Monday, October 25, 2010

Things I Didn't Do Over The Weekend - Ode to Joseph Heller

Of all the things I didn't do this past weekend, there are two that I feel especially compelled to share with you.

I usually plan my trips to visit family in the Des Moines area to coincide with my need for a haircut, since my hometown barber far exceeds any barber I have ever visited in every category (quality, thoroughness at trimming my crazy bristly-spiky hair, price, etc).  But this past weekend was an exception as I just wasn't able to fit everything in and get my ears lowered.

Haircuts had been on my mind ever since I noticed that Vodka Alley had gotten a mullet: 


If you've ridden through the alley at all this summer or fall, you would notice a significant change from the near canopy jungle that it had been.  The picture above clearly shows the transformation to "business up front", and if my camera phone were better quality, you would also see the "party in the back."  Maybe there were a few empty bottles the mowers didn't want to pick up, so they continued to let the vegetation run wild...

Speaking of geography along my commute, the votes are in from the quiz on my Public Art post, and there was so much disinterest in the quiz that it was hard to tally them up.  My neighbor Brendan wins the participation ribbon for actually guessing (via my Facebook feed), but unfortunately he missed the mark.  The correct fill in the blank answer was "C" (There is no ladder to climb).

Back to other things I didn't do...

The wife and I were in downtown Des Moines for the Saturday farmers' market, and didn't find any B-Cycle stations to check out.  Because I didn't see any stations, I wondered if the bikeshare pilot program had ended.  Sure enough, after a quick scan of the website's map, the stations were all in locations where we hadn't looked.  Sadly, this wasn't the first time that I had visited a city without trying out its bikeshare.  My visit to Washington, DC in the fall of 2008 claims that distinction, unless you count cities that don't even have bikeshare programs.  If that's the case, I actually didn't ride the bikeshare in Des Moines well before not riding the bikeshare in DC.

Interested in having a B-Cycle station in your city that you can not ride on the weekend, too?  Go to the website and vote:

B-Cycle

What didn't you do this weekend?

Summary
Week 98
Monday - Car (AM & PM Carpool)
Tuesday - Bicycle
Wednesday - Car
Thurs & Fri - Bicycle

Week 99
Monday - Car (AM & PM Carpool)
Tuesday - Friday - Bicycle

Week 100
Monday-Friday - Car

Mileage
10/22/2010 - 603.1
Publish Post

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Public Art

The past two weeks have been a colossal bike commuting FAIL.  I can blame this fail primarily on being on-site at an out of town client in southern Minnesota in an area that wasn't densely populated. Let's just say it's been...agricultural. I'm back in the saddle this week for some in-office work and to take part in fall bike-walk week.  Perhaps the end of my late September slump will coincide with an end the Twins' struggles.

In celebration of my return to bike commuting this week, I'm offering up another quiz related to my normal commuting route which deals with a specific graffito at the I-94 underpass.  Here it is:



As you can tell from the picture, this isn't so much a "graffito" as it is an "area formerly known as a graffito," which has been recently painted over, presumably by some inexperienced city official who has not yet realized the magnitude of his folly.  In addition to the above column, it appears that the entire collection of the "Anarchist Underpass Art" series has been covered in a similar fashion.

In a time of significant budgetary constraints facing the municipality, our elected officials should have had the sense to tout these works of art as their own doing, which our progressive city surely would have embraced whole heartedly.  (I'm thinking a Walker Art Center East satellite location)  Savings would have been reaped in both the public art works and bored teenager graffiti clean-up budgets, but instead we're left with two tone support beams.  Just think of the pension overpayments that we could have funded with these savings!

All of this leads me to the one question multiple-choice fill-in-the blank quiz about the above pic:

Question:
Pick the item that best fills in the blank, which was previously painted on the support beam pictured above (my comments in parentheses):

There is no ___________________________

a) Santa Claus
(some truths are better learned late than never)

b) such thing as a free lunch
(Anarchists love macroeconomics)

c) business like goat business
(singing the praises of an agrarian economy)

d) ladder to climb
(sobering warning to greedy, cycling capitalists like myself)

Bonus Question:
This blog post contains an allusion to a movie quote, if you can spot it you get a bonus point.

Summary
Week 96 (Sept 20-24)
Mon - Friday: Car
Week 97 (Sept 27-Oct 1)
Mon - Friday: Car

A lot of carpooling was mixed in there.