I'm a lasagna boy!

In which Critical Mass reaches critical mass

I just heard Critical Mass ride past, and I was thrilled.

The legal adage "possession is nine-tenths of the law" illustrates part of my new-found enthusiasm for Critical Mass. As private cars become increasingly favoured,, even in this so-called transit-first city of San Francisco, I become irritated that the de facto ownership of the public right-of-way goes not to pedestrians nor to cyclists, nor even to public transit or cartage, but to private automobiles. San Francisco makes plodding efforts to build transit corridors, but continues to expand freeways, rebuild roads designed for cars, and shunt cyclists and pedestrians off to less-convenient and half-baked schemes for getting around. Probably the only advantage that a pedestrian or cyclist has in this city are its stairways, beautiful, and inaccessible to cars.

I first rode in a Critical Mass when I moved to Pittsburgh in 1995. The entire experience was forced and without vibrance. I tried again in the Bay Area, and was intimdated by the sheer volume of cyclists (and Venice-Beach-style freaks) who turn out at Justin Herman Plaza every Friday, and especially the last Friday of each month; I also rode a stilted Peninsula Critical Mass ride down El Camino, from San Francisco to San Mateo. That ride seemed more intent on flagrantly and illogically flouting traffic laws. For years afterwards, I shrugged and told myself that I ride in Critical Mass every day, when I am on the streets and using (asserting?) my rights as a cyclist. Lately I have realised that cyclists must forcefully assert the right to be on the streets, to take the lane, to refuse intimidation either by private motorists or by poor civic planning.

Civic planning: SPUR has been calling for system-wide reform for thirty years. At this point, I doubt that their message gets across to the hopelessly foundering Board of Supervisors.
The San Francisco Charter includes such lush and promising language as:

2. Public transit, including taxis and vanpools, is an economically and environmentally sound alternative to transportation by individual automobiles. Within San Francisco, travel by public transit, by bicycle and on foot must be an attractive alternative to travel by private automobile.

3. Decisions regarding the use of limited public street and sidewalk space shall encourage the use of public rights of way by pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit, and shall strive to reduce traffic and improve public health and safety.

4. Transit priority improvements, such as designated transit lanes and streets and improved signalization, shall be made to expedite the movement of public transit vehicles (including taxis and vanpools) and to improve pedestrian safety.

Now I am again excited about Critical Mass: it is joyful and over-the-top, and reminds cyclists and non-cyclists alike that we need to share the roads. For autos, every day is their Critical Mass.

In which I wonder about the loquaciousness of cabbies

Each of the various cabbies has been tethered to a mobile 'phone, and, with the brief exception of nodding when we announced our destination (and, in one case, asking "Which way do you want to take?" in our quest to get from late-night SoHo to Midtown East), prattled endlessly in a tongue I could not identify. Occasionally I caught words of English, or French, but always wrapped into another tongue which was at one point subject to the expanding empire of one European country or another.
My amazement continued: only one trip featured a native English-speaking, traditional-looking cabby (who would no doubt prefer to be called a hackie), and he did not sport a mobile 'phone. One driver rattled endlessly into a 'phone which had a most elaborate ring-tone (a Bengali pop song?), and switched off occasionally with another 'phone. Another driver took twists and turns through Ell-icey to avoid the bridge approaches, and navigated this all while enjoying a heated debate (argument? how could I tell?) in a tongue I could not place. In San Francisco this happens only occasionally, and somehow I feel more comfortable asking the drivers what language they are using, but here in Manhattan I simply sat quiet, in awe. And the airwaves crackle with three thousand different languages.

In which this isn't some kind of metaphor.

Goddamn, this is real.
Once again, props to Greg for having his ear to the ground: Shellac are hitting the road in August.

Lest you forget, shellac is both a noun and a verb (third denotation for both).

In which a bicycle is locked up

This sequence of still photographs assembled into a Flash movie and set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons (witty, that) illustrates a phenomenon similar to the one John Glassie documents in his recently-published photo-study, Bicycles Locked to Poles.

In which I need a camera

UPDATE: Anna snapped the sculpture on Steiner.

