One of the best things about blogging is joining the community of other bloggers, finding people with shared quirks and interests, and following along as other people unfold their narrative, whatever it is. Today I though I’d introduce a handful of blogs I follow pretty religiously, especially blogs whose connection to cycling is less obvious than, say, the good folks at Ecovelo, Cycleicious, or Bikes and The City. Click through and enjoy.

Homegrown Evolution
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne write Homegrown Evolution, an LA-based blog that explores a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Kelly and Erik are the authors of The Urban Homestead. Here’s a quick link to their bike-focused entries.

Gurldoggie
A Seattle-based blog, Gurldoggie is like a baker of perfect little blog-entry treats about an artist, musician, or writer, always just the right length, posted almost daily. I can’t say enough good things about Gurldoggie’s rhythm of little tidbits. Daily inspiration on multiple levels.

Fat of The Land
Our friend Langdon is always out foraging, and has made quite a name for himself since the publication of his book Fat of The Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager. He’s opened my eyes to the bounty around me as I cycle the city and the countryside, and now I regularly stop to fill my panniers with urban-foraged fruit, berries, even mushrooms. His posts generally feature delicious recipes, and often seem to begin with a jealousy inducing phrase like “I’m just back from several days of backpacking,” or “When I was recently camping for a week…”

Northwest Cheapsleeps
For northwesterners in search of an inexpensive getaway, this is the place to start. Lauren hand-picks destinations in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia that are friendly, clean, cozy and under $100 a night. Her blog provides fresh ideas on a regular basis, while the Cheapsleeps Finder collects the bargains in a handy database.

The Tangled Nest
And finally, you know that my wife is the real writer and blogger in the family, right? In addition to writing book after book after book, she blogs at The Tangled Nest (and I post there from time to time as well), about “the urban-earthen home,” the twining of home, garden, food, craft, and co-existence with the wild, natural world.

Also regularly perused: ZeFrank, Kottke, Strobist, Notcot, White African, Koelle Art, Humanosphere, Poppy Gall, and Afrigadget.

Have you got other non-bike blog suggestions?

I was very tempted to go to Maker Faire Africa this year, but the business I had in Nairobi fell through, and I opted to spend this weekend preparing for Burning Man instead. (Tough choice!) They’ve just posted a “meet the makers” short video. Looks chilly in Nairobi this week!

Maker Faire is a great event and I am pleased the momentum has carried through from the first Maker Faire Africa, held in Ghana last year (and mentioned on Bikejuju here).

As you can see, though, despite the vibrancy of the grassroots bicycle and bicycle design sectors in Africa, they are under-represented at Maker Faire Africa, especially when you compare it to the US Maker Faires, where there is always lots of bikey fun. From a distance it seems there are even fewer bicycle projects in Nairobi than last year in Accra. I have a little dream that we could use the Maker Faire Africa gathering in 2011 or 2012 as a place to bring together the African grassroots bicycle sector. What do you think?

There’s big news in our house: the careful selection and late afternoon arrival of two much-anticipated gerbils as a back-to-school indulgence for my daughter Claire, who starts sixth grade on Monday. Precilla and Blossom are busily exploring the cardboard tubes and big yellow wheel of their new habitat, and as I write this Claire is supposedly asleep in the bed across the room from them, though it would not surprise me a bit if she were secretly peeking at them one more time.

Normally this rodent invasion would not be bike blog news, except for the coincidence that I ran across another rodent item today that is bike-related, one that unlocked a rush of childhood memories from some quarter of my brain sealed off at about age five and rarely accessed since.

If the image above clangs a bell in your memory as loudly as it does in mine, then you know I’m talking about the pig family, setting off in their orange convertible on a trip to the beach, in Richard Scarry’s 1975 classic Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. And it’s only a few pages into the book that the family encounters Officer Flossy on her classy red bike, chasing after all manner of traffic scofflaws.

While I absolutely love the idea of foxy Officer Flossy on her bicycle, tooting her whistle as she chases down the dangerous driving dingo, it may surprise you to learn that Flossy is not the subject of today’s post. No, today’s post is about rodents, remember? And the memorable rodent in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go is this little lady:

Mistress Mouse, up on the truck engine, is a tow truck driver who can “fix almost anything.” And she drives a super cute little pink tow truck (see it on the cover image, above?), which finally brings us to the visual punchline of today’s post, this amazing little eight second Vimeo glimpse of a girl whose loving father turned her trike into Mistress Mouse’s Tow Truck. It’s almost as cute as our new gerbils! (We want to see more of the Mistress Mouse Trike!)

