Going nowhere...

with critical mass

Critical Mass is a mobile space unlike those that are often meaningless precisely because they are stationary: streets, parking lots, and parks. Folks normally move through and along the spaces, rarely stopping to acknowledge their significance, and perhaps more importantly, their effect on them.

Massers, on the other hand, move past and often through them giving each a new, if temporary, meaning. This in many regards is the essence of Critical Mass. It is a gathering point; a space between different places as well as between the bikers themselves that functions as the dynamic foundation for a mobile social network. The street, the parking lot, and park all become a zone that we know in a new way by connecting with them without having thee destination most find at the ends of the street.

Critical Mass
has no itinerary

This makes it both an implicit display and an explicit but assumed feature of the street. Although outsiders might rarely stop to acknowledge the formative influence of the street, the mass, as a product of a culture that occurs in the street, is significant and requires examination. In The City: An Urban Cosmology. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999) J. Grange observes that the street functions primarily as a temporal location that incorporates fluid combinations of time:

Time in the street is the continual collision of the past and the future with the present. There is no time to stop and recollect the past. It simply “comes by”. The future streams into the present with such immediacy that it could be said to implode into the present. (109)

Critical Mass
is an ever shifting point

It provides a location in movement and renewal in progress. It represents the simultaneous desire for a future but also a shedding of the past. The latter is the desire for an ever-shifting destination point. Unlike the street itself, which demands a return journey, here we have total involvement, an immediate connection, a mobile space where time is removed in search of no real end point – that immediately physical, but also very much conceptual end of the street – the destination point.

Critical Mass
is instructive

The mass is a zone of unconscious assumptions. As massers roll they reflect on it; thus the mass shapes bikers and enters their identity as a formative site of the urban experience. We find located in the street very specific and deliberate information markers, right up to the point where the street is the information marker as with the information superhighway. The street comes to be a site of knowledge and discourse, in constant interplay and renewal, presented to bikers as they roll through.

The French Situationists, though writing in the 1960s about pedestrians, noted that for the Flaneur, that streetwalker and social critic of fin de siecle Paris, the street offered a key location for the play of the social that would become Critical Mass 30 years later.

The Flaneur lives his life as a succession of absolute beginnings. From the past, there is an easy exit; the present is just a gateway; the future is not yet, and what is not yet cannot bind. (Bauman 139)

It is the flaneur that:

…is like a detective seeking clues who reads people’s characters not only from the physiognomy of their faces but via a social physiognomy of the street. (Shields 63)

Massers, like flaneurs, read the street. From the detective like gathering of information on the street, they operate as a moving point on the temporal continuum of the street. It is the massers who stop to exert their reading, their observation of the streetscape in order to fix it in a point in time and space.

This is to say that flaneurs are not dead, gone with the arcades of modern Paris. All massers, as street-users, are implicated in a flanerie of necessity in this period of late capital. We find ourselves exposed to a range of message systems in the streetscape – information networks that represent the global village in our very own local thoroughfares.

It is Critical Mass that exposes bikers, in their corner of the world to the multiple discourses of the urban environment. The mass is one of the few open locations away from comfort points in the home, shopping mall or school. A space that is inhabited, yet common, invested with multiple meanings and ownerships simultaneously.

We might see the mass functioning in terms of what Giroux labeled public pedagogies; those informal pedagogical practices that

…are not restricted to schools, blackboards, and test taking. … Such sites operate within a wide variety of social institutions and format including sports and entertainment media, cable television networks, churches and channels of elite and popular culture, such as advertising. Profound transformations have taken place in the public space. (Giroux 498)

Critical Mass
is both host and horde

It is an active host of public pedagogies (such as the roadside billboard, or traffic sign) and a pedagogical force of its own contextualisation. As urban flaneurs massers negotiate the streetscapes whilst being bombarded with information flows as public pedagogies, each drawing their own discursive formations and identity forming practices. In itself, the mass becomes a vibrant location of information flows, discursive practice – public pedagogies.

And it is this that incorporates massers as unwitting flaneurs. They absorb the flows and constructions of the mass and its streetscape and interact as individuals contextualised by the urban environment. They read their way through urban habitats with the mass creating a path to those key points of destination. Massers draw meaning as they pass through the streetscape and as it responds to them, washing over them with images and representations of the global, urban space.


Critical Mass, as both a physical entity and imagined space, is implicit in the construction of meaning via this publicly instructive capacity. As such, it warrants more serious attention as a location of the construction of the social and location in which discursive formations find meaning and information flows present representations of our world.

Sargent's Patent Bicycle Handle Co.

what's in your
handlebars?

