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Culture
Transportation
Science + Tech

Dare to Dream of the Most Amazing Bicycle for Christmas

VIDEO: Watch the Zenga brothers of BC make and ride their tall, weird bikes.

Tyee Staff 25 Dec 2019TheTyee.ca

ZengaBrosTallBike.jpg
How do you make, ride and survive a bike like this? Watch the vid below. Photo of Dave Zenga from Zenga Bros. Facebook.

They grew up feeling antsy and restricted in the small-town world of rural British Columbia and responded, welding torches in hands, by creating a variety of stretched or stacked art bikes.

If you live in Vancouver, you may have seen one of the Zenga brothers on their impossibly tall bikes whizzing by and given your head a shake. But Benny Zenga says there is something about the way their “foolish” looking tall bikes carry weight and roll along that makes them the only kind of bike he’d want to ride around the world. It has to do with centre of gravity.

“There’s some serious scientific shit going on,” he claims, “that blows every other vehicle out of the water.”

The video below introduces the siblings who’ve been creating community art projects since 1999 and allows us to ride (and crash) with them. Hearing them talk about challenging the banal through hands-on projects that result in glorious eccentricities is a nice antidote to the consumer hype on full blast from Black Friday to Boxing Day. And a fun reminder that humans are designed to entertain themselves. Our only glitch is when we take ourselves too seriously.

Watch the video here.

Happy holidays, readers! Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 2 to give our moderators a break. See you in 2020. [Tyee]

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