bicycling is living

Yeah, so I don't post all that often anymore. As a friend of mine said once, people who have enough time to blog regularly usually don't have enough of a life to make it interesting! (Not to say that mine is all that thrilling...)

Last night was Bike Night, and it went well. Next year will be amazing. What's cool, is that this year's Green Party gubernatorial candidate, Jill Stein, actually showed up to speak. She didn't have anything earth shattering to say, but it was nice, and she made a great point about not allowing diminished expectations — the less we ask for, the less we get. It's a fine line that activists have to walk, between looking like an extremist and being impotent.

I also apparently got some big props during my boss Tim's speech, but I was outside staffing the valet bike parking, and didn't get to hear anything except the last sentence or so. Ah, well, I did get enjoy the applause, which made me blush. And I had some nice company (and brownies!) while I was stuck outside, too, so I was happy enough.

We had an auction of bike related items and I had submitted some jewelry that I'd created with recycled bike parts that I'd had laying around the house. Surprisingly, there was a little competition for it, and the final bid was over $20. Cool, huh? If you want to see what it looked like (and learn how you can make your very own bike jewely) check out this page on my minimalist website. (It actually has three pages on it now!)

squeeeeal!

If you are like me, this will make you squeal in delight.

I watched the Episode II dvd this weekend. All of it. I'll have some philosophical discussion about it sometime soon...

broke

I have about $20 to my name. Hopefully, the unemployment stuff is all worked out (they apparently don't like it when you work temp jobs) and I'll get a buttload of money form them soon. As a bonus, though, I've been doing a lot of cooking and baking, and I'm probably eating a lot less junk food!

Been busy with MassBike stuff. Bike Night is the big event of the year, and I've been doing PR work to make it seem like people would be fools to miss it! See MassBike's event page for more info.) Yay!

I hadn't gotten a chance to mention that I saw Bowling for Columbine a while back. It wasn't any masterpiece of filmmaking, but it definitely was effective in generating discussion. The premise of the movie is asking the question of why is the US such a violent country. Many of the standard answers are pretty much debunked (video games, movies, too many guns, etc.). And the movie leave you with the question essentially unanswered. My best guess is that we have cultivated such an atmosphere of inferiority in our populace — through advertising gimmicks, test crazy school systems, and workplace/social hierarchies — that we are have turned into a country of paranoid bullies. Anyway, I highly recommend this movie. As a bonus, it's got South Park stuff in it to help alleviate the depressing tone of the topic.

my hero

Leave it to an nonagenerian to say what my last posting said in a much more elequent and inspiring way. See what Granny D has to say about the political devide that haunts this country, in this speech she recently gave in Boston.

United States of Idiots

We have spawned an entire society of imbeciles who have no idea of how the world works. I have to I keep reminding myself (and others) that people do what they do, and think they way they think because they just haven't been taught anything else. It's not really their fault that they vote for the wrong people (and referenda). Its all very simple to them - Candidate X says that he's gonna lower taxes and make more jobs, so hell yeah I'm gonna give him my vote. What's funny is that these people aren't just greedy, but in their blind greed they end up screwing themselves (and the rest of us) over.

Heck, one of my supposedly intelligent roommates voted to eliminate income taxes entirely (as did about half of Massachusetts voters!). When I pointed out what that would mean (cutting a majority of social programs such as housing and health insurance for the elderly and handicapped), she said, "well, they proposed it, they must have a plan". The State House can't even plan when they have hoards of money, I can't even imagine what would happen with no money... I also reminded her that our rent would probably double. She apparently thought that the landlord couldn't legally raise our rent that much, but the fact is that he can if he needs to cover property taxes.

Anyone can make a bad decision. But the problem is that more and more people are making more and more bad decisions. And we're all suffering for it. All I can think is thank goodness I don't have any kids. I'm utterly convinced that something big is going to happen sometime soon. It's really just an intuition, but I'm absolutely sure that some sort of world-sized metaphysical scale is getting so unfathomably unbalanced that it's starting to look more like a catapault than a scale. And day now a giant flaming ball of metaphorical pestilence is going to come hurtling at us, and we're going to be completely fucked.

