bi [sic] le

So I checked email this morning and found a comment to a two-year-old YouTube video clip I posted of an encounter with wrong-way cyclists, one of my random and occasional “This Is Why I Hate” series.

YouTube User “Berlitz777″ wrote:

@wildbell  I live in L.A. and it really irritates me to see you people riding all over the right hand lane in traffic. I often imagine running you over and speeding away. I think if I ever have the chance to hit one of you on Sepulevda blvd; you know, that long stretch of road near Skirball Center where it sometimes get’s lonely? If I ever have the chance to hit one of you and get away with it — I’m gonna do it. Free Christopher Thomas Thompson.

To which I responded:

Thanks for the comment Berlitz, but I don’t think it’s going to help free Dr. Thompson. It does reinforce the need for me to be triply careful when I ride. I’m pleased you haven’t yet acted on such an irrational and violent impulse to injure or kill someone simply because they ride a bike on the streets that you do, and I hope for your sake and for the sake of bicyclists in Los Angeles that you continue to vent your hate-filled venom online rather than on the streets.

As you can probably tell my considerate reply was through clenched teeth, but one executed successfully because of my personal goal to promote peace — too meet evil, with good.

But don’t go  congratulating me for my insane ability to meet fire with nice,  because I am no Ghandi. Not by a loooooooong shot, what with my first impulse being to invite Berlitz777 up to that lonely stretch of Sepulveda near Skirball Center where I’d promise he’d have no trouble finding me because I’d be the determined looking motherfucker with the bike on the side of the road and a crudely crafted cardboard sign hoisted over his head of which one side would read: “Hey, Berlitz777! Your Momma Rides A Bicycle!” and the other side: “Berlitz777! Queen Of The Gassbags!”

And the main reason I didn’t go that route? Not for lack of hackle-fed motivation, but rather because taking the hate bait from such chickenshits of the city accomplishes nothing but a waste of my time. So instead of behaving reactively and meaninglessly calling him out, I opt to proactively recognize that he did me a favor in reminding me that he and other 120-pound cowards driving 3,000-pound egos like him are out there somewhere, and to be that much more alert, cautious and considerate when I ride.

I’ve long had it with Audi. Like most cliché-loving car companies that can’t help but sell the sizzle for the steak they hypervaunt their cars to be magical life-changing devices full of sexy. In the past Audi’s claimed their product line can “reawaken one’s long-lost love of driving.” Really Audi? Is that the best you could do?

But then it gets even worse with this most recent ad above — slickly filmed here in Los Angeles to add insult to injury. My wife Susan can attest to how much I loath it. The several times we’ve seen it she’s had to endure me involuntarily contorting, usually followed with obscene gesticulations that underscore a monologue laced with foul language directing where Audi can uber-shove their stupid and stupidly expensive cars.

Do I take it too seriously? Absolutely. But why shouldn’t I what with the cheapshots Audi felt compelled to take at such easy targets as crowded buses (trundling along the 6th Street Bridge), bike commuting (in fake rain no less while going the wrong way up one-way Flower Street south of the Disney Hall), Segways (at 7th and Grand), and veggie-powered wagons (in Griffith Park). Bastards. Go pick on someone with your own overinflated sense of self-importance.

Particularly rankling is the spot’s elitist tag line: “Many people are trying to do their part,” the narrator intones over a scene of a Segway rider having trouble negotiating through pedestrians at the aforementioned downtown corner. Then it cuts to a winding section of what looks to be Mt. Hollywood Drive (ironically closed to vehicular traffic) wherein an Audi A3 TDI “Clean Diesel” five-door aggressively blows by an aged Volvo wagon sporting a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker (passing on a blind curve no less). After that comes the narrator with the kicker: “Some, just have more fun doing it.”

At 5,141 commuter miles biked this year Audi: some of us just have more fun calling bullshit.

I’m southbound on La Brea, pedaling in the curb lane. There’s a parked car between me and Wilshire Boulevard so I work my way to the left edge of the lane and as I get there a sedan in the center lane passes me and I see there are four males in it — all of them wearing identical redshirts. Maybe they’re carpooling to work or a job site. Or a parole hearing.

