Friends of ours were getting rid of their wisteria tree, and the wife wanted to bring it home. It was Mother’s Day, and on Mother’s Day if she wants a giant wisteria tree, she gets it.

Nigel’s just rad.

It’s Christmas Eve, and instead of drinking coffee by the fire while the kids do laps around the house, I’m at work. So I pulled the trigger on a Creme de Fleur.

Suck it, pumpkin muffin, I’m goin’ all in. Check this out, multiple independently targetable custard vehicles.

*BOOM*

Hopefully I’ll get out of here early, then off to pick up something special for Ruby, sneak it home, and cuss at it while it fails to cooperate with my efforts to assemble it. Also, there will be beer, maybe in the shower.

Are you doin’ your gittin’-r-done-est to got-r-did?

It’s a very gray November morning, but the overcast layer isn’t without texture, so it’s still pretty. I took a long way in and rode by The Capitol, the light was even and diffuse, and you could see every edge of every detail on the pillars and the dome.

Somewhere around 18th and G or so, I saw two very well dressed young men, long black overcoats and pressed blue shirts crossing the street. One of them answered his beeping phone, opened his mouth, and out came Jeff Spicoli. Party delegate? Full-on, brah, he’s always ready to party. Wonder if he’s incoming or outgoing?

Cledus is running beautifully, the ride in was perfect. It was about forty degrees coming in today, which was especially pleasant after yesterday’s 27, and good lord I’m thankful that I’m not girding my loins and studding my tires for 15. There, someone’s got something to say about a 40 degree day.

That’s about that, time to code. Anything special going on in your world?

I’ve made the switch from the old reliable Bloglines to the newer (and therefore improved) Google Reader to keep the manifold of Internet feeds sorted and stacked. The interface is, like all things Google, well thought out, amazingly intuitive and mostly mistake-free.

Unencumbered by the Bloglines bookmarking system, I’ve freely and easily accumulated a number of “starred items”, and rather than post a bunch of pithy links off to the right, I thought I’d dump them all on you at once.

Here’s the all time greatest cover of The Final Countdown, via HTATBL. If that doesn’t help you avoid the bummer life, then it’s hot on your tail.

One of my personal crusades is getting people to understand the consequences of using cell phones and iPods when they oughta be paying attention to other things, like their surroundings, driving, other people trying to get off the escalator, etc. Sometimes it’s annoying, but frequently it puts people’s lives at risk, and it’s one I feel acutely when I have a close call with a car whose driver is on the phone. It seems to me that if we know talking or texting impairs your driving as profoundly as driving drunk, then we oughta be as serious about stopping it. Perhaps the fact that one of the engineers on the Metrolink that crashed, killed 25 people, and injured 130 more sent 29 text messages in the hours before the wreck, the last one 22 seconds before the collision, will get folks to take it seriously. Or maybe we’ll keep inventing new ways to select ourselves out of nature, since we’ve defeated a lot of the old ones.

Dammit. I was going to post a link, via BoingBoing, of Big Bird singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green” at Jim Henson’s memorial service, but it’s been removed. Maybe YouTube was inundated with complaints from people about getting caught crying at work, it was sad and beautiful.

From Amsterdamize, The Dutch are trying to drop their CO2 emissions to 40% below 1990 levels, and one piece of that puzzle is figuring out how to distribute goods in dense, often congested urban environments. DHL is taking advantage of Amsterdam’s abundant waterways and using floating command centers, racy red and yellow gondolas that serve up to 20 bicycle couriers. Too cool.

Who Is IOZ? IOZ is the one talkin’ sense atcha, so listen up, then get to bookmarkin’.

The idea that we should cease purchasing oil that originated in this or that country as a kind of economic sanction to punish governments we don’t like for being Muslim and Scary and Evil is right on par, morally and intellectually, with the idea that we should invade them, kill their leaders, and convert everyone else to Christianity. The reason we should seek to reduce consumption of all oil is that it’s a non-renewable, dirty resource of declining recoverability which has deranged millennia-old patterns of human settlement and habitation for the past hundred years. Its point of origin is totally not germane.

Again via Amsterdamize, A Dutch traffic engineer visits Burlington, Ontario to help them build a better bike infrastructure. My feelings on helmets are similar to his, I think.

In the shadow of Burlington City Hall, the tall, lanky Dutchman Wim Mulder looks down at the bike helmet as if he doesn’t often wear one or hasn’t even seen one before.

