I’ve heard it said many times that pimpin ain’t easy, but let us not forget that hooking is no walk in the park, even when it is a literal walk in a literal park. That is when it is no piece of cake. But apart from the abstract difficulty of being a sex associate (hooker) or sex management consultant (pimp), there are some physical occupational hazards these people share with cyclists which are now being addressed by Spanish authorities.

I am speaking, of course, of the dangers of putting one’s person into or near the roadway, which is something cyclists and hookers alike must do in order to conduct their respective business. Hookers tend to be safer on the sidewalk and endangered in the road, and cyclists are safer in the roadway and endangering themselves and others on the sidewalk.

This is not to say that any cyclist on the sidewalk is automatically a hooker, because there are some cases in which sidewalk riding is okay by me. If someone is so young or so old that they’re likely to fall over at any time, then traffic might not be the place for them, but the sidewalk is also dangerous what with all those hookers roaming about.

Thankfully, science has produced some measures that we can take in order to help drivers see us on the roadway, but let me not be misunderstood. By “us” I mean hookers. Hey, I’m not proud of it, but I need a new bike for next season and money does not grow on trees.

Here’s what’s going on in terms of high visibility hooking over in Spain:

You’ll note the similarities to a bike commuter’s high visibility garb:

But the similarities do not end there! Let us not forget that cyclists and hookers each employ red lights to make others aware of their locations, and in the case of the hookers, moral ambivalence. When Sting sang to Roxanne that she didn’t have to “put on the red light”, however, I don’t think it was because she was about to ride over to the coffee shop and there was still daylight out.

One wonders where the similarities between hookers and cyclists end, actually, now that I think of it, but if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.

That is, of course, unless you need a date.

First of all, let me just say that I am all for the so-called green movement. I am not a fan of Al Gore’s, but that is merely because I lost a street fight to him when I was a young boy. In addition to having a wicked headbutt, Mr. Gore makes a strong case that humanity needs to be a little better about cleaning up after itself. I have seized upon this as excellent reason to continue riding my bike instead of driving my car whenever possible, and encouraging cows, whenever possible, to stop farting so much.

Even so, I think it is possible to take things a bit too far, which is why I am so charged up about a new environmental activism tool that I have discovered on the web site Lifehacker this week. Not only is it useless, it will no doubt exacerbate whatever problems there already are between drivers and cyclists on the road. In short, it is to the ideas I espouse on this blog what Al Gore’s vicious headbutt was to my adolescent face.

To quote from Lifehacker:

Don’t like paying for pressurized air for your bike tires? Don’t like energy inefficient vehicles? Make this automatic bicycle pump on the cheap and steal from a car.

Admittedly, Lifehacker is in the middle of a thing they’re calling Evil Week, which I guess has something to do with Halloween. It feels to me like they’re using the holiday as an excuse to run some stories that they’ve sat on in the past because they encourage people to be jerks to one another. After all, Halloween isn’t a time to be evil, it’s a time to eat candy corns and dress up as a slutty version of whatever costume-ish clothes you have laying around. Nothing evil about either one, really.

ASIDE: Now I will use the word “contraption” to describe the item in question, because that is the word that one uses when one describes anything that has been constructed, or “fashioned” in any way, which one does not approve of. It lends a healthy measure of disdain.

This contraption — feel that? Boo-yaw! — consists of a hose which connects two pump heads. The idea is that the cyclist would attach one end of the hose to a car’s tire, and the other end to their bicycle tire, thus robbing the car tire of air and pumping up the bicycle tire, not to mention showing those cars what’s up.

There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, car tires run at air pressures typically in the low thirties psi (puppies per square ion) and bike tire pressures can run well over 100, so using this hose to pump up your tires is somewhat like opening a window to help your air conditioner cool the house… in the summer time… when the yard’s on fire.

Mountain bike tires can run at much lower pressures, but there aren’t as many cars hanging around trailside as there are in the city, and anyway, mountain bikers are too busy taking the marijuana drugs to worry about tire pressure.

