Bicycling magazine

By the time my Bicycling magazine subscription lapsed for good, I had lost most of my interest in that publication.

To be sure, there were still interesting articles sometimes, such as "The 90-Year-Old Who Can Kick Your Ass" – a profile of a nonagenarian, former pro cyclist still riding strong. And there were the recurring staples, like "Get Stronger Legs!" and "Fix a Flat in Two Minutes Flat!"

But too often, Bicycling seemed little more than a shill for the bike industry. Their regular "buyer's guide" issue seemed like free advertising – and a not-so-soft sell, at that.

The magazine had enough interesting stuff, though, so that I saved a bunch of old copies. And recently I've been leafing through them in search of past articles, like the one about the 90-year-old.

I noticed that not only was Bicycling a shill for the industry it supposedly covers impartially. It was a shill for Lance Armstrong.

It's really sad to see all that old stuff, now that Armstrong has suffered his spectacular fall from grace. There are countless articles from Armstrong's heyday, with titles like, "How Lance Will Win Tour #5." For years, he was Bicycling's cover boy.

I've written elsewhere that Armstrong almost certainly used performance-enhancing drugs. That topic is not the purpose of this essay. I guess I don't really know what the purpose is, except to illustrate what I consider media hypocrisy. It is true that I haven't checked out Bicycling magazine on a regular basis in years. But it is also true that I heard its editor talking disparagingly about Lance Armstrong in an interview on NPR about a year and a half ago, before the fish really hit the fan. He said he had the goods on him: yes, he doped. He was a cheat. What a sad day for cycling.

Now that Armstrong had served his purpose to Bicycling, this editor was prepared to piss all over him.

Why Are You Here?

Lung gets very little traffic. I wish I could do something to boost readership; no one likes having their stuff ignored. But first and foremost, I enjoy writing. I like doing these posts. If no one reads them – well, so be it.

Lately, though, there has been a jump in readership. Nothing huge, but noticeable. I can only measure this by the hit counter provided by blogger.com. Over the last couple of months, it shows readership going from almost nil, to an average of thirty or so hits per day.

How come? I have a theory...

The most popular (if that's the right word) post here is a little ditty from 2011 called The Amazing Toilet. It is not a particularly amazing post. It is not particularly amusing, either, or insightful. Nothing like that. So why the sudden increase in hits?

I think that out there in the vastness of cyberspace, there are lots of people with backed up or broken toilets. Rather than search the Yellow Pages, they turn first to the all-knowing Internet. With just a few carefully chosen keywords, they wind up at "The Amazing Toilet." It tells them nothing about fixing a busted potty, but does go on for several paragraphs about how ingenious is the modern commode.

It's gotta be something like that.

A distant runner-up to The Amazing Toilet is Litterbugs, Part 10: Zug Island, a reflection on an industrial dump in Detroit. Its popularity really stumps me. Well behind the toilet post and Zug, in position #3, we find a rather charming, uncharacteristically sentimental ode to a dearly departed ballyard entitled Last Look, to which I will admit being proud of.

President Obama: Election Aftermath

Too often, I fear the worst is about to happen.

Like last week, when I all but resigned myself to the election of Mitt Romney as President of the United States.

Of course, I was wrong. And happily so. And when all is said and done, there isn’t much change in this post-election era. Same president. Same Republican-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate.

Yet I honestly believed that the zealots were about to storm D.C.

On Election Day morning, I left the house fearing the worst. The sign at left had caught my eye a week or so before and I wanted to make a record of it. It was about a half-hour’s bike ride from my house, and on the outskirts of town – a liberal bastion in Colorado.

Later in the day I got what turned out to be the last of countless robocalls that have come in recent months. A woman’s voice, simultaneously sultry and outraged, said, “President Obama has failed to unite us.” I hung up.

That evening I settled before the idiot box for what I assumed would be a very long, very painful night of election returns. I was most interested in the Presidential race, although there were other races and ballot issues I hoped to hear about. Imagine my surprise when Obama’s re-election was called before 9:30!

It turned out to be a great night for the Democrats. Some lunatic Republicans went down to well-deserved defeat (I’m thinking of Akin and Mourdock in particular). Strides forward on gay marriage. A couple of states, including my own, even legalized marijuana, although how that shakes out remains to be seen.

On Wednesday I went back to where that nutty sign had been, wondering whether it might have been taken down, or perhaps amended with some new dire warning of the coming apocalypse...

Postscript: I went by a second  time later that day, and the entire sign had been removed!