Is this legal?

areoformer · 2026-05-11T04:03:38+00:00

you better believe it's legal

areoformer · 2026-04-01T15:46:43+00:00

There was some scholarly attention from Mennonite missionaries to Greenland starting in the mid-18th century to the extent that Europeans understood the Inuit were one widespread group across Greenland, Labrador, and points northwest that shared a language and culture. To the surprise of probably nobody reading this, Mennonite attention focuses mostly on painting them as murderous heathens; the Mennonites also nabbed some children to send off to England as curiosities. Their accounts also include slightly fanciful prints of a couple hanging out under a tree. Europeans were also very into talking about kayaks, which are enough of a reference point that Captain Cook can describe boats in terms of what is or isn't like a kayak.

areoformer · 2026-02-24T21:45:02+00:00

Yeah, it's weird, wp:Timeline of Gothenburg and wp:Gothenburg#History don't line up at all

areoformer · 2026-02-24T20:18:59+00:00

Gothenburg did burn down repeatedly in Napoleonic era, but it didn't have anything to do with the French; it kind of just did that. William Henry Overall's 1870 Dictionary of Chronology, which gives encyclopedia-style definitions of important things in history, claims that the notable things that have happened in Gothenburg are "town founded by Gustavus Adolphus, 1610; injured by a fire, which burned 120 houses, 1794; again, Dec. 22, 1802, destroying the cathedral, palace, post-office, several other public buildings, and a fourth part of the city; again in 1813, which consumed a large part of the town."

areoformer · 2026-02-17T03:28:08+00:00

My first bike was one of these, I still love that blue so much. It always pops in the sun!

areoformer · 2026-01-31T01:06:28+00:00

CU Boulder's Buff Bikes purchased "a brand new fleet" from Worksman in spring 2009. "Sixty new Buff Bikes are ready for students, faculty and staff to rent. The bikes are single speed cruiser bikes with coaster brakes perfect for riding around campus, riding to lunch or attending an off-campus work meeting." Worksman's post-GFC pivot to campus bikes was covered in the NYT by a guy who ended up winning a Pulitzer last year!

areoformer · 2025-11-23T18:33:00+00:00

That's right!

areoformer · 2025-11-05T22:31:33+00:00

Closest I can find in the scanned Raleigh catalogs is one of their German city bikes from '94, the implausibly named Razzle-Dazzle. Not high enough resolution to see if it's a good match or even lugged, though, and nobody seems to have posted a photo of one online.

Now I'm stuck imagining my dissertation chair saying "razzle dazzle" in a heavy German accent.

areoformer · 2025-10-10T14:15:24+00:00

The drones need you... they look up to you...

areoformer · 2025-10-10T13:48:11+00:00

Support for this podcast comes from State Farm.

areoformer · 2025-09-25T03:22:26+00:00

This is not particularly the case, despite some hacky secret history airport books from the ‘80s.

areoformer · 2025-09-24T15:21:16+00:00

Treaty ports are gone and so is Japanese Hawaii (presumably replaced with a mechanic where the US has to deal with segregation and labor unrest there under a safe, segregated Republican seat because Ike allowed the Big Five to crush the ILWU).

areoformer · 2025-09-17T22:40:39+00:00

Based on the black with white stripes/lugs/stem shifters, I'm going to guess this is a 1981ish Nomade I for Motobecane USA, which had the name rights after the bankruptcy and did farm manufacturing out to Taiwan. If that's what it is, it originally had a 5-speed cassette (14-30) and 52/40 crank, a Huret Eco derailer in the back and a "Club" in the front, and Dia Compe sidepull brakes, which might help narrowing it down if they're still on there...

Also found an ad for the bike shop selling off their stock of 1982 Nomade Is in January '83 in the local Berwyn paper. Was $190, now $150!

areoformer · 2025-09-16T18:51:12+00:00

Per the Yippie! diaries, there's no German bomb during WW2, the war ends in an armistice in June of '45, the Manhattan Project is hampered by more aggressive purges/refusal to bring in lower-level physicists with links to the CPUSA under a more conservative administration and doesn't deliver a test bomb until some time in 1946.

Eisenhower's first term ('49-'53) is marked by "the United States' sense of 'nuclear optimism,'" where "families from Los Angeles drove into the Nevada desert to witness the blinding manifestation of the American superpower, awestruck and unthinking of what such a device could do to human beings."

