What Are They Trying To Say--And To Whom?

Unless you do all of your cycling on unpaved surfaces, you are bound to see road signs during your rides.

We don't notice, or think about, most of them because we see them so often.  Others simply don't apply to us.

But some are really strange. For example, there was the one that said, "Graffiti is a crime camera enforced".   Was that sign trying to tell us that graffiti is camera-enforced?  Or that graffiti is a camera-enforced crime?

Then there was the one that warned us, "Use of cameras prohibited and strictly enforced".  Now, perhaps I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I can't, for the life of me, understand how something can be prohibited and strictly enforced.

Some signs leave you wondering who is their intended audience and what, exactly, they are trying to tell said audience.  I saw an example today not far from my apartment.

About a kilometer from my place, next to the East River (which isn't actually a river), there's a Con Ed power plant.  It's located on Vernon Boulevard, which rims the river, just south of the bridge to Roosevelt Island.

(Interestingly, there's a Moishe's storage facility across Vernon Boulevard that used to be a factory that made Loft candy.  Now I wonder how much I--and members of my family ate!  Well, I guess I shouldn't worry yet:  Nobody's glowing in the dark!)

Anyway, a bike lane now runs along the western edge of Vernon.  As it happens, the lane directly crosses the path of the Con Ed plant's driveway, through which trucks enter and exit.

The traffic lane that borders the bike lane handles southbound traffic.  A driver headed in that direction would not be able to read the sign, except perhaps in a rearview mirror.  The northbound traffic is so far to the right that most drivers probably wouldn't see the sign.  Even if they did, it probably wouldn't matter, as neither the driveway nor the bike lane enter, or intersect with, the northbound traffic lane.

The bike lane is sub-divided into a northbound and southbound lane.  As with the auto traffic, southbound riders wouldn't see this sign.  Even if they glanced back to look at it, the sign would be useless to them, as they would have already crossed the driveway.

So, I have to wonder:  For whom was this sign intended? (Or, in market-research speak:  Who is the intended audience?)  And what was the sign's creator trying to tell the intended audience?

You have to wonder what some people are thinking when they make and post signs.

Like Another Day Of Riding In Europe--Well, Sort Of

In addition to Paris, I have cycled in other parts of France, including the Alps, Pyrenees, Loire Valley, Normandy, Alsace and Vosges.  I have also pedaled through other European countries:  England, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic.  

Something occured to me today:  In all of those places, I never felt as tired after a day of riding as I sometimes do after a day of cycling near my home.  It didn't matter whether I was riding through hills and mountains, through valleys or along sea coasts:  Even the days I spent climbing the Tour and Giro peaks didn't leave me as spent as a day of riding up North American peaks.

Now, you might be thinking that it has to do with the excitement I feel about being in another country.  That certainly is true:  I savored the experiences of riding through medieval villages as well as the streets of the capitals because they were different and because I knew that I might never see them again.  On the other hand, when I ride to, say, Point Lookout, I enjoy it but I know that chances are that I'll be doing it again fairly soon.

But now I realize something else about riding in Europe leaves me less tired:  The sun, even in most parts of Italy and Spain, isn't as strong as it is here.  Most people are surprised, as I was, the first time they look at a map or globe and see, for example, that London lies at almost exactly the same latitude as Calgary, or that Rome is actually a degree further north in latitude than New York City.

Not only is the sun less intense in most of Europe than it is in most of the 'States; it is also more likely (except, perhaps in some of the Mediterranean regions) to be shielded, partially or wholly, by clouds.  

Arielle

Which brings me to today's ride--on Arielle, my Mercian Audax.  It started sunny, but about an hour and a half into it, the sky thickened with cumulus clouds.  They even darkened a bit, but there did not seem to be an imminent threat of rain.

And the day warmed up to 31C (88F):  not a "scorcher", but a couple of degrees warmer than what we normally experience in this part of the world at this time of year.  Normally, that combination of cloud cover and heat means one thing:  high humidity.

From I Love Bicycling

Except that wasn't the case today.  The weather reports said we won't experience high humidity until the day after tomorrow.   If what I felt during my ride is any indication, those reports weren't lying:  Even though I was riding in higher gears and at higher RPMs through much of my ride, I wasn't sweating nearly as much as I would expect.

Back to the sun:  I slathered myself in sunscreen before I started my ride, and I brought a vial of it with me.  But I never used it and didn't notice any burn at the end of my ride.  In fact, one way I know I've absorbed a lot of sun on my skin is that I feel sleepy afterward.  At the end of my ride, however, I had the energy to play with Max and Marlee, and to make dinner rather than order it.

The best part, though, is that I rode longer than I intended:  I turned a 120 kilometer (75 mile) ride into 165 (a little more than 100) by making a couple of "wrong" turns.  Furthermore, I rode up a ridge and over a couple of chains of hills I wouldn't have encountered had I stuck to my original plan, such as it was.  In fact, I spent an hour and a half doing nothing but riding up and down hills.

Near the end of my ride, clouds parted and the sun shone brightly.  Even with my fair skin, though, it didn't sap my energy.  It was almost like extending my European trip by another day!

This Explains Everything--Or Me, Anyway

Some of the experiences I've recounted in this blog are part of my "previous life", if you will.  In fact, my other blog--on which I haven't written much lately--started as a kind of journal or diary about my transition from that life to the one I'm living now.

When people learn that, for many years, I moved through this world as a guy named Nick, the question they most often ask is, "When did you know?"  Like so many things in my life, I knew about it long before I had the words for it.  

Another piece of self-knowledge that came to me before the language I needed to describe or explain it is that of my sexual orientation.  Even after I came to terms with my gender identity, I still struggled to explain, in any way that would make sense to anyone else, my attractions. Gay, straight, bi, homo, hetero, lesbian, pansexual, asexual: None of those terms seemed to fit.

But maybe, just maybe, I've finally come across le mot juste (Pardon my French, s'il vous plait!):

From Pinterest