Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
What is it with bikes that causes endless aggravation? I bought mine new a year ago and no matter if I use it a lot or very little, there’s always something wrong with it. For one thing, the gears have never functioned properly in its entire existence. The breaks are great when new but then they get loose after a while and you have to mess with the string to tighten them. But when you go there, you notice that it’s quite a challenge to fix it so that the brake pads will stay symmetric, more often than not, one of them is inching closer to the wheel than the other and you get the wonderful automatically breaking effect. Aside from that, you know that sooner or later you will puncture your tire. Do I ever hate fixing that, it’s a pain in the ass to take it out, you have to dismount the wheel and break open the tire with a screwdriver. Then you patch the puncture, wait for it to dry (or you can replace it, either way it’s still time and effort), then put it back in, again a pain in the ass to seal the tire with the screwdriver. Then put the wheel back on.
And unless you’re some kind of bike enthusiast, the maintenance is just a pain in the ass.
Finally got around to watching the flick last night and I’m rather disappointed. Denzel was decent but Ray Allen wasn’t very convincing, he should stick to basketball. The story wasn’t all that interesting either, few strong points. It’s basically about a total basketball fanatic who wants his son to be the player he could never be. So he pushes him very hard from a young age and the kid ends up hating his father. In a heated argument one night, the father pushes his wife out of the way, she hits her head on the sink and dies. So the father goes to jail for 15 years and leaves the boy with his sister without even a roof over their heads. But they make it and the kid goes on to become the #1 prospect in the country. At this point the father returns and wants to patch things up, ultimately so that the kid will sign for a college that is friendly to the mayor so that his sentence can be cut short.
).
