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Looks tasty, what's on it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/feb/03/egypt-protesters-head-protection-helmets

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2011/feb/03/egypt-protesters-head-protection-helmets#/?picture=371390050&index=3

My kind of peaceful protest - lobbing wedges of stilton and stale bread rolls.

I'm getting more and more into Belgian beers. Just got back from a little trip to Edingurgh, stubled upon a fantastic german pub called The Brauhaus, photos to follow shortly!

You need to go to the Belgian Monk in Norwich if you're ever up that way. Evenings end early on the 11% Roland Klokke.

as for japanese i seen women leave their purses / handbags on tables in cafes and go to the ladies in shinjuku , tokyo ........am shocked by this but nice to know people have trust in society ..the problem is they come here and are robbed within 5 mins :(

I used to leave my iphone to secure my table or seat at the bar in Tokyo. It's a lovely place for that kind of behaviour. One time I left my custom-built fixie locked up outside my office in the centre of town while I went to work, and then when I came to ride home much much later found that it had fallen over because I'd actually not locked it to anything just put the (cheap-ass) cable lock around the fence and not through the frame.

Take this shit to the bikes and fixing forum, bitches!

WHO'S FOR BEER..?!??

Just back from three weeks in San Francisco and Tokyo. Probably sounds like hipster heaven, but unless your skinny-jeaned fantasy is all day meetings, windowless offices and long haul economy flights it wasn't. So, beers. Plus I owe Balki some handprinted wallpaper. Balki: beers?

Oh god, cows & cows & cows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY

I for one am almost in tears. The piece is redolent with the conflicts and tensions inherent in the whole superhighway scheme, and it's almost overpoweringly poignant.

Well with the GBBF now on, now is probably the time to organise an ale-up.

Do you a-holes "hear" what mattty "said"? My cunting squared lock is 24mm+ in thickness, in diameter measurement.

Only if you cut it diagonally. If you cut it square on then it's 18mm the whole way down, unlike a circular cross section which starts off thin and reaches 18mm at the widest point. If effort is a function of the total amount of metal you have to abrade, then your lock is 27% more demanding than an 18mm diameter circular cross section: 18mm squared for yours, versus pi * 9mm squared for a circular lock.

Quoted for truth:

The Olympic rowing champion suffered a fractured skull, a gash to the back of his head and bruising to his brain after being hit him from behind on a quiet strip of road in Arizona.
His life was saved by his crash helmet, which took the full force of the impact.

His eyes were like the sun, his amberviews were magnifying glasses, but I'm nobody's woodlouse.

++rep

Here's one I caught earlier:

Get a crayfish pot and a bait box. You can actually make do pretty well with one of those little net bags that clothes washing tablets come in. Stick some meat in this and hang it inside your crayfish pot so that it doesn't sit on the bottom but wafts deliciously in the water. You can use any old meat, including things the fishmonger can't sell, like heads and so forth. Bacon works quite well, though I don't know why. Prime your pot, stick it in the water and come back a day later to harvest your bottom feeding dinner. You should be able to catch enough for dinner every time you want to eat for free, as long as you plan ahead. Search on youtube for ray mears crayfish in order to learn how to kill them cleanly and remove the alimentary canal. You need to look out for scallies nicking your pot though. Ain't that always the truth.

Exactly my mum's approach to Christmas presents too.

Have you done any cycle training since you got back on your bike Shoosh? There's nothing like an expert second opinion, and they may be able to suggest other methods of maintaining awareness or mitigating your difficulty in looking behind. I am utterly sold on cycle training; it's free, you learn stuff, and become safer.

If anyone else saw those massive alarmed Xena locks in the first post and thought, "I'll have one!" maybe my review will change your mind. Exec summary: I'm sure it's a very secure lock, but it's bloody heavy, fiddly, and the alarm isn't worth the money you'll spend on batteries.

I saw this lock in GA2G's seminal lock thread and was immediately taken by its size and apparent robustness. And it's fair to say that the fantasy of hearing the alarm go off, going outside and beating the thief to a barely living pulp with his own boltcroppers played some part in the purchase too.

I got one from Cissbury Leathers and with some other stuff got the free postage, and they delivered quickly. I got a Fabric Horse holster made for both my Mini Fahg and the new Xena ($5 bucks extra plus the measurements gets you a double holster) and was ready to go.

First of all, this lock is huge. The shackle is very thick, and covered in clear plastic, which looks very nice with the massive locking piece at the end and I'm told prevents freeze spray attacks. I don't know if thieves are intimidated by lock aesthetics or not, but I would be.

It's also very heavy. it weighs 3kg, which is a kilo more than the Mini Fahg, if you're familiar with that. It's not so bad in the holster, although the 5kg weight of the pair of them is pulling the poppers out of the belt. Fortunately I can keep my bike indoors at both ends of my commute, so carrying this thing would not be the norm, but it's OK in any case. I expect smaller people would probably feel it more, but at over a 100kg rolling weight, it's not a massive addition for me.

Xena do a lot of alarm locks - disc locks, padlocks and so on, and as you can see the alarm system is fairly generic. It takes quite an expensive amount of watch batteries, but batteries are supplied. I don't know if the factory batteries are cheap crap or not, but they don't last very long - I got three full length alarm bursts from the ones supplied with the lock. The alarm itself is also not very loud. Up close it's quite unpleasant, but no more than using an angle grinder. And if you're in a noisy pub and the bike is over the road, you won't hear it. So while it might put someone off, it's probably not going to alert you unless you are listening out for it.

