Welcome to the Jungle. We've Got Fun and Games!

Do you like to receive unsolicited advice?  Of course you do.  Well, my advice to you this morning is not to attempt to bunnyhop someone who just got hit by a car unless you're absolutely sure you can clear the victim:


Crystal City from Patriot on Vimeo.

I'm not really sure what happened here, but it seems like the perfect storm of poor course design, poor race marshaling, and the willingness of the typical road racer to run over his own mother for a mid-pack finish:



Nicely done all around.

Speaking of unsolicited advice, Dorothy "The Crypt Keeper" Rabinowitz:

Has made another video, which I won't even bother to embed because it's totally lame, and indeed it's really only noteworthy because she obtained a new hairdo and a series of Botox injections this time around:

The whole thing's just profoundly sad at this point.  Basically, it's like the "bike lobby" pinched her ass at the shuffleboard court, and while she may have pretended not to like it she went back to her condo, got all gussied up, and then returned to the scene of the crime in the hopes that it would happen again.

Sadly for her, it's not gonna.  She made "The Daily Show" and that's as good as it's going to get.  Time to get back in your coffin and close the door.

By the way, this whole conservative-pundits-hating-bikes things is a relatively recent development.  Consider William F. Buckley, who ran for mayor back in the 1960s:

(William F. Buckley)

And who proposed the sorts of "livable streets" reforms that would have made the people at Streetsblog mess their shants:

To relieve traffic congestion, Buckley proposed charging cars a fee to enter the central city, and a network of bike lanes.

I'm not sure what happened since then, but I blame pretty much all the negativity that comes our way on Portland and stupid stuff like the World Naked Bike Ride:

Portland is living proof that a society without shame quickly devolves into something about as culturally redeeming as a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

Meanwhile, in its ongoing attempt to hate bike share for paradoxical reasons, the Wall Street Jernel is now criticizing it for not being in enough places:

While New York City's nearly two-week-old bike-share program already is among the largest in the world, it's passing over neighborhoods where nearly 90% of the city population lives.

The solar-powered docking stations and the nearly 6,000 stocky blue Citi Bikes are located in Manhattan below 59th Street and selected neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Vast swaths of the city—including Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, most of Brooklyn and much of Manhattan—are left bikeless.

In other words, the food is really terrible--and such small portions!

Since when does the Wall Street Jernel care about all those schlubs in Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island anyway?  It's all so transparent.  No, if they want to pretend to care about poor people convincingly they really need to copy the liberal hand-wringers at the New York Times, who are suddenly all worried about rich people stealing helments from people in the projects:

The line for helmets was very long, and yet few of the people I spoke to were actually residents of the Rutgers Houses or any of the neighboring public housing. I did, however, meet a svelte Argentine woman in running clothes who had come from the Upper East Side. There were also two young women who taught at Bard High School Early College and lived in brownstone Brooklyn, and a woman named Barbara Becker in the company of two sons who, she said when I inquired, attend Friends Seminary in Manhattan, where annual tuition is roughly 296 times the price of an expensive bike helmet (and 1,850 times the price of a helmet you can buy at Han’s Market, a convenience store next to the Clark Street kiosk that has quickly expanded its business from milk, soda and frozen foods to biking gear).

Oddly the Times is very upset about wealthy people snatching up all the cheap bike helments, but they have no problem with those same people hogging all the real estate.

("Sorry we priced you out.  Here, take a shitty bike helment for the road.  Good luck in Pennsylvania!")

Probably saddest of all though is newspapers in other cities with bike share who are trying to wheelsuck off of all this Citi Bike publicity.  Consider this article in the Boston Globe:

Which contained the following quote, as pointed out by commenter "Kilpatrick"on last Friday's post:

Even some avid cyclists, like 32-year-old Brooklynite Kym Chamber, treated the new bikes with skepticism. She worried about the safety of inexperienced cyclists unaccustomed to New York’s eat-or-be-eaten roads. And she wondered whether the influx of newbies would clog up the bike lanes, already too few and too narrow.

“I just don’t see this becoming the new Amsterdam,” Chambers said.

You do realize you're actually in New Amsterdam, right Kym?

Of course you do.

Lastly, if you're a redhead who likes ice cream you totally missed your chance to get laid:

redhead with bike on 1st ave 4th st eating ice cream - w4m (East Village)

saturday afternoon i passed the cutest red head leaning against his bike, eating ice cream in front of a deli on 1st ave and 4th st. i stopped mid sentence and my stomach sank. he completely did not see me other than a quick look at my leg and he'll never see this but im posting this anyway because he was so cute. and had cute and tan freckly bike legs. drool. 

if your hot ginger bike friend was around the east village on saturday tell him to send me his picture!

Sucks for you.