Not to be pessimistic or anything.

It's easy being green

Elections tomorrow. I'm actually really curious to see how it all turns out. The country seems a lot more interested in democracy and it's inherent citizen participation these days. Leave it to King George to aggravate the moderate centrist voters enough to actually care about voting. Both Massachusetts' and Maine's Green party gubernatorial candidates are polling at at least 5%, and these polls are notorious for getting only the opinions of the stay at home wives and the elderly (though both of my grandmothers voted for Nader). Even the current governor of Maine says (off the record) that he is voting for the Green candidate. Locally, the old boy democrat state rep from the next district over, Tim Toomey, is getting a run for his money by a determined Green. The centrist (and even some of the wussier leftwing) media is so scared of the Green in the Governor's race that they have gone out of their way to either ignore her, or, now that the public is actually aware of her, to bitch and moan about the greens "spoiling" their party. The outcome that many have hope for is starting to come about—the centrist dems are moving left a smidge in order to try and court the favor of the left. The aforementioned Toomey has gone well out of his way to be really really nice to bicycle advocates lately. So much so that he even showed up at a very small meeting for the Friends of the Community Path just to let us know that he had been working hard on getting the path funded, and of course, to pass out flyers about his campaign.

There's even a write in campaign in Senator Kerry's (essentially) unopposed race to let him know how upset many of us are about his locally unsupported decision to vote to give Georgie the keys to the toy, I mean, war chest. The woman's name is Randall Forsberg and she's a democrat, not a green, but she's an anti-war activist from way back. To vote for her (all across Mass) for Senator, you have to write her name and address in in a specific way, for it to officially count. For instructions go to www.rforsberg.com.

I didn't go to the protest yesterday. Fortunately about 15,000 other people did, including Tim Robbins. Someday I'll make it to a protest, really I will.

party people

The rest of the household went out to a Halloween party at ManRay. On a Wednesday. At 10:30. If I didn't have to work tomorrow, I might have gone, but I'm pretty much ready for bed now, so no big fun for me. Eric was dressed up minimally, but had on these Clark Kent glasses and has just bleached his hair and he looked shockingly like this guy I used to have a huge crush on (and did, eventually, do the nasty with). So it was creepy looking at him all night. I had to ask him if he had any percings, just to be sure that the resemblence was only above the neck...

Busy week again. I've got a big meeting on Friday in which I think I'm going to have to tell them something that they don't want to hear. But I've got to say it and I've got the backing of a state representative, so I'm not terribly worried. As long as it doesn't snow or freezing rain on my way there (it's about a 15 mile bike ride there), I think I'll be fine.

SCUL was great on Saturday. Not so much the ride, which was quite short and derby-filled, but the award ceremony before the ride. I actually got an award. I got the Stone Cog award for "embodying the spirit of SCUL". Pretty damn cool, if you ask me. Especially since I'm such a wallflower at these things. The trophy is the best - a tower of bike gears and axles welded together in a particularly pleasing sculptural shape with a plaque and everything. I now have two, count 'em, two bicycle trophies. I'm so cool!

life as we know it

Wow, it's been a while. It's been so long that my browser had forgotten the address of blogger...

So, yeah, I've been insanely busy. I'll be working full time for a couple of weeks while Tim is off campaigning for his Senator pal. It's a lot of work to be a bike advocate! The police education program is going full steam ahead, and we got a contract to make a national version for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Damn! I think I'm going to try to learn Flash to make it look spiffy.

The Critical Mass Halloween ride was a wash last night. I don't know what's wrong with some people. We're going to need a few people to do some organizing, as much as we prefer to avoid it. I wish I had the time...

