So for a while now, I've been thinking about Critical Mass, a sort of flash mob-ish group that at takes over the streets of a major city on the last Friday of every month, filling them with cyclists and usually utterly disrupting traffic and city function.

On the one hand, it seems like kind of a dick move, and I've yet to hear how they'd deal with having to let, say, an ambulance pass through their midst.

On the other hand, as someone whose primary mode of transit is a bike, I do appreciate it being underlined that cars don't own the fucking road.

I do see the value of street theater, and in this regard the actions of Annonymous have been the high water mark. Recruitment by the Church of Scientology is at a standstill. Copies of Dianetics aren't selling. the COS is utterly fucked.

The tactics of Critical Mass aside, it's an extremely valid point that they're making. Even in places with designated bike lanes, it can be a god damned nightmare to do something as simple as make a left turn if there's any amount traffic. I've yet to have a single person stop their car when I make a turn signal. And it happens at least sometimes when people signal for a turn in a car.

Which reminds me of a funny story.

I was riding home from Davis Square, down Harvard ave, and a brand spanking new Mustang pulled up alongside me. The driver asked me how to get to Route 16. I told him go straight through every set of lights until he crossed a bridge.

He drove on, and took a right turn at the next set of lights. I started pedaling like mad, and manage to catch up to him and told him that he should have gone straight through the intersection that he'd just passed. I pointed at a sign for route 16.

He thanked me again, pulled a U turn, and I watched as he drove straight through the intersection, passing by the turn-off that I'd pointed out for him. No chance of catching him.

No helping some people, eh?

Bullshit chatter in the background aside, this is a Good Thing

Pretty obvious choice for VP, all things considered.

I'm not going to dwell on this long, save for presenting my favorite Joe Biden moment of the 2008 election season



The McCain campaign has been quick to quote Biden's criticism of Obama during the primaries, which would suggest that either they won't be picking Romney (which also would be a Good Thing) or that they're a bunch of idiots.

We're not going to go see Mama Mia again

Talk about a man taking a stand eh? I love other people's conversations sometimes.

Five dollars for a minor league doubleheader at Fenway while the Sox were out in Chicago. It wasn't lost on me that I was seeing two baseball games for less than the cost of a "beer" at the ballpark, and far less than the price of a real beer. That my cargo pockets could have easily concealed a couple of Coronas wasn't lost on me either.

It's important that we learn from these experiences.

The atmosphere of a ballgame that no one who's watching really cares about (at least not the outcome) is interesting. This isn't to say that the excitement wasn't there, it was. If you aren't at your feet when the game is tied in the twelfth, you aren't a baseball fan. And there's something especially rewarding in knowing that the kid up at the plate was playing high school ball earlier this year, and that recieving a 12th-inning standing O at Fenway is huge for him.

In any case, the ballpark somehow managed to actually be a pretty decent place to get some work done. And for more or less as much as I'd spend on coffee at one of the usual sorts of places I'd go to write.

re: The Olympics-- I can't seem to fully explain my comparative lack of interest this time around. The locale is a factor, no doubt. Being accused of racism on a forum due to my opposition to the Chinese government by an Afghani-born Canadian who has nothing but (often but not always warranted) bad things to say about the United States left a bad taste in my mouth that still hasn't faded. As have the reports about people's homes being demolished to make way for the games-- for those of you playing along at home, that's human rights violations for the expedience of an event that was offered to Bejing on the condition that it clean up its human rights record-- and all the pomp and circumstance that's glorified an utterly corrupt government...

The first event that's made me perk up and say, "I need to see this" came just as I'm typing these words, upon learning that one of the semifinal matches in Judo is going to be Russia versus Georgia

I'm fully aware that I may, in fact, be a bad person.

But when I compare this morbid fascination to my exuberant cheering in 1996 as Kerri Strug landed on a fucked-up ankle it adds perspective .

Good lord, I want to vomit whenever I see a team of Olympic gymnasts and I have to wonder how much of it is age falsification-- at least one of gymnasts on the Chinese team has been credibly accused of lying about her age-- and how much of it is that these girls actually are sixteen and just look like they're in grade school because of what the sport has done to them.

Which maybe drives more to the heart of the matter. The International Olympic Committe, in the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play, has enacted anti-doping restrictions that preclude a compettitor who used an emergency inhaler when suffering an asthma attack the night before an event. In the spirit of human kinship, they extended a hand to a country with a bad rep so long as they cleaned up their act, knowing full well that there was no way they could enforce the caveat and indeed no way that the Chinese government would take it seriously. In the spirit of human decency, they raise the minimum age requirement for competition in certain events that take a particular toll on a young athlete's body and yet declare it to be Someone Else's Problem when there's a confirmed instance of falsification.

The question is, does this capitulation to China reveal anything about these people that we didn't already know if we were paying attention?

Should be a hell of a match...