Mastodon posts

1. here’s a tag you can mute, no hard feelings, ok cya later: #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

   the new valencia bicycle lane design is effectively an upside down muni track painted green down the center. I expect cyclists to eat shit when they try to enter or exit it mid-block just like we already eat shit when we have to ride parallel to them.

   I immediately take the car lane for the full block as soon as I see a car in the current bike lanes. “I got us a lane, come on in fellow riders, I think to myself”, and maybe I’m imaging it but I usually get a vibe of relief when the see another cyclist stuck in the bike lane realize that they can join me safely

   (while on bad days I’ll also mentally add, to myself, ”the people in cars will never respect you for following their rules, look out for yourself first”)

   #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

   so anyway, with an upside down muni track painted green, I’ll have to pretty much stop my bike to enter an unobstructed travel lane mid-block when the curbed bike lane is obstructed, so I will probably try to look farther up ahead and do it at intersections. it’s gonna be dumb but I’ll cope #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

   what really grinds my gears about the design is the repeated references to paint, signs, and enforcement: no left turn, no turn on red, and so on: imaginary safe places to be next to actually unsafe places to be

   maybe it’s my stupid vulgar marxism, or engineer-brain but that smacks of liberal metaphysics to me: deeply unserious magical thinking that inherently tolerates failure for the insanely shitty reason that its credulous to other unserious critics

   #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

   if your goal is zero deaths, this ain’t it. if your goal is zero injuries, this definitely ain’t it.

   We already have this pattern northbound on Valencia at 14th (at Zeitgeist). I always assume I’m going to be killed here and take the car lane before the intersection if I can, I’ve seen too many rights on red bearing down on other cyclists here

   it isn’t the driver’s fault, it’s simply a design failure with band-aides. it relies on signs, paint, and enforcement.

   #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

   

   

   

   so clearly the goal isn’t zero deaths, and the city should drop the vision zero pretense, it is absolutely stollen valor at this point

   I’m also pretty unsatisfied w/ the SF Bike Coalition line on this. They’ve never, in the history of the organization, been radical, but c’mon y’all “centering merchants voices?” sounds like something london breed would say.

   I probably won’t renew my membership #BicyclingInSanFrancisco

2. another one! “Death and the Gardener” by Jean Cocteau, fits in two posts:

   A young gardener said to his prince, “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning and he made a menacing gesture. Tonight I wish by some miracle I could be far away, in Ispahan”. The prince lent him his swiftest horse.

   That afternoon, walking in the garden, the prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you make a threatening gesture at my gardener this morning?” “It wasn’t a threatening gesture,” answered Death. “It was a gesture of surprise. I saw him far from Ispahan this morning and I knew I must take him in Ispahan tonight.”

3. going back for more Black Water, “Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties” ( https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/Enoch-Soames/) is fun both as a story and as motivation for silly nonsense (cw: spoiler,: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/a-memory-of-the-nineteen-nineties/376995/)

   Enoch Soames by Max BeerbohmEnoch Soames A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties By MAX BEERBOHM When a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I hadFull Text ArchiveA Memory of the Nineteen-NinetiesBeing a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to returnThe Atlantic

4. i’m sitting here watching this old jacques pepin video, he’s making a risotto milanese (with american brown rice), and he gets to the saffron and just whips out a tin that has an ounce of god damned saffron in it, lmao ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5vUuLh3ASQ)

   Tender Oso Bucco Recipe from Jacques Pépin | KQEDJacques Pépin conjures an imaginative Italian menu for special guests featuring oso bucco, "whole bone" veal braised with vegetables and broth until it is te...YouTube

   

   (if you haven’t made risotto m. recently, that’s about a hundred bucks worth of saffron. when I buy it at the grocery store I can get a hundredth of an ounce in a weird little bag for seven bucks)

5. “centering" “voices” “communities” “most vulnerable” “advocates”, etc, while maybe not originally liberal nonsense, is now definitely liberal nonsense. Stop the nonsense!