and the record skips, the record skips, ..cord skips....skips....ips!
Want to know how the week is going, enh, read the last few days, pretty much watching sad post season reruns at this point!
ugh.
We were fortunate to have two visitors swing in yesterday. Proof that saints walk amongst us, a gent, helping out a family down on their luck and living in a welfare hotel, came in and picked up a couple bikes for their kids to give them something to do. He came in with another gent, no relation, who he obviously takes care of, who is blind. Had an interesting conversation with him, as he had questions regarding what it felt like and how one rides a bike, and changes gears. It was a good test of descriptive language to get him to be able to at least imagine what it felt like to ride a bike. With that experience in mind, it got me thinking about how it would be possible to build a bike for a blind person. No joke, I'm not talking about a three wheeler with really big curb feelers, but something that employs similar technology as the self driving car, but doesn't necessarily do the riding for someone. Just kind of an emergency back up, with sensors similar to those annoying gizmo's in a game controller that vibrate. Set them up to vibrate the left or right grip if you're drifting, or vibrate both when a stop or obstacle is directly in front of you then employ enough breaking power to a set of automatic disc brakes to slow the bike down before you hit the target. Yes, a three wheeler would probably be preferable, but at least it would give someone who otherwise wouldn't be able too, to experience the freedom of riding a bike. OKAY, so either that's a question for another day, or I just gave some enterprising individual a really good idea! Either way, maybe it'll get done!
SO, the other visitors brought us in a really sweet, classic Raleigh touring bike, we got out right quick! Check it out below.
As far as that goes, it was it for the day. Spent the better part of the day trying to do some research for a certain part of the book that I want to be really historically accurate, only to come to find out, that aside from some really boring statistics and town notes, trying to find descriptive passages or pictures about any particular place that is not of incredible historical significance is DAMN hard! I remember, when I was a kid, I would enjoy visiting the Exeter Library, before they moved it to their new digs. Back then, you could either go to the Philips Exeter Academy's library and sift through microfiche files (that's like a sort of prehistoric Google where you actually had to do some reading to fins what you were looking for) or I could climb down the stairs into the basement of the library, and there, stored in huge stacks in one of the towns Fall Out Shelters (those were built back when folks thought "Duck and Cover" would actually prevent you from being vaporized in the event of an Atomic attack!) were copies of the Exeter News Letter amongst others, dating back well over a hundred years! Unfortunately, those day's are long gone. Kids really can't do things like that any more, but being given certain dispensation by the elderly librarian who seemed to appreciate my curiosity regarding history, allowed me free reign. Nowadays, seems like we have lost some of those more personal, timely remembrances. I have bugged Barbara, the curator at the Exeter Historical Society, a few times with questions regarding the minutia of life in the 30's there, and she has yet to fail to impress me with the plethora of history she has stored away, easily accessible in her brain. However, most of it are just facts. I needed to be able to feel the small town back then, and luckily I did find just that when punting about online! It was a twelve minute segment of a documentary, one of those "our generation" type "you are HERE" kind of newsreels filmed in 1940, about "small town life" in Exeter, on You tube! This thing was filmed only two years after the big part of the book is set, so I could actually "drive" around the town with the film crew and meet some of it's most prominent citizens from that time! What REALLY threw me, is they do a bit on the Fire Department located on Court Street , and at one point in the film all the fire trucks are shown leaving the fire house, and as they pull out, lo and behold, directly across the street is the house Angi and I first lived in together! WOW! Didn't know it had a full porch at that time! It was INVALUBALE!!!
ANYWHO! Really, truly, very muchly hope we have more fun and frivolity to write about tomorrow! (HINT, HINT!)
See ya soon!
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CLASSIC RALEIGH TOURING BIKE! ONLY $130.00!! |
Oh, man, that Raleigh is GORGEOUS!
ReplyDelete(And probably gone by now, seeing as how I slept in.)
As for the blind on bikes, the most common answer is that they ride in the co-pilot seat on a tandem!
Now here's my offer: If you are in touch those guys, and the blind guy isn't too tall (under 5' 6"), he would fit on the back of our tandem, and I would be honored to give him a ride on the thing if they stopped by.
What got me thinking about all that, was a show watched o Netflix a few years ago "Stan Lee's Super Human's" (or some such title) and one of the gents featured was a blind man that taught himself echo-location. Yep, just like a bat, he would make a series of clicks, that when the sound bounced off nearby obstacles he could navigate around them. No joke. They even showed him riding a bike around a parking garage (granted it was slowly) sending out these clicks and deftly avoided parked cars and support pylons. I figure, using similar technology....who knows?
ReplyDeleteAnd with my hearing, that ain't happenin', Jack.
ReplyDeleteBut I would be honored to put your friend on the back of our sleek duo machine and give him a taste of the thing.
OR: You can sell him and his friend a tandem, and I will teach them how to ride it well. (It's not as easy/obvious as you might think.)