Collateral Damage—Or Debris?

 When I wrote for newspapers, there were times I wanted to do unspeakable things to whoever wrote the titles. Sometimes those lead-ins had little or nothing to do with what I wrote. Or they made the reader think my article was slanted in a way it wasn’t.

I was reminded of those experiences when I came across a Fox News item about Olympic bike race mishaps in Paris.  Some had to do with the road conditions themselves, as I mentioned in a previous piece. Others were a result of the rain that plagued the opening ceremony and first few days of the games.

Jackson Thompson’s report is actually good:  He sticks to describing the conditions I mentioned and riders’ experiences. It doesn’t seem to betray the anti-bike bias one might expect from the network.

But its headline does:  “Paris streets littered by bicycle crashes during Olympics triathlon amid wet conditions.”

Now, I realize that “littered” is used to mean “full of,” “covered with” or “scattered.” But using it in the context of “streets” implies another of the word’s meanings:  strewn about like trash or debris.

Could it be that Fox News’ headline writer though Mr. Thompson wasn’t toeing the company’s explicit or covert line?

Hunger Ride?

Another heat wave. Tomorrow will be even hotter. 

I didn’t eat anything before setting out on an early ride to Randall’s Island. On my way back, I started to feel hungry about five kilometers from my apartment.

We’re the pangs in my stomach a result of the ride, not eating breakfast—-or seeing this?:

Do I Look Like One?

I was on my way to the post office when one of my new neighbors spotted me.

“Excuse me, can I ask you something?”

“Well, that depends”: my usual response to such a question.

“I’m going to ask you this because you look like an environmentalist…”

She wanted some advice on what to do with some seeds that have sprouted. Now, I don’t know whether my response was any more sagacious than what I could have told her if she had asked what to do about a guy. I was, however, intrigued by her perception of me.  “What made you think I’m an environmentalist?”

“I always see you on your bike.”

While my reasons—which I hardly think about anymore—for cycling aren’t primarily about the environment, they do help to keep me in the saddle. For one thing, I know that I’m putting a lot less carbon in the air than I would if I were driving. For another, even though I’ve had more bikes than the average person during my life, I have kept and ridden a few of them—including at least three of my current bikes for longer than most people (or Americans, anyway) keep their cars. That might also be a reason why I recycle and reuse whatever I can:  I believe that my ethos behind such practices is linked to fixing whatever I can on my bikes rather than replacing them with the “newest and latest.”

To my new neighbor, my bike gave me away as an “environmentalist.” Might she also have seen me sneaking granola when I thought she, and nobody else, could see me?