The lock mechanisms - both the actual unlocking and the shackle removal - are both pretty fiddly. The key is small, and doesn't fit very easily. I found myself repeatedly removing the lock mechanism when I meant to just unlock it. Removing the shackle isn't particularly smooth either. unlike the Kryptonite, I have to shake it a few times and hit the lock to get the shackle to come out. And putting it back in can be tricky too, for the same reason.

The alarm trigger is also pretty unsophisticated: a single knock will trigger it, and once triggered, the only way to disarm it is to unlock it, with that fiddly little key. It gives you 5 seconds warning, during which time in your rising you will struggle to get the key in at all. The trigger mechanism also means that anyone else locking their bike near yours will probably set your alarm off if they nudge your bike at all. And if you're locking your own bike, you'll need to make sure you use your other lock first, as fitting it second will set of the Xena.

In summary, I'd say you should spend your money on something that is as strong but lighter or cheaper. It looks hardcore and I'm sure it's an absolute bitch to cut through, but it's extremely heavy and for my purposes the alarm isn't worth the weight and ongoing battery expense. Lastly, the locking mechanism and the shackle fit just feels clumsy, and I'd prefer to have a lock that didn't get in the way of locking.

It's subtle, but what he means to say is that 'Floyd has lied', or, better still, 'has been lying' to the public for years...

Many American vernaculars use simple past tenses instead of the perfect past alternatives* you offer, so I wouldn't be too swift to draw that conclusion about the subtle use of language indicating intent.

*Sorry I don't have a reference to hand for this, but you can hear it very often, e.g. "did you eat (en-US) already?" vs "have you eaten already?" (en-GB). My anecdotal observation is that among younger people in the UK there is a shift towards dropping the perfect for the simple past.

[QUOTE=jenny j;1507755]And what about the people who ride without ever looking behind themselves?? I followed a woman (and this one does seem to be a women's thing) for about a mile this morning; she was signalling and weaving her way past the cars but never once looked behind her. I would have brought it to her attention. But I was behind her. So didn't exist.

Eye contact, ftw
Disagree totally - I see both sexes do exactly this...[/QUOTE]

+1 When I did my training that was the trainer's observation - I rode like hell and never looked back. I slowed right down for a month and started to look back a lot, but since then have been creeping back up to speed, drafting and dodging again. The thing is when you ride at speed in dense traffic you need to look forward all the time, because if you look behind even for a glimpse you can easily end up tasting the vehicle in front.

This is all going a bit off topic though, and to be honest I'm not sure it's possible to have a discussion on women's safety in traffic beyond sharing anecdotes. Aside from the vulgar biological differences, there is vastly more in common between the sexes than not, and while there may be a sex bias towards a particular behaviour, the bias is always going to be much much smaller than the range of that behaviour.

Friend of mine got stopped by le fuzz carrying one of these the other day, so, I think, fail.

I'm still living in 1992 :)

I thought the remake of clash of the titans was good

Good, as in the opposite of bad, which in 1992 meant the opposite of bad, or rather good... er, I think I agree. Crap film, anyway.

Hard Candy - Ellen Page was good, but Patrick Wilson totally insubstantial and vapid, so I didn't care whether he got cut or not, which meant the film had no centre at all for me. Same with Little Children (although not so crap a resulting film) in that I couldn't buy into Kate Winslet fancying him (but that might just be seething jealousy, not sure)

Straightheads - Hard to wonder how Gillian Anderson's agent pitched a revenge flick with Danny 'Why don't you just fuck off and' Dyer to her, but presumably she herself still had to read the script and decide that it would be good for her screen career to sodomise a man with a rifle barrel.

My housemate has his stem and forks on back to front, and an extra gear lever on the seat tube the wire of which is attached to the back brake so he can increase the tension on the brake as the pads run down.

This is the man who made and uses a barbecue made out of a 3 wires and a satellite dish (you can smell the paint burning) so I'm used to utility being trumped by quirkiness, which is probably why all horizontal surfaces in the house are covered with neatly arranged springs and cogs, and all vertical surfaces are filling up with maniacally scrawled-on coasters mounted on found plywood hung up with fuse wire and masonry nails.

How long would you expect that climby route to take? I'd like to come along but fear being dropped very early.

Embankment / Upper thames Street is fucking mental, I wouldn't try to ride there recreationally ever unless in a group.

That was my commute a couple of years back and my very first thought on reading this thread. Best commute ever - fast roads, with lights you can see way in the distance so their timing's clear enough that you can slow down and coast through as they go green or attack hard and fly through on amber. At the end of it there is a short little rise up to Tower Bridge and then you can nip over that and hit south London, or you can head down The Highway for a little respite before another long, clear straight. Depending on how hard you want to bring it, head right and go along the river for a quick rest, or head into the Limehouse Link - not strictly allowed, but doable - and pop out the other side (keep left until you're out the tunnel) and head right into Canary Wharf. Marsh Wall gives you another stretch without any lights, but I prefer to go round the island on Westferry Road before taking a left on to the A13 which becomes Commercial Road and heading back towards civilisation and bagels.

Walworth Road really is a charmless skid mark on the tired grey pants of London.