Moving Target

Nhatt Attack's Top 5 moments of 2008
6 January 2009 by Ms Nhatt Attack

In pictures!

2008 - a useless review
31 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Tour de Ville preview
11 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

was last night. For those that were worried that it will only cater for the fixie crew, I can confirm that there’s a bit more to Jos’ and Keith’s thing than deep Vs and riser bars. The shop opens on Saturday. The coffee machine is being installed tomorrow, but there was copious liquid refreshment and good company at last night’s preview. Good luck, guys!

HOP Xmas fund shirts
5 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Buy one of these exclusive shirts. Obergruppenpistard reckons he’s only making 25. I don’t believe him. More over on the dark side.

Charlie Brave builds bikes now
5 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Moving Target has been around for a long time. A loooong time. Since 1988 in fact. One of the guys who started it, Charlie Bayliss (who went under the nom-de-plume of CC Brave), has a blog over here called The Artful Dodger Bicycle Works, and was kind enough to mis-spell my name in one of his posts. ChiDley, godammit!

CB was never the kind of guy who wore lycra, even though he messengered in the 80s. He always dressed in trackies, and wore trainers. I do remember that he had a some sort of ariel contraption on a rack on the back of his bike, which enabled him to get exceptional radio reception and transmission, something that gave him an extra edge on the Booker open call channel, on which he first worked.

Crap Xmas Treasurecat Saturday
5 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

As part of the Fixed #2 launch, there is a treasurecat this Saturday. 2.30pm at the basket-ball/polo court at the top of Brick Lane. You need £5, a lock, a bag, a digital camera and a team-mate. This is a benefit for the London Courier Emergency Fund. Hooray!

CMWC 2009 web-site
4 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

As I am sure you all know by now, the 2009 Cycle Messenger World Championships will be held in Tokyo in September sometime. The guys have now got cmwc2009.com up, but there’s still very little detail, although I am sure that it will be a great event.

Kyotoloco 2008, a courier event which has been running for a few years now, was held last month, and will be run again next year as the pre-event for the CMWC, on the weekend of 12/13 September. More details on that here.

Busy busy, fixed and roller
3 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Well, maybe not the kind of busy that puts pounds in your pockets, but coming up tonight is the 2nd round of the the Rollapaluza Winter League. Tonight’s edition is over 1000m, or twice the normal length. I have never raced over 1000m in a roller race, but I bet it is seriously unpleasant. You can join the fun at the birth-place of London roller-racing, the Horseshoe pub, Clerkenwell Close, from 6pm tonight, £5 in. More details here.

Zindex plunges!
2 December 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Earlier this year, in my own homage to bikesnob’s pistadex, I devised the Zindex. At that time it was running at at +3.93 (the sale price of a 2nd hand Zo bag divided by the price of a new one). Earlier today, a 2nd hand Zo bag sold for $237, giving a Zindex of +2.37. This means that the Zindex, a measure of the hipness of messenger culture, has plunged by 1.56, a loss of nearly 40%. The credit crunch has bitten urban hipsters hard.

Damage report from Team Awesome Day
30 November 2008 by Buffalo Bill

Juliet got this nasty shiner at the recent Team Awesome Day. And Ted ended up with marker-pen all over his body after falling asleep in a bath. Team Awesome, you are a bad influence.

Derby bicycle courier
29 November 2008 by Buffalo Bill

This from Derby Evening Telegraph:

In 1981, the then employment secretary Norman Tebbitt famously suggested that unemployed people should get on their bikes and look for work. Today, with unemployment on the rise again, that is exactly what Alex Wells has decided to do. At the start of October, architectural technician Alex was made redundant from his job at a practice in Nottingham, due to the downturn in the construction industry. He has now decided to turn his cycling hobby into a business by setting up a bicycle-powered courier company called City Cycle Couriers Derby.

I am sure that all Moving Target readers will wish him all the best. Not least because he has started at the beginning of winter! Rubber-side down, get some overshoes and maybe see you sometime soon, Alex.

10 motorcycle couriers killed a year in Istanbul
28 November 2008 by Buffalo Bill

According to this report in Hurriyet. Also worth noting is that according to report, courier companies have to be licensed. No mention of pedal-bikes in the article, though.