I'm trying to make myself go to SCUL tonight, as it's the last official ride of the year. But it's pouring and I'm so damn busy, that I might just go for the closing ceremony and then head home instead of riding. I miss the gang, but I'm just so burnt out on biking stuff lately. I got a nice little distraction last week when my roommates and I went out for dinner and saw a free showing of Jackass the Movie. I vehemently opposed going, but I had a hard cider on an empty stomach and was completely unable to coordinate myself enough to figure out another movie to sneak into. So I went and I actually really enjoyed Jackass. There were definitely some really stupid bits, but there were a lot of really funny, and not so violent, stunts. Plus, there were bicycles :)

You know, one of the reasons that I don't post as much as I should here, is that Blogger has a lot of glitches. I still haven't figured out what is wrong with the archive list on the left side of the page. Some people can see it but I can't. And then there is the problem that every time I want to post Blogger/my browser gets stuck and I have to log out and back in to post. Grrrrr.

plenty of pixels

Sorry about the complete lack of posting goodness in the past week. Just been pretty quiet, and that last post about the war pretty much said it all. I did forget to mention that our long lost roommate finally returned from his overseas mission playing computer games. Yay! Because of this I've now been sucked into playing some of the video games that our new roommie brough with her. The snowboarding game is pretty cool, even in my opinion. And I also just found a pretty nifty 3D generating program called Groboto. It is primarily a building block type program, but it has some pretty bizarre tools and forms. You can create images that look like they're straight out of Age of Empires, or you can do some amazing organic fractal looking stuff. The problem I've got is that I can't seem to be able to export it so that I can use it in a more powerful rendering program like Bryce. If I can get it working, I'll probably use the images for graphics on my temporarily abandoned Random Turtle Productions site.

Tomorrow, I get to testify (well anyone can, really. Want to come?) at a state legislative hearing about pedestrian and bicycle safety. I have no real idea what I'm gonna say, beyond the fact that people are woefully uneducated about the rights and responsibilities of bicyclists. I'll probably play up school-age education, with a hint of police education for good measure.

4 out of 5 FBI agents agree

The war on terrorism is a failure. Apparently, in both FBI and CIA internal studies, last year's war on Afganastan is officially a bust. According to an article in the New York Times:

"Classified investigations of the al-Qaeda threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States ... Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."

Another article on Alternet.org goes into detail about how badly we did at accomplishing the goals that were espoused by the US warmongers. And guess what, we're about to do it all over again. More and more, this country seems like it's stuck in some made-for-tv movie.

Speaking of movies, anyone notice how the highly acclaimed "Wag the Dog" has suddenly disappeared from the TV guide listings?

grey, green, and orange

It must be fall.

I'm spending more and more time inside, and it makes me a little mopey. Though I've been staving off mopeyness these days with advocacy, letter writing, mapmaking, and lots of junk food.

I didn't make it to SCUL this past weekend. But I did do some tabling at the MassBike tent for Harvard Square's Octoberfest. It was ok, but we need to be more organized to appeal to more people.

Over the weekend, I also came up with my preliminary checklist of priorities for bicycle advocacy. The order is relevant, but not set in stone. I think it's a good starting point for coming up with a vision for bicycle friendly transportation design planning. While this may be reinventing the wheel (spoked, of course), it was important for me to break it all down into categories that I could put in an order of priority. This isn't a perfect list, call it a rough draft. In planning for transportation, facilities should be designed with these priorities in mind:

1. safe for all users
2. accesable/comfortable
3. environmentally responsible
4. convenient/efficient
5. inexpensive

With transportation being so intricately connected with everything we do as a society, and with it currently being a major problem area (traffic jams, serious accesability issues, and unbelievable death rates caused by dangerous behavior) I think that this may be a really good time to seriously reconsider our transportation policies. And I think that bicycling advocates can play a major part in addressing some of these issues. If we look at a broader picture, we cyclists may be able to tap into a huge collection of advocates who share an overall goal. This would give us a big, booming voice, rather than the tiny (but muscular) voice that we currently have.

where is the line?

