One Month Till London - Looking at Folders

Only one month till I head to London for a long weekend. I'm looking forward to it enough to want to bring along a British-made folding bike to enhance the experience.

The British are so fond of their 'folders', it's kind of a national past-time for them. Just a few of the British-based designs:

The Strida.


The Brompton.


The Moulton.


The A-Bike.


The Raleigh (it's actually a rebranded Dahon).


The Vintage Raleigh (aka The Twenty).


Folding bikes are officially allowed by London Transport, including the Underground, on train service. Quicker commutes are only part of the benefit. They also turn heads.



My favorite is still the Strida, though. It looks improbable and tidy, and it lies smack-dab in the urban commuting category.

Did you know some folding bike fanatics take to touring on a folder?

There's even a tandem folder.



That defeats the purpose of portable commuting in my opinion, but if it brings a smile then c'est la vie.

Unlocked my blog

That's right, only eight years after the fact, give or take a few weeks, I got a hold of my old blog again.

It was one I created for a two-month trip to Thailand. Following the trip, I stopped posting to it and pretty much forgot about it. So successfully did I forget, in fact, that I never updated the contact info and forgot the password.

For anyone in such a predicament, do not try to get google staff to help you unlock a lost blog. I entreated them on numerous occasions to no response. In any case, this evening I tried a few combinations, and there it was - dusty, intact, unlocked. So now what?

Now that it's back, I may eventually take the time to merge in the pictures from the trip. I have lots of images that never got set with the text. Image uploading was a herculean task in 2001, y'know.

Banned Hip Hop from Brooklyn

In a spare moment, I recalled a song my brother and I had on cassette tape from around 1988 that was a cut up assemblage of JFK assassination sound bites into a sort of rap song. Ever since we taped that song off of Dallas community radio, we always kept it around for us and our friends to hear. We had heard it was *banned*, which made it exceptionally strong arsenal in our tape collection.

So I was trying to find it again, and as it turns out, the authors of the song were known as Double Dee and Steinski, aka Doug DiFranco and Steve Stein, a couple of media biz 20/30 somethings in NY at the time. There's plenty of info about them, including interviews and a spot in the turntablism movie Scratch.



Given the common broadcast origin of cut-ups and samples in songs, I find it remarkable that a Brooklyn DJ duo could put their ideas into a song that resonated so well for us for completely different reasons. Growing up in Dallas, we found it ominous and on some level subversive to hear a song that flagrantly spun a day of infamy into an arty rap song. Plus you could kind of spaz out to it.



You don't need pirate radio to get Steinski anymore, it's available at Amazon. Following decades of legal obstacles, it has recently been released for the first time.


Or hear it here.