The weather today is spring-tacular. Not only is new stuff coming out of the ground:
But the spring peepers are even peeping! I only noticed spring peepers for the first time like last year, which is strange, since they’re loud as fuck and I don’t know how I’ve managed to tune them out all this time. Here’s what they sound like:
The video is nine hours long, but make sure you watch until the very end, because it’s worth it.
Just kidding:
Ha ha, made you watch.
Anyway, yesterday was rainy but today was warm and sunny, so there was a beguiling mist hanging over the hilltops that I could not figure out how to capture with my poor photography skills:
Just spray your monitor with Pam or something and you’ll get the idea.
I was also quite pleased with my choice of bicycle:
I always thought I’d be too old to ride a singlespeed mountain bike by this point in my life, but ironically it’s quite the opposite, and it turns out when you get old and snow piddling around on a tiny gear is juuust fine.
Plus, soon I’m not going to have much choice, since my older son is officially big enough to appropriate the Jones now:
Of all my bikes it’s the one he’s always most admired, and now that he can ride it he’s quite excited. In fact he’d like me to give it to him permanently, but in order to take ownership he must first pass a skills test that will involve successfully negotiating a series of off-road obstacles without putting a foot down. Should he complete these Feats of Strength, the Jones will be his:
When it comes to bikes or anything else, it’s extremely important to put near-insurmountable obstacles in your children’s paths, otherwise they might get the idea that it’s all right to enjoy themselves, and you wouldn’t want that.
Fortunately, there’s little chance children in New York will fall prey to the delusion that riding bikes is enjoyable, thanks to the way we talk about it:
I know it’s important to draw attention to the “stuff that needs to change” part of riding bikes, but I think maybe we’re losing sight of the “riding a bike is awesome” part while we’re at it. In fact I don’t remember the last time I saw someone refer positively to riding a bike in New York City, so as an experiment I went to the Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives’s Twitter feed to see how far I had to go back before I found something that made riding a bike sound attractive as opposed to like a suicide mission. Eventually I got tired of scrolling gave up, but I did find this:
Lob knows there’s a million things wrong with cars and how we use them, but this is like saying the dagger ear cuff is built for the sole purpose of stabbing people to death, when we all know its real purpose is to deflect the fact that you’re too afraid to defy your parents by actually getting your ear pierced:
The contention that barbed wire license plate frames are meant to impale people is especially absurd when you consider that in order to do so you’d have to ram them with it, which is going to maim or kill them even if you’ve got a totally benign license plate frame such as this:
If anything, I’d be much more worried about Cat Mom, who could be distracted by the 40 strays in the back she’s rounded up for spaying and neutering.
Anyway, it’s not that I side with the car-addled people over the advocates, it’s just that people are so car-addled it takes a sharp tool to cut through the brainwashing, and if you instead try to go at it with a plastic sport like claiming novelty license plate frames are designed to kill people it only reinforces their notion that anyone whose critical of cars is crazy.
Though if they ever try to make us put license plates on our bicycles we can get barbed wire license plate frames too!