There was an editorial in the Boston Globe today which brought up the ethics of medical experimentation on captive subjects. In nazi Germany in the 40s, medical experiments were conducted on subjects who were given no choice in the matter, and were heartily tortured in the name of science and for the "good of mankind". Given some thought, most people will quickly come to the conclusion that subjecting an unwilling victim to pain and misery for research purposes is immoral. My question is this: Why do people suddenly do a 180 with their ethics when the victim's DNA composition varies by more than 1 percent?

As most people are well aware, some of the other members of the primate order are within just a couple of percentage points of human DNA. Chimpanzees, specifically, have a cognitive development that is estimated to be roughly similar to that of a 4 year old human (in linguistics, mathematics, social relations, and self awareness). Jane Goodall, of all people, is quoted as saying ''As a mother, I would do anything...to save my child.'' as a begrudging acceptance of medical experimentation on chimpanzees. Whe I hear this, I have to wonder if she would be willing to sacrifice another human child to save her own. Obviously, the life of a human child is indeed important, but why is an individual of another species so much less important that we would consider torturing it acceptable behavior? Modern researchers have the resources to develop medical solutions to disease without the needless abuse of other "higher-level" life. Why don't we concentrate our energies on developing more ethical medical models, and leave the other inhabitant's of this planet unscathed? It's gotten better in the past 20 years, but people are still making excuses, and it's most definitely not a priority.

Obviously, as ethical humans, we do have to draw a line between higher morals and our human instinct for survival, but I am continually shocked that we, as a society, have chosen to draw the line so close to our own species as to exclude all other forms of life.

If anyone is interested in this debate of ethics, I highly recommend a book called "Defending Animal Rights" by Tom Regan.

bully

In the same 24 hour period, the US (via Ari Flescher) publicly stated that we would be happy to see Saddam Hussein murdered, while we also want to be given immunity from the International Criminal Court so that we can get away with this sort of murder. It's amazing how obnoxious we've gotten. We not only refuse to support a world court, exatly the sort of thing that could readily deal with people like our long lost buddy bin Laden, but now we are trying to bully individual countries into signing agreements allowing the US to be exempt from the court's jurisdiction. If we keep this kind of thing up, you just know that there's going to be a huge backlash throughout the rest of the world. We are fast becoming the new enemy. And the few of us who are intelligent enough to say "Hey! Wait a minute!" are being stifled by not only the media, but by the police as well. In one location, the police started a spy file on a woman simply because she had a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumper sticker on her vehicle. And with our new police nation, courtesy of the homeland security whitewash, millions of dollars of our tax money are being spent spying on peace groups. PEACE groups! People wandering around wearing butterfly costumes and toting handmade cardboard signs that urge the US to stop killing people and singing hymns are being classified as extremest criminals.

The chief of police in Washington DC has openly declared that his policy is to arrest people who have not committed any crime, just to get them out of the way. This policy just recently saw the mass arrest of people in the area of the WTO meetings in DC. As an example of how widespead the "premptive" arrests were, the some of those tossed in the wagon included a Washington Post reporter and Oliver North's official photographer.

When are we going to grow up and act like a civilized country?

bloat

I've been taking the past few days off of stuff. I really needed some of that "downtime" that those in the business world so covet. The whirlwind that was my September is over, and I'm feeling back to normal now (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable...). I'm now spending time going through all the reading material I picked up along the way to Minnesota and Maine. In looking at it all it really hits me that activists really need to collaborate more often instead of reinventing the wheel (and the spokes, and the brakes, and the blinky...). So many people are working on so many similar and related projects, not just in the bicycling world, but very few know what everyone else is doing. So I've decided to make an effort to put together a broad view of where we want to go, who is alredy heading there, and what they are riding (metaphorically, I mean!). My problem is that I can't decided to just do it, or if it would be better to do a bunch of research first...

