Bikes on Bikes

I don't usually link to The NY Times, because it's so ubiquitous, but they have a great slideshow of items that bombed or buzzed at design stores across the nation this year. Since many of you are design-savvy, to say nothing of how design-sensitive Giant Robot is, I thought I'd mention it.

One of the buzz items this past year was this thing:The Stockholm Bike Basket...Christmas present, anyone?

I have a story about bikes. Three years ago I got hit by a car going 45. I was on a bike. Broke a leg, my ego, spent Christmas and New Year dosed up and horizontal. Cried a lot. And the kicker was, I hadn't ridden a bike in ages before that, so I blamed myself - i.e. maybe the skill doesn't just come back. Maybe I'm just a bad biker.

Anyway, I figured it was no loss to the world if I never got on a bike again. But then I moved to Deep South Brooklyn, where you pretty much need a bike to get anywhere in less than an hour.

And I love it. It's made me more endeared to self-entitled critical massers, the Tour de France, and that protective hole in bike seats for testicles.

So then I came across this great bike design blog, which makes me realize that if you only need one compelling reason to ride bikes (other than that it's an environmentally friendlier alternative to cars), bicycles might be Man's greatest gift to Design. Symmetry, gears, perfect circles, function, detail, color, dimension, weight...