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City bike shares are great, except for having to use your stupid legs, says Kickstarter inventor
03.04.2014
06:02 pm
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ShareRoller
 
The most prominent city bike share in the country is the Citi Bike program in New York, which launched in mid-2013, an event that triggered great hope among bike activists as well as fear and loathing from the likes of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal (seriously, if you want to see the elite troglodyte opinion at its worst, click on that link).

Riding a bike in New York City can be quite dangerous—mostly for the bicyclists themselves. That’s why Citi Bike took great care in imposing certain limits on the bikes’ capacity. They can’t accelerate to any great speed; they’re sturdy bikes that are ideal for a quick jaunt across town, but don’t expect to break any world records on one.
 
ShareRoller
 
For some folks, though, it wasn’t enough to have inexpensive bicycles available over much of the terrain of Manhattan and Brooklyn—some kind of hack was required. Enter the ShareRoller, a Kickstarter project that’s just stupid enough to get funded. The ShareRoller is a little device, invented by one Jeff Guida, that you can attach to the front of a Citi Bike (or the equivalent bike in many American cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., all of which use the same model) that will let you surpass the 20-mph barrier with ease. The motor is “a briefcase-like machine,” proof positive that the primary demographic here is commuters and office workers.

Guida’s looking to make $100,000 so he can develop his ShareRoller prototype, after which lucky investors will have the honor of paying $1,195 to buy one of the new devices. Honestly, at that price couldn’t you just get an electric motorbike of your own? (It’s relevant here that electric bicycles are banned in New York City; Guida thinks that the ShareRoller would constitute a workaround for that law, but don’t get your hopes up.)
 
ShareRoller
 
For the record, I’ve used the Citi Bike system before, and I think it’s a great project. I don’t think New York needs a lot of office workers toddling around on ShareRoller-powered Citi Bikes, however.
 

 
via Gothamist

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
At long last, the invisible bike helmet is here
Under the Smogberry Trees: Dr. Demento Documentary on Kickstarter

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.04.2014
06:02 pm
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Under the Smogberry Trees: Dr. Demento Documentary on Kickstarter
04.24.2013
01:44 pm
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The advent of a site like Kickstarter has been a wonderful gift with some flaws. Wonderful because it has given folks the chance to get such viable things released and funded, like the previously lost work of cult filmmaker H.G. Lewis, not to mention a high definition release of the surreal Sominex horror film, Manos, The Hands of Fate. It can be flawed because there are some whose projects got kicked off of Kickstarter and not in a good way, including the HD restoration of The Opening of Misty Beethoven. (Though, the rubber still met the road on that project without Kickstarter, thankfully.)

However, that is not why I am here today. Instead, this is about an outfit called the Meep Morp Studio and their undertaking of a truly worthy project entitled Under the Smogberry Trees: The True Story of Dr. Demento. Anyone like myself who grew up listening to Dr. Demento’s radio show will instantly feel their heart swell knowing about this project. Championing “novelty” music and giving airplay to acts ranging from Spike Jones to Frank Zappa, not to mention the wholly underrated Barnes & Barnes (who warrant their own documentary), Dr. Demento was a breath of fresh air in a radio landscape often dominated by AOR, over-produced country and butt rock as far as the eye can see. Heck, we have the man to thank for basically helping jump start the career of Weird Al Yankovic.

Novelty music has always been the awkward redheaded stepchild of musical genres and often unfairly so, since it takes real talent to be boldly ridiculous, wonderfully weird and steadfastly true to a sound that has a snowball’s chance in Hell of making anyone a millionaire. Formerly a roadie for Spirit, Demento, also known as Barret Hansen, has done more for esoteric music in the past forty years than all the music historians combined. Given his contributions to radio and strange music, on top of featuring interviews with Art & Artie Barnes and Bill Frenzel aka Ogden Edsel (“Dead Puppies,” “Kinko the Clown”) among others, it would be a gift if this documentary gets fully funded.

Posted by Heather Drain
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04.24.2013
01:44 pm
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