This morning outside the café, an unsurprising Lower Haight tableau of faeces, -- canine, but I wouldn't make any assumptions -- was dressed-up with pictures of a smiling W, neatly pinned to the poop with toothpicks. I tried to photograph with my point-and-shoot, but it reported "Memory Card Error", and then I pulled out the cameraphone, but it crashed and restarted when I pushed the "Capture" button.
On the subject of outsider art, the neighbours are marshalling to stem the tide of awful, amateurish graffiti tags. Despite semi-polite pleas (such as the posters placed on several Haight St. business windows asking to "Please stop tagging our windows") and the grotesquely-defaced murals (a few years ago, we lost the colourful mural on the retaining wall where Divisadero crosses Duboce to taggers: now ditto for the less-appealing, but still a carefully-considered piece of public art, on the side of the New Santa Clara Market at Scott and Haight), the taggers do not stop. There seems little rhyme or reason for the tagging: it recurs on some buildings, but almost never on others. Typically, buildings with large expanses of a single, light color suffer the most (with the exception of the Horse Love): Jack's Records, the large Victorian apartment building that houses Maire Rua, and the forlorn '50s cinderblock atrocity at Pierce and Haight.
Someone tucked a flyer into the grate of my building last night, encouraging residents to appeal to our Supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi.

In which we are as different as chalk and cheese

The list of apps I added to my powerbook after a clean install of Tiger:

• Acquisition
• Adium
• Camino
• Conversation IRC client
• Delicious Library to catalogue my books and DVDs (the music is already managed through iTunes, natch). This cost money.
• DivX 5.2.1
• DVDBackup, fair right usage and all that. I prefer having my movies on one disk, not four hundred, thankyouverymuch.
• flickrExporter plugin for iPhoto
• flickrUploader
• Growl Notifier
• iLife '05: this cost money.
• iPassConnect
• KisMac, a port of the excellent BSD wireless-security tool kismet.
• MacStumbler, a very handy tool for finding wireless access points, especially when iPass is not an option.
• NeoOfficeJ
• NetNewsWireLite, despite the RSS integration in Safari
• osx2x, the awesome little widget that forwards X connections between boxen
• Quicksilver ß42. If this cost money, I'd pay for it.
• SSHKeychain, painless key management
• TomatoTorrent, even though the official BitTorrent client supports retries and resumption of partial downloads, this has a better logo ;-)
• VideoLan Client (the beta: the head does not run on 10.4)

In which I go to Spain and wear a helmet

Spain adopted a mandatory helmet law for cycling outside of cities in 2004. Helmets are not compulsory in towns and may be removed while climbing steep hills.

France has a lively discussion on helmets going on. The best summary is probably this page on the Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette site. They analyze deaths in Paris and in France as a whole and conclude that helmet usage is a personal question but can save lives.

I began reading Randy Cohen's The Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine when a friend pointed me to his discussion of (motorcycle) helmet laws. Although he tends to the snappy and glib, he was spot-on in saying that the financial and social cost borne by people other than the helmet-wearer offsets the personal liberties infringed-upon by requiring helmets.
I still shudder when riding with someone who isn't wearing a helmet. I think I value my noggin and what's inside, and will take all reasonable precautions to protect it. On the other hand, I rarely wear gloves when cycling, and I learned a hard lesson a few years back when I tumbled down a briar-covered hillside in Joaquin Miller Park.
Some of this may have its root in my cracking open a Kiwi helmet when I was 11 or 12, and walking my 10-speed bicycle across a busy intersection when an elderly Unitarian barrelled around the corner of Beechwood and Wilkins and sent me flying. Of course, not everyone who wears a helmet is doing so sensibly: I cringe when I see people flying down Haight St. with their helmets perched ever-so-saintly on their heads, but fail to stop at the intersection (controlled by a STOP sign), or wearing headphones, or both. Fer crying out loud: I've seen people eat a chrome meal at that intersection, and it ain't pretty.
Somewhere I have a picture of me in Barceloneta, 2001, on a bicycle but without a helmet.