Calling entrepreneurs: better bike baskets
Every practical bicyclist needs folding rear baskets, and they’re overpriced. So are the rear racks that hold the baskets and act as a fender. Google the baskets, and you’ll see prices from $15 to $30—apiece! You need a pair. You need the rear rack, too, and those things also range up and down the double-digits.
A folding rear basket is 7 panels of stiff wire mesh. The dimensions are 2 gallon jugs or a 12-pack or a large paper grocery sack. How expensive can that be? For convenience, there’s no match: drop stuff into the baskets, and go. Forget those plastic crates tied vertical behind the seat, or anything on the handlebars. That’s awkward, and anything that’s awkward in traffic is suicidal. If you buy the baskets, you’ll use them all the time, and they’ll pay back their ridiculous price very soon.
But if your bike is a tool—not a toy—and the price is too steep, you won’t buy the baskets. Then it’s a hassle to carry stuff home from the store, and you’ll stop doing it. You’ll drive or walk or do without. If more and more people are actually using bicycles, I suspect they also consider rear baskets, look again at the price and think “not now.”
What needs doing is to show the manufacturers that there is enough demand to generate volume sales, if their product is attractively affordable. If there’s any discernible trend at all, they can roll in the seige-guns of Mass Advertising. I don’t know if you hawk bike baskets as cool or green or scientific or what, but the ad-men do. They can sell sugared paper as food, celebrities as gods and entertainment as journalism, so why not bike baskets as something—anything?
Bruce Williams
Lexington
Editor responds:
That sounds like a challenge for the Broke Spoke.
Music round-ups
Lady Gaga may be responsible for some things, but “turning a generation of little girls into streetwalkers” (“Live music to make you happy: 3/17-26”) is not one of them.
I tend to shake my fist at those who lazily tag the most popular artist at the moment as the cause for all adolescent evils.
That being said, nice reviews.
Jackson, north Lexington
This comment is for whoever wrote the review for The Brothers Burn Mountain in North of Center (Buck Edwards, “Live music to make you happy: 3/17-26”). That last paragraph about The Brothers Burn Mountain is a bit derisive and cruel, and almost as poorly written (though in a different way) as that poorly written band bio that you so viciously criticize. Obviously neither Ryan nor Jesse Dermody wrote that bio. If you’ve ever listened to them in their interviews or spoken to them in person, which I have a couple of times, you’d realize they have a fluid, free-wheeling, unique and original way of saying things. So it makes you wonder who did write that bio, and why it’s up on their website. Maybe it’s beyond their control? For the time being?
I agree with you though that The Brothers Burn Mountain are damn good.
Let me point out to you some of your own pretentions. What do you know about Wisconsin? For example, the snow season in southern Wisconsin lasts about five months these days, not eight months, and is getting shorter and shorter as the world heats up. And if you’ve ever kept up with The Brothers touring schedule, you’d realize how little time they actually spend in Wisconsin. They’re constantly travelling across the entire Midwest and down south too, playing shows. And I’ve seen Fargo by The Coen Brothers that you’ve alluded to with your ‘wood-chipper’ quib, and I find it ridiculous that you’d even try to compare either of The Brothers (who are quite articulate and intelligent and warm-hearted) to that inarticulate, murderous thug from the forementioned film.
Amen.
Kathy
Buck Edwards responds:
Interesting criticisms. Let me address them point by point:
1. There are many things beyond our control, such as the price of tea in China, the size of our feet, and whether we develop acne as adolescents. Band bios, however, are eminently controllable.
2. I know nothing about Wisconsin. Why would anybody know anything about Wisconsin if they didn’t actually live in Wisconsin?
3. Yeah, global warming’s a bitch.
4. As far as I’m concerned, the Brothers have a wood chipper out back until it is positively demonstrated that they do not. That doesn’t lessen the quality of their music.
5. Amen to you too.
Rest in peace, Dottie
I just discovered this article (“Inaugural LexFest a success,” October 13, 2010) and appreciate the props to our farm, but i have sad news that [festival goat] Dottie is no longer with us. I won’t go into the gory details, but she is greatly missed by all.
Jessa Turner
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