Whisky Van Gogh Go

I would say [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] is the Gen Y equivalent of modern myth to Gen X’s Star Wars “fighting Daddy” obsessions.
— Jacob Clifton

Darth Vader tells Skywalker he has to made a decision: He can keep fighting a war he will probably lose, or he can compromise his ethics and succeed wildly. Many young adults face a similar decision after college, and those seen as “responsible” inevitably choose the latter path. However, an eight-year-old would never sell out. Little kids will always take the righteous option. And what’s intriguing about Gen Xers is they never really wavered from that decision. Luke’s quandary in The Empire Strikes Back is exactly like the situation facing Winona Rider in 1994′s Reality Bites: Should she stick with the nice, sensible guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawke)?
— Chuck Klosterman

There’s a slightly embarrassing reptile-like part of my brain that would be perfectly happy if I strapped myself to an IV and just consumed cultural criticism for the rest of my life.

You have too many principles.
— a friend, a couple days ago

The city of New York has deployed a series of signs at locations where bicycle accidents are common. The signs feature haikus, the purpose of which is to capture the attention of bicyclists en route and… is this a social Darwinism thing?

The use of haiku is inappropriate; if they really want to paralyze the minds of cyclists, the obvious solution is Zen Kōans. I submit for your meditation:

• The pupil asked Zhàozhōu, “Is a bike lane still a bike lane when it is only ever occupied by delivery trucks?” Zhàozhōu replied, “Wú.”
• Without thinking of good or evil, show me your face before it hit the taxi door.
• When a head unprotected by a helmet hits the pavement, does it hear a sound?
• A cyclist on a bicycle is as a kitten in a shoebox, neither alive nor dead, in a perpetual dance with a fuckwad cab driver since the beginning of time.
• If you meet David Byrne in a bike lane, kill him.

Last summer I had the opportunity to participate in a Kickstarter for the TiGr bicycle lock. I received my lock last week and couldn’t be happier.

The TiGr is a long titanium bow and a pocked-sized latch. It’s stronger than a Kryptonite D-Lock and weighs less than a bottle of water.

It looks a bit unwieldy out of the box — as long as a bicycle top tube — but in practice, I’ve found that it’s less visually obtrusive than a D-Lock and even easier to haul around. Shedding the pounds of a Kryptonite (or one of those gawdforsaken chains that so many New Yorkers carry) makes your bike feel like a totally new ride.

I expected that the lock wouldn’t be as versatile as a D-lock, but the opposite is true. The bow is incredibly flexible, so you can lock to a post of nearly any diameter, and the long reach of the bow even opens up new possibilities on already-crowded bike racks.

I was also skeptical of the velcro retention straps, but they work just fine. And manipulating the latch is faster than dealing with a D-Lock once you get the hang of it.

(Technically you are supposed to run it through a wheel but I never bother.)

Unless there’s some undiscovered weakness (a la the Bic pen trick), an entire industry has just been made obsolete. Every urban bicyclist is going to want one of these. I hope Mr. John Loughlin patented the hell out of it. 

TiGr locks are shipping to Kickstarter backers today. Following that, I believe there will be a second run for public buyers via the website. I imagine that the final stage is a formal, permanent manufacturing company; interested investors should line up ASAP.

Andy Inhatko’s latest podcast is a retrospective on the career of Douglas Adams. I was surprised to hear that his favorite Adams book is also my favorite — Last Chance to See, a nonfiction travelogue where he took a year off from science fiction to travel the world in search of the rarest and possibly most-fucked of the world’s endangered species.

Back in 1992 I emailed Douglas Adams to ask if Last Chance to See would ever be available in paperback. He responded over two years later, saying “Yes, it’s available from [some imprint], behind the worst cover in all of history.” 

personal notes:

• The Hitchhiker books were probably the first “adult” books I ever read.
• I heard Dire Straits on the radio the other day and remembered that scene from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Such a romantic book.
• My downstairs neighbor was the director of Starship Titanic. He described Adams as “an interesting guy to work with” and left it at that.
• Douglas Adams would have taken to Twitter like a fish to an ear.
• Damnit Inhatko, the bird was a kakapo, not an aye-aye. That’s a goddamned lemur.