Stuff that works: Power Grips pedal straps for winter riding

A month or so ago I discovered a newish blog "Coming Thru!", a Helsinki-based cycling blog, mainly focused on cycle commuting. There are a number of blogs about cycling in Helsinki written (for obvious reasons!) in Finnish, but my Finnish is hopeless enough to make reading them a pain (although I understand enough to really appreciate the people out there doing great cycle advocacy work). So it was great to find a Helsinki cycle bloggers writing in English like on Coming Thru. Anyway, over there Markus appears to be working through the frustration and expense of finding a clothing system that keeps you dry and warm enough to want to cycle commute on cool mornings, but not so hot you end up drowning in your own sweat. As anyone who does aerobic exercise in cool to cold weather knows, this isn’t that easy and can become an endless source of fascination, frustration, new gear purchasing and annoyance at kit you buy turns out not to work as well as the advert promised.

I’ll try and write more about my cold weather cycling experience in the future, but this post is dedicated to a simple idea that greatly improved my autumn/winter cycling experience – Power Grips. Power Grips are simple neoprene straps that fix diagonally onto any basic cage-style cycle pedal and do exactly what old fashioned toe clips do but better. By slipping your feet in diagonally through the to the diagonally positioned strap, your foot goes in with ease. Then when you straighten your foot parallel to the bike it becomes held firmly by the strap giving you the same power as you would get from an SDP style clip pedal. Hard to explain in words but incredibly simple in use – see the photo below (or here) and you’ll understand. Nevertheless, despite holding your foot on the pedal firmly, getting your foot out is easy so stopping and even falling off safely is no harder, perhaps even easier, than with SPDs.

I use clip-in pedals on all my bikes; different SPD version on my mountain bike and commuter, and SPD-SL style on my road bike. But I also get cold feet riding as the temperatures get lower. Sealskinz socks, and then neoprene over-shoes help, but still by the time the temperature is about or below freezing, my feet still get cold and I came to the conclusion that conduction through the cleat (a lump of metal on your shoe connected to bigger lumps of metal – the pedals) was the main reason for this. With Power Grips attached to an old pair of cage pedals I could wear roomy, old leather sneakers and when it got really cold, wear over-shoes over them. With a standard sole, rather than the pedal cleat on a cycling shoes, in contact with a minimal amount of metal because of the design of cage pedals, conduction of heat was minimized. Net result: warmer feet, and less miserable cyclists! So, yes, Power Grips do seem pricey for what you get, but if you ride a lot in sub-zero temperatures you will probably find them worth the money.

Loads of Helsinki bloggage

I'm in sight of finishing my PhD thesis and submitting. That doesn't actually mean it will pass of course, but even submitting will be a huge release. It's boring, boring, boring, but there you go - someone told me a long time ago if you're not totally bored with your PhD subject by the end it suggest you don't know enough about it.

Anyways... pretty poor blogging performance has resulted. But whilst skiving from making yet more changes to chp. 3 today, I found three really interesting new blogs about Helsinki in English. So it doesn't matter if I don't write much, because -at least on Helsinki- these folks are more interesting. Check 'em out.

Jees Helsinki Jees - architecture and urban design, but not in a boring way. Everybody lives somewhere and when you start thinking about whether where you live works or not, it's really interesting.

Instant Kaamos - Seems to be another English bloke who has been here for sometime. He's totally right about the stupid give way to the right sometimes thing.

Helsinki According to PPUsa - a Helsinki photo blog. Loads of great photos.

They're all a bit downtown-hipster feeling, which is absolutely fine, but remember there is more to Helsinki that the inner suburbs (although most of my hipster colleagues wouldn't agree). Downtown is the interesting bit of Helsinki, but somehow it is quite different to the suburban reality of many Helsinkians. Maybe I should try and blog about that myself sometime.

Thanks to Jonas at the ever interesting Svenskfinland in English blog for pointing the way.

