Every reason you should spend money at Rivendell and Velo Orange is right here.

From the Riv site:

Ten percent of receipts on Thurs and Fri will be donated to Haiti relief. You can read about this on the Velo Orange site, too. Chris there proposed it to me--VO's doing it, too, and it's a good idea. If you don't know Velo-Orange, you should. On the surface they may appear to be competitors, and at the most basic level, at a business-discussion level, I guess there's no denying that they are. But they're also friends, and they're pointed in the same general direction we are, and let me tell you, folks-- it's good to have more companies, more people, going in that direction. It's not like the racing world isn't ten times huger as it is; it's not like this movement, or whatever you might call it, has a full head of steam. More really is merrier, so go to

Velo-Orange

and whip out your credit card.

Donating a portion of sales to Haiti relief is a sensitive, tricky deal--- as a business, you depend on sales, but also, you want to do some good along the way. I've thought of this as "leaving good snail tracks," and there are selfish and altruistic components of it. If we swirled down the crapper in a few months or a year or some other dreadfully short time, I sure wouldn't want to look back and think, "We cheated a lot of people and were selfish SOBs along the way," and now we're out of business, oh well."
No matter how things are going and how they go, I want my worst thought to be something along the lines of, "Well, we tried hard. Maybe I wasn't a good enough businessman, but at least we didn't cheat people, and we gave a bunch of money away to good causes, and that's better than nothing, that's nothing to scoff at."
Don't take that to mean we're going down. We haven't had to lay anybody off (but are in no position to hire anybody new). We either earn business or don't, and we try to.
The Haiti relief deal going on now--- a cynic who hates us (and hates VO) might say we're using the disaster to boost sales. It would be hard to defend against that. Well, today we had a lousy sales day, capped off with a huge refund (bike deposit refunded, circumstances changed). We sent $1000 to Mercy Corp, directed to Haiti. It's not braggy stuff, but I'm mentioning it as a preemptive measure, in case somebuddyboysomewhere gets the wrong idea.

Anyway, the Haiti disaster is a disaster for all other charities, too. Whenever one cause makes big news, money that would have flowed to the other charities gets refunnelled to the Newsy one.
I do happen to think Pat Robertson's comments on the earthquake are --- well, I think he's full of --- well, I should probably just say I think he's off base. Is that OK? And I'm sure he doesn't care, or read this. I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, and I'm sure he claims to mean well, and I'm sure in the next few days he'll clarify what he really meant....but holy cow, Robertson...


These are good people, doing good work.

Pat Robertson, on the other hand, is a cunt. Fucking christian assholes and their mouths and being up in everyone else's business.

Enough, already.