Yet, the traffic engineer visiting from Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, is here to help Burlington build its cycling infrastructure. He rides. In fact, his job is all about growing his hometown’s cycling network.

“We have a policy that we want to make the roads safe enough that it’s not necessary,” Mulder says of his bike helmet, loaned to him before a group ride to see how Burlington measures up on cycling terms.

And finally, to get you on your way on this link-tastic Monday morning, enjoy some top notch Bicycle Kung Fu Fighting, courtesy of Cyclecious.

Gonna be tough not to have a great week now, ain’t it?

Ever since that Supreme Court ruling, we knew it was coming, and now it’s here. Smith and Wessons on the streets of D.C., see for yourself.

Pretty in black, wonder if you can get it nickel plated?

I wish it had knurled wooden grips. I had no idea Smith and Wesson even made bikes, much less nice ones. I figured someone had cleverly dressed up a standard aluminum hardtail with some decals, but upon closer inpection…

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

Well whaddya know! Headtube badge… downtube logo… seatpost clamp- whoa, what? Ooooo.

Sweet theft-deterrent seatpost clamp

I don’t know what it is about that clamp, but I like it. Might even be a theft deterrent. Nigel needs one of those, wonder if they make it in a 33mm (or, in this case, a 1.3002 caliber?)

I know this: considering the size, cost, maintainability, elusive quality of “sweetness”, and complete lack of an operating system to crash, this makes a hell of a lot more sense than a Segway.

This is awesome.

And also, if you put lipstick on my pig, do you know what the difference will be between that pig and a pit bull? I’ll tell you: a pit bull can easily kill a pig. And, as the pig dies, guess what the Hockey Mom is doing? Going to her car, putting on more lipstick, so that, upon returning, finding that pig dead, she once again looks identical to that pit bull, which, staying on mission, the two of them step over the dead pig, looking exactly like twins, except the pit bull is scratching his lower ass with one frantic leg, whereas the Hockey Mom is carrying an extra hockey stick in case Todd breaks his again. But both are going, like, Ha ha, where’s that dumb pig now? Dead, that’s who, and also: not a smidge of lipstick.

Don’t blink! No blinking!

To the very large, bow-tied SUV driver I met at 17th and New York during this morning’s commute,

I’d like to apologize. I yelled at you this morning because you went through that red light, forcing me and 2 pedestrians to actually back up out of the intersection, even though traffic was going a quarter-mile per hour, even though it gained you about 12 feet of forward progress.

As you can tell by the tone, I’m not apologizing because I don’t think it was that big of a deal. It was. I’m apologizing because a better person than I would’ve approached your open window, drawn your attention to what just happened and pointed out (in a positive, constructive way) that it was dangerous and inconsiderate, and ended the conversation in a way that made you feel like you just made a new buddy. I’m working on becoming that better person, but all I could think of at the time was, “What the fuck was that?!”

And you replied angrily, and I responded to that with more swearing, and now both of us will need to eat soap before we can get anywhere near kissing our mother’s cheeks. And since we didn’t connect, you’re angry at me, probably more belligerent to bikes than you were before, and I’m all wound up about you, your SUV, your starched striped shirt and bow-tie, your girth, pretty much everything about ya. I didn’t make the effort that would’ve given either of us a chance to think that the other person wasn’t an asshole.

For that, I apologize, asshole. I’m workin’ on it. Here’s hoping the rest of your day goes better.

Cheers.

Most days, BikeSnobNYC will produce one or more paragraphs that delight me greatly. Today, this one got me chuckling audibly.

You’d think there were other devices in the vehicle that he might have employed more effectively if his goal was not to run into me, but apparently by simply sounding an alarm he thought he was doing me a favor. After a brief exchange that was actually fairly civil (apart from the fact that every sentence finished with the word “dumbass”) I reflected upon the incident. An then it hit me. Some people are actually so stupid that they think horns make things happen. They actually believe their car comes with a magic button in the middle of the steering wheel that can change reality. Suddenly, I became aware of the constant chorus of beeping all around me–the kind that’s always present in a big city, and the kind you simply tune out like you do crickets in the country. In every case, I realized the drivers stuck in traffic all around me were using their horns not to communicate information but simply in a vain attempt to change what was happening to them. It was as though they thought sitting in congestion was a bad TV show, and that by honking they might somehow change the channel and be transported to a clear roadway. I’m not sure where this notion comes from. I don’t think there’s ever been a traffic jam where somebody beeped and the thousands of others also caught in the traffic jam suddenly realized, “Hey, he’s right, we can all just go!” and it was over.