Surfing at the End of the World

Photography by Jason Green

7 a.m. Woke up, got out of bed, rode my bike to the LIRR and three hours later, double-overhead at the end of the world.

Epic 8.23.09

Wheelers

I was riding up Bergen Street a few weeks ago when these appeared in the horizon. They weaved up and around in fluid, synchronous flocks, sometimes splitting up into groups, sometimes coming all together. That's when a fellow biker pulled up along side me and spontaneously began telling me about this old guy who stands up on his roof, waving his arms around.

"So he just stands up there and conducts the pigeons?"

"Yeah."

And it just gets better and better.

Fair Syndication Consortium

We seem to have made some headway in solving this whole "newspapers and magazines are dying" debacle.

Editor & Publisher reports that over a 1,000 publishers -- including the NYT, Washington Post, Conde Nast, and even Gawker -- have band together to "track sites that swipe and re-use content from the original creators. The Consortium would then contact the site as well as the networks serving ads for compensation." So that means I'd owe E&P some money, eh? Or is this considered fair use? Actually, since the article doesn't disclose whether E&P's publisher joined, I'm assuming not.

Here's hoping it all works out smoothly.

Bikes and Skinny Jeans

Urban Outfitters now has a portal linking their shoppers to custom-built Republic bikes. Though my instinct is to make some sarcastic comment (see "Ipecac" reference here), I actually think it's not repulsive. Bikes should be as mainstream as hipster fashion. That said, I'm much more into this and this.

OMG

Planters Cheez Balls are dead. And have been for quite awhile.

Anniversary

A few years ago, while I was on fellowship in Boston, I decided to brush up on my Mandarin-Chinese speaking skills. I found a woman from China, a doctor, on Craigslist who had also recently moved to the city, and began a language exchange. Once a week, we'd meet in Cambridge and converse: 45 minutes in English, 45 in Chinese. We'd talk about mundane topics -- involving words that I could pronounce with ease -- and not necessarily things that were really on my mind. For example, "I am having a nervous breakdown trying to understand synthesizing a chemical compound, namely from a Mexican root plant, into an anabolic steroid" was not one of them.

One evening, we met at the Barnes and Noble cafe in Harvard Square. After multiple sessions talking about weekend plans, the orange line to JP, and, like, siblings, I decided to venture onto more trenchant subject matter. I asked her what she knew of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In 1989, she was just a child, maybe in high school, and lived in a city far from Beijing. She recalled it as barely a blip in the news -- certainly nothing of too much note, some students causing trouble. I was incredulous, though at the same time, having studied contemporary Chinese history during undegrad, not. But surely, I pressed, she'd seen the internationally famous "Tank Man" image. She didn't know what I was talking about. I became obsessed, and led her down to the history aisle. I pulled book upon book from the shelves. Totally futile. Sweaty and nauseous from the effort, I finally gave up and we parted, with the implicit understanding that we'd meet again the following week.

The next day, I pulled a link from the Internet and prepared to forward her the image. But somehow, I couldn't hit send. It's hard to explain why I suddenly decided to become a willing accomplice in covering up a shame of such magnitude. Perhaps I just didn't want to rip her from her bliss. In the end, you can't pull or push someone else into facing life's harsh truths, and certainly not inside an anemic Barnes and Noble. We never met again.

For those who aren't afraid, here it lies.

And here.