This turn of the century British company created a detachable set of handlebars. They contained pump, oil can, cleaner, and a combined wrench with carrier. Half the handlebar could be easily detached or refixed by the rider by one turn of the wrist. This advertisement appeared in The Hub magazine on 7 August 1897. The image come from the library of the Cyclists' Touring Club, held in the National Cycle Archive.

Pithy

ordered east

With all the bike fashions that've been coming out there recently, the one aspect that gets little or no attention? Helmets. It's an important question if you're a vehemently anti-lycra lout. You know what I mean if you've rejected neon colors for civilized tweeds. You spend your time trawling velopunk sites for just the right thing to wear on nostalgia rides. But headgear? It seems our sartorial predecessors needed no stinkin' helmets. So I imagined the next best thing - the venerable Wolseley Pith Helmet. What it lacks in actual cranial protection it makes up for in stylish panache. And, as I found out during last September's raining A.B.C.E., it's weather-proof as well!

Then, yesterday, I discovered that my historical speculations were spot-on. Here's a British divisional cyclist corps in Wolseleys from Cycling magazine, July 1915.

HUZZAH!!!!!

Keep calm & carry on - Part II

from National Lampoon's
European Vacation

You can't get a more stiff upper lip than Eric Idle, particularly when he's suffering at the hands of Chevy Chase. It is the quintessentially British trait. As the home of Uncool Britannia, the Sterling Times, notes,

Keeping a stiff upper lip is pretty hard to do and that's just the idea behind it. When someone gets upset, his lips usually tremble. Keeping a stiff upper lip is supposed to hide your emotions. This expression dates back to the 1800s, but is still used today. So why just the upper lip and not the lower? Well, most men of the era had mustaches and a top lip was more noticeable if it was quivering.

The future ain't what it used to be...

100 years
of Futurism

Today marks the anniversary of Futurism. In the first manifesto of the 20th Century, F. T. Marinetti drew a line in the proverbial sand between 19th Century bourgeois gentility and the fearless energy of the modern. and Both share a fascination with bikes yet at the opposite ends of the love-hate continuum. But unlike Albert Jarry, the pedalling, bad-boy of the French Avant Garde, Marinette consigned bikes to the dustbins of history.

Back in the last years of the 19th century, it was all about vélomania. Bikes were the cutting-edge choice of the forward-looking folks. The absurdist playwright, Alfred Jarry, would regularly shoot his pistols at Paris landmarks from the saddle of his racing bike. The Dada artist, Marcel Duchamps, created his first readymade, The Bicycle Wheel. But with the fin de siecle came the fin du cycle as the epitome of all things modern. While declaring his joy of mechanical force in the Manifesto of Futurism, F. T. Marinetti quite literally sideswiped bikes. The manifesto's preamble described a reckless, high-speed joy ride which inspired Marinette to become the father of 20th Century Futurism. At one point his glorious car hurdles towards two bikers:

... suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in a ditch. ... As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.

Simply put, the same machine that had propelled the world towards the modern now was its greatest obstacle.

Such references may seem a bit esoteric, or worse; dated, to most bikers in the first years of the 21st Century. For me, though, they show that all bikers are now Futurists ... but with a twist. Bike accidents today, like Marinetti's bike attack, are more likely to be described from the bikers' perspective. One of the great rituals of every Critical Mass is swapping stories about bike accidents involving cars. In fact, I've never heard a story involving only bikes. And it goes without saying that each story has a touch of the heroic: the brave biker goes into battle, often tragically, against an evil, angry, arrogant, and stupid owner of an environmentally destructive SUV. That the biker has lived to tell the tale simply reinforces the noble righteousness of this chosen way of life.

What I'm getting at is that we bikers are the weird offspring of the 19th Century Avant Garde and the 20th Century Futurists. Like Jarry or Duchamps, bikers believe they have chosen a cutting-edge, forward-looking alternative way of life. And like Marinetti, they recognize that bikes could effectively blunt, if not reverse, the forces of technological progress. But in contrast to Marinetti, bikers celebrate this potential.

Not that I'm attacking bikers as technophobic luddites. Quite the contrary. It's the irony that fascinates me most. On the one hand, bikers embrace a future that stretches the possibilities of the present as did the Avant Garde. On the other hand, they reject the techological present with all its limitations on the individual and communities as did the Futurists. And many bikers do it with the same angry militancy as Marinette.

Again you may ask, What the hell does this irony have to do with bike commuters, freakbikers, massers and Share the Road activists? For me, the biking life is about so much more than the present tense. For better or worse, it has a past tense as well as a future tense. It's about a nostalgia for the future.

