In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
In my half-century of dedicated cycling, I've noticed that, when it comes to food, there are two extreme types of cyclists. One fuels up on pepperoni pizza washed down with Coke or Pepsi and eats steaks or cheeseburgers and ice cream after the ride. The other wants the packaging to be as organic as the food in it.
Most cyclists, of course, fall somewhere in between. I admit that I eat and drink stuff that isn't found on most training tables, but I cringe at Twinkies, Jell-O and the like. I eat less meat in all forms than I did in my youth--and I not only eat more vegetables, but more of them are fresh rather than processed.
Like many other Americans, during the past decade or so, I have discovered the joys of one vegetable in particular:
You have to stop for: a.) a railroad crossing or b.) a drawbridge.
I admit that on more than one occasion, upon hearing the bells, my legs pumped out a momentary burst of speed that would have impressed a Russian sprinter. OK, I'm exaggerating---only slightly! đ But I did manage to cross tracks before trains plowed through, or bridges before they opened.
It's been a while since I pulled such stunts. These days, I envision the fate of a cyclist in this video:
He hung onto the North Palm Beach, Florida span as it opened. According to a news report, the witness who took the video saw the cyclist on the bridge as it began to lift and, believing the cyclist would ride down, started to take the video.
When the witnessed noticed the cyclist was in trouble, he stopped taking the video and "rushed to help him down off the bridge," according to police.
The bike was damaged but the cyclist suffered only "pain and discomfort" in his left shoulder from holding himself up on the bridge and a slight burn in his right inner bicep from sliding on the railing.
He declined EMS help at the scene but went to the hospital on his own.
The bridge tender claims she didn't see anyone crossing the bridge.
This morning, anything that can fall from the sky has been falling.
All right, that was a terrible description to use on Day 2 or 3 (depending on what you consider “zero hour”) of Putain’s, I mean Putin’s, invasion. Actually, it would be a frightening description any day, given my proximity to an airport. So let me be more specific: Anything that can naturally fall from the Earth’s atmosphere—snow, rain, sleet and freezing rain is falling. That combination, according to my, shall we say, layperson’s understanding of meteorology, can happen only in the conditions we have now: the air is saturated and the temperature is yo-yoing a degree or two above and below the freezing point.
The weather is indeed frightful. But some of the resulting scenes are, if not delightful, at least interesting.
I don't know whether Robert "Bicycle Bob" Silverman, about whom I wrote yesterday, uttered the title of this post. It's not hard to imagine that he did--le peinture n'est pas une infrastructure--when he was campaigning for the safe, practical lanes Montreal's cyclists enjoy.
Someone who did say that--in English--was a fellow identified only as "John" in Hertfordshire. He documented a "near miss" in which a driver squeezed him over to the curb.
"John" blames, in part the driver: "Whilst this was telegraphed right from the point when the van signals to turn right, there was a weary inevitability of at least one of the drivers not being able to see beyond the end of their bonnet and creating an easily preventable situation"
While the carelessness or cluelessness of drivers is not news to cyclists in the UK or US, "John" also blames what an editor of road.ccsarcastically calls "a great piece of cycle superhighway." His all-too-close encounter, he says, "demonstrates that poor cycle infrastructure, in this case a narrow lane that disappears just when you need it, can cause more problems than it solves."
He said what I've said--and, what I don't doubt "Bicycle Bob" said: Poorly-conceived, -constructed and -maintained bicycle infrastructure is not only less convenient, but more dangerous, for cyclists and motorists alike, than no infrastructure at all. I have seen too many examples of that here in New York, but too many planners persist in believing that simply painting a few lines on a street will lead to a safer co-existence, or at least a truce, between cyclists and motorists.
What made all of that even better? Cycling. La ville aux cent clochers is, simply, one of the best cities for cycling I've encountered. The bike lanes aren't just lines of paint in a street: They're physically separated from the rest of the traffic (although a couple I rode seemed a bit narrow for two-way bicycle traffic) and there seems to be more respect, or at least a better detente , between cyclists and drivers than I've seen in any US locale.
Moreover, the lanes I encountered weren't just paths that suddenly began in one place and just as suddenly ended somewhere else, far from any place else. (Perhaps if I'd spent more time in the city, I might have found such useless paths.) Instead, there are at least a couple of lanes on which you can cross the city, and other lanes are actually useful in getting to and from anywhere you might be or want or need to go. You can even ride a lane to the Jacques Cartier Bridge or other crossings to or from the city, which is on an island.
What I didn't realize was that much of that pleasant, stress-free riding was a result, directly or indirectly, of "Bicycle Bob" Silverman.
In the previous paragraph, you might've noticed that Silverman had a penchant for appropriating the rhetoric of political upheval. That was no accident: He identified as a Trotskyite and, in his twenties, lived in Cuba, where he met Che Guevara, before he was deported for distributing anti-Soviet literature. After that, he lived and worked on an Israeli kibutz before "bouncing around Europe" and falling in love with cycling while riding in France (of course!).
