The PUBLIC R16 is certainly intended to conjure memories of English club racers. It even comes in British racing green, just in case you miss the point.

A cityfied road bike

What sets the R16 apart from most of the road bikes sold in the US is a set of steel fenders, touring-style bar end shifters, and a proper kickstand. With the addition of a rack and panniers, the R16 is probably best suited for recreational riding, light errands, or fast commuting. A jack-of-all-trades, more performance-oriented than its upright, fat-tired siblings.

It comes with a 4130 chromoly steel frameset, 2 x 8 drivetrain, retro-styled toe clips, Dia-Compe brake levers, a beautiful quill stem, painted-to-match rims, and a Brooks-inspired saddle with brass rivets. Paired with PUBLIC’s signature stripes and contrasting cables housings, it’s a looker.

It’s also a bit spendy, for what you’re getting. The R16 is a decent buy at its introductory price of $999, but will retail just south of $1200. This makes some of the model’s no-name, cost-cutting component choices look cheesy: Rims, hubs, seatpost, stem, brake calipers, shift levers, and headset. The R16 shifts gears wuth Shimano’s serviceable, but soon-to-be-discontinued 2300 series derailleurs, and turns with a budget FSA crankset.

The competition

This introductory level kit probably works just fine. But it doesn’t compare well to similar bikes in the same price category. Take the Surly Pacer, for instance. No fenders or kickstand, but you’ll get better-finished Shimano Tiagra derailleurs with a 2 x 10 drivetrain and STI shifters, nicer tires, and Tektro brakes.

Perhaps a more appropriate comparison is the modern descendent of the bike PUBLIC is attempting to emulate: The Raleigh Clubman. While today’s Clubman no longer rolls off an English production line, it bears a strong resemblance to its storied ancestors. For the same price as the R16, you get a full Tiagra road group (including crankset and hubs), painted-to-match fenders, Weinmann rims — and a real Brooks Swift saddle, not PUBLIC’s riveted look-alike.

PUBLIC: A city bike company

One way PUBLIC could sidestep questions about its current component selection might be to offer the R16 with a Nexus internal gear hub. This would win some vintage cred, align the R16 with the best of PUBLIC’s existing models, and optimize the R16 as a drop bar city bike — which is how most customers will probably use it. Until then, the Raleigh Clubman is the obvious standout in its category, a stronger buy than the PUBLIC R16.

But PUBLIC’s new road machine still pushes all my happy buttons, and it shows that the design team in San Francisco is willing to take risks. I’m a big fan of Public. They’re one of the first companies I mention when people ask me to recommend a modern city bike. Of course, what constitutes a “city bike” is a bit of an open question these days, and I’m glad to see Public adding to the conversation.

Feel free to be ironic and share this on Facebook.

Or maybe he’s not a Muslim — he’s some big guy in a hoodie. Perhaps he looks Mexican or Asian. The point is that he’s different from the mostly white, mostly male comment warriors who roamed the web after the Aurora massacre, talking up a high-caliber utopia in which everyone is safer because everyone is carrying a gun.

The He-Men. When they think about a world in which everyone is packing, they think of people with faces and values similar to their own. Things get murkier when the other person doesn’t look like someone who might be sitting next to you in church. Even if they happen to be an American citizen with the same constitutional right to a firearm.

Fighting gun violence by encouraging more people to carry handguns is like bleeding a patient to save his life. The Hillbilly Hipster fad of conspicuous carry isn’t the solution to mass violence, though it might be a end up being a boon to ammunition factories.

Outlawing ownership of body armor by private citizens would be a good start. Creating the conditions for people to live fulfilling, less stressful lives would be another: Jobs that matter; economic conditions which support stable families and relationships; and ready access to health care, including mental health counseling.

In short, things which make for happy and coherent societies. But don’t expect coherence from the He-Men, who want to impose a frontier justice that didn’t work in the Wild West, and won’t work now.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)

They hadn’t even mopped-up the blood in Aurora, Colorado, before the He-Men moved in to flex their manliness.

