January

This class is designed as a complete introduction to the basics of maintaining your bicycle yourself. Learning to fix your own bike can save you money, ensure access to reliable transportation, and be a rewarding personal experience to understand how your vehicle functions. Participants aren’t expected to know anything beforehand – the only thing you need to bring is your lovely selves, your bike if you want, and a creative desire to learn!

In addition to providing technical explanations and building mechanical knowledge and confidence, this class will attempt to provide a basic overview of the role of community bike shops throughout the country and world, as we work to build sustainable transportation movements locally and globally.

Thursdays, January 10, 17, 24, 31 - 6:00-8:30pm

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• What is the real story behind all the bad economic news?

• Why are we not richer by our burgeoning tangible wealth, instead of poorer by a snowballing financial “debt”?

• How could it be that an innocent child born in the U.S. today is already, according to the “experts,” a quarter-million dollars in “debt”? When did newborn babies borrow this money? How are they supposed to “repay” it? Is their future mortgaged before it starts? Has “original debt” replaced “original sin”?

• If every dollar in circulation is “borrowed” into existence through “loans” from private banks, where does the money to pay the “interest” come from?

• After a century of explosive growth in real economic activity, why have we not grown out of our “debt”? Is there a perverse logic built into the system that is causing us to grow into it our “debt”?

• Why in the last century have family farmers been forced off the land by financial foreclosure, or threat of foreclosure, until now those living on the farm comprise less that two-percent of the population?

• What is this “debt” burden doing in real terms to our civilization, our earth, ourselves? What is “debt” anyway? What is its effect on the psyche of generations growing up in saturation of its financial demands, ecological devastation and social disintegration?

• If I am well-educated, working hard and “playing by the rules” in the “richest country on earth,” why can I not pay my bills and/or why am I perpetually in debt?

• Has fear of financial destitution replaced fear of dying as the most dreaded eventuality in people’s lives?

• Is there hope?

These and many other monetary riddles haunt our post-modern world. Indeed, they are increasingly experienced as threatening the viability of our personal lives, the existence of civilization, and even the continuation of life on earth itself. Can we get a perspective on this? Can we turn a corner? Is there a vision on the other side?

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"Carrie Daklin is mad as hell and doesn't want to take it anymore," begins a column by Ruben Rosario. Want to keep reading? You bet. That's because Rosario always writes with voice, with attitude, with a passion that grabs the reader. Journalism prof Carrie Brown-Smith writes: "Voice doesn’t HAVE TO mean less facts or more ill-informed ranting ... there’s still hard-hitting reporting, but the person behind the story isn’t completely hidden. If anything, the biases they are trying (often to little avail) to hide are instead transparently represented to the audience and become part and parcel of their expertise rather than a liability." If you want to work on livening up your writing, join us for Finding Your Voice, a two-hour workshop at the Daily Planet office on January 11, 7-9 p.m. Register ahead of time, and e-mail instructor Mary Turck ([email protected]) samples of your writing — something boring you'd like to improve or something with voice that you'd like to brag about.

Course tuition is $10; scholarships are available for students to whom this fee is a burden. Register at thedatabank.com:
https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/262/donate.asp?formid=TCM-Event&c=5092822

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This class is designed as a complete introduction to the basics of wheel building. We are posting this class late, but if we have sufficient interest we will start the first class with lacing rims. The second class will entail bringing the wheel up to tension and truing it radially and laterally. It is okay if you don't understand what this means we will start at the beginning. No prior knowledge is necessary, however, it will be useful to understand the basics of truing.

We will be following Gerd Shraner's method feel free to peruse his book http://www.icelord.net/bike/ArtOfWheelbuilding.pdf

I am going to push this into January because not enough people registered in time. Please let me know if you would like to join us.

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