Should anyone with a clear head use this hose to slightly reduce the air pressure in the car’s tire to teach it a much-needed lesson about environmentalism, they will also effectively be reducing its efficiency, causing slightly more harm in the process.

Additionally, the cost of the materials, about $20 USD as far as I can tell, is above that of a regular CO2 inflater, and well on the way to a good floor pump, which are two things every cyclist should own anyway.

Look, I’m not an expert. I’m just a guy who likes riding bikes and happily blabs about them on the webbernet, but I think that this is an idea whose time will never come. I appreciate Lifehacker’s attempts to “hack” my life for me, but I’m just going to leave this one alone and continue hoping for a rematch with Gore.

Bring it on, Gore! I know you can hear me!

When someone does something that you don’t approve of, how do you handle it? Do you say something to them, or just keep quiet? Do you prefer to lead by example, or correct through violence? Each situation carries its own proper reaction, and one can only determine what works best through experience. I’m speaking, of course, about people parking in bike lanes, and I’m here to tell you that it is illegal to keep a burlap sack of snakes on your person so that you may throw them at people who displease you.

That was a costly lesson.

As I’ve said before, it annoys me when I see a car in the bike lane, but I don’t know if I’m right to be annoyed or not. The matter requires further consideration, but in the absence of a cure, I’m left with the symptoms. Those being an annoyed feeling an an urge to say something snide to the driver should he or she present himself and I find myself without a handy serpent.

Now, let me say first that I think a lot of bike lane parking is just a byproduct of people being concerned with their own lives and not necessarily paying attention. I don’t think that they are maliciously hogging up the bike lane, they’re just, say, running into the pizza place to grab a slice. I use pizza place as an example because there is a particular pizza place at Edgewood and Boulevard that never seems to fail to have at least one car in the lane.

Perhaps that place just makes pizza so delicious that people about to eat there enter a trace state where the lines on the road mean absolutely nothing to them, although that doesn’t appear to be the story told by their Yelp reviews. In fact, the webular site that I found last week which lists the drivers parking in bike lanes seems to have a great many Edgewood entries, although it hasn’t been updated for most of 2010. Perhaps it is the street itself which is the culprit.

When I was riding by last weekend with my esteemed colleague Bubba T, I spied an SUV parked in that very bike lane, and, as luck would have it, a fratty-looking dude exiting the establishment and heading for its cockpit.

“Nice bike…” I said to the driver, as Bubba T and I very obviously circumnavigated his vehicle.

“Thanks.”

“…right here in the bike lane.” I concluded, not wanting him to miss the point.

That was the end of that particular exchange, although when we stopped at the next red light, Bubba T informed me “That guy thinks you’re an asshole.”

That Guy might even be right.

Of course, they handle things much differently in New York. Instead of making snide remarks or lobbing adders at people, New Yorkers merely send a brigade of clowns into the streets to patrol their bike lanes and then engage in loud buffoonery should they spot an offender.

I have to say, I think the Clown Brigade might be the best way to remind drivers that bike lanes are not for parking, and I hope we get a similar brigade here in Atlanta. In the mean time I’m just putting white powdery makeup and little colorful hats on my snakes.

As much as I love being a cycling blogger, it isn’t very lucrative. You might think that I am dictating this entry to a busty secretary with whom I abscond on weekends in my private jet made out of caviar. In reality, I work as a humble graphic designer and webular site curator, and spent a recent weekend with two nerds designing a web application named Caviar. It is a fine life, and I have no complaints, but I have nevertheless decided to give it all up in order to pursue employment at the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.

As you already know, I hold their efforts in high esteem, and have been known to make things and volunteer my precious time to forward their organized raids. I’m not sure how the organized raids are helping to advocate cycling, but they’re a hell of a lot of fun.

When I heard that ABC is looking for a Bicycle Advocacy Coordinator, I knew that I was the man for the job, despite, lets face it, a slight qualification mismatch and a penchant for mounting one-man raids and calling them “advocacy”. You don’t want to know what I think of as “coordination”.

