Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.
Michael Cohen echoed something I've thought for some time. But even if he hadn't made that the remark at the end of his testimony yesterday, the talking heads and political bloggers would have been talking about who might run against the incumbent, and whether Cohen's testimony makes it more likely that Trump will indeed lose to one of them.
So many people have already "tossed their hats into the ring" for the Democratic nomination that it's no surprise when anyone else--including someone almost no one outside of his home towns has heard of--does the same.
Until last fall, Beto O'Rourke fit that category. Then the three-term Congressman narrowly lost an election for one of Texas' two US Senate seats to Ted Cruz, who himself came in second to Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination two years earlier.
I'm still learning about O'Rourke. He sounds pretty good to me. I must say, though, that even though I like most of his views, there is something else about him that appeals to me:
Lest you think he is trying to appeal to the hipsters on his Surly Steamroller fixed-gear bike, here he is on an '80s Bridgestone:
Waddya think? Could he beat el Trumpo?
Three years ago, the Canal St. Martin was drained. The City of Paris does that about every ten or fifteen years.
In dredgings past (sounds like a series of old therapy sessions!), the "treasures" at the bottom of the Canal included home furnishings, street signs, gold coins(!), World War I shells and even a car. But the most recent drainage served as a sort of geological record of changes in the neighborhood around the canal--mostly the 10th Arrondissement--and in the City of Light itself.
The streets around the waterway have become the sites of bars, restaurants and clubs. (The Bataclan, site of a mass shooting during a November 2015 concert, stands literally steps from the canal.) The area is home to "Bobos"--a term combining "bohemian" and "bourgeois". They are probably the Parisian equivalent of hipsters. At any rate, they share many of the same tastes with their Brooklyn counterparts.
They include a thirst for craft beers (French as well as American) and wines. Empty bottles and cans bearing those labels littered the bottom of the canal when it was dredged. So did another passion of that evanescent group: bicycles--specifically, those from Velib, the city's bike-share service.
As far as I know, neither of the city's two canals--the Harlem River Ship Canal and the Gowanus Canal--has ever been drained. Interestingly, the Gowanus--one of the most toxic waterways in the United States--flows, like the St. Martin, through a hipsterizing (Think of it as the hipster equivalent of gentrifying.) neighborhood. According to an urban legend, the Mafia used to dump their "hits" in the Gowanus because the bodies would dissolve.
Which brings me to this question: Could a Citibike survive a dive into a city canal?
Somehow I doubt it would be even as intact as the bike in the photo. That Citibike, missing since September 2017, showed up in the bike-share service's port at 73rd Street and Riverside Drive, where filmmaker Ted Geoghegan found it. Its coating of barnacles and mud indicates that it spent time in the Hudson River--which, at that point, is actually an estuary.
No one, it seems, can explain how it got from the river (or wherever it was) to the bike dock? Did a thief take it, dump it, feel guilty and dive into the water to fetch it? That seems unlikely because, well, that's not what thieves usually do, but also because if the thief did indeed dump the bike in the river, he or she wouldn't have found it in the same spot, or anywhere nearby. The more likely scenario is that some boater or fisher found it and, not knowing what else to do, quietly brought it to the bike port.
That bike is more than likely beyond repair. Spending almost any amount of time in the water would have destroyed the bike's electronics, and the growth on the rest of the bike indicates that the brackish water has corroded the rest of the bike so that it's structurally unsound, and its moving parts are probably irreparable.
(Interesting aside: The Gowanus and Harlem Ship are the only two canals in New York City today. In the 17th Century, however, lower Manhattan was laced with canals. That's not surprising when you realize the area was then called Nieuw Amsterdam, and the Dutch settlers were following a model of urban planning for which their capital is famous.)
I wear a helmet when I ride. Well, most of the time, I do. Whatever the naysayers might say, I have had two occasions when wearing my helmet probably, if not saved my life, then at least prevented serious injury. In the second of those incidents, my helmet actually broke in two but I escaped with only a few scratches.
I admit, though, that I've ridden bareheaded, even after those incidents. When I ride in Florida, I don't wear a helmet: Even on cool days, most riders, it seems, aren't wearing them. And on my recent trips to Paris, Rome, Cambodia and Laos, I went sans casque, except on the Grasshopper tour in Siem Reap. I think the only reason we had those is that Grasshopper tours is run by Westerners and was probably covered (pun intended) by insurance regulations in the US or someplace else. Otherwise, in Southeast Asian countries, I'm not sure I could have even found a helmet: I didn't see any in the bike shops I peeked into, let alone the bike stalls of the market places.
In the Italian capital, I followed the age-old advice: Do as the Romans do. I did the same in Paris, which meant that in both cities I didn't wear helmets. It wouldn't have been hard to find a hardhat in either city: In fact, some rental services offer them. But it seemed that no one else was wearing them, so I didn't.
So, even though I have had occasions in which wearing a helmet might have saved me, I am still hesitant to support laws requiring every cyclist to wear one. We don't have such a law here in New York, though every once in a while some police officer tickets an unsuspecting rider who isn't wearing one. In some places, like New Jersey, helmets are mandatory for kids; a few other places require them for adults. But even though helmet-wearing has become more or less the norm in much of the US, there are still relatively few places that require it.
I am more ready, however, to support another ban: one on headphones, at least ones that cover the ear. Right now, the city of Washington, DC forbids cycling with headphones. So do a few other jurisdictions; more, however, do not allow motorists to drive with mini-speakers covering their ears.
Now some startup company, Conduit Sports, has come out with a headphone that doesn't cover the ear and block the ear canal. Its creators say their device allows for "situational awareness". By that, I assume they mean that you can hear horns and other traffic sounds while you listen to Cardi B or Brockhampton.
Riding with such headphones may well be safe. Still, I'll stick to riding without them, or without any other audio stimulation other than what's provided by my surroundings when I ride. Even if I'm doing a ride I can do in my sleep, I prefer to hear what's around me, in part because it helps me to think, meditate or simply relax while riding. Also, I reckon it's safer than riding even with those new headphones.
But I'll still wear my helmet. Most of the time, anyway.
