I just read on Salon that Sheldon Brown passed away on February 3rd, 2008. Brown provided one of the first repositories of bicycling information on the web, one of the first bike shops online, and championed single-speed and fixed-gear bikes. His obituary was run in the London Times.
Sheldon Brown, with his patented POWerwheels
I never met him in person, but he was an active presence on some bicycling mailing lists and message board during the early days of the 'net, and was knowledgeable, funny, and all-around one of those people that made communicating electronically worthwhile rather than just an exercise in personality disorder diagnosis. His posts by his alter-ego, Carrapace Completed Umber, were always hilarious.
His articles on riding fixed-gear bikes convinced me to build up my fixie back in 1999, before I was aware of it being a totem of urban hipsterdom. That bike has some parts I ordered from the shop he worked for, Harris Cyclery. It'd be nice to think a little bit of his spirit is in my bike, and probably thousands of bikes around the world.
I wasn't aware of his illness from multiple sclerosis, as I haven't really kept up with those lists and sites. I'm sorry to hear about his passing, and that for the last two years he couldn't participate in the activity and lifestyle he so clearly cherished. My condolences go out to his wife and kids (whom he loved dearly), and his friends, virtual and IRL.
Edit: Memorial donation info here.
My wife Katie and I are hosting Thanksgiving this year for the first time, as it just didn't work out for us to travel down to Southern California. A few weeks ago I ordered a heritage turkey from Bi-Rite Market, a chichi small grocery in the Mission here in San Francisco.
"Heritage" is to turkeys what "heirloom" is to tomatoes, breeds that had been forgotten about as agriculture became mechanized in the 20th century. Supposedly they have a richer taste, and more dark meat, than your standard turkey. My turkey apparently came from Good Shepard Turkey Ranch, in Kansas.
My bird came with a tracking number, GSRA674, which allows you to look up where it came from. It was sort of odd finding out personal information about the food you're going to eat (mine was born last spring, and was killed--or "met its final destiny" as they put it on the website--when it was 24 weeks old). I, like most Americans, am not used to associating the food I consume with the farms and ranches where it's grown.
Good ol' GSRA674 is currently brining in my refrigerator in a lime green tub I bought last spring, when good ol' GSRA674 was but a young hatchling. I got the tub for my friend Ashwin's "Thanksgiving in May" party. He basically really wanted leftover turkey to make something he calls toastettes (turkey sandwiches sealed in an iron contraption and roasted over the fire, something like a meat pie I guess), and found an excuse to do so. That's where I first tried brining, and the turkeys we made were incredible.
For the three people left in the world who still care about hockey (including myself, and I suppose our fearless leader, so that leaves one--any takers? anyone?) Salon.com sports columnist King Kaufman's take on the NHL lockout is a good read, and explains the utter incompetence of the monkeys that run the NHL.
Basically, the owners backed themselves into a fiscal corner due to optimistic, if not outright delusional, revenue projections and the false economy of expansion fees. The house of cards began to collapse because a) better coaching, conditioning, and materials science (think about Patrick Roy's mammoth foam legs pads, compared to the leather-covered burlap sacks used in previous eras) decreased scoring significantly, and 1-1, 26-total-shots snoozefests in mid-February for some reason didn't increase the interest of the casual sports fan; b) despite that kind of on-ice excitement, the explosion of cable and satellite didn't bring a significant increase in television viewership, but did result in NASCAR races ("He's making a left turn, Jim.") and competitions of large northern European men carrying boulders outdrawing NHL games; c) with the exception of Denver and Dallas (i.e. two of the league's best teams) and to a lesser extent San Jose, the western/southern expansion teams have neither expanded the hockey fanbase nor captured the local sports fan's imagination.
So now the owners want a hard salary cap, because they've demonstrated they cannot understand basic economics, resulting in financially unhealthy franchises, and the league led them along the primrose path to Abaddon by failing to understand the hockey market, the sports market in general, the entertainment market in general, their fans, societal trends, or anything that was happening at any point between 1991 and 2004.
Unlike the last baseball strike, there has been no real fan backlash against the players that can be exploited by the owners and league, probably because the only people who miss hockey at all at this point are the most ardent fans, and Canadians, who the league doesn't really care about much anyway. Nonetheless, the league has been trying to foment fan revolt in the media by accusing the players union of being greedy, a tactic which would work better if the union hadn't just proposed a 24% across the board salary cut. Meanwhile, the NBA is looking a lot more interesting to the casual sports fan (player/fan stand fights notwithstanding), and SportsCenter is making jokes about a forgotten sport called hockey.
If the league ever decides to look up the meaning of the phrase "negtiating in good faith," maybe in time for the start of the 2006-2007 season, they'll probably notice that a third of the players are happy playing in Europe (where they don't have to deal with the Tie Domis and Derian Hatchers of the world), and the fans are spending their season ticket money at the multiplex, watching cheeseball elimination ceremonies and CSI reruns on their TiVo, and getting excited about the Miami Heat/Dallas Mavericks game on ESPN. Meanwhile their Steve Yzerman jerseys are getting stale and dusty in the closet, and they can't remember which team last won the Stanley Cup.