Nevertheless, let’s get down to the application process. Here is the job description:

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, in partnership with Georgia Bikes, Bike Athens, and the Savannah Bicycle Campaign was awarded a grant funded by Share the Road tags purchased by Georgia bicyclists. This position will contribute to efforts by this state network of bicycle organizations and advocates in developing a statewide approach to public education, awareness, and bicycle safety outreach. The network will contribute to the development of bicycling as a safe and accepted method of transportation, recreation, and fitness in Georgia.

Can you believe it? I’m probably already a signficant cycling advocate just by way of riding often and being good looking. Sounds to me like all I would have to do in order to make $16/hr for 20 hours a week is keep it up! That’s a like a million dollars a month, I think, but let me not get ahead of myself. There are a few skills and education requirements:

Education
• Degree in urban/transportation planning and/or traffic engineering preferred
• Degree in public policy or public health welcome; business/pr/marketing degrees relevant
• Undergraduate degree required; masters preferred

Okay, that might be a slight stumbling block as I barely made it out of high school. I don’t have an undergraduate degree, let alone a master’s degree, but I have started wearing Degree, the deoderant. I think that should probably be sufficient. I’ll just put down “Hell yeah, Degree!” and hopefully they won’t ask about any particulars.

After all, I did go to college. I still have all the beer-sodden fraternity paraphernalia to prove it. If only I’d known that I could make $320 a week after just a few short years in a Master’s degree program, I might have stayed in school and not gone on tour with the Vomiting Lounge Chairs, my former punk band.

The job description also notes carefully that I must include a cover letter in my application email. I’m not sure how to email a cover letter, so I’m just adding a ton of spaces at the top of it in hopes that one blank page prints out first.

All I can say is that I would be an excellent choice to make your $320, ABC, and I look forward to war whooping in your offices within the coming days. Email me back!

No one can deny that bikes are a great way to get around the city, which is why cycling as a whole is on the rise. A rising tide lifts all boats, however, which means that bikes are being ridden by law abiding folk as well as fierce and efficient killers. This is also true of boats, but that is for another time. I am, of course, referring to ninjas. Yes, our noble message about the joys and benefits of cycling has been heard by those awesome pajama-clad death dealers, and they are now riding from grim errand to grim errand.

This strikes me as an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of cycling advocacy. True, it’s hard to imagine ninjas being more efficient killers than they already are, but that would appear to be the case.

Urge your looking muscles over to this excerpt from a news article right here:

POLICE in Winnipeg warned residents to lock themselves in their homes on Sunday as they searched for a man who shot dead two people and injured a third in a bizarre shooting spree.
Local media reported that the suspect was believed to have shot at his victims from a bicycle, using a sawed-off shotgun.
[...]
One witness told the paper the shooter was dressed as “a ninja”.

I wasn’t aware that ninjas use sawed off shotguns to kill people, but I don’t wish to be an armchair assassin, even though that would mean a lot of opportunity to type “ass”. Choice of weapons aside, it seems to me that ninjas would be particularly concerned with bike maintenance, as a squeaky chain or a clicking bottom bracket could alert an enemy to danger and ruin a killing. Again, I am by no means an expert. All my killings have been hasty and poorly planned.

The fact is that we can’t concern ourselves with a few marauding ninjas. Unless, of course, one is currently menacing us with a shotgun, in which case we will very likely be quite concerned, but very briefly. No, the good we do for our community by encouraging people to ride far outweighs the bad. We must press on!

I believe I am doing my part. I had a conversation with a gentleman — who I believe may have been Andre 3000 — on the subject of bike etiquette yesterday afternoon in some extremely slow traffic on Euclid. He poked his head out of his car to ask why I was creeping along behind him instead of going around and skipping to the front as most cyclists do. I explained that bikes are supposed to follow all the same laws cars do, and that I, as a very important blogonaut of the intertubes with over one (1) readers, have an unshakable commitment to integrity when I think someone might be looking.

It’s hard to gauge what effect this had on Andre 3000, or if it even was Andre 3000, but whatever the case, I feel good about myself. Hopefully I won’t learn later that Mr. 3000 is a ninja in addition to being an actor and a musician. I didn’t see a sawed off shotgun, but its tough to tell.

They’re sneaky, ninjas.