Wisdom Through Wheelies

As an educator, I've always been in search of ways to keep my students' attention--especially when it's late in the semester or the weather outside is nice.

If I were younger, I might try Chris Poulous' methods:

In 1991, when he was 20 years old, he won the Bicycle Stunt World Championships in Denmark. He also was victorious in a number of other competitions until injuries sidelined his competitive career.

Now he's a motivational speaker, with a particular emphasis in encouraging the young to lead positive lives.  Kids, as you might expect, are a natural audience for him, though I must say I enjoy his presentation, too.

Recently, he visited a summer recreation program in Northborough, Massachusetts.  He said his show was a "special treat" for kids 3 to 5 years of age because they don't get to go on field trips, as the older kids do.  From all accounts, however, everyone present--kids and adults--loved it.



I mean, what's not to like about someone who use backflips and bunny-hops to teach important life lessons?

"They're Trying To Take Our Guns. Why Not Their Bikes?"

"Bicycle Accidents Kill More Children Than Guns, But You Don't See Calls To Ban Bikes."

That is the title of an editorial Dean Weingarten wrote for Ammoland.  According to statistics he cites from the Center for Disease Control's Database, there were 2467 "unintentional pedal cyclist deaths"--for a rate of 0.18 per 100,000-- of children aged 0 to 17 from 1999 to 2017.  During the same period, according to the CDC statistics Weingarten uses, there were 1994 "unintentional firearm deaths" of children in that same age group, for a rate of 0.14 per 1000,000. 

To be fair, Weingarten reports that both figures are dwarfed by the numbers of children who died unintentionally as occupants of motor vehicles, in "unknown situations, motor vehicles," or from suffocation, drowning or a half-dozen other causes.  Still, he uses the disparity between the unintentional deaths by bicycle and by firearm to try to make the case that guns are unfairly blamed for children's deaths.

He may be right about the burden of blame borne by firearms, in part because the numbers of children accidentally killed by firearms has been trending downward.  But he is using that fact, and the greater number of deaths by bicycle, to rail against proposals to require gun owners to keep their weapons locked and unloaded.  Such a requirement, he claims, keeps gun owners from using their weapons in self-defense.  

Whatever the validity of that argument, using bicycles as the "straw man," if you will, does nothing to support it.  For one thing, a child isn't going to hurt him or herself by finding a bicycle in the attic or garage, as he or she can by finding a loaded gun in daddy's desk.  

This image was included with Dean Weingarten's editorial.  

More to the point, though, is this:  Even though guns outnumber people in the US, an American kid is more far more likely, at any given moment, to ride a bike than to chance upon a gun.  When that kid is on a bike, he or she will spend more time riding than he or she would in the presence of the firearm.  And, finally, it's harder to control where and in what conditions a kid rides than it is to keep a child away from a gun, or to ensure that the gun can't be fired accidentally.  

So Weingarten's argument that bicycles are more dangerous than guns to children doesn't hold up.  Even so, he tries to use it to bolster an even flimsier--and blatantly sexist--argument that lawmakers (Democrats, mainly) claim that they want tighter gun regulations "for the children" to pander to non-gun owners, "most of whom are women," according to Weingarten.  On the other hand, he says (probably correctly) that most gun owners are men.  

He ends his article with an even clumsier attempt to appeal to emotion:  "But the real elephant in the room is why are we not calling for bans on bikes?" (sic) Of course, that piles yet another fallacy onto an argument full of fallacies:  How in the world can he, or anyone, compare banning bicycles to keeping guns locked and unloaded? 

First One In!

The new semester has just begun.

It looks like my bike is the first one in:

I have to set an example, if not a trend, you know.

If only more would follow!

1934: Pedaling The Lake

I occasionally ride to, or through, Flushing Meadow Park.  If you've never been there (or haven't read my posts about it), you might recognize at least one of its landmarks:  the Unisphere, built for the 1964-65 World's Fair and featured in Men In Black as well as other movies and TV shows.  

What you also might not know is that, like Prospect and Central Parks, it surrounds an artificial lake.  During the summer, those lakes are popular for, among other things, boat rides.  

Flushing Meadow, however, offers a type of water craft not available in the other city playgrounds:  pedal boats.  While they bear more resemblance to oversized beach toys than to boats or bicycles, they are propelled in the same way as your bicycle:  Your feet spin the pedals.  

I haven't tried one, but I plan to, if for no other reason than to see whether the experience is more like cycling or boating--or neither.

Perhaps these young women could have offered some insight:

For ten cents, had the opportunity  pedal across the waters of Lake Lucerne, near Seattle, Washington.  Their pedal boat literally combined two bicycles with a boat (or, more precisely, a raft) made of milled timbers.  The women's leg power propels the contraption forward by means of a water wheel attached to the bicycle gears.

It's pretty clever, if you ask me. If only the resort's managers could have had such acumen:  In December 1934, four months after the photo was taken, the property (which included 98 acres of land in addition to 16 acres of lake) was seized and sold at a U.S. Marshal's auction to satisfy a $22,763 court judgment. 

As far as I know, there haven't been any pedal boats on the lake since then.

Did He Ride Hands-Free?

I've done all sorts of things on a bicycle that, until I did them, I wouldn't have thought possible.

And I've done most of the things most people do but would never admit to doing.  Among them are at least one  most people will admit to having done during puberty or even in their teen years, but not as an adult.

I think you know where this is going.

The things I've done that most people won't admit to having done aren't all things I've done on a bicycle.  In fact, it never even occurred to me to try one of those things while astride two wheels.

Hint:  It's something that shocks people when they catch someone doing it precisely because they know they themselves have done it but would never own up to it.

It was a cause of consternation for me when, as a teenager, I was supposed to watch for shoplifters in the Alexander's department store where I was working.  

When I heard some suspicious rustling in the next aisle over--women's wear--I was ready to spring into action. The man in the aisle indeed had a pair of silky panties in his hand.  But he wasn't stuffing them into a bag or his pocket:  Filling the latter would have been difficult, as his pants were pulled down.  So were his underpants. 

As extensive as Alexander's employee training was, it didn't teach us how to deal with a man masturbating in the lingerie aisle.  Being the teenager I was, I was tempted to say something snarky (or that my young mind would have thought clever).  Instead, I called a security guard who dragged the guy away and called the cops.  

I'm guessing that the guy was charged with public lewdness, or some such thing--even though the "public", as far as I know, consisted only of that security guard and myself.

I hadn't thought about the incident in a long time.  A news story that came my way brought it back to mind, and with it, a question I never thought I'd ask:  What would I do if I saw someone masturbating on a bicycle?  Oh, and what if I were a cop and caught someone in the act?

I'm sure there must be something in police academy training that covers, if not such a specific incidence, then at least what to do if a person is pleasuring him or her self in public.  

That is the situation an off-duty police  officer in Macomb County, Michigan (near Detroit) faced recently. She was jogging on an asphalt trail in a county park when she "observed a very tall man in gray pants riding a mountain bike and fondling his genitals in full view of the public."  According to that same report, about half an hour later, another woman saw the same man "on his bike with his penis exposed."

Did he ride hands-free?

The man, William Benjamin Brown, was charged with two counts of "aggravated indecent exposure," which could bring him a two-year prison sentence.

Here's what I'd like to know:  Did he ride hands-free?  Or did he use one hand  to keep a straight line and the other to wiggle?