Having nothing to do with research, I managed to drag my ass to the SCULympics event last weekend, and had a blast. I actually wish I had participated in more competitions. The bike limbo looked really fun, and, after a few modifications to the bikes (like removing the seats and flipping the handlebars upsidedown) a few pilots managed to ride under a 30 inch bar (that's only two and a half feet)! The event that I thought that I had a real shot at was the donut eating event (while riding a bike). I figured with my many years of practice, I'd be a pro at eating a donut faster than anyone else. I was surprised to discover that it is significantly more difficult than I ever imagined, especially since one of the elements that I hadn't prepared for was the military style heckling by the audience. I've always said that if I was subjected, for some unimaginable reason, to a real boot camp commander yelling in my face, I'd completely break down in hysterics. Well, that's what happened when my SCUL buddies did this while I was stuffing a donut in my mouth. So, sad to say, I didn't even place in the top three in the event. Oh, well. Next year...

testy

Blogger has some technical difficulties periodically, and I lose all my archives. I can't figure out how to fix it.

basking in the blue glow

Tim and I spent the day in some random place called Duxbury working on the final edit for the Public Service Announcement. It wasn't terrible. Actually the final product was much better than I expected. However, it was almost nothing like what we had wanted. The guy at the government agency who contracted us to produce the spot nixed the kinda cute idea we had for the ad, and ended up leaving us with a pretty dull script. And then the production company (and the director) went in and pulled out pretty much everything else that was interesting or important. I have a feeling that our compatriots in the bicycle community will be disappointed with it, and there are some questionable behaviors that should definitely have been avoided when shooting it all. But, at least the general public will probably get something useful out of it. Plus, I got my cute little bicycle bell sound in the ad, and it works quite well at the very end as the image fades to black. And the experience of organizing the thing was definitely a learning experience for us.

On the way back into Boston, Tim and I had a couple of hours to kill before the annoyingly infrequent commuter train came, and we just so happened to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with a Toysareus store within walking distance. Tim hit the jackpot when he discovered a Star Wars Trivial Persuit game on clearance for 10 bucks. We got in an entire game (I won!) before we got back into civilization.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the big SCUL olympics. Bike limbo, bike tossing, and competetive donut consumption (while derbying) are just some of the events I'm curious to participate in... It's been too damn long since I've made it to a mission and I'm looking forward to it bunches. Hopefully Ms. tropical storm Isadore will be fizzled out before then, if she hasn't already.

I also really need to go food shopping, I've been surviving on Wheat Thins and M&Ms since I got home.

back

A nice trip, nothing shocking. I realized that old time Mainers had road design all wrong, and instead of putting the roads (and homes) in the valleys where it is level (and there is water for farming) they just put the roads in where ever they wanted to. Thus, roads go up and down the mountainous terrain. No fun for bicyclists - at least not ones carrying their homes on their backs like turtles do! Anyway, the trip was productive, I watched kids play with clay and paint in the children's area, helped them walk on stilts, parked bikes for all the people riding to the fair, ate a ton of good food which was all organic, (batter fried shiitake mushrooms, mmmmm), listened to a bunch of folks play the fiddle, heard my mom's friend's band Tree By Leaf (who I love), and walked 'till my feet nearly fell off for three days straight. I also picked up the new Critical Mass book, and several t-shirts with turtles on them. Oh, and I got more of the best maple syrup ever! I had some two years ago and only this year found the farmer's market table which had it again. I think they might put cocaine or something in it. It's just that great.

I didn't get that much time with my mom (as she was only at the fair for a few hours on Saturday), and she seems a bit depressed by my stepfather's continued illness. I felt bad that I didn't really get a chance to talk to her about it. She's kind of lonely up there. I don't know why she wants to be out in the middle of nowhere like that, especially in a place where she is utterly dependent on others to get her anywhere. The more involved I get in transportation issues the more insane it seems that in most parts of the country, you are really screwed if you don't drive a car. A woman at the fair found out that I'd biked the 20 miles from my mom's house with my camping gear and her response was "Good for you!" I had to explain to her that it wasn't like I had an alternative - walking was pretty much out of the question, and there really is no public transit. If I'd had an alternative I would have taken it.

off again

Well, now it's off to Maine. Tomorrow I head up for the grand event of the Common Ground Fair. Yay. I wish I was ready to go. Yesterday I got this sneaking suspicion that there were a bunch of things that other folks needed me to do, but I didn't get a chance to do them, or even remember that I was supposed to. Erf.

