weekly Go Flip Yourself

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling:

Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity.

And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.

Being able to repair the problems on that bike with such little know-how or experience made me reflect on the simplicity and elegance of such a simple piece of engineering. Everything I needed to know on that bike I could inspect myself.

if you want to be able to briskly climb stairs when you are 75, you need to be in the top 95th percentile of cardiovascular fitness.