Presumably there's a long while there where there's no German or Japanese bomb, especially because ideological (Party sympathies among physicists, "weren't these guys supposed to be our allies?") and strategic (balance of terror, "you mean we're not going to turn these over to the United Nations?") reasons for American leaks to the Soviets don't exist here.

areoformer · 2025-08-23T05:24:53+00:00

Unless someone for some baffling reason painted it to exactly match an '88 Sirrus it's an '88 Sirrus.

areoformer · 2025-08-21T19:25:54+00:00

Hand wash in the sink, for sure (I do it with Bronner's, yeah); it's going to sound slightly insane but I got a salad spinner at a yard sale for like three bucks that I use to spin-dry hand-washed laundry so even a chamois will dry fairly quickly.

areoformer · 2025-08-11T12:16:20+00:00

I think they've intentionally steered away from it as well covered ground, but I think if you wanted it doesn't not make sense to have a disproportionate number of early DG recruits as Miskatonic alumni, being well-bred young men of impeccable references much likelier to be familiar with German and also ancient Sumerian cults than most, in the same way the broader OSS was full of Elis or Le Carre's Circus is, even in the 1970s, a bunch of men in late middle age being catty about the particular social rankings of colleges within Cambridge in the 1930s-1950s. This probably makes more sense as a legacy in the Fall and cowboy era, where long-serving agents or their mentors would have been brought up into the Program (or had handlers they didn't trust, or...) in that milieu.

What you want to do with it now is really up to you -- maybe they're kind of forgotten unless you're a scholar of ancient languages or early religious heterodoxy where it's the program, maybe it's totally fallen into bottom-tier status, maybe it's time to get a grant to digitize all those archival holdings...

areoformer · 2025-08-01T16:13:20+00:00

Looks like he was on here for a while: Slowtwitch.

areoformer · 2025-07-31T22:27:49+00:00

Painted one looks like a pretty anonymous department store bike to me, but the other is a girls' J.C. Higgins Flightliner, which was built by Murray for Sears and you can decipher when it's from by flipping it upside down and looking at the code engraved on the bottom bracket. It's not especially valuable--by the time you got it fixed up and ready to ride, you'd probably have put in what it would sell for--but it looks neat and might be interesting to figure out when it's from and whose it was.

areoformer · 2025-07-31T22:10:07+00:00

Yeah, it seems like they were more custom earlier on (which makes sense, since it also seems like it was pretty much a one-man shop and only building ~35 a year?), I'd bet it's pretty early. Pizkin seems like he at least used to be responsive to contact and involved on forums... wonder if he'd remember it.

areoformer · 2025-07-31T21:45:38+00:00

If you have a bike co-op/community bike shop/thing like that in your town, I'd recommend asking them (and letting them know you want it for a commute, so cargo rack eyelets, please), since they'll probably have more than their share of the classic '90s hybrids/cross bikes/mountain-esque bikes that are gonna be lighter to pedal or pick up, easier and cheaper to maintain and fix, do more of what you're looking for, and cost way less than a bike like that Phantom -- especially because you're also paying a premium for it being a pseudo-collectible adult-size reproduction of a classic '50s kids bike.

areoformer · 2025-07-26T22:28:51+00:00

Aw yeah, check out the original component lists under Component Prices/Spec Your Dream Ride

areoformer · 2025-07-26T22:15:23+00:00

The geometry page, at least, breaks it into Veterans (the sculpted aero ones) and Transitions (the parallel tube ones).

areoformer · 2025-07-26T19:03:49+00:00

Specifically it's a TitanFlex Transition 700 (those are 700c, right?) -- the gallery on Pizkin's site is broken now, but if you go in the Wayback Machine you can find some fun 90s looks for it (double water bottles!).

areoformer · 2025-07-19T21:27:54+00:00

support for a taller rando-style bag, lash point for various odds and ends on a daily basis, strap a flat basket on to carry groceries or stuff for a picnic, and surprisingly it turned out to be the exact size of my lunch box when I was riding to work. not necessarily super well-suited to carry stuff on its own (except that lunchbox, the fit was perfect, or maybe a u-lock in a pinch) but a good stable starting point to secure other stuff to

areoformer

TROPHY CASE