I almost crashed the bike this morning, distracted as I zoomed on the bike trail beneath Interstate 25 near the north end of Albuquerque. The bridge abutments are prime swallow turf, and I was looking to see if any have returned from their southern sojourn. I almost took a header into the trailside railing, and …
Continue reading ‘Wednesday Bird Blogging (Bike Blogging?)’ »
Scot, on his commute home yesterday in some sort of dry hurricane: I came very close to being simply swept into a car waiting alongside me at the light at MLK and Broadway. My teeth were sandpaper by the time I got home, and my face a circle of pitted dark encircling the clean patch …
Over the last couple of days’ riding: A pair of crows harassing a hawk. Two guys up in a cherry-picker using a high-pressure hose to clean pigeon shit off of the Blakes Lotaburger sign. A couple of old hippies with a shopping cart. Asked us where we were going. “Up in the mountains,” we told …
Sunset Canyon is quite possibly my favorite mile of cycling in Albuquerque: View Larger Map If you like to climb (as I do) and you’re stuck in town either because of time constraints, or because it’s winter, there are a series of short, steep, lovely climbs on the neighborhood streets that make up the Sandia …
Went bicycling looking for killdeer. Found one, but in the process also saw more than a hundred pigeons. (I counted. Somewhere I wrote down the number. It was something like 167, but when the subject is counting pigeons, you shouldn’t trust three-digit accuracy.) There’s a great book about feral pigeons, called Feral Pigeons. Google books …
Continue reading ‘Feral Pigeons: Notes From a Blog Post I Never Got Around to Writing’ »
I took a crack this morning at explaining, by example, three things that are currently going on in our U.S. energy economy. The first is the way gasoline consumption has remained depressed, even as prices dropped. The second is the way the drop in consumption has been disproportionately carried out by people near the bottom …
One of religion’s longstanding problems is the immutability of scripture – the inevitable struggle over the inability of a fixed text to respond to changing conditions. You can see this as Jews try to keep the Sabbath, and in modern fundementalists’ struggle over shellfish. I was thinking deeply about this issue today on my bike …
A changing picture: $2.00 gas: “Get off the road, you fucking faggot!” $4.00 gas: “Dude! Awesome bike!” (h/t Nora)
Sunday’s ride with the fixie boys was a particularly amusing one: View Larger Map There in the middle you can see that we sorted out some nice shortcuts through the airport, and at the southern end some fascinating dirt road wanderings around the new Mesa del Sol development. Bonus points to Andrew for helping us …
In which I try to explain the fixed gear craze: Welcome to the world of the fixie, where cycling is reduced to its purest essence. Bicycle racing today revolves around marvels of technology. The old “10-speed” has become a 20-speed or more. Carbon fiber allows bike frames you could pick up with a finger, and …