The light at Wilshire is red and as they come to a stop in their lane I pass them noting both front and rear passenger-side windows are down as I come a stop in mine. At the green I get going across the intersection and by the time I get to 8th Street they’ve pulled abreast of me and slowed slightly and I’m getting a sense something’s up. Keeping my focus ahead of me I brace for anything from a “Get off the fucking road!” to having something thrown at me, but nothing happens until the driver hits the gas and the four bust out loudly laughing and they pull ahead. Then the passenger riding shotgun sticks his arm out the window with his fingers splayed wide yells out “Honk!” a couple of times as he makes ass-squeezing gestures with his hand.

One might argue that perhaps it wasn’t about me. That maybe I wasn’t the subject of their moronic attentions. I’d counter that given the arm’s-length proximity of my rock-hard gluts to their soft-serve intellects, it’s hard to imagine the display being meant for anyone else but me. Either way, I smile at the buffoonery, mostly in relief that that’s all there was to the encounter.

But that’s not all there was.

(more…)

Wowza! Via a post at LAObserved about a wholly defaming and highly suspect slammajam made by an unnamed source about a downtown restaurant on the Eater LA blog, I just learned about something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which apparently holds harmless from liability any “providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information provided by others.”

So basically if some anonymous blogger with full intent to defame and malign however baselessly or biasedly writes that someone  who we’ll call “Jonas Dough” is a “raging pedophile and serial killer” I am entirely under no obligation to verify and/or debunk or in anyway research such opinion and am at entirely protected liberty to reprint it verbatim as fact.

Not that I do much in the way of such ax-grindingly libelous and patently damaging garbage like that found in the above-mentioned post at Eater LA, but it’s really good to know I can if I want to.

And by “really good” I mean really lame.

And by really lame I mean that if this kind of full-assed, irresponsible reporting being condoned and allowed to stand by Eater LA’s overlords at Curbed Network simply because there is precedent to do so (and probably because the resulting increased traffic is a cha-ching) then the least I can do is wipe Eater LA’s sister site Curbed LA from my blogroll and delete my account as a commenter.

UPDATE (11:04 a.m.): Eater LA has offered the owners of the restaurant the opportunity to argue the unsubstantiated allegations presented in the post. That’s a bit like Salem giving its alleged witches the chance to argue against their guilt with nooses tightened around their necks.

It almost pains me to spell this out because it’s common fucking sense, but instead  of “equal time” after the defamation (while also leaving it live), the simple and proper and legitimate and fair and ethical action Eater LA should have taken would have been to use the “tipster” accusations as a springboard to contact the eatery’s owners and get their responses to them and then post a balanced item about it. But instead Eater LA and Curbed Network is condoning laziness and irresponsibility and doing so from behind the protection afforded this indecent section of a so-called Decency Act, while snickering as it reaps the benefits from the increased traffic the controversy has generated.

Dear Neighbor Who Drives The Jet Black Chevy Suburban Whose Clackalacka Sound The Engine Makes Means You Either Use Crap Valve-Wrecking Gas Or It’s A Noisy-Ass Diesel-Powered Earth Killer,

I saw you this morning, you turd with appendages. You meatbag with a pulse. You backed your ship out of the driveway across the street, straight into our driveway because with such a monster truck and such a fershit turning radius, that’s the only way you can get it turned out onto the road so you can go get your Starbucks or more fucking fuel for the trip back home from Starbucks.

I’ve got no problem with that other than you’re this tiny little guy  looking hugely foolish behind the wheel of such a big stoopid vehicle, but it’s a free country. Looking like an idiot is an inalienable right.

My problem is that having just put the trash cans out for pick-up, I watched and listened as you backed out of your driveway across the street and up onto my apron and in the process you collided with the black can, piling it back to the curb and knocking it over.

It doesn’t surprise me that you couldn’t see what you did, because your Suburbass is really just one fucking self-centered, self-entitled  blindspot.

What surprises me is that you didn’t do the right thing and go full stop on your clackalacka engine, get out and pick it up — and don’t even argue that you weren’t aware of what you did, because I know you heard it. Maybe even felt it too. I know this because as you went full rudder to get your house on axles out of my driveway and and pointed southward, you stopped looked over your sloping left little-boy shoulder, took a moment to observe the havoc you wreaked, and then turned back like it was somehow not your problem that you just knocked a trash can over and jammed it up against the curb. Then you, gunned your battleship and drove the fuck off probably thinking about more important stuff like the donuts that awaited you down the road. Or maybe it was Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity Day at IHOP if you didn’t run out of gas getting there. Yay!