The new roommie came home lst night for the first time since I've been here. She was up at the Toronto Film Festival hanging with Bruce Campbell. She's funny. With all of us residents together there was a big push to get her cats to be social with my girl. Seth broke out the catnip tea (yes, for cats) and brewed up a bowl. It was pretty amusing to watch the three of them take turns growling, hiding, and rolling in the bwl of tea. I don't think cats really know what to do with catnip tea. Sometimes they would drink it, but most of the time they would just stick their faces in it and get all wet. Poor, silly fuzzy people.

Today I get to watch my boss try to present our Bike Law Education to a crowd of police officers. Should be fun.

drugged into submission

The masses that is. Not me. I got into a depressing argument with Mr. MP7 last night about the need for peace and how little the US is doing to work for it. He countered with his belief that sometimes you just have to kill people. Funny thing is he calls ME defeatest. I posted something on one of Kevin Smith's (movie director) sites about how people tend to give the impression that the US is full of arrogant, ignorant, racist, and self centered people, and that we don't actually want peace - we love war because it makes us feel all puffy and important. I was posting this just to make up for the deluge of postings that went on and on about how great "America" is and how the whole world should care about our little tragedy of 9/11 because Washington, DC is the "seat of democracy for the world". I try to remember that most of the kids who post on Kevin's site are 13 year old boys, but still...

On a lighter note, I put in a bunch of time at MassBike this week, and we managed to accomplish most of the stuff we needed to do. We got our campaign questionnaire mailed out to members. The responses were very, very encouraging, and reading them all, you'd think that all of the folks running for governor were avid cyclists and were out there ever day or something. One of them does do triathalons, and another did do his campaing tour of the state on a bike, but neither actually consider using a bike for day to day commuting. But, hey, it's a start. We also put together our script for the public service announcement that MassBike is getting paid to produce. It's going to suck though, I bet. And we are being forced (by the government contract) to use a really crappy videographer to create the spot. And it'll most likely air only at 4 in the morning during reruns of the Golden Girls... But I'm going to chalk it up to a learning experience - someday we may get to do a real one, and we'll know what not to do. Also this week Tim and I went out on a mission to take some example photos of dangerous bike/car interactions. Unfortunately, we had no car. (We bike afficianados are pretty much a car free lot, especially those of us in urban areas.) Tim plans to hang out at his parents house this weekend and wants to use his mom as the stunt driver for the photos. Cool.

Now that I've finally settled back into life in Beantown, I'm ready to go off again. This time I'll be biking/camping and generally hanging out at the Common Ground Fair in Maine. The fair is just so me. It's huge (though nothing compared to the Minnesota State Fair), filled with Miane art, crafts, non-profit organizations, music, kids, and 100% organic, healthy, delicious food. If you volunteer a few hours a day you can attend the fair for free and get a camping site too. I did it last year and had a lot of fun even though it rained almost the entire time! This year, I'll do a little no-rain dance before I leave. I'll also get to see my mom a bit. Yay.

(Originally posted Sunday, Sept 15th)

365 days

Well, it's been a whole year since the suicide hijackers took over four planes over the US. So where are we now? Have we learned anything as a society? Are all of those patriotic flag waving folks recommitted to creating a healthy democracy? Are we more more concerned about our communities? Are we taking measures to wean ourselves from Mid East oil? Are we providing the needed political support to our newly installed government in the country we tore up while seeking the big guy Osama B? Have we brought justice to those he plotted to kill by putting him in jail and on trial? Have we learned that negotiations are at least as effective as bombs in dealing with others? Are we making our own elected leaders accountable for their actions? Are we paying attention to the root causes of political problems and looking for solutions and not just bandaids? Are we putting people before profits? Are we working to make our world a better place?