Your grandma's bike club

knickerbockers
and all

I posted yesterday about our local lady bikers who just brought out a gorgeous PinUp Calender for 2009. It got me thinking about the role of biking throughout the his- or her-story of the Feminist Movement. This was particularly true in Australia of the 1890s. Denied the vote and the right to property, the ladies hopped on bikes as another way to prove their equality with men. Conservative gentlemen, not surprisingly, were aghast. With the help of the medical profession they claimed biking was injurious to the fragile female form. Undeterred, lady bikers responded with letters such as they written to The Champion.

To the Editor of The Champion,
Sir
Permit me to thank you for your criticism of Dr. Torrance's remarks on women cyclists. As one of them, I have had more abuse lavished on me in the last few months than during the whole previous course of my life, and the worthy clergymen's strictures are merely a few more straws to a weight which we wheelwomen are quite used. One can ignore the vulgar comments of street larrikins and larrikinesses, well dressed and otherwise, but the press and the pulpit are of sufficient importance to be noticed. But even pulpit and press often make absurd mistakes and criticise many things in the blindest ignorance. Cycling is one of them. Many writers (on the Argus especially) do not even know the terms of the sport, and all others, clergymen included, who denounce it are invariably non cyclists.

I abandoned a skirt and adopted rational dress for greater safety (twice being nearly killed by my skirt catching in the pedals), and not, as the enemies of cycling say of all women who wear rational dress, because of vanity. No woman is expected to ride horseback in a street dress, to play tennis in a tightly fitting visiting costume, or to walk miles in a tea gown. Why cycling should be the only pastime for which women would dress in a thoroughly unsuitable manner (as in skirts) is a mystery. Imagine men playing football in tweed suits and tight shoes, cricket in mackintoshes or rowing a race in evening dress. Men dress suitably for every sport, why not women?

The hope of the Argus, "that those persons (ie-lady cyclists) may find themselves frowned off the road" like many a Cassandra-like prophecy of that well established journal, is doomed to disappointment. Cycling for women is coming to stay. Lady Brassey rides in skirts, but that will not cause the rational dress party, nor any woman with regard to her safety and comfort, to follow her example. Melbourne is singularly behind the times in this matter and it is odd that those persons (principally Australians) who venerate anything and everything British, from boots to the latest handshake, have not yet learnt that the majority of English women cycle (as they do in America) in rational dress.

"A lie has no legs" saith an ancient saw. Perhaps the anti-cycling public thought so of women and are shocked to discover their mistake,

Yours,
Rational Dress.

Lady bikers...

you've come a long way,
baby!

At least here in The Windy City! Last Fall, a few gal pals were gathered on a back porch enjoying a warm evening. The conversation quickly turned to the gents’ perceptions of their velomania. The relative equality of the velotariat often hides a more complex relationship between the sexes. Is a lady biker cute or just one of the guys? Why can't they be both? Could they? From this, Thought They Knew (us) was born: a group of energetic lady bikers with a passionate commitment to explore their conflicting identities in highly creative ways.

But this ain't your grandmother's bike club. Rather than planning their first ride, they decided to issue what's gotta' be the first-ever Lady Bikers' 2009 PinUp Calender. It features 12 lovely ladies with diverse connections to the velotariat and their trusty steeds: from a career bike messenger to a poet, from all-weather road warriors to track racers. And the proceeds are dedicated to the Chicago Women’s Health Center. I picked up my own copy last Friday night at The Bike Winter Art Show Opening at The Flatiron Arts Building, 1579 N. Milwaukee. Va-Va-Va-Boom, what a night and what a calendar! All 12 models were in attendance along with a couple hundred fans.

Fat Lad's 3rd Riders Writing Cycle

the seven deadly
cycling sins?

I initially planned to answer this week's question from Fat Lad with some pithy and trenchant observations. But while I was rummaging around my hard-drive for some appropriate images I started to think, What the hell, isn't a picture worth a thousand words? So here's 7,000!

Lust


Gluttony


Greed


Sloth


Wrath


Envy


Pride

Keep calm & carry on

this too
shall pass

Times are tough. Since January's Black Monday, the US economy continues to hemorrhage jobs as global financial markets plunge. Personal debt is astronomic. More credit is nearly non-existent. Here in The Windy City the anxiety are palpable; although folks are muddling through. Whether or not it was last week's record warm spell, there are more bikers on the streets. Costco Warehouse memberships are at a record high. Neighborhood taverns and restaurants are quieter than usual on weeknights. The same is true for every large city across the world.