The plague terrorist takedown

(Photo - some dodgy terrorists with really snotty noses, hence massive handkerchiefs)
Some years ago for work I looked in some depth into the idea of "WMD terrorism". In the early part of this decade, Jihadi terrorism seemed unbounded in its brutality, someone had sent weapons grade Anthrax through the US postal service and CNN found footage in an abandoned Afghan camp of al Qaeda people gassing dogs. It all seemed so possible and hence utterly terrifying. But the scary thing was, the more you dug, the more crap you found you were digging through. And I don't mean scary crap, I mean just simple common or garden bullshit. The concept of WMD became virtually meaningless through sloppy over-use in global discourse. I remember hearing a normally sensible and grounded former US marine general on NPR call ricin WMD and just thinking the world was going nuts. Ricin is as much a WMD as bullets are. Some American terrorism 'experts' still go on about "European ricin plots", seemingly unaware that in court case after court case these claim have virtually all turned out to be nothing. American neo-Nazis were messing about with ricin in the 80s, but nobody ever accused them of plotting Armageddon. The collapse of the Bush Administration's claim that the Saddam regime had WMDs, and wanted to give them to al-Qaeda, had a lot to do with the slow retrenchment of the world's media from the story. But every once in while once these stories pops up again like a fart in a bath.

I remember seeing the story about AQIM fighters dying from the plague in Algeria a few weeks ago and didn't pay much attention. I've researched quite a lot on the Algerian situation in the past and soon learnt that vast amounts of what you read about terrorism in that country is crap. The agendas of many different actors make sorting out fact from fiction pretty hard when it comes from Algeria, and the idea that AQIM (the former GSPC) were messing around in mini-biolabs with bubonic plague seemed far-fetched to say the least. What I hadn't realised at the time was that the story came from the Sun. If you read the Sun to get your info on jihadist movements, you deserve everything you get. I noticed just two weeks back that even whilst the bodies were still lying in the open in Victoria, the Sun was suggesting that it might have been terrorist 'what done it' with the bushfires. They won't just scrape the bottom of the barrel, rather attacking it with a chisel and mallet. But whilst reading around on some other North Africa related issues in the last couple of days, I've come across some really quite impressive takedowns of the story by some quality bloggers.

So first off check The Sun Lies for a rather in-depth fisking of the story. The Armchair Generalist has a very good overview of why it is all bollocks and even finds an Algerian doctor writing in a medical journal who notes that the Algerian medical profession thinks it's bollocks too (although I'm sure the good doctor would use slightly more technical language). The Generalist sticks with the story coming back a few weeks later to note that the Algerian health ministry and WHO are also both voting for the "bollocks" option. Jihadica has an interesting post looking at this along with other very unlikely stories from recent times about al Qaeda - Thomas writes:

Let me start by congratulating the journalist on being able to fit the four words “al-Qaida”, “gay”, “rape” and “horror” in one and the same headline in the world’s largest English-language newspaper.

Journalism of that 'quality' - it just makes you proud to be British. OK, so maybe I'm missing a 'not' from that last sentence.

(You might also be interested in this earlier post on related matters)

Thought for the day

A wise man, who is from Minnesota where they seem to produce wise men, once told me: "life is too short for bad beer". He is so right. So when I was in the supermarket last, I decided to try some Lia Fail which I haven't supped before and jolly nice it is too. Just try to get over the paint-yer-face-blue cliche Scottishness of the branding, which the continentals eat up with a spoon, and enjoy.

Today, I have been mainly listening to Stephen Fry podcasts, which accounts for my good humour despite the lateness of the hour and darkness of the night.

You are meant to be my editors!

I take it every one was so excited over the tutu discussion, that nobody told me that I had got the wrong link to the Stupidest Man on Earth blog. The correct link is here:

The Stupidest Man on Earth

...and now also in the original post.

More good blogs to visit

Bored of the same old blogs? A couple of suggestions for those interested in news and thoughts on the more depressing parts of the world. Firstly, The Stupidest Man on Earth - subtitle "on war and stuff". It's written by Jari, a very well travelled Finnish journalist, a real old school hack (and I mean that in the nice sense); he probably even has one of those khaki vest with about a hundred little pockets on them used by genuine foreign correspondents for some secret purpose not revealed to the general public.

Next is the [My]State Failure Blog, I found this by following a link from The Stupidest Man on earth, only to realise that I met the guy who writes it, Péter, at the conference I was at in Stockholm last week. Small world eh? Péter was, unsurprisingly, giving a paper on state failure. It is more theoretical than Jari's blog, so will appeal to the IR and political science types out there, but still written in an approachable way if you are in to that sort of thing.

But I'm sure you're not bored with this blog of course... and just to tease you, I'm debating whether to include in the weekly climbing post a picture from last weekend of a man doing a climb whilst wearing a pink tutu, fishnet stockings and fairy wings on his helmet. But I'm sure the serious-minded readers of this blog wouldn't be interested in something so silly?