Had I not had to spend an extra second or two picking up my dropped jaw from the floor I wouldn’t have gotten a slow start out the house and down the front steps, and you and our neighbors would have heard all about what a four-star asswipe you just demonstrated yourself to be. But by the time I got down to the street you were clackalacking it over the the top of the hill, leaving me to right what you’d wronged. Fuckstick.

Can’t WAIT to tell you aaaaaaaallll about it.

UPDATE (01.25): While out doing some garage clean up, here came the Suburban clackalacking up the road into a parking place across the street from me. So of course after he made the long leap out of the truck to the pavement I asked him (congenially, I’m only a foul-mouthed blowhard on my blog… and my bike) what his FAIL was for not stopping to pick up his mess might be. At first he denied knowing what he’d done, but when I told him I witnessed him stopping and looking at the downed trashcan after he hit it he then changed his story to say he didn’t realize he knocked it over before sheepishly apologizing for being so careless. I’m sure he then went home and blogged rich with expletives about the jackass neighbor with trashcan issues and a heightened sense of responsibility, but that’s the way of the world nowadays.

Given my self-competitive nature, I’d been hoping to top last year’s haul of seven trees, but could only lash down a matching number — albeit with a couple asterisks that make this pick-up “better” than 2008’s.

Asterisk No. 1: Last year the seven trees  included our own — which was one of the reasons I started this silliness of sweeping our neighboring streets for pitched pines. I figured if I’ve gotta go to the recycling center anyway, I might as well pick up any others I see that would otherwise just sit there on the curb decomposing for weeks. This year we decorated our fledgling living tree, so technically there was no reason for me to go much less make the rounds and clean up after my thoughtless neighbors.

Asterisk No. 2: The volume of this year’s catch was far greater than last years, which included a couple dwarf trees.

Thankfully this didn’t take a lotta time. The first three were found in the two blocks south of our house and, the final four were stationed at that popular drop zone on the corner of Bellevue and Silver Lake Boulevard, which is where Susan snapped the picture of me lashing down the last of them.

The really good news is that along the surface street route we took from there to the recycling station at the L.A. Zoo’s parking lot, it was entirely tree-free.

The disappointing news was that upon transfer of our trees to the city employees involved, there was no reward. In past years there were energy efficient lightbulbs, coupons for free mulch, and seedling trees given out. This year. Nothing but a thank you.

But I’m not in this for the freebies. I’m in it because someone’s gotta be and because I take far greater pride in my neighborhood than any of the seven lame tree tossers in my immediate vicinity who don’t.

Small Flickr photo set here.

I’m not often prone to political snarkage here, but I can’t turn around in the blogosphere lately without having to STFU and read diatribes from apopleptic people who are ready to kick Barack Obama to the curb because he apparently signed off on whoever in his inauguration committee picked Pastor Rick Warren to say a few religious words at the president-elect’s big day.

From the venom and outrage and yowls of betrayal and FAIL being shoveled around the internest you’d think Obama had tapped Duhbya as our next energy secretary, or Osama Bin Laden to head up the defense department… not some conservative evangelical pastor from Orange County to give an invocation.

And this comes too quickly on the heels of all the misdirected hate-filled lameness after Proposition 8, which passed not because the No On 8 campaign put up so little of a pre-election fight thinking they had it in the bag, but apparently because  a mormon lady working at  El Coyote gave a hundie to the Yes side when her church told her to. Who knew!

But just as I mostly kept my mouth shut through that tumult, so did I keep clammed up when the Warren news broke and the liberals starting harmonizing their choruses of outrage.

But now I’m reading there’s going to be anti-Warren protests this weekend in Hollywood and Silver Lake and frankly I’m  sick of these big whiny battles being waged over such meaningless machinations — and don’t start with all the scary talk about how this selection portends an evangelical shift in Obama’s religious leanings. Even if that’s true: So. The. Hell. What.

I don’t know who frustrates me more: righteous rightwingers or lock-step lefties. I think I despise them both equally.

The irony is that many of the protesters that will be out there feeling ripped off and disappointed and sporting “Impeach Obama” signs spent good parts of his campaign nodding wistfully every one of the 12 million times Our Next President said sincerely that you better expect him to reach across aisles in an effort to bring the country together.

Guess that’s only okeedookee until Obama actual goes and does it.

