Category Archives: Reviews

K2 CINCH is the best of both worlds

I dropped by princeton ski last night to check out the K2 cinch bindings. They are fantastic. I’m going to buy them as soon as the thanksgiving sales hit. Jebus they are sweet.

They generally look like a regular strap binding. The clicks on the straps look kind of crappy, but they are standard attachments so you could replace them. I like to ratchet down really tight, but these seem to pop too easily. No matter.

The great thing is that you can easily adjust your binding tightness while riding, just as with any straps.

But the killer application is when you want to get quickly in and out. There’s a power cord at the back just like flow bindings. If you drop the lever, you can pull back the highback and at the same time raise the ankle strap. I put on a pair of store boots and tried whipping the feets in and out of the bindings. No problem, plenty of clearance. And when you need to lay the high back flat, you can, just like a regular strap binding.

I currently can’t see a downside to these at all. At $210 in a nyc shop they are definitely priced to move. Perhaps I am just dazzled by the messianic glow that seems to emanate from these sacred bindings, yea, for they are the ones fortold in our ancient snowboarder prophecies.

Now let’s start seeing some decent lacing systems. Go forth and design ye engineers, and produce them for me!

Slave narratives

While Sam and I were in charleston for the wedding, she picked up a book called “My folks don’t want me to talk about slavery” filled with stories by former slaves of what it was like for them and what emancipation was like. Thes stories came about because of one of the things governments can do that are good, public works projects. During the Depression, the government hired a bunch of out of work writers to travel across former slaveowning areas, find former slaves, and record their stories. Project Gutenberg has just published online, for free, an etext about the administrative process that led to this project and how the writers went about it. Sample text in in it also goes in about the religious beliefs and superstitions of the former slaves.

Interestingly, like a lot of old folks, many of these people reminisce fondly about how much better life was during “Slavery time.”