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The 1980s-era Winchester Burley bicycle trailer I've been using for a few months finally packed it in today. A steel tube ripped. This steel tube was welded at a right-angle to both tube segments which held the wheel axles. It ripped just below the welded join with the axle tube for the left wheel. It took a good hour for the tube to rip all the way through. As the rip progressed there was less-and-less to hold the left wheel at a right-angle to the road surface; the loaded trailer box was pushing down, and the unbraced axle couldn't maintain a right-angle, and was hinging upwards, driving the top of the wheel towards the side of the trailer box.

Every evening, before I go to bed, in my cosy parkade, I tuck in my bike and trailer. The trailer gets a bed of newsprint, to catch drips from the, hopefully, massive load of returnable bottles, and cans, neatly bagged, and tied on the trailer -- it's just good manners, it's not my property, after all.

This evening, the last broadsheet, to go in the most important, potentially drippiest, place, turned out to be a double-truck ad from Apple, saying how the "Designed by Apple in Cupertino" statement, branding all their products, is the signature of all the engineers, and artists, and people at the company, and how it means everything (the fact the stuff's made in China means nothing).The ad copy also explains that they design their stuff to enhance "each life it touches" -- it's so true! You don't even need to have an Apple product for the wizards in Cupertino to make your life better! Thanks Apple. Cllick on the images to enlarge them.

"My God — it's full of stars!"

OK, it doesn't really remind us of Bowman's exclamation in 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), so maybe we're full of it, but I liked the the juxtaposition, particularly as I found the cart just exactly as you see it. It wasn't there this morning, so I would guess, by now, if anything, it's full of bottles. Binners who rely on the kindness of strangers for the tools of their trade, moan these days that shopping carts are getting hard to come by.

A shopping cart binner once tried to tell me, quite earnestly, that shopping carts were only rated to hold 40 pounds-or-so, as opposed to the 100 pounds for a standard bicycle trailer, such as mine. I laughed at him -- welded, steel wire shopping carts should be able to carry several hundred pounds, perhaps up to 1000 pounds! I would prefer we called them shopping trolleys, like in most Commonwealth countries, but I also think bike trailers should be bike carts, because I grew up understanding that a cart had two wheels -- current definitions say two or four. Click the images to enlarge them.