Look: I get the anger and in fact I don’t agree with the greenlight given to Warren. He’s anti gay and pro-life. He probably thinks the earth is only a few thousand years old and it’s all intelligently designed and for Obama be it directly or indirectly to give a fella like that a soapbox from which to proselytize is questionably suspect.

But that’s about it.

I knew as much, but a quick search of the Google shows me that I didn’t coin the term “indignorance,” which can best be defined by the statements of one angeleno named Graham A. Rowe in a letter to the editor he wrote to the Wall Street Journal, responding to that paper’s entirely slanted and negative August 1 article on bicycling in Los Angeles (yes, the one I had issues with). Here’s what Rowe couldn’t keep himself from saying:

Bicycle riders believe that they should enjoy all the benefits of both car drivers and pedestrians. They choose to ride both with and against traffic. They obey no traffic signs, never stop at red lights or stop signs. At a red light they decide to become a pedestrian and simply ride across the crossing. They ride on the sidewalk at danger to pedestrians. Bicycles should be required to have a fee-paid license plate and be ticketed for infractions. Maybe then they would be more careful and get more respect.

Rowe could have gone a long way to make himself look less a kneejerk idiot if he’d just started the rant with “Some,” but instead he choses to lump us all together as law-breaking, sidewalk hogging, wrongway riders hellbent with ill anarchistic intent.

BikinginLA has a far more reasoned and complete response to this myopic jerk. Me, I just try to roam around the ether looking for any whiff of background on him. And while I can’t verify if this is the same Graham A. Rowe or not, a search of the Google for that name yielded this 12-year-old nugget of FAIL from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority website (bold emphasis mine):

Individuals Barred Or Suspended
Jonathan G. Fink, (Registered Representative, Los Angeles, California) and Graham A. Rowe (Registered Principal, Los Angeles, California) submitted Offers of Settlement pursuant to which Fink was suspended from association with any NASD member in any capacity for 60 days and ordered to requalify by exam as a general securities representative. Rowe was fined $5,000, jointly and severally with a member firm, suspended from association with any NASD member as a general securities principal for 15 days, and required to requalify by exam as a general securities principal. Without admitting or denying the allegations, the respondents consented to the described sanctions and to the entry of findings that Fink engaged in numerous purchase and sales transactions in various securities for the account of a public customer that were excessive in size or frequency in view of the financial resources and character of the account. The NASD found that Rowe failed to establish or follow adequate procedures reasonably designed to carry out the supervision of Fink to ensure compliance with applicable rules and failed to respond when confronted with various situations that indicated that the recommendations by Fink were unsuitable. The findings also stated that Rowe failed to approve promptly in writing each discretionary order entered in the discretionary account or to review such account at frequent intervals to detect and prevent the transactions

Via the LADOT website I filed this complaint after almost being smushed by the impatient and reckless driver of Dash Bus No. 99058, between it and parked cars on Fountain Avenue last evening:

I am a commuter bicyclist and was riding home eastbound on Fountain Avenue yesterday (May 21) evening. Having crossed Highland Avenue at approximately 6:55 p.m. traveling in what’s commonly referred to as the “door zone” alongside the cars parked on the south side of the street I was overtaken and passed by Dash Bus No. 99058.

Demonstrating a total disregard for safety and the law, the bus driver accelerated and passed me less than a foot away from my left shoulder forcing me to stop in order to avoid either being hit directly by the bus or pinned between the bus and the parked cars to my right.

Any precious time saved in this dangerous and entirely illegal and unnecessary manuever was negated by the four-way stop sign a couple blocks further east that we arrived at almost simultaneously. And while keeping pace with the bus all the way to Wilcox, when I looked to the driver for any kind of recognition of her wrongdoing all I got was a defiant attitude and some unheard words in return.

Though clearly the driver is not aware of either the proper and legal way to pass a cyclist nor the potential consequences of her inconsiderate and reckless actions, I trust that the LADOT can comprehend that had I not taken evasive action I could have been severely injured or killed because of her impatience and utter dismissal of my legal right to the road.

Therefore it would be in the best interest of the LADOT to reinforce upon this driver — and all your vehicle operators — a respect for cyclists’ rights to the road.

Also called: How Not To Park Your Big-Ass Rig In The Bike Lane You Long-Haul Bastard

Venice Boulevard. Monday Afternoon. Note the red blocks indicating the parking dyslexia of this 18-wheeler’s operator. It’s the other way around, bonehead!

View the vidclip here.