Mistress Mouse from jeff hamada on Vimeo.

Officer Flossy is still chasing Dingo Dog, though! Can you spot him? Do you think she’ll ever catch him to give him that ticket? Faster, Flossy, faster!

All illustrations © Richard Scarry. Video found via booooooom.com

The Burning Man festival comes every Labor Day, and the last three years I’ve seen friends getting excited, and going, and raving about it, and I’ve wished I was there. I’ve lived vicariously by looking at pictures, and posted some here. But this year, finally, I am taking the plunge, indulging my 40-year-old self, and joining other friends marking the same four decade milestone in a camp we’re calling It’s Your Burnday. Departure is a week away, a box truck with our camp’s major structures has already arrived on the Playa, and my room has turned into a pre-departure staging area piled high with a crazy psychedelic jumble of outlandish attire and desert camping survival supplies.

Black Rock City has bikes in its DNA. It has a serious bike culture. It is a temporary city of 45,000 people, designed from the outset for bicycles and pedestrians, with almost no cars allowed (except for “mutant vehicle” art cars). The sheer size of the place make bikes the best option for getting around. And what bikes they are! The person-powered vehicles of Burning Man range from disposable (hundreds of bikes get left behind at the end of the event each year), to truly fantastical.

Bone Bike image by Ron

Canopy trike image by Sterling Ely.

Will you be at Burning Man? Let’s ride! It’s Your Burnday camp location will be at 3:45 and C, shoot me an email, or leave a comment, or just look me up when you get there!

A couple of urban cyclists in Black Rock City stop for a friendly chat. Photo by Ionan.

I love this image from Flick user Adam Jones of a cool bike with a circle in the middle of the frame, and a little boy peeking out the door:

My friend Stefania was in Nigeria and she was kind enough to bring me this great notepad with little everyday cycling scenes. Thanks!

Related:

• By Fixie Through Lagos, Nigeria
• Artist Profile: Chris Koelle • Bike Snob Book Illustrator

My friend alerted me to this story on Cycling News about a stage race held in Benin, West Africa to mark the 50th anniversary of independence.

Having swept the podium in the first stage, the riders from Burkina Faso approached stage two with confidence. Their cycling program is quite impressive. They have a team of full-time cyclists who receive military salaries. Essentially, they’re soldiers of cycling. They ride slick Colnago frames with 10-speed Shimano components, while most athletes from Benin and Togo ride old chromoly frames with friction shifters. Burkina Faso sets the bar pretty high for an African cycling team. It’s great to see them raise the level of competition in the region, but it sure makes life tough for the little guys.

So, we had our work cut out for us. Wearing the yellow, green, and red of the Benin national team, I was excited to help our sprinter Augustin Amoussouvi put on a good showing for independence day. We departed the village of Pobe for 75 kilometers of rolling terrain to Porto Novo. The national police escorted us to wave bush taxis, trucks, and wandering goats out of our path.

Digging a little deeper, I enjoyed reading two other articles by the same author, Christoph Herby, about the Benin national team. Herby is a Peace Corps volunteer and former race, who previously wrote:

Introducing the Benin National Team

Strategically mounted rapid-fire mountain bike shifters.

Amongst the riders who congregate are three members of the national team – athletes who’ve competed abroad in the Tour du Faso, the Tour du Togo, or the West African CEDEAO Tour. Robert Kponha proudly sports his combativity jersey from the Tour du Togo. Alexandre Zotogbé is a scrappy all-rounder. Augustin Amoussouvi’s thick calves identify him as the sprint star of the team.

Dreaming of the Champs Elysees:

I ride with a wiry bunch of boys who’ve somehow discovered bicycle racing at a time when football-crazy Africa prepares to host the World Cup. We’re quite a sight rolling down the highway in a paceline of scavenged parts and clothing.

If you want to poke deeper, Christopher also has a website and blog, featuring his gorgeous photographs and a little more on cycling in Benin. I’m please to see he’s connected to my pals at the Village Bicycle Project, who have supplied him and the team with bikes and parts.

