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Tuesday, June 23, 2020

15 more minutes

Photo courtesy of ex-girlfriend who must have
been a recipient of one of my father’s 30 copies.
When I was in the third grade, I learned to solve the Rubik’s cube in a little under a minute. Don’t be too impressed, I was in a couple of competitions and my old nemesis won in under 20 seconds. But my father, who was hoping I’d be smarter than I am, was impressed and called up some reporter he knew at the local paper to write about me. That night, we drove all around Monrovia buying up every available copy. I’m using the term “buying” loosely, as we went to every machine, put in a quarter (or whatever the paper cost in 1980) and took all the remaining copies. Years later I started thinking this approach was exactly wrong. If you want the public to know how great you are, you can’t take all the evidence out of circulation.

Our quad tandem was built by Rodriguez Bicycles in Seattle.
Anyway, a few decades later and I have once again become newsworthy. Which reminds me, have I failed to mention that we now have a really, really long bicycle? For those happening on this page that might be interested: It has 15 S&S couplers (which enables the quad to be converted to a triplet or a regular tandem and also to fit into 3 airline standard cases), a Rohloff Speedhub, a bar end shifter controlled rear disc, and two child stoker kits. The rest of the bike is pretty standard.




They spelled our name wrong and mixed up
Jancie and Zooey, but we were powering by
so quickly that I suppose the errors are
understandable.
I made sure to tell my children that if we went out to buy multiple copies, we would be paying for each one. But when I saw that the Maui News sells for a whopping $1, I started to reconsider. Fortunately, my ethics were not put to the test because the machine at the hospital only had one paper left. Nico went out to buy another 10. I'm going to assume she paid full price.