Trolley jack on wooden boards

Had one of those days today. Haven't been on the bike as much, just nothing there. Hopefully it'll all come good tomorrow.

Can we have a thread every Friday with this title?

The smiley one off Buck's Fizz

Enough people have told you it was a daft thread, so just good luck in sorting it.

Don't buy a singlespeed

Shortcut – I'm guessing it's not a heavy clay topography round your way….?!

Yup. Tyres ordered yesterday at 13.10, sitting in our kitchen this morning.

I know the feeling of patiently waiting for the "right" ebay items to come round for days, only to see the price go through the roof in the last 10 seconds or so, meaning another 9 day or whatever wait. So frustrating! I'm surprised that you reckon (even with Merlin) the prices were so close new, but it does have the advantage that if something is broken, you have decent comeback.

Will try and get along but won't be until 6.45 earliest

Hmmmm….just ordered a couple of UST ones…..

Indeed I have, and not the singing variety of entertainment! Would like to go to the rice terraces up north – maybe next time. Supposed to be amazing!

Cheers. Good to know there's two of us on here.

+1 here for the Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

*silently wonders if Bunnyhop can help make barnsleymitchs dreams come true whilst altering a jacket to make the ultimate cat scarer aka 'best thing ever'*

Taken either in or out of context, that is one of the most bizarre and mind-boggling sentences on here!

Matty – Mabuti naman po, salamat. Ang galing ng balut comment mo! (I did have some help on that…..).

I didn't realise that Pinatubo was closed. Gosh.

I forgot to mention that Bohol is excellent for wildlife, too, they have the tiny lemurs there which are very cute. I borrowed a (tiny!) bike there last time and rode around a "country club" somewhere near Manila, there were loads of bikes there and to my utter astonishment, an Orange 5. All immaculate though. Will try to get to Clark when we're next there.

+1 married to a Philippina! As above, the roads are not the safest / best / fastest, to get around far from Manila it's best to fly. However I would strongly recommend a day trip out to Mount Pinatubo (the one which erupted in massive style about 20 years ago); it's about 2.5 hours each way from Manila and then you have to take some hugely fun open "jeeps" and then about an hour's trek to the crater – which is vast and has a lake in it.

Further afield thoroughly recommend Bohol / the Chocolate Hills; Bohol has a very good ecological philosophy to it and is very beautiful (that's a flight though). Everyone talks about Borocay, but my feeling is that it's got a bit too commercial now; there are better places.

The people are wonderful, but as above don't expect anything to happen too quickly / logically, just be patient and it gets there in the end (usually after a lot of eating and singing, the nation's two great pastimes). It is hot and humid, but November is probably getting on for the best time to go, although I understand the weather's been bonkers this year. No-one will have a clue by the way why you would wish to walk / trek anywhere! There are some mtb tracks (all unofficial as far as I know) around Manila.

Good luck!

(Waves to Matty)

Got / had older style Hopes on a number of bikes, and (as TJ above), once settled require hardly anything and just keep stopping me.

Beans on toast with a good pint after a long, wet and exhausting ride for which you forgot to pack any food, I reckon. In front of a fire. Surrounded by dancing girls. Or something.

Mine's the best (to me) as my mrs gave it to me and she's fantastic!

Get well soon, fella! That sounds horrendous.

Listen to your Dr's etc of course, but my experience with a lower disc right out was that biking helped my back enormously – non-impact (reasonably!) and the exercise strengthened it. Another vote for "Keep it", then.

Shall we form our own party? I'm sure we can dream up a manifesto that we will have no intention of following once in power, and think of the perks…?!!

Indeed.

I would normally say here that I cannot wait for the day that the Tories are removed from being anywhere near the levers of power. But that almost certainly means that Labour will be back in, and I am mightily disillusioned with them. Does this make me an anarchist, a realist or merely old enough to be cynical? I have rather lost my idealist faith in politics over the last few years. Bah humbug.

Whatever happened to

Dear Old Lenny
The Great Elmyra
And Sancho Panza?

Ah, Propaganda…..superb!

My commute and the thoughtless, selfish others who share it.

Binners – please let us have some more quotes. They're pure gold!

Thanks for the suggestions. Fenix look promising and I will drop Trout a line too.

Cheers

3 years ago, I bought a horizontal dropout Inbred off here for low money and just put it together with whatever I could find as a cheap trial of s/s, reckoning that I wouldn't get on with it. Can't remember costs but it couldn't have been more than £500.

After some messing around with ratios, I settled on the magic 32:16. Absolutely loved it, it gets taken out regularly, and I wouldn't dream of getting rid of it. And apart from some unsuccessful faffing with tubeless this year, maintenance is virtually nothing.

Good luck!

Thnaks TJ. Found the website but looks to be US-based and I need in a couple of weeks. Any UK-based suppliers?

Have a run a mix of Hope M4 and Avid Juicy on my Inbred for a couple of years. Apart from the wildly differing power, absolutely no problems. The whole bike is made up of a jumble of spares that I had at the time, poor confused thing it is.

8-25-33 (=50)

Yeah, baby.

Cake eater – was she being pursued by an "admirer" from STW? :D

Not a commuting "spot" but Mrs Ononeorange took a pic last week of one walking right past our kitchen window. It was a Muntjac it turned out (hear them making a strange barking sound at night. Now we know what's making that weird noise). Sorry, no bike content!

I get it regularly and have done for some time. Hurts like a ****! I try to manage via diet as I prefer to avoid drugs like the plague, however that is tricky as I also have high chloresterol (hereditary too) and the dietary things that tick both boxes are pretty few and unappetising. The main thing however that I have discovered (somewhat through desperation) however is that drinking lots of water when it starts is very beneficial – I assume that it dilutes the bad stuff – plus has the advantage of shifting headaches as well!

In swimwear…I missed it!

How many bikes can you get in a Cessna?

"Hi – I'm GeeTee – are you Dave?"

"This machine can only swallow money"

"I'm single – are you fixed?"

The collective strength of STW is behind you. Keep going in your inimitable style!

Peacemakers by Margaret Macmillan. An very readable history of the Versailles peace conference and the unintended screw-up that came out of the Great Powers' pretensions of greatness. Good custard pie fight on page 151.

OK. Ta

I have Shi*mano on one bike, I really don't like the vague feel compared to SRAM and I can just never, ever keep the Shimano indexed. Set it up and within a ride it's all over the place. My SRAM is perfect once set up – I just leave it alone. When I have some cash, the Shimano is getting converted to SRAM.