Related Bikejuju post:

• Loading Bikes for Ghana

Did you know that with a grinder you can turn your old disc brake rotors into highly effective ninja throwing stars?

As seen at at The 40th Avenue Institute of Metallurgical Arts and House of Odd Bicycles (aka Shawn’s garage).

Ok, it’s a relatively simple idea but I fell for it. I have to admit that I think this is pretty cool. “Precious” is a Specialized bike that has been outfitted with sensors that feed to a live web interface. The website shows the grade the bike is climbing or descending, the cardinal direction the bike is heading, and more. (Check the site during the day; during the night the bike, and the sensors, are still.)

In addition, in a tally reminiscent of scientist Michael Fay’s Megtransect expedition across the Congo basin, the website is tallying roadkills, honking cars, flat tires, and other vital cycling statistics in real time. And building on the temperature, humidity, grade, and map data, Precious has also been programmed to tweet various witty and relevant remarks as @yesiamprecious. (The bike currently has twice as many Twitter followers as its rider – that’s gotta smart!). I thought immediately of HAL, Wired drew a parallel to Knight Rider. You get the idea.

No Direction Home

The bike is being ridden by a woman named Janeen McCrae or “the noodleator” as a fundraiser for the Livestrong foundation, and she is also tweeting/blogging the trip at a website called No Direction Known. She had a rough day today, climbing hills in Kentucky, and I have mad respect for her, cycling solo across the country for a good cause. Her blog entries are honest, funny, and well written (though I do wish her RSS feed contained photos).

The sensor-laden bike aspect of this project is somewhat reminiscent of the Yahoo Purple Pedals bikes, which were loaded with GPS and Flickr-connected cameras, and lent to various riders as a Yahoo promotion. (Tech details on the Yahoo bikes) While those bikes had many interesting adventures, the one I remember best is the creative rider who took his, in the pre-election period, on a very carefully planned ride around Manhattan, so that the “dot every sixty seconds” automatic Yahoo map application would spell out “Obama.”

Precious was built by the interactive firm BreakfastNY, and thinking of the Yahoo project begs the question why Precious does not integrate any kind of camera. I guess some task has to be left to the rider in addition to sweating up the hills in the heat.  In any case, the country she is currently rolling through is beautiful and challenging, and her efforts deserve our support. She’s only trying to raise one dollar per mile, or $4262, which to be honest seems like a pretty low goal for a solo cross country ride, and it must be feeling especially low as those miles drag on during this section of the ride, climbing hills in the Kentucky heat. So I pitched in for a couple dozen miles tomorrow, and you should to.

Ride strong, Janeen! Say hello when you reach Seattle!

It’s been a bikey couple of weeks: Tour de Fat last weekend, and Dead Baby Downhill this weekend. Dead Baby Downhill is, as Gurldoggie put it, Seattle’s “annual race/party/ choose-your-own-adventure – billed with only gentle hyperbole as “The Greatest Bike Race the World has Ever Known.”

The Sprockettes were just one of many diversions at the after party in Georgetown, which also included something like 60 kegs of beer, bands on several stages, rides from Cyclecide, and tallbike jousting.

I was partly there as a roadie for my friend Shawn, who was debuting the new flame effect on his outrageous bike “The Bomb.” I’d say it was a success.

Meanwhile… I’ve been piling up links and notes to myself and Bikejuju to-dos like there’s no tomorrow.

For example: I keep meaning to tell you that the Rat Rod Build-Off is finished and it’s time to go vote for a winner from among the 65 bikes (!) that got built.

I can tell Burning Man must be coming up, because my Bikes of Burning Man 2009 post is suddenly getting traffic.

And there’s good news in that regard – I’ll actually be there, on the playa, for the first time this year. Will you? Let’s connect!

But enough about the freak bikes… I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug a few more great bike events coming up in Seattle:

• August 15 – Fiets of Parenthood, next Sunday in Wallingford – put your kid on that bike and show us your stuff!
• August 28 – NWFF Bike-In Movie at Cal Anderson Park
• September 11 – Seattle Bicycle Music Festival
• Check out the Seattle cycling calendar at GoMeansGo.org for more events

Keep riding! Take a lane!