I spent half the demo trying to fold and unfold the bike and probably looked like a street performer outside of Carl Schurz Park (think someone tossed me a quarter at one point). The staff at NYCeWheels was great and after the demo they had the bike ready in about an hour. I opted to ditch the BOX (and the subway) and rode the bike from York Avenue (between 84th and 85th street) to Grand Central Station.

This is a beautiful machine and I’ve posted pictures on Flickr here, here, here and here. It’s a M3L in RACING GREEN.

I’m a bit of an Anglophile (in case you didn’t know) so this machine is the perfect complement to the stable of fine bikes at the Green Scarf Dispatch Company. The best part of owning a folding bike is that you don’t need a bike permit on Metro-North to carry it on board so Saturday/Sunday adventures in Manhattan will be easier than ever.

Related
(1) Brompton Bicycle
(2) Folding Bike/Anime
(3) Brompton Folding Bike – NYCeWheels Favorite Folding Bicycle

(2) Kibun is NO Toast but he’s squishy nonetheless

(2a) PRICELESS: “Botan! Plushie mode. This is one of Botan’s seven tricks. When she’s like this people will think you’re a plushie enthusiast rather than someone smuggling a boar into class.”

(3) Can a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization? (NYTIMES)

(3a) Ed!t

(2) “Hello Kitty” Air Jet by EVA Airways

(3) A5/05: Lufthansa and Graphic Design: Visual History of an Airplane

(4) ‘Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight’ Exhibition

“Despite the spate of revisionist histories in recent decades, Eisenhower remains an enigma: A quiet man projecting an image of almost leisurely detachment whose leadership won a global war and helped secure for America its position as unrivaled leader of the free world.”

(2) A Convergence of Faith and Reason (WSJ)

“Below the patrons who kneel just outside the sacred space is a skeleton laid out on a sarcophagus. Above it, an inscription reads: “I once was what you are now, and what I am you also will be.” This memento mori, placed under a symbol of Golgotha, suggests that the skeleton represents both Everyman and Adam, widely believed to have been buried under the place where Christ was later crucified. The reminder of physical death is contrasted with God the Father holding the cross, offering the promise of everlasting life.”

(2a) A related quote from “Why I Write” by George Orwell

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.”

“Arrietty is adorable, diminutive, and special and the last scene features a tea house with stained glass windows.”

I can’t draft anything that isn’t biased. I love Miyazaki and small things. The backgrounds were gorgeous and the music and characters were great. I love it (for very personal and sentimental reasons) when she givers her hair clip to Sean.

The benefits of the quiet mind (or my first borrowing):

Found this tiny pin on the train platform this morning. It would fit inside a quarter.

Borrowed time, but time well spent: Animation god crafts ‘Arrietty’ from classic story

(2) Pixar Animator Enrico Casarosa On The Inspiring Work Of Hayao Miyazaki

(3) Top 10 Romantic Movies for Geeks

(4) Pod Hotels Coming To An Airport Near You

(5) Page By Page Creative Lamp

(2) “The moral, as I take it, is that sometimes you have to leave home for a while in order to recognize the treasure that is there.” – Daniel Libeskind from Breaking Ground

(3) This print ad for Brooks is fantastic and it’s a shameless opportunity to quote Alain de Botton.

“At the same time, he [Kahn] lets us openly savour and celebrate the antique pleasures of oak, showing to full advantage the warm-tones, clarity, and striated grain with which time endowed it. As befits a building dedicated to the paintings of a nation more tortured than most by the completing claims of history and modernity, the Yale center for British Art delivers an elegant essay on how past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. In doing so, it sketches the for us the dimensions of an ideal contemporary Englishness.”

(2) Happytime Pizza???? The Disney Feature Animation Bldg. includes a 1980s style arcade created by the studio’s set builders. The “pod” was built to inspire the animators working on Wreck-It Ralph Disney’s 52nd full-length animated feature.

(2a) The arcade from the Disney Feature Animated Bldg. included in the Spring 2012 issue of Disney twenty-three.

(2b) “It was called Happytime Pizza, and it was a replica of a small family-run pizza joint that had existed in Halliday’s hometown in the mid-1980′s…The interior re-created the atmosphere of a classic ’80s pizza parlor and video arcade in loving detail.” – Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

(2c) Pac-Man (TV series)

(2d) Pac-Man’s Anatomy

(2e) A tribute site to Arnie’s Place

(3) Playmobil: allowing children to make up their own story (The Telegraph)

(3a) A Surprise For This GeekMom – Playmobil Is For Older Kids Too!

“All of his poems are inextricably linked to the places where they were written. For much of his adult life, Mr. Bonnefoy spent his summers with his wife in an abandoned monastery in Provence.”

It’s snowing.
Under the flakes, a door opens at last
On the garden beyond the world.
I set out. But my scarf
Snags on a rusty nail,
And the cloth of my dreams is torn.
(“The Garden,” 1991)

(2) A Penchant for Dreaming (WSJ)

“Burne-Jones was a founding partner of Morris’s design company in 1861. His specialty was stained-glass windows and tapestries—he did the figures while Morris handled the borders—but over the years he also designed jewelry, illustrated books and made mosaics. All done while continuing his own career as painter and watercolorist. He may have loathed his own age, Ms. MacCarthy notes, but he possessed its work ethic…The purpose of art, for him, is to be a refuge from the coarseness of the industrial world.”

(2a) Fancy some DISNEY MAGIC? (The Moment of Truth Concept Art for The Sword in…)

(3) The glorious sword of authority was given by Lord, / Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him. / Taiping unifies the World of Light. – Hong Xiuquan

(4) “Light is the measure of everything. It is absolute, mathematical, physical, eternal. There is an absolute speed to it, you can’t outrun it; that’s what the theory of relativity is about. Stand here and remember what you can. What you remember is in light, the rest is in darkness, isn’t it? The past fades to dark, and the future is unknown, just stars.” – Daniel Libeskind