Charge Podcast

Charge Bikes - Lazy Susan from Charge Bikes on Vimeo.

Charge Bikes recently released this hilarious new one minute long podcast introducing its new urban commuter the Lazy Susan. A women's specific 3-speed townie with drum brakes, chrome fenders and a low upright riding position, the Lazy Susan has an all-aluminum frame that features an integrated rear rack and inset plywood deck. MSRP will be $699.

This is the first of several new models from Charge slated to arrive in the US for Spring 2010.

Mystic Rats Turned Loose In Copenhagen Next Week

More news from the developing Cinelli Mystic Rats/Copenhagen story. Cinelli has donated an additional quantity of pre-release bootleg bikes to be outfitted with the Copenhagen Wheel for next week's climate summit. This email is from Cinelli President Antonio Colombo:

Cinelli is very pleased to announce that its bicycles will be present at the most important environmental conference of the decade (in Copenhagen) next week.On the 15th of December the world will see the unveiling of a fleet of mysteriously elaborated Bootleg Mystic Rats at the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors.

The Mystic has been chosen to showcase a pioneering new technology created by SENSEable City Lab MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for the The Kobenhavns Kommune, funded through the Italian Ministry for the Environment with technical support by Ducati Energia.

This technology will take the form of an innovative hybrid-electric bicycle wheel that can be easily retrofitted into a bike and which can sense and map real-time environmental conditions in cities.

We are pleased to have been able to offer our support to such an exciting and important cycling initiative which we hope can help push cycling into a new era of widespread urban use. We will be able to give more information from the 15th.

Let it Snow!

Rolling Deep... Chronic

Thanksgiving weekend was a bit unusual in Douglas, Arizona this year. Two fifteen year old Mexican boys and their bicycle were shaken down by Customs and Border Protection officers. The officers sliced their tires open to reveal:

a) ordinary bicycle tubes
b) cornbread stuffing
c) 7 pounds of marijuana

Ay carumba! But even with a street value of $11,000, their pot-laden pedal-bike would barely get an honorable mention on the Top Ten Most Expensives Bicycles list.


Get a load of this gold-plated Charge Plug that made the list...
it even comes with it's own bodyguard!

Guess Who?

Who's the Chippendale on the Commencal? *cackle*
Click on over to Bikeradar for more...

Cinelli-Powered Green Machine

Cinelli-USA's Ben Coffey fielded an interesting call from MIT's SENSEable City Lab this week. The project team contacted Cinelli looking for a bike to use as proof-of-concept for a new product to be unveiled at the upcoming UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. The bike they chose was the Cinelli Mystic Rats Bootleg (pictured above). The Mystic Rats is a new production bike aimed at the US market for early 2010. There is only one of these bikes in the US at the moment and it's a beaut, so it was with some reluctance that we agreed to part with it. But, hey, this is about saving the planet.

Early Version of the Copenhagen Wheel from the project's website.

The Copenhagen Wheel is the culmination of a three year partnership between MIT and the city of Copenhagen. The components include an open source electric bicycle wheel that can be easily retrofitted into any regular bicycle plus a host of sensors which are powered by the wheel. These sensors provide data for a variety of applications like location awareness, theft prevention and real world social networking.

Can an affordable, easily to retrofit motor-assisted wheel that can harness power of the 'net make bicycling as über cool and all-pervasive as the web itself? Will everyone in the green future be riding white Cinelli bikes? We'll wait to find out - and let you know as the story unfolds. The UN Summit starts on December 7.

link to The Copenhagen Wheel (thanks Christine!)

eeeeee... ride er die

so yesterday after work, i roll up to the hippie grocery store closest to BTI... a little gem we call 'the cottage'. and all the employees are cool, real people who don't mind that i park prunella indoors while i do my european:style daily shopping trip. while i was paying for my yummy vegetables, one of the clerks handed me his cd, and suggested i listen to the track "ride or die" as i biked home. but, of course, it's nearly 2010... and i haven't carried around a discman for, well, the past decade. so i slipped it in my u-lock pocket and went off to battle SUVs in the dark. i just now pulled the disc out of my bag and was showing it to tim, co-computer monkey. judging it by its cover, we dismissed it as some darling delinquent punk band. popping it into the cd tray, we were both pleasantly surprised... and our assumptions were dead wrong. instead, we found the consciously created and cleverly crafted cadence of mister kin keezy. check out his video "ride or die" that other co-computer monkey, casey, dug up. enjoy. and roll deep.