Harrumph!

Is it a senior moment when I mis-date an event in the Google calendar? I did and shall follow up on the state of cycling in Boston as soon as the report appears on the city site.

Dumbly, I not only put the day for in-person delivery for this evening instead of last evening when it occurred. I also tweeted and Cinched that. I have removed those erroneous leads and apologize if I confused anyone.

As a relentless (and my sons say weather-foolish cyclist), I do keep tabs on the situation. I am pretty sure that there will be incremental improvement data and forecasts on the continuing addition of bike lanes, racks, bus racks and such. In addition, our city’s cycling goddess (a.k.a. bike coordinator) Nicole Freedman is after a bicycle-sharing program here.

Truth be told, I’m less sanguine about the future of the latter. I’ll cover that more in future posts.

If today’s bitter cold has you off your bike and in your TV chair, you can keep  your mind focused with two Left Ahead! oldies. A year ago, we chatted with Freedman and a few months before that with her Cambridge counterpart Cara Seiderman.

Otherwise, I offer mild redress for my error with previous related posts. Click on Cycling to the left or here for those.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, bikes, Boston, Seiderman, Freedman

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We people could used more RAM.  In common public activities — for this post, think walking, cycling and driving — there are a ton of data to analyze every second. Yet the human norm is to limit the input, to be overly selective in using our brains.

A fatal example occurred in Boston when an 84-year-old walked out into traffic on Friday. A cyclist knocked  him to the curb, where he hit his head. He died two days later in the hospital.

Like competing Greek choruses,  we immediately heard:

• The large subset of bicyclists are all monsters! String ‘im up.
• A very quiet repeating chant of make the roads safe for cars, walkers and pedalers.
• A small subset of grumblers about crazy pedestrians.

I have a stake in all the races here, being a multi-modal guy (add the subway or T as we call it here). Moreover, I have been hit by car drivers four times. The first, at age 6, was my fault; I ran across the street in front of a car with a green light. The second and extremely serious, at 19, was when another of the six students in my Greek class (yes, a third of the class was involved) wasn’t paying attention and flung me up and through his VW’s windshield. Twice as an adult cyclist in Boston,  I was hit by drivers who simply did