I’m kinda exhausted after spending the day riding 100 miles through eastern Pennsylvania as part of the Livestrong Challenge Philly bike ride. This event raised over $3 million to fight cancer, including $1,310 from my friends and family. I was riding in memory of my mom, who died of stomach cancer in 2007, and in support of my friend Liz, a cancer survivor. This was a very hard ride due to hills and difficult weather, but also deeply gratifying.
Personal thank-you’s are coming soon. First I want to share a few photos and a map.
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Today I am traveling to beautiful Montgomery County, Pennsylvania for the 2010 Livestrong Philly bike ride. Tomorrow I will ride 100 miles to fight cancer. Wish me luck!
If you enjoy reading this blog, the best way to show your appreciation is to make a donation. The money goes to Livestrong, a support and advocacy group that helps people with cancer.
As of this morning I have raised $1,170. Will you be the one who puts us over $1,200? There’s still time to give! Go make a donation here now!
There’s a scene in “Twelve Angry Men” where Juror #10, having exhausted all his other arguments, starts to use ethnic stereotypes to argue why the accused is guilty. The other jurors, one by one, stand up silently and turn their backs to him.
That’s what I was hoping to do with yesterday’s post, “Hallowed Ground,” showing photos of things as close to the World Trade Center site as the proposed Park51 Islamic community center. One by one, all the arguments against the center are falling away, so the only argument left is anti-Muslim bigotry. People who want to make that argument are free to keep talking, like Juror #10, until it becomes apparent what their true motivations are.
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A few photos of stuff the same distance from the World Trade Center as the “Ground Zero Mosque”:
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Important announcement: If you enjoy reading this blog, you should make a donation to the Livestrong Foundation. I will be riding my bike 100 miles in Pennsylvania on August 22 as part of Livestrong Challenge Philly. Your generosity will improve the lives of people with cancer.
The goal of today’s bike ride was to go 60 miles and average at least 14 miles per hour. I chose a route for smooth, flat, uninterrupted, wide-open riding: The Belt Parkway greenway, continuing to the Rockaways and back. Rockaway is an eerie place, consisting largely of an empty, never-realized street grid of overgrown fields. It’s oceanfront New York City property waiting to be developed. It’s where the city might push if we run out of space. But we aren’t out of space yet.
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From Washington, D.C., Gerritt sends this photo of a Metro poster. It says:
“Unlike some subway systems (which will remain nameless), you don’t see rats the size of house cats roaming Metro.”
Them’s fightin’ words.
First of all: You gotta problem with our rats?
Now, what else? Let’s see. Unlike some subway systems (which will remain nameless)…
- We don’t have to swipe on the way out.
- Our trains run all night, so they won’t leave you stranded, drunk and helpless at 3 a.m.
- Our transit cops don’t arrest people for eating candy.
- We have this amazing invention called express service.
- There are so many tracks that when one of our lines gets shut down, there’s always a workaround.
- Our trains are filled with hip, weird, fashionable, messy, crazy, confident people. Loafer-wearing bureaucrats and terrified interns, not so much.
- You can instantly tell one station from another because they’re all painted different colors.
- Where else do you get to hear announcements like, “A crowded subway is no excuse for improper sexual conduct?”
- We have the Manhattan Bridge, the best view in mass transit.
- Randomly and without warning, a mariachi band will appear.
Got another reason the New York City subway is superior to the Washington Metro? Send it to me using the Feedback tab on the left-hand side of your screen and maybe I’ll use it in a future post.
There was a point when everything looked like hell. Banks were collapsing, threatening to take New York City down with them. Newspapers and magazines were folding all over the place. We lost Circuit City, the Virgin Megastore, and a lot of small businesses. Food supplies even got scarce enough to drive prices up. I remember talking to someone about the possibility that we might soon walk into a supermarket and find no bread on the shelves. This was only 2 years ago!
Today, the Dow closed up 2%, New York feels like its booming, and Newsweek magazine actually found a buyer. Even Blockbuster is still kicking.
Why were we all so scared two years ago? Why was I so scared?
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“It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.” — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1.
This summer I’ve been obsessed with “The Great Gatsby”. Yesterday I decided to ride my bike to the towns on the North Shore of Long Island where the book is set. How closely do these neighborhoods resemble the roaring ’20s kaleidoscope I see in my imagination when I read this story? Would I find Gatsby out there?
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Important announcement: If you enjoy reading this blog, you should make a donation to the Livestrong Foundation. I will be riding my bike 100 miles in Pennsylvania on August 22 as part of Livestrong Challenge Philly. Your generosity will improve the lives of people with cancer.
On this especially beautiful Saturday, I rode my bike 72 miles out onto Long Island and back. Out there, I cruised around the north shore villages of Great Neck and Port Washington. There’s a very specific reason I chose these two destinations, which I will explain in a future post. Regular readers of this blog can probably guess what it is.
Highlights of this ride:
- Passing the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
- Seeing the house on Forest Parkway where Betty Smith lived when she wrote “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
- Riding on the abandoned Vanderbilt Motor Parkway (where I hit my top speed of 30).
- Crossing Utopia Parkway, made famous (to me at least) by the band Fountains of Wayne.
- Getting a bagel sandwich in Manhasset and eating it on a bench with the turtles, dragonflies and egrets in Manhasset Valley County Park.
- Stopping for a beer with Leslie and Brian and friends at their new place.
- Witnessing the excesses of Long Island mansions and the depressing decay of northern Brooklyn and eastern Queens, just a few miles apart.
A map follows.
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