Warning: I'm going to start this post with a completely useless, and possibly even frivolous, literary and philosophical question.
Here goes: How would la Commedia Divina have been different if Dante could not see the entrance to the underworld as he entered it?
Of course, we'll never know the answer. Or, for that matter, we'll never know what Dante might have written if he'd been with me instead of Virgil and he was at Hell Gate instead of the gate of Hell.
One of the thickest fogs I've seen in New York cocooned the area. While crossing the Queens span of the Triboro bridge, I could not even see the cables just a few feet to my right, let alone the railroad trestle that spans the Hell Gate channel just a few hundred meters upstream.
I sure was glad not to be driving.
By now, calendars for the coming year have appeared in your local bookstores, stationery shops, department stores, pharmacies and other retailers.
I must confess that I am one of those people who doesn't pay for calendars. Or, at least, I don't pay regular price: If I buy any, I wait until the year has begun and they can be bought for next to nothing.
I've had a bicycle-themed calendar or two in my time. I might get one somewhere this year. With that in mind, I typed "bicycle calendars" in Google and found some that look very interesting:
This one from BIke EXIF-Cycle EXIF features a bike I'd like to see. Does that banded paint job continue throughout the rest of the frame? If so, does it continue in a blue-green theme, or does it transition to other hues?
(Seeing it made me think of a bike I rode for years and will write about in a future post. Stay tuned!)
Don't try this at home!:
I'll confess that I did: A couple of my old off-road riding buddies and I rode onto the trackbed less than a kilometer from last week's derailment in Spuyten Duivyl. And we missed an incoming Amtrak train by less than that!
Now here's one I'd really like:
I like anything that shows women in various modes of cycling, whether they're racing or commuting in skirts and heels--or doing something more whimsical. I'm not interested in the "bikes and babes" calendars I often saw int he shops in which I worked.
Then, of course, there's the Classic Bicycles calendar published by bicycle Quarterly:
I might get myself one--or a Mercian calendar.
Here in New York--and, I suspect, in other places--people are whining that bike racks and bike share ports are "taking away our parking spaces."
To hear them, you'd think there's a kind of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario, in which every bike takes away a parking space.
They should see this:
How often, when we're on our bikes, do we see some place and tell ourselves, "I must come back!"?
It can be an interesting historic site or natural feature, or some beautiful (or simply odd) street- or land-scape, or piece of architecture.
Or it might be a restaurant or coffee shop.
I don't often see businesses with my name on them. I certainly wasn't expecting to see one in the middle of the Bronx, just a few blocks (and one stop on the #4 train) north of Yankee Stadium.
Notice that it's called "Justine", not "Justine's". I wonder if its proprietor read Lawrence Durell's novel by that name, or the George Cukor film based on it. (Anouk Aimee plays the lead role.) Or, perhaps, the owner read another novel by the same name--written by none other than the Marquis de Sade.
One of these days, I'll go back there. I wonder if restaurant reviewers ever consider a restaurant's name in writing their critiques.
I went to Stonehenge once, a long time ago. I don't know whether I'll ever make it there again. If I don't, this might be the nearest thing--at least visually--I'll see for a while:
I didn't have to leave the country--or, for that matter, New York State--for it. In fact, I didn't have to go very far from Queens. To be exact, I found it at Point Lookout. What it's doing there, I'll never know.
More to the point, I don't know who put it there or why. I'd love to know.