His vocabulary also reflected his flair for the dramatic. Le Monde Ă Bicyclette staged "die-ins" to protest cyclist deaths--which have since decreased significantly--in the city and province. Silverman and his organization argued that the reason was not, as some claimed, that cyclists were careless or they shouldn't have been cycling in the city in the first place. Rather, he argued that there were too many cars and that their number wouldn't stop growing as long as the city's and province's infrastructure is built around moving them rather than on human interactions and sustainable transportation--and that the bicycle is as viable a mode of transport as any other.
He also led other kinds of demonstrations, like the time he dressed up as Moses* and pretended to part the waters of the St. Lawrence River to lead cyclists across. (Hmm...Maybe this is why he was called a "prophet" of the bicycle-friendly, sustainable city.) Another time, he rolled out a carpet on Boulevard Maisonneuve to press for the group's demand for an east-west cycle route (which now exists) across the city. In yet another action--which got Silverman three days in prison--he and a group of fellow cyclists painted clandestine cycle lanes in the dark of night.
He and others want to memorialize Robert Silverman, who passed away at age 87 on Sunday.
Whatever the city does, the next time you ride there (or if you ever get to ride there), thank him.
*—I tried to find a photo of “Bicycle Bob” in Old Testament prophet mode. To this day, my mental image of Moses is Charlton Heston: a result, most likely, of seeing “The Ten Commandments “ every year, on the night before Easter, during my childhood.
This year's Winter Olympics have just ended. I have to admit that I didn't pay as much attention to them as I've paid to Olympiads past, though I haven't been living under a big enough rock to not know about the saga of Kamila Valieva. Whether or not she intentionally took a banned substance, the way her teammates and coach and the Russian sports establishment have treated her is child abuse, pure and simple. That the International Olympic Committee did nothing to prevent her situation from snowballing--and, if they do anything, they're more likely to discipline her than her team, coaches or the relevant Russian organizations--confirms something that I've long known: The IOC is, purely and simply, one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. Even if Valieva's tale of woe hadn't unfolded as it did, the fact that this year's games were awarded to Beijing is, for all sorts of reasons, evidence of how avaricious the IOC is.
(As Harry Shearer reminds us, the Olympics are a movement, and we need one--every day!)
As bad as the IOC is, it has at least one other rival for unscrupulousness in the sports world: the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). (I'd also put FIFA in the same league, if you will.) The travesty of Lance Armstrong's carrer is, alone, evidence of that. UCI officials seem to react to doping in one of two ways: They look the other way until they can't (that's how they acted in the L.A. farce) or they talk about how they're going to do whatever they keep riders from using banned substances and severely discipline those who did, while making some deal or another that sends the exact opposite message.
Red Bull, to my knowledge, isn't banned by any major sports organization. I've never drunk it myself, but from what I've heard, it gives one of the quickest, most intense, legal bursts of energy. That is probably the reason why it's so often associated, whether through sponsorship or in other ways, with high-intensity sporting events.
Evie Richards at the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Alberstadt, 2021
Such was the case with the Mountain Bike World Cup, the sport's premier UCI event. Sponsors are selected by the UCI, as they are at other events under the organization's umbrella. Red Bull is sponsoring this year's edition, as it's sponsored the past ten. I can't help but to see some UCI official winking while making the deal.
Well, this will be the last time for Red Bull. For next year's event, Discovery Sports will be the sponsor. They're part of the Discovery broadcast network, which broadcasts a wide variety of sporting events. I don't fault their work, but, given UCI's history, it's hard not to think that the money involved swayed them--and will give the UCI even less incentive than it (or the IOC or FIFA) to act on its stated commitment to fight doping and other forms of corruption in the sporting events they sanction.
Here in the United States, today is Presidents’ Day.
When I was a kid (really, I was!), two separate holidays were celebrated: the 12th for Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday and the 22nd for George Washington. That meant two days off from school unless, of course, the holiday fell on a weekend. In the 1970s, those fetes were eliminated in favor of a Monday holiday in February.
The resulting long weekend gave stores (and, now, Internet retailers) a day to mark down prices on stuff they couldn’t sell for Christmas or other holidays—and customers an excuse to shop.
As I wrote a few years ago, during the 1890s-early 1900s Bike Boom, Washington’s Birthday was Bicycle Day. Bicycle makers debuted new models in splashy shows, and with sales, in much the same way the day would become the occasion to introduce new car models.
From what I’ve read, that day was chosen because, at this time of year, people sense that Spring was around the corner—and, in the warmer parts of the country, it had all but arrived. In those balmier locales (and some less temperate), the day also began the riding or racing season.
Our current President, Joe Biden, has been spotted riding with his wife, Jill, on more than one occasion. His predecessor who shall not be named did everything he could to denigrate bicycles and cyclists. But Obama, Clinton and both Bushes were at least occasional cyclists. So was Jimmy Carter, until recently.
I don’t think Ronald Reagan ever mounted two wheels while he was in office, though he was known to ride in his younger days. And another president I shouldn’t name—let’s call him Tricky Dick—is probably the last person in the world I would expect to see on a bike. (Peter Sagal quipped that in San Clemente, he was seen surfing in his dress shoes. So it’s not surprising to see him cycling in, shall we say, non-cycling attire.