So it isn't at all surprising that Barter Books, in the UK's Northumberland, now sells a reprint of the WWII propaganda poster above. Several million copies of Keep Calm and Carry On were printed but never distributed. Winston Churchill's Ministry of Information had decided to use them only in the event of a German invasion. Fortunately they were never needed. They would've then been consigned to the dustbin of history if it weren't for the discovery of a single copy by Barter's owners, Stuart and Mary Manley, in 2001. Their subsequent decision to sell reprints at £3.60, or $5.54, has met with great success. While we are nowhere near the dark times of the 1940s, these posters are a wonderful reminder that this current crisis shall pass. Or as Churchill declared,

The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.

Bikers watch out

yet again
from the
Royal Society
for the Prevention
of Accidents

Are you a really good cyclist?

from the
Royal Society
for the Prevention
of Accidents

The really good cyclist knows that the essence of good cycling is never to take others by surprise and never to be taken by surprise. He always makes sure that his bicycle is in perfect condition, paying special attention to his brakes and lights. He realises the difficulties due to the fact that motor vehicles travel at a much higher speed than he does and makes the allowances accordingly. He knows that turning right is one of the most dangerous manouevres...

Vélo-buse

Paris Vélib on
the Highway to Hell

After 18 months, the alternative transport crowd in Paris has learned a painful lesson that every car rental company in the world has known for years. A lot of folks are hard on their rentals. Even I in my younger years as a cager enjoyed nothing more that grinding my rental's gears or taking it off-road for a little four-wheelin'. And so it goes with this relatively new bike rental scheme. Of its 20,000 bikes, 11,600 have been vandalized. That means 1,500 daily repairs. But that's not the worst of it; another 7,800 are missing with a hefty replacement cost of 400 Euros (around $500) per bike.

What the hell is going on in The City of Lights? It appears that les mecs, its homegrown bike hipsters, have been doing a little grinding and two-wheelin' of their own. Those crazy, crazy kids are bumping down stairs, rolling handrails, and generally pushing their rentals to the breaking point. It's appropriately called Vélib extreme.


So what do you do? Applaud France's vibrant youth culture or bemoan all the young whippersnappers who are gleefully de-greening les boulevards???

Tweed run

Brought to you
by the LFGSS

It would seem that there are homegrown velopunks in the UK. Last January, London's fixe prix shed their hoodies and rolled up jeans for the civilizing comfort of tweed ... Saville Row tweed. Or at least they headed over to that venerable locale of every discerning, gentleman cyclist. And as they say, timing is everything. Imagine if our British Cousins had postponed the run for sometime around now. Hip-length Wellies would've been the order of the day. Fortunately, the fine, mild January temperatures didn't sodden their kit, nor dampen the high spirits ... nor bruise the copious libations.

False spring continues...

with its
ups and downs

Living in The Windy City is a lot like having a difficult lover. It takes a whole lot of patience. Every upside - miles and miles of lakefront - has its downside - 1000s of bikers & peds on the Lakeshore Path. Bikewinter is also a good example, particularly when there's a False Spring like the one we're getting now. So here's my own personal compilation of the up ... and downs ... to our amazing 60+ degree weather today.

The upside -
It stops snowing

The downside?
It starts raining.

The upside -
Bike shorts weather!

The downside?
Now where the hell
did I put them last fall?

The upside -
The sun on newly exposed pale, skin

The downside?
Neon Lycra-clad
guts & buts all around you

The upside -
There’s a warm breeze
blowing steadily out of the south.

The downside?
My daily commute downtown
goes 8 miles due south

The upside -
I can see, hear, and feel
the world around me again.

The downside?
How long has my
rear SA hub been making THAT sound?

The upside -
No more snow & ice in the bike lanes.

The downside?

...just lots of
pot holes, piles of pebbles,
and small, sharp pieces of glass

The upside -
The young ladies switch
to less bulky coats & shorter skirts.

The downside?
There ain't no downside!

False spring

but I'll take it
anyway

It's going to be in the 50s today with a 30% chance of rain later in the day. That'll be the 4th day of what we Windy Citizens call False Spring. It wasn't coined here. Out on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, the early settlers used it to refer to those deep winter warm spells brought on the Chinook Wind. Chinook means snow-eater in the language of the Chehalis, the local Native Americans. They can melt over a foot of snow in a single day and raise the temperature as much as 40 degrees in less than an hour. This is caused partly by warmer temps and partly by the evaporation caused by these dry winds.


