As I continue my fool’s tour of bicycle anatomy, let me guide you to the next in a long line of misunderstood components: the bottom bracket. While its job seems to be a pretty simple one (connect the two crank arms and spin!), the bottom bracket acts like that crappy employee that we all have at our respective jobs, the...

I love my Garmin GPS thingy. I kinda like it because it tells me how far I’ve gone and how fast I’m going and what time it is. But I really like it because it lets me map out my ride, just like that kid in the Family Circus. And unlike the kid in the Family Circus, I can make my route spell out swear words if I...

I like to talk a lot of shit about the Powertap, but I think I need to make my motivations clear. I don’t hate the powertap; I just don’t know how it works. It’s new and scary and confusing. And rather than learn how this devil tool does it’s voodoo magic, I’d rather treat it the same way that Joe...

It was the existentialist poet and avid cyclist Donald Rumsfeld who described in his magnum opus, Press Briefing Feb 12, 2002, that there are things that we know and things that we don’t know. But “there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” As the war in Iraq rages on,...

Someday, when I become one of those people who buys multiple bike parts, I’ll write reviews of different models of the same component. But for now I’m just going to write reviews of non-specific bike parts. Like “wheels.” With conclusions like “one of the roundest parts of my bike.”...

I’ve learned a lot about the Internet in the two months since I got one. I’ve learned that “LOL” means “very funny” and that “BRB” means “I’m bored with this conversation and will most likely not be returning.” And that “A++++ EBAYER!@#$ WULD BUY AGAIN!...

I’d like to talk about brakes. Actually, that’s not true. I feel completely dispassionate about brakes. But I feel obligated to talk about brakes. Because this is supposed to be a website about bike stuff, and I’ve been wasting everyone’s time talking about cookies and pornography (even though I do not...

Christmas shopping fucking sucks. For the last five or ten years I’ve been saddled with a guilt-based gift theory that everything I buy needs to be consumable or transferable. Which is why, by my estimation, a book or some homemade cookies are a “good” Christmas gift and VHS pornography is a “bad”...

Every season has something for a cyclist. Fall is for cyclocross. Summer is for touring and mountain biking. Spring is for road racing and track. And Winter… well, winter is for eating cookies and watching television. Unfortunately as bicyclists, I feel like we’re underrepresented in the media and keep getting...

I’d like to continue the sosovelo tradition of what we will call “presumptuous product reviews”, building a healthy catalog of products that we’ve chosen to love before we’ve bothered to try them, in a transparent and feeble attempt to get samples of the product for free. Once we’ve built up...

A more respectable bike blog would pick a brand of tire, then a particular model from that brand, and they’d go ride it around and talk about its “handling” and its “grip” and the “pattern “of its “knobs”. But I don’t know what any of those words mean, because...

I really like when food establishments trust me enough to serve myself for a set price. It makes me feel like a grown up. Like a valued and respected member of society. Unfortunately, I also really love to take advantage of this trust they’ve given me and I use it to serve myself the greatest amount of food possible....