So, you’re hanging up the dirt bike for a few weeks and waiting for the ground to freeze. (You’re also doing hand-strengthening exercises so you can eventually get your Nokian studs onto your Mavic rims.)

You’ve decided to put some energy into finishing off that lovely pink cruiser with the grip-tassles and the wicker basket. But there’s just one thing missing, the final finishing touch, and you can’t quite put your finger on it…

It’s the Hello Kitty slick! Available from Nirve for just $25.99.

I’m guessing this is a wire bead, in which case it would technically not be a good stocking stuffer.

A lot of people have contacted us asking about the other contestants in the Literature Contest. We got over 200 entries, and a lot of good stories. I read all of them—they came in really handy when I stepped in a groundhog hole, injuring my Achilles tendon, and was denied bike riding for a couple weeks shortly after the end of the contest. (Insert joke about mind-numbing here. But really, I enjoyed reading them.)

Anyway, I picked the top dozen and sent them around the office for the staff to read. Everyone voted for their top four, with each place assigned a certain number of points, and so the winners were chosen. Here’s the breakdown for the top dozen:

#1 – Wallhangers, by James W. Crissman
#2 – Metric Bubba, by Stephen Gleasner
#3 – A Leader of the People, by Kevin Scott
#4 – Requiem for Frog Pond, by Lindsey Dickinson
#5 – No Man’s Land, by Marc Maurino
#6 – The Unraveling of an Idiot, by Keith Kowal
#7 – Bikelife, by A. Matt Wickenheiser
#8 – The Bicycle Garden, by Marcus B. Anderson
#9 – The Straight and Narrow, by Jeff Dick
#10 – The First Mountain, by Jayson Lorenzen
#11 – The Power of Suggestion, by Brian Bartell
#12 – I Have Monkey Butt, by José Rodríguez

We might put some more of these stories in the magazine, or here on our website, so keep an eye out.

By the way, second-place winner Stephen Gleasner’s close-to-local paper, the Bangor Daily News, did a story on his win recently.

A lot of people don’t realize what a rennaissance man Tom Ritchey is. He’s one of the original mountain bike inventors of Marin County, he’s the founder of Ritchey designs, and he’s likely the guy who supplied the headset, handlebars, stem, and/or seatpost on at least one of your bikes.
Ritchey is also the founder of Project Rwanda, a non-profit operation that brings specially designed utility bikes to the coffee growers of an African country that just a decade ago was still reeling from a genocide that killed nearly one million Rwandans. Coffee is Rwanda’s only significant export, and coffee growers have traditionally had to carry their beans down from the mountains on foot… or on ingenious handbuilt wooden scooters.

When Ritchey first visited Rwanda in 2005, he immediately saw that more and better bikes could dramatically change the outlook for this dirt-poor but soul-rich nation, and he launched Project Rwanda – a whole constellation of events and charities, from microloan bike sales to an annual bike race to a Rwandan national cycling team.

I talked to Tom the other day, and he told me, “I first went to Rwanda in 2005, and it changed my life. I knew this was something that I’d be doing for the rest of my life. These people and this place — they’re just amazing.”

Full disclosure: I’m hoping to volunteer for Project Rwanda, and you should consider doing what you can too. World Bicycling Relief and Kona Bike Town are two other great bike initiatives working right now in other parts of Africa, and I’ll tell you more about them in the coming days.

Mountain bikers are probably the most ecumenical of all bike riders, at least the dudes I hang with. Often and without shame they’re willing to ride BMX, road, singlespeed, free — heck, they’ll even throw themselves at the track, even though fixies without brakes scare the dirt out of ‘em. Their love of all two-wheeled things often extends even to motorcycles — anathema to certain leg-shaving purists in lycra who wear face masks during moderate air inversions.

So among dirt riders, it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to create a true mountain bike - motocross hybrid. A couple of industrial design students at ApriliaForum have posted plans and final pix of a motorized dirtbike on a light mountain-bike frame. (It looks suspiciously like something Julien Dupont would ride.)

But as one commentator at VisorDown.com points out, without pedals this thing is just a light motorcycle. (Also, that is emphatically not a MTB frame; but that is a sweet Marzocchi fork.)

Still. With pedals, it would be the world’s coolest off-road moped!

We all look on with undisguised envy when a trials rider shows up at the Wednesday Night Ride and hops around the picnic tables on his bicycle like it was a pogostick with a very low seat.

Many bicyclists may not realize that trials riding originated in England and Spain on small lightweight motorcycles in the 60s and 70s. But of course a lightweight bike has significant advantages over a lightweight moto — chiefly that the rider is the center of gravity, rather than the ride, making the bike more of an extension of the rider rather than the other way around … and coincidentally making a whole lot of seemingly impossible tricks possible.

Still, there is another even more dramatic difference between bicycle trials and moto-trials, and it’s made pretty darn obvious in this video of moto-trials rider Julien Dupont: That little internal combustion engine allows for some pretty dramatic anti-gravity tricks like wall-climbing and uphill stairs jumping.

Then again, there is that dude who the world record for riding his bike up the stairs of many of the world’s tallest buildings. Gravity just doesn’t apply to some people.

Rather than enjoying the dubious deals of Black Friday, I had a nice ride on the crossbike miles from the nearest shopping mall.

But while I was dodging fat squirrels, it occurred to me that the biggest shopping day of the year might have been all that much “more blacker” (in the Spinal Tap sense of the comparative) if Chanel had managed to roll out that $13,000 commuter bike they’ve got planned for “the Spring 2008 line.”

Nothing says “ignore all economic indicators” like a five-figure steel bike from a perfume manufacturer.