the wonderful, more than you can believe it!

Back in the day when I was working at my first bike shop, we used to order Chinese food from a place down the street called New Jia Wei, which they pronounced as "New Highway". The food was quite good... perhaps the tastebuds memory cortex is affected by the good times at that shop, but I might be inclined to claim it among the top 3 General Tso's chickens available in recorded history... it was definitely the best in downtown Wallingford.


Anyway, every time we would call in to order, they would take the info down, and then tell us "your order ready 10 minute ago", to which we would always reply, "wow, you guys are fast". It wasn't about making fun of their mastery of the English language, as their English was worlds better than our Chinese.


Anyway, we'd sit around the back table of the shop eating some great Chinese food, and we'd look though the bike shop porn... various catalogs, magazines, and special order/closeout buy sheets that would hit the mail every few days. We'd dream about how we might make our bikes a few ounces lighter for just a half a paycheck or so, and angrily debate the merits of 32 spoke three cross wheels vs a two cross lighter option... During one of those epic lunches, someone came across an add for an overseas parts manufacturer, ChengShung Industries, or something like that. The add featured eerily lit bicycle parts floating through the cosmos, with the tagline "the wonderful, more than you can believe it!"

It was our own little precursor to the internet rage of "all your base are belong to us" . Weird thing, the internet. Remember when identity theft was all about getting fake id's? I remember when my high school first got email/telnet/pine, and you could send a message through the computer to someone sitting all the way across the room. You could probably do it to other places too, but to do that you needed to use the big scary not-Apples on the other side of the room reserved for Computer Club members.

Much as I think cars and airplanes and color TV and the Kennedy assassinations and the Challenger disaster were big moments in time, I think we have gone through some wacky momentous times in our lifetimes too. It is interesting to think about how the technology changes from then till now match the personal changes... more to come...