Yesterday, the rear wheel on my bike started rubbing on my brake. I didn’t notice it during my ride from office to the house, but when I walked my bike inside. The wheel wouldn’t make a complete rotation. When the wheel isn’t true, there’s only one thing to do.
Drove to the office today, then, and carried around a bike wheel. So I braced myself for having to find a bike shop that wanted to take on the job. Fortunately there’s one just across the street from our office. And when they opened, at noon, I walked my wheel into the shop. Ran into someone I knew, who noticed that I seemed to be missing part of my bike.
That was a keen diagnosis of the problem. My colleague was not, however, interested in fixing the problem, or hearing my considerable repertoire of bicycle puns. But the bike shop was willing to take on the job. (This isn’t always a given.) The young man at the front desk warned it might take a while. They are busy. Start of the school year and all of that. But they had the thing fixed before the day was done. It just needed a new spoke and to be re-trued.
It was a spoke they put on a few years ago. I remember then that the shop manager gave me a line about how long spokes last. This is going to happen, so don’t be so hard on yourself or your wheels, basically. All but two of the spokes are original, though, and today he had to repair his own work.
I assume I hit a bump awfully hard. So he’s having to repair my damage to his work. Most importantly, and happily, the problem is fixed and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I can ride my bike again tomorrow.
Quitters.
Their raising their efforts at razing the Poplars Building. Suddenly, they’re getting close to being halfway through of pulling down the apartment-turned-dorm-turned-administration building.
At least on the top. There’s an impressive mound of rubble just out of our view here, and it seems the destruction of the lower part of the building will be done separately. But earlier today someone was on the roof hosing down the debris. Talk about drawing the short straw.
This Spin Doctors record came out in the summer of 1996. It was their third record. The first one had the songs you got sick of from heavy radio play. The second flopped — it only sold two million records. This one was a return to form, and provided a nice bridge of their pop sound and their blue eyed funk.
“Pocket Full of Kryptonite” was quintuple-platinum in the early 90s. And that form comes up here in songs like this, even if the record was never going reach that kind of prominence.
Here’s another example from the same Spin Doctors vein. But, hey, by this point they could make music and go to the mall (I remember reading that somewhere) which was impossible for them just a few years before.
Maybe a little anonymity isn’t a bad thing, musically speaking. One track here became a sitcom theme, and featured in a few commercials, but the project as a whole got a lukewarm reception from contemporary reviewers. It also received precious little airplay — probably why I picked this up as a radio station giveaway — but there’s some fine musicianship here. Bassist Mark White and drummer Aaron Comess have always made this whole band come together, whether you were listening or not.
I played that song a lot. It’s one of their old live show staples, with a weird ambiance when you consider the band, but I think I lived in a house made of magnetic tape and vinyl when this came out. Probably no one I knew liked this record, so it didn’t get much play around people, but I enjoyed it for what it was. And it had a bit of attitude, in a suburban, blue-eyed funk sort of way.
This is the not-so-hidden track, and it gets panned, but only because we hadn’t reached the Biz Markie renaissance yet. Biz sounds perfectly natural and happy in this mix, and anything that makes him happy should make most people who listen to music happy, so give this one a spin if you’re still here.
They also put out three more records after this, the last one in 2013. They’re still performing, as a three-piece. There are eight shows through early November on their website as of this writing, and their social media is still active. And, I bet if you run across them on a 90s station you’ll still sing along.
