She’s A Champion. Sign Me Up!

 Molly Cameron has become one of my heroes.  Her decades as a cyclo-cross racer and in the bicycle industry has given her a platform—which she isn’t shy about using—to advocate for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.

In April, she announced that she won’t be going to a CX World Cup event in October or the 2022 World Championships if, as currently scheduled, they’re held in Arkansas. “I won’t be spending any money in Arkansas or any other state that is passing laws to discriminate against the LGBT community,” she said.

Now she’s going even further:  She’s opened a GoFundMe page to raise money for her advocacy work as she launches a national organization for LGBTQ+ representation in the bicycle industry and sport.

Sign me up!

A Juneteenth Freedom Ride In Bronzeville

Lately, there's been much talk about things returning to "normal" or becoming a "new normal" as pandemic-induced restrictions are eased or lifted.

Some aspects of the "new normal" will be welcome.  One, I hope, will be a ride Jason Easterly and Mike Allan took last year and are repeating this year.

Jason Easterly. Photo by Ariel Uribe, from the Chicago Tribune

Easterly is, among other things, a spin class instructor.  Allan was one of his students.  Last spring, when gyms were ordered to close, Easterly took his classes online.  Allan continued his participation.

In the days after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, in the words of Easterly, "we were living in a powder keg." People were "sitting in lockdown, not able to get out" as "our loved ones" were dying.

Allan suggested a bike ride--in person, through Bronzeville, the Chicago neighborhood where he and Easterly live.  They would invite a friends.  A 15-mile route was planned, as was the date:  19 June a.k.a Juneteenth.

They decided to call it the "Freedom Ride," in commemoration on the date in 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to inform enslaved Americans that they were free.  At that time, Texas was the frontier:  There were really no major cities between St. Louis and San Francisco.  The Lone Star State was the last bastion of slavery, as it was the Confederate state farthest from Washington DC.

So the slaves of Texas, the last to be liberated, learned of their freedom some two months after the Civil War ended and two years after Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation.

Apparently, a lot of people in Chicago (and other places) wanted to be liberated from lockdown.  About  200 showed up for that ride.

It will be reprised this Saturday, the 19th.  Riders will meet at noon Wintrust Arena, 200 East Cermak Road, and pedal to Bronzeville and then into downtown.  

Perhaps the “Juneteenth Freedom Ride” will become an annual event—and part of “the new normal.” 

And The Point Of This Is....?

Fifty Shades of Grey showed us that there's no book so ridiculous and poorly-written that people won't read it.*

The past few years have shown us that there's no candidate so ignorant, petty, vulgar and just plain mean that people won't vote for him/her. 

And there are some ideas so impractical and pointless that some tech person with too much time on his hands won't work on it:

Zhihui Jun, a Huawei engineer, got the idea for the riderless bike when he was recuperating from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident.  Hmm....That sounds like designing a shoe that walks itself while waiting for your sprained ankle to heal.   

Anyway, I must pay all due respect for his talents as an engineer (He must be better at math than I could ever dream of being!) and, I suppose, his imagination.  Maybe it was a "just for fun" project.  After all, what is a bicycle without a rider?

Again, with all due respect to Mr. Jun, he isn't the first to come up with the idea.  This was spotted on an Amsterdam Street a few years ago:

I ask:  Why?

*--Aside from lines like, "I must be the color of the communist manifesto" and the number of times the author uses words like "oozes" and phrases like "my inner goddess," the book is objectionable because its depictions of BDSM are BS.   Don't ask how I know! ;-)