As a replacement I bought him another one second-hand from CraigsList.com. This particular bike used to belong to a post-doc in neuroscience at Harvard who was moving to another country. I hope Ethan can hold onto this one a little longer than the previous one. It does have the advantage that it is fairly heavily scratched and beat-up, meaning that it will not make an inviting target (I hope).
The "weird" factor for CraigsList is still just as high as it ever was, but in spite of this I always feel as though I wind up meeting interesting people that I would not ordinarily encounter.
I can still remember the experience of selling my Toyota Corolla wagon back when we were living on Withrow Place in CA. After weeks of strange email and telephone exchanges, the guy who eventually bought it drove down from the east bay in a borrowed car with his wife and his baby daughter, who was barely six weeks old. The van he had been driving before had no place for a car seat, so he really needed a "real" car. At our dining room table, instead of a check he handed over a bag of cash -- he claimed that when he sold his van, the guy who bought it paid him that way, so he was just passing it along.... ok then :-).
[Postscript: new bike was also stolen, after a couple of months. Then weirdly the old old bike was recovered... had to be rehabilitated, however.]
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