnst, GerryGleason, MichaelHerman, MichaelMaranda, LukeMartin, others from co-conveners page, who have pledged to show up, bring friends and add spirit.

(*) The best way to engage with this growing socially active network is to go online and join the omidyar.net community. Omidyar.net is the Virtual Roof under which much of the planning, coordinating and follow-on work occur. If you can’t join us onsite and want to convene a local version of this simultaneously, please contact us so that we can help you post your discussion notes and next steps into the main conference online workspace. One way or another, we’ll all go forward together!

Nash family reunion

I received an email invitation today to a Nash family (my maternal grandmother Elizabeth’s maiden name was Nash) reunion in August. Included was this photo from 1959, the Jonckheere family (Elizabeth married my maternal grandfather Gus Jonckheere) farm in Howell, Michigan. Amazing to me how familiar these people look, even though they must be a generation older than the people I know now.

Ice Cream (and mouse clicking) for a kids playing

: “We Need Your Help Now! (see easily amazed or Eyeclectic for for details or simply go to Flavor Graveyard directly to vote for KaBerry KaBOOM! If it wins, KaBOOM! will receive a portion of the proceeds for each scoop sold.