Is this billboard telling us that if Morgan & Morgan wins your case, all they want is for you to pay? I mean, I could understand if they feel that way: I've felt the same way about jobs I've done.
Or should they reverse the order of "Only" and "Pay?" Somehow I think that would entice more would-be clients: If the lawyer doesn't win, you don't pay.
One would think that in a firm of lawyers, at least one of them would have thought about how they phrase their pitches.
One of the most difficult things I had to do when I taught freshman English classes was to define plagiarism.
The standard working definition is taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. Of course, if such a definition were ever codified as law, just about everyone would be guilty. After all, so many things most of us say in the course of a day come from Shakespeare, the Bible or other works of literature--or are simply familiar utterances from famous or anonymous folks. As often as not, people aren't aware of the source of whatever they've said, even as they acknowledge that "there is nothing new under the sun."
So I have to wonder how the world would be different if some patent or intellectual-property attorney had too much time on his or her hands in Waterloo, Wisconsin in 1975. Would Dick Burke and Bevil Hogg have been sued for naming their new bicycle company Trek?
I mean, even if they weren't "Trekkies," I'm sure they would've known about the iconic space-travel series. Then again, I don't know how Gene Roddenberry would have heard about a couple of latter-day hippies building bikes in the Midwest as the '70's North American Bike Boom was losing steam--or how inclined he would have been to sic lawyers on them. Somehow, I think the folks at Paramount Television Studios, which purchased Desilu, the original producers of Star Trek, would have been even less likely to know what a couple of dudes in "flyover country" were up to.
What if he'd built bikes?
From what I've read, the company's founders claimed that their choice of name had nothing to do with Captain Kirk's vehicle. Ironically, Hogg wanted to name the company Kestrel--which would become the name of another bike maker that, a decade later, would pioneer the carbon fiber and fork design on which Trek would still later base their carbon-fiber offerings.
So, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or cringe when I learned that Trek challenged Jchon Perkins' registration of his trademark name--Prize Trek--for a mobile game app. Players "participate in a scavenger hunt and win valuable cash (sic) and prizes sponsored by local businesses" according to an Associated Press article. It is, the article claimed, "a powerful marketing tool that can provide small businesses with free advertising for life."
In 2018, when Perkins applied to register "Prize Trek" with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Trek Bicycle filed an opposition, claiming Perkins' trademark could too easily be confused with theirs. The following year, the USPTO overruled Trek's opposition and granted Perkins his trademark.
Last year, he sued Trek Bicycles, claiming their opposition had delayed the app's development and market entry. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Janet Neff ordered the case dismissed. So Perkins has his trademark, but the app doesn't seem to be available to the public just yet.
Whatever comes of the app, this story is quite the Trek, I mean, journey.
Last year, I wrote about the debate over the helmet law in King County, which includes Seattle. The arguments, as I recounted, have been presented as either public-safety or social-justice issues.
On one side, those who wanted to keep the regulation posited the same reasons proponents of similar mandates in other jurisdictions assert: Helmets prevent, or greatly reduce the chances of life-altering or -ending head injuries. This argument is made even more forcefully to require helmets for children, as many locales do. King County has been one of the few jurisdictions to require them for cyclists of all ages.
While opponents don’t deny the value in promoting safety for all, they point to the uneven enforcement of the law. While proponents—who include medical experts as well as some policy-makers and cyclists—cite statistics indicating that “helmets save lives, full stop,” in the words of one researcher, opponents point to equally-persuasive statistics showing that Native Americans (of whom the Seattle area has one of the largest communities in the U.S.), African-Americans and immigrants are disproportionately stopped, ticketed and even arrested because they weren’t wearing helmets.
Notice how I worded the last part of the previous sentence. Too often, critics charge, the helmet law is used as a pretext for stopping non-white, poor, homeless and visibly non-gender-conforming cyclists. Such cyclists are, as often as not, using their bikes as their primary or sole means of transportation. Or they may be using them to make deliveries or to, in other ways, work. Such riders often ride bikes that were given to them, salvaged or acquired through barter or for little money. This, they may simply not have the funds to purchase a helmet.
Well, opponents seem to have taken the day. Yesterday, the King County Board of Health voted to repeal the law, which had been on the books since 1993. This repeal will take effect 30 days after the vote.
While I wear a helmet and encourage others to do the same, I am ambivalent about mandates. One reason is unequal enforcement I’ve described. Also, as some have noted, attitudes and social norms about helmet-wearing have changed during the past three decades. Thus, some say, all-age helmet requirements probably don’t encourage helmet use: The cycling haven of Portland, Oregon, which has never had an all-ages requirement, has a level of helmet-wearing similar to that of King County.
The repeal, however, does not mean that all cyclists in King County can ride bareheaded: Seventeen municipalities (which do not include Seattle) have their own helmet codes, which won’t be affected by the repeal. So, I suspect, the fight is not over.
