Bicycle Fixation Weblog
10/23/2006: "Let the Blither Begin!"
Welcome to the official launch of the Bicycle Fixation weblog. (It's official in that you don't have to read the poorly-typed and scatological imbecilities I hammered out for test messages.)This will be the spot for announcements, rants, news links, snippets of bicycling or sustainability info too small to constitute entire articles but too good to let dry up and blow away. Maybe pictures too if I don't get too lazy.
What it won't have is comments from my beloved readers. it's not that I discount your opinions--far from it; many of you are tired of hearing me beg for that article I strongarmed you into offering. No, it's just that I don't have time to weed out the phone card ads, stock tips, Viagra testimonials, porn-site link lists, and just plain sub-moronic dung-flinging attempts at shock-and-awe (more accurately, schlock and flaw) that some of our less-fortunate fellow netizens feel compelled to post to any open forum.
I went through enough of this when we had a bulletin board on our sister publication, The New Colonist, and I have even had some meticulous Australian pornographers tediously fill out BF's Comments and Submissions forms to send me mile-long lists of URLs to their nickelodeon blowjob teasers. (Listen, you pathetic roo-raping losers, if you can't keep your limp dicks away from your keyboards, at least waste each other's bandwidths, and not mine....)
But if you want to read about bicycling in the modern world, and into the future, and the convergence between the bicycle and the rest of the sustainability movement, you've come to the right place, mate! Hang around a while, eh?
Stitching the River Ride, Redux
A few weeks ago I posted an article about a ride I took one Sunday, riding all of downtown Los Angeles's bridges between Broadway and Olympic boulevards. Last Sunday I repeated it, this time with about twenty other riders along, including a few members of the L. A. Wheelmen, and the indomitable Chuck Schmidt of Velo-Retro, riding an immaculate black Waterford fixie. (But all of Chuck's bikes are immaculate.)
We wandered back and forth between the Eastside bluff and the warehouse district, past the San Antonio Winery and the Brewery lofts (one of the first factory-to-lofts conversions in LA, and still an artists' colony), over, around, and under a variety of delightful Art Deco bridges, between rows of loading docks, past busy alleys, past hilly parks complete with ponds and resident ducks, and through leafy neighborhoods cluttered with clapboard bungalows and gang graffiti. At one point we came to a bridge that had been closed for filming, but a friendly motorcycle cop escorted us across the bridge and through the set--where the grips dropped their work to take pictures of the parade of bicycles.
At the last stop, on the Olympic Boulvaqrd bridge just past the old Art Deco Sears, Roebuck, & Co. building, oen woman commented that she'd lived in LA all her life and had never seen so much of the city as she had that day! Not bad for a twenty-mile ride, and a testament to the power of the bicycle for revealing our world and our communities to us.
Glad to report that only a tiny minory of riders drove to the start of the ride. Most rode their bikes, and a last group of six of us headed west after some tasty Chinese pastries by the statue of Sun-Yat Sen, riding together to the Miracle Mile area, where we all finally parted ways.
