Coupl'a Days...

The Gloucester GP is this weekend!  I'm working on a story for Patch, as well as taking some photos which may be for myself or may show up somewhere.  I'm borrowing this photo from Lyne at Podiuminsight.com of local woman Mo Bruno Roy- this is what it's all about!  Pray for rain!

An "Interesting" article by Brian McGrory

Make Boston bicycle-free

Brian McGrory, Globe Columnist / Jul 15, 2011 03:14 AM

As Mayor Tom Menino prepares to roll out an ambitious bicycle-sharing program on the streets of our great city this month, offering hundreds of bikes for short-term rental all across town, I might urge him to go in a slightly different direction.

He ought to ban all bicyclists from Boston instead.

Ban them as in, here’s the city line, Lance, there’s a bike rack. Lock it up, and flag yourself a nice air-conditioned cab. Maybe you won’t be sweating so much when you walk into work.
Oh, I know, bikes are the future. Bikes are clean. Bikes are quiet.
I couldn’t agree more, which is why this is not an indictment of the bicycle, an efficient, affordable instrument of transportation. But to paraphrase the National Rifle Association, bikes are not the problem, it’s the people on them.
And those people are the scourge of the city. I don’t mean anything negative by that. It’s just plain fact, painfully clear to anyone and everyone who has ever exercised their government-sanctioned right to sit behind the wheel of a combustion-powered vehicle and drive on roads that were built for, yes, cars.
In a crowded city like Boston, with narrow streets, daring pedestrians, and delivery trucks double-parked nearly everywhere, this task can already be perilous enough. Throw in a bunch of cavalier cyclists who believe with every cell of their beings that they own the road, and it’s near impossible to get around.
Here’s the biggest problem with urban bicyclists: Their personalities. They exude a sense of superiority as they sip vitamin water amid an afternoon breeze while I, just for argument’s sake, may be tucking into a Filet-O-Fish in the sealed confines of my car, quickly abandoning hope of finding parking near my gym.
That superiority leads them to blast through red lights and stop signs with no hesitation, swerve into traffic with the entitled expectation that everyone else will screech to a halt, glide the wrong way down streets, across sidewalks, through pedestrian malls, constantly yelling, “Watch it, dude!’’
They are a self-celebratory lot, these cyclists, parading around in Lycra even though most of them inexplicably have shapes that beg for L.L. Bean, proselytizing through ham-handed bike commuter days, gathering at their little festivals to talk about how they’re saving the world. Shame on us for buying into their act.
And these are the good cyclists, the ones who actually own their own bikes. We’re about to get hundreds upon hundreds of amateurs pedaling all over our city who have no idea what they’re doing. Orthopedists will be flocking here like it’s the Gold Rush of 1849.
I caught a glimmer of hope this week when Boston Police announced plans for a crackdown on reckless cyclists in preparation for the bike-sharing program. Finally, sanity. Cart the offenders away in the backseats of squad cars, just for the irony. I called yesterday to see how it was going. Over the first two days, police handed out no - that’s zero - citations, and 40 warnings. It gets better. They gave out more than 100 free helmets to offenders. Oh, and everyone got a local bike shop 20-percent-off coupon.
That’s some crackdown, folks.
Let me stress, these cyclists are more than welcome in the suburbs, riding in flocks along uncluttered roads. I figured they were perfect in Cambridge, until I learned that there’s a bit of a rebellion going on in the kumbaya capital of the world. Police have begun cracking down on sidewalk riders, and a courageous councilor named Henrietta Davis publicly admonished reckless cyclists in December.
We can’t let Cambridge, of all places, beat us to the punch. Our mayor likes being on the vanguard these days, and this is our big chance: Boston, America’s Bicycle Free City.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com

Love me some cross and love that bike.

This is not a bike shop but if I had one I'd want it to look like this.

If this isn't the most beautiful bike ever made, I'd like to see which one is.

There's something just pleasant about uniformity, isn't there?

Two Images

EVEN MORE APPS... mostly free, but some for around a dollar.

This tells you the angle of anything you hold the iPhone next to.  Say, your head tube or seat tube.  This costs 99 cents.  Not free- but is it really all that much money?  Honestly?

This is a little confusing, but claims to be a GPS mapper that is free to download.  Again, remember- I have no iPhone, so you're on your own.  Just letting you know about them.


Quiver is 99 cents, but a great way to keep info on your bikes together if you have a few of them around (don't forget other members of the family)

Shiftit takes your gearing and your cadence and tells you how fast you'd climb some famous mtns.- focusing on the TDF.  How is this useful?  Not at all, that I can tell- but it sure would pass the time quicker waiting in a drs. office, wouldn't it?  It IS free, as well.


Of course, you don't need me to tell you that google can lead  you to literally hundreds of these sorts of things, and I'm not even getting into the cycling sport news kind of apps that practically every bike magazine now has available, usually for free.  These take RSS feeds and compile them on your phone.

Another Free App for MTBers.

This is where you can get a free download of Every Trail for iPhone or Android.

And

This is where you can see what it'll do.

If you have the technology, I suggest you go there and download immediately. 

You're welcome- and if you don't have MTB Boston, you can thank me by downloading it HERE.

An Open Letter To A Kook

To the dumbell who cut me off this afternoon.

I bet you thought you were pretty cool swooping down that hill and cutting just inches in front of me.  It's cool.  I saw you coming.  But, you know, with my leather saddle and fenders (and a helmet), I'm sure I looked like such a "square" that to someone cool like you, I simply had to be passed.  I mean, sure, it goes against all bike etiquette I've ever heard, but whatever.

What kind of pissed me off was when you immediately veered back to the left (as soon as you got the turn under control) and cut in front of me a second time, still without saying so much as "sorry about that".  You know, with your long flowing rock n roll hair, I'm sure it's hard to see all around, but in fact there are other people on the road with you.  Maybe it was just a long guitar solo or something.  Couldn't see if you had an iPod somewhere under there.

picture this, but without a helmet...

But in the end, it's not about me feeling a little miffed.  What you've got to be thankful for- riding that obliviously- is that I was on a bike and not in a large truck that's not so easy to stop.  Forgive the lame soft-rock reference, but then we'd be talking about Dire Straits...