“If I’d been in that theater, I’d have pulled out my Glock. END OF STORY,” boasted a USA Today comment troll I won’t bother linking. He’s right. He’d be dead, too, end of story, as powerless to help himself as the 62 others caught in a madman’s crosshairs. Blind, confused, and outgunned by a prepared assailant with superior firepower and head-to-toe body armor.

Then you have Representative Louie Gohmert. He’s the guy the good people of Texas’ 1st Congressional District chose to send to Washington, a God-fearing He-Man who fervently believes the solution to gun violence is more people walking around with guns.

“It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying,” said Gohmert, who apparently doesn’t mind the prospect of his family sitting in the dark with a couple hundred well-armed strangers. He drove his point home: “I mean in Tyler, Texas, we had … a shooter come in over a domestic matter, and just start shooting people. And it was a guy with a concealed carry -– he got killed, but his shooting at this guy caused him to run and no doubt saved a lot of lives. He was a real hero.”

Tragedy in Tyler

Gohmert’s rambling account reaches back to a 2005 shootout on the steps of Tyler’s courthouse. There’s no doubt the civilian he mentions — Mark Wilson — was a hero. Beyond that fact, the Congressman lapses into the same macho fantasy world as the would-be warriors parading their bravery through the blogosphere.

Mark Wilson wasn’t at the scene when the Tyler gunfight started, so his concealed weapons permit is irrelevant. The assailant had already shot two members of his family and was fully engaged with police when Wilson approached from behind and opened fire with a handgun. But like the shooter in Aurora, the Tyler killer was prepared — and wearing body armor. He slaughtered Wilson in the course of a few seconds.

Beyond the Wild West

It took a high-speed chase and a determined officer with an assault rifle to end the carnage in Tyler. It took the arrival of police to arrest the subject in Aurora. That’s usually how things happen: The bad guys have the element of surprise working for them, and we have the police. Though Americans own something like 65 million handguns, less than one percent of all crimes involve the defensive use of a gun. Most gun fatalities are suicides. We’d like to believe otherwise, but there are few mass tragedies ended by gun-toting private citizens. That’s the stuff of movies.

This post is not an appeal for gun control. It’s an appeal for bullshit control. We need to be more realistic about the salvific power of firearms, and look deeper than Hollywood storylines to the causes of mass violence. We owe that much to the victims in Aurora, who stand in silent witness to whatever it is we do next.

Izhar cardboard bike project from Giora Kariv on Vimeo.

It’s durable … it’s cheap. What I like about it the most most — it’s made out of cardboard!

– Designer Izhar Gafni

I don’t know whether Gafni has a commercial product here, though I bet what he learned about working cardboard could translate into more lucrative products. What I love is this guy’s love of bicycles, and his refusal to accept anything bur success. [Hat tip to Byron at Bikhugger]

I’ve ridden past this parish almost every day without stopping to take a picture. It’s Our Lady of Martyrs Roman Catholic Church, on Old Barrancas Road in Warrington. Catering to the local Vietnamese community, it looks as if it could have been extracted whole from Saigon in 1972.

Today — June 10th — is the 49th anniversary of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức. His shocking suicide in a busy Saigon intersection was designed to draw attention to the Roman Catholic-backed regime’s suppression of Buddhist religious practice. Every faith has its martyrs.

The new album from Patti Smith, Banga, dropped today. I’ve been listening the past hour or so — it’s her best in years. April Fool was actually released in advance of the album, and is probably my favorite cut so far. That it involved bicycles doesn’t hurt.

We’ll ride like writers ride
Neither rich nor broke
We’ll race through alleyways
In our tattered cloaks …

She’s still the bastard child of Baudelaire. Banga is available in the usual places, but I bought the 320kbps digital download at 7digital.

I admit to being smitten by this modular storage concept, the brainchild of Spanish industrial designer Antxon Salvador. A BrickBox is solidly constructed from layered birch plywood. They come in a couple of sizes, lock neatly together, and can be stacked to form large bookcases, room dividers, and furniture. Need to move? The disassembled boxes are their own packing containers.

BrickBoxes are not inexpensive. A row or two of the large size (ten units) would set you back about $500, if they were for sale in the US. Then again, so would a quality shelf, which lacks the flexibility of the BrickBox system. Salvador hopes to have a North American sales agent soon.

[Hat tip to fellow GPlusser Sasa Vignjevic]

A brief Sixth Sense moment ensued before I realized that if I’d inadvertently deleted my account and made myself a cyberghost, I wouldn’t be reading about it on a limited (non-public) Google+ posting. I went and checked my settings, anyway.

While I was gone, several people jumped in, expressing surprise. Though I was fairly active on Twitter and Facebook before Google+, most of the folks I talk to there are new acquaintances. They’ve also become people I pay attention to, and it’s good to know that if I suddenly disappeared, someone might notice.

Google+ has become the social network I care about. I joined early, with a n0w-deleted Gmail account. Teresa probably had both my old and new accounts circled, mistaking my spectral doppelganger for my current +Self. In any event, reports of my Google+ death seem premature, at least from my vantage point.

Google+ ain’t dead, either

Every few weeks, an article bubbles to the top of the linkbait swamp, declaring the death of Google+. Some seem rather self-serving, put forward by people with large followings (and proportionally vested interests) on other services. Now and then, one raises an interesting new point.

Such as this piece on Fast Company, citing a new RJ Metrics report attempting to quantify Google Plus’ current state of development. In a nutshell, RJ Metrics asserts that while Google+ may have a lot of members for such a young service, people aren’t very active. There’s been a lot of online discussion of the Google+ “ghost town”, so I won’t add to the sounds of blowing tumbleweed and mournful coyotes.

… Other to point out that Teresa’s post is exactly the difficulty with the RJ Metrics survey, which is based on public Google+ messages. Perhaps it’s right about people joining Google+, then not participating. But those of us who do participate don’t always post publicly. We post to our circles, which are — for the most part — arranged topically. The only people who will see these messages are those in the intended circle, which makes gauging the health of Google+ based on public postings a bit problematic. Troubling enough, I think, to banish RJ Metrics’ ghost town conclusions to the data equivalent of Boot Hill.

Interests are interesting

I think it was Byron from Bike Hugger who said that while he uses Google+, he doesn’t feel bound to become its cheerleader. I agree, but it’s hard for me not to feel emotionally invested. Whether through Google’s intent or not, it has become a network bound by interests, rather than relationships.

My suspicion is that Google packaged Google+ very poorly. They initially presented its core feature — now duplicated to some extent by Facebook — as a way to manage relationships. Circles were trotted out as an online reflection of real-life social groupings. These are institutionalized on Google+ in the form of default Friends and Family circles. Posting something semi-private? Don’t want to bother professional associates with pictures of you slurping tequila shooters while wearing a Speedo? Send that to your Friends circle. Hope all of them are actually friends.

In practice, Circles are difficult to maintain by relationship. I have business partners who are also close friends. I have family with whom I am not particularly friendly. These complicate relationship-based Circles. Interests, on the other hand, are a lot clearer. Bob from work likes bikes. So does my brother, Peter. We’ll put them both in a Bike Tribe circle, and share appropriately. Both Bob and Peter might appear in other groupings, and that’s fine. Neither will see my tequila and Speedo pictures, because I’d like to talk to them again.

We are passionate about our interests. They’re interesting, as are the people who share our passions. We’re building new relationship on Google+ based on this flow, which is largely the opposite of how things work on Facebook. My guess is that Google+ will grow as Google accepts this, adjusting the service to make topical Circles management simpler or automatic (based on user-defined rules or behavior).

In the meantime, Google+ isn’t dead, and neither am I. Feel free to drop my Google+ profile in one of your circles.