1999 Trek 6000 mountain bike

I can’t help if if I have an eye for free bikes.

Two filthy crusty old bikes with "free" signs
One person’s trash…

These two appeared one the sidewalk on the next block from my house.  One is merely “free” (more about that later).

The other, a Trek 6000 mountain bike, promises “Clean me up and I’m a good bike.”

It definitely needed some cleaning! And came with a very interesting little bell with what seemed like a design of crossed band-aids on it.

Trek 6000

It definitely took some time to scrub off most of the grime and dirt, but with that plus air in the tires, the little Trek was basically rideable!

Blue Trek 6000 mountain bike with white decals.
Almost ready to go.

The chain was seized up by rust in a couple spots and the shifters were non-functional, and one of the rear brake arms was seized. In approaching these problems, my goal was to spend zero dollars.

The chain was easy –  I put a lot of lubricant on it and let it sit overnight, then kind of cleaned it with an abrasive pad and a rag.

It’s common for older Shimano shifters to gum up. The grease used when they are manufactured turns almost to glue. It’s hard to take them all the way apart to clean them, because there are a million very tiny parts in there and lots of springs, so they have a tendency to fly apart in a every direction.

A shifter with plastic covers removed, showing tiny gear teetn and pawls.
Thumbshifter revealed.

With a three-part plastic cover removed, you can see the innards. That pink thing is part of a little display that shows what gear you are in. I managed to clean out most of the crusty grease with some lubricant and a little pick, and wiggle everything back and forth to work in the lube and pretty everything came loose. The main culprit was the little brass-colored pawl that you can see just on the right of that toothed disc.

The brake was actually the hardest to fix — it was really rusted on. I never was able to get it to pivot completely freely, but it’s ok. The silver part is a sleeve that goes into the black part and it is completely stuck.

one brake arm showing mounting surface
The recalcitrant brake arm.

So anyway, with 3 or 4 hours of effort, a new friend joins the fleet: a 1999 Trek 6000 mountain bike in “Inkwell Blue” with front suspension and Shimano Deore LX 8-speed components.

Advocacy & Freedom of Speech

In the final module of this course, our focus is advocacy and activism.

Watch a couple videos. One video is a “crash course” on US law about freedom of speech — you might need to watch it more than once to catch everything. I’ll ask you to pick one other video to watch (see below).

Additionally, please write two short posts for your blog. One post should  discuss your position on freedom of speech.  The second should discuss, analyze, or assess the rhetoric and style of the person (or people) in the video you choose.

But first! I’m going to tell you the story of a colorful personality, the great Lloyd Bitzer.  Actually, he was not a colorful personality, which you will discover if you do an image search. But he was an important figure in the history of the study of rhetoric.

Bitzer wrote a famous definition of rhetoric. He argued that rhetoric is speaking or writing that seeks to change the world by changing the thoughts or values of an audience. The members of the audience, with their new thoughts or ideas, become the agents for change.

So if you want to change the world, that means there must be something wrong with it, right? Exactly. Bitzer theorized that people speak up because they encounter what he called an “exigence” (most people today would say “exigency,” but when you’re the great Lloyd Bitzer I guess you can spell words however you want).

An exigence, Bitzer wrote, is “is an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be.” Hang on to this idea — it’ll be important in the coming weeks.

Videos:

We watched this is class, but watch it again: Freedom of Speech.

Pick one of the following, depending on your interests. Or watch more than one — they all help us think about the complex relationship between rhetoric (speech or writing that moves people to act) and direct action (such as civil disobedience).

Historian/raconteur Utah Phillips and musician Ani DiFranco tell us about the Spokane Free Speech Fight of the early 20th century. This is an audio track that was released on CD in 1999.

Comedian George Carlin delivers his notorious “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” bit (audio only, from a 1972 recording). The fallout from this monologue went all the way to the US Supreme Court — look it up, Pacifica v. FCC.

British person Stephen Fry tells us about civil disobedience, a term coined by the American anti-slavery writer Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies the success rate of nonviolent social movements in a TEDx talk. You can hear from Chenoweth and her co-author Maria Stephan in this NPR piece as well.

Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King argues for the right to protest in a speech given the night before his assassination in 1968 (this is a very short excerpt, but you can find the full transcript and audio elsewhere online). If you haven’t seen King’s later speeches, they’re worth watching — like this one.

Lastly, would any list be complete without Matt Damon?

 

Read & Respond for class on Tuesday 11/21

Advocacy and activism take many forms. This week, we’ll look at the story of Kathryn Bertine, a cyclist, author, and filmmaker who tackled gender disparity in professional cycling.

Read an article about Bertine here.

We’ll also look at a communication issue that has attracted a lot of attention lately: mansplaining. As public speakers, how can we avoid mansplaining, and how should we respond to it?

Read San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me.”

For class on November 21, read and respond to the story of Bertine and to Solnit’s essay. Identify what are the most important points to you, and discuss an example from your own experience or knowledge.

Below, a map from Solnit’s fanciful atlas of San Francisco:

 

Twitter and the First Amendment

Here’s a new analysis of the constitutionality of presidential tweeting (or rather, blocking):

According to Dennis Baron, “The Knight First Amendment Institute claims that when Donald Trump blocks Twitter followers who criticize him or his policies, he’s violating the First Amendment, and so Knight is suing on behalf of seven blocked tweeters to force the president to unblock them and open his Twitter feed to everyone.”

Read more on Baron’s blog: https://illinois.edu/blog/view/25/576432

 

bikesnobnyc & Velo-Taxonomy

Cover of Eben Weiss’s first book, based on the bikesnobnyc blog.

Way back when in the early days of this course, a student named Kiran Malladi told me about the bikesnobnyc blog. Kiran is now a manufacturing design engineer at Apple, and hard at work, I hope on the much-touted Apple bicycle.*

Bikesnobnyc is written by Eben Weiss, who has become America’s foremost (and most ill-tempered) public bicycle intellectual.

Read Weiss’s humorous taxonomy of cyclists–when you ride a lot in the city, you start to notice that there are lots of different groups out there. Weiss focuses on people who ride for fun (mainly)– he doesn’t much mention people who ride bikes out of economic necessity.

I don’t know if Weiss has launched a public speaking career. If you can find video of Weiss speaking, add a link to it in the comments (below).

*There is no Apple bicycle, touted or otherwise. Except in our dreams.

Bikeways and Homelessness

On Wednesday, October 11, I attended a forum on bikeways and homelessness in San Francisco. This forum came about because there have been some conflicts between homeless people camping and bicyclist using bikeways, particularly a network of bike paths under the 101 interchange at Cesar Chavez Blvd. Because city and state agencies have cleared encampments and fenced off spaces under many freeways, campers have moved onto bikeways in some areas.

The forum was an attempt by SF Supervisor Hillary Ronen and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to educate cyclists about homelessness in San Francisco, and to describe some of the efforts underway to find people housing.

About 60 people attended the event, and we heard from Supervisor Ronen, a Bike Coalition person, two homeless advocates, and a representative of Caltrans, the state transportation agency that maintains the 101 freeway.

I learned that on any given night in San Francisco, there are about 7500 people experiencing homelessness. This number has been holding pretty steady for the past few years, although there has been a rise in visible tent encampments, like the ones we saw on Division St. during our October 3rd expedition.

Speaking of Bicycles students on Division St. under a section of Hwy 100 on October 3rd, 2017.

A few panelists speculated about the rise of tent camps in SF. One person observed that many homeless people used to camp in the Mission Bay area (where we visited Dr. Bauer on October 3rd). But all the new construction in that area has led them to try to find other places to camp.

Supervisor Ronen outlined her efforts to create “Navigation Centers” — a new kind of shelter where people are treated with greater dignity (for example, you can keep your pets with you) and possessions are more respected and secure. One of these centers has opened near the 101/Chavez interchange.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before the end of the panel to get to another event, but it was a great learning experience for me. I feel that I now better understand the reasons for the current situation (as well as solutions underway), and I also have greater empathy for the people experiencing homelessness whom I’ve encountered on bike paths.

More about this issue (and link to video) in this SF Examiner article:

‘Gut-wrenching’ videos of SF bike route populated by homeless spur debate

 

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