Hooray! Two new blogs I'll be reading:

Beth Bikes. I was fortunate to know this badass lady in college - before either of us were cyclists (I was a biker then, sure, but have since crossed a couple of important thresholds...). I'm not surprised that she's thrown herself into racing with such gusto - everything she does, she does 120%. I love reading race reports by people I know, so I look forward to more. Hey Beth! I'm glad your face healed! Damn!

Bike Snob NYC. When I first read a few of this person's post, I scowled, a whole lot. Come on! A whole blog dedicated to snark? Aren't there better ways to spend one's time? It's not that I disagree with him - yeah, just about everything that he mentions is stupid is really, really stupid. I just try not to let it get to me enough to blog about it... I prefer to try to be more positive than negative. But I've gone so far as to read the extensive comments to some of his posts, and the way that Bike Snob responds is considerably more tempered and even-keeled than I had expected. So that's good.

Oh. A third. A guy in the NYC fixed gear/alleycat scene or community or whatever here, is training for the Hour Record, and writing about it at Hour Record. "Training for the hour" sounds a little bit presumptuous, like taking on Goliath, but who among us here on the streets can say they're willing to punish themselves for a solid hour at Kissena just to see how they do? Plus, further marks in the "race reports by people I know" category.

I was thinking about focusing this blog a little bit more, since people enjoy my write ups of races, but here's the thing: alleycats are really, really awesome, but I don't want to get overly caught up in them. I mean, okay, I'm caught up in them, but I don't want to only write about alleycats. This touches on a bunch of stuff involving valuing processes and things that don't necessarily produce tangible results - "elevating the lived experience to the status of art" - and so needing to remind myself that I have a lot of fun with and on my bike, without racing. So I'm not going to focus it. Because, after all, what has riding a bike shown me? That I can get anywhere and do anything - and more than that, that I want to go places, do things, explore, try things, go to quiet spots in the city, cross through worlds, open new doors.

You can do anything on a bike. Anything. I swear. My challenge to you: bike every day for a year, and see if your life is better than before.

A foray into reflections on the "blogosphere"? What?

I've been having problems with blogs lately. Some of the fuss over at Tenured Radical gets repeated The Combat Philosopher (who, by the way, has an interesting post about some environmentally despicable things happening - among a host of other despicable things, of course - in New Orleans).

This all seems uncomfortably similar to what happened in Wesleying's post - itself mainly a link to a Wesleyan Argus article - about an incident involving the Middletown Police violently attacking a student of color outside of a party. The comments section was flooded with idiocy from people all too willing to use the internet as a way to shed their humanity and somehow argue that justice has been served with the attacking and pepperspraying of a student who they don't like.

Assholes.

(It makes me glad that my blog isn't heavily trafficked - not that my daydreamy self-indulgence is particularly inviting to inflammatory remarks. Though I have a livejournal that got some idiocy visited upon it by people who chose not to identify themselves - apparently, criticizing racism in the classroom is not good, oh, and something about how liberals are dumb, too. right)

I recently sent an email to The Gothamist, pointing out that while they're a convenient news source, their overall quality goes down as soon as somebody clicks on "Comments" and is exposed to a veritable bevy of racist and sexist remarks, particularly any time Al Sharpton is mentioned, and frequently when he isn't.

Remember when about a month ago, the New York Times broke the news about how people use the anonymity of the internet to act in ways that they probably wouldn't 'IRL'?

It makes me wonder if, as more and more of people's communication and interaction takes place through the internet (as it has for a chunk of people in this world), people just become worse human beings.

Today, it was rainy, and people bumped me in the face with their umbrellas, but I wrote poetry and picked up an Italo Calvino book. Kurt Vonnegut died recently. There - I waxed blogoriphic, as I am wont to do, so as to keep this post consistent with my others.