Back here in the City of Big Shoulders, False Spring gives most of us a big boost. In general the relief from sub-temperatures makes everybody feel better. Folks get energized and hit the streets in greater numbers. Unfortunately, some suffer headaches, depression and nervous disorders. It's rather easy to deceive one's self that Spring is on its way. Yet when False Spring recedes, as it most certainly will later in the week, winter is back with all its fury.

Pinoy traffic taming

those who have less in wheels
must have more in road

I've been to the Philippines 4 times now and for considerable amounts of time. Unfortunately, I've never had the cajones to get around by bike. Much of my work takes place well off the beaten track ... literally. It rains most of the time ... at least when I'm there. And like most Asian countries, kar kultur is king. I won't even get into how Pinoy cagers drive. However, the next time I go I just might be tempted. Philippines President, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, recently issued Administrative Order 254. As part of her government's plans to cut fossil fuel use by 50% in two years, all major roads nationwide will be made more pedestrian- and bike-friendly.

The new paradigm in the movement of men and things must follow a simple principle: those who have less in wheels must have more in road. For this purpose, the system shall favor non-motorized locomotion and collective transportation system such as walking, bicycling and the man-powered mini-train.

Sounds like a step in the right direction but I've no idea what a man-powered mini-train might look like. Perhaps something like this?

Fat Lad's 2nd biking topic:

Bike lanes?
We don't need
no stinckin' bike lanes

Fat Lad's weekly cattle prod question:

Are dedicated bike lanes protecting you from cagers or treating cyclists as 2nd class road users?

My answer, based on three folks way smarter than me, is that bike lanes don't ghettoize nor protect bikers. First, Russell Kirk, the intellectual icon of American Neo-Cons, once referred to cars as mechanical jacobins. By referring to the extremists of the French Revolution, I believe he was saying that cars have utterly and violently transformed the way we experience each other and the world. Perhaps he was the one who inspired the Hells Angels to coin the phrase cagers for drivers imprisoned in their rides? What does this have to do with bike lanes? They are merely one of many tools the velotariat is using to utterly and PEACEFULLY transform the way we experience each other and the world. Rather than ghettoizing us from the world, they are inserting us into it.

Second, Groucho Marx, the consummate icon of outsiders, famously stated I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member. Now, consider that cagers are a Kar kultur club that you would never want to join. In fact, you're dedicated to utterly destroying it. Have you ever seen the words Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad emblazoned on the back of a Critical Mass t-shirt? Such an attitude isn't likely to endear you to the hearts of the four-wheelers. In fact, it's bound to make most downright hostile, particularly when they're being corked during the Friday evening rush-hour.

This hostility means, on the one hand, that bike lanes won't necessarily protect you. On the other hand? Bike lanes aren't really meant to protect you. They're meant to stick the velotariat right up in the cagers' faces. If we're really serious about breaking the kar kultur club, the we have to accept the risks that come with it. So finally, as my father used to say,

You can't have your cake
and eat it too.

Good lord!

Bikewinter
comes to the Brits

London buckles
under worst snow in 18 years

The day the music died

yes, I need you
Buddy Holly

Buddy Holly
7 Sept 1936 – 3 Feb 1959

Long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But february made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

So bye-bye, miss american pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so-
Do you believe in rock ’n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?

Well, I know that you’re in love with him
And I saw you dancin’ in the gym.
You both kicked off your shoes.
And I dig those rhythm and blues.

I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died.

I started singin’,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Oh for ten years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
When the jester sang for the king and queen,
In a coat he borrowed from james dean
And a voice that he stole from you and me,

Oh, when he'd had a enough of that,
He pinched the queen and passed the hat.
Then while the king looked down,
He walked off with his crown.
And while lenin read a book on marx,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.

We were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
And singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
Birds flew away with a fallout shelter,
Eight miles high and fallin' fast.
It landed foul on the grass.
The players tried for a forward pass,
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast.

The half-time air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
But we never got the chance!
The players tried to take the field;
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?

We were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die."
"this’ll be the day that I die."

There we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.
So jack be nimble, jack be quick!
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.

And as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
Satan smiled with delight
The day, the day, the music died

I heard him singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
Went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play.

And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.

And I heard 'em singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.

That's enough for today...

Mid-winter Bhaiku

brrrrrrrrrr...

It ain't over yet:
temps at 6 degrees below,
where are my thermals?

Vintage British 3 Speed Bicycle, Very Nice! - $30 (Dover)

from Craigslist
in Boston

Date: 2009-01-18, 11:49AM EST

Perfect for commuting and just leaving outdoors. Great for everyday use. Great "Winter bike" I cant remember if it is a Mens or a Womens, but I know its a 3 Speed. Pick up only. Bring a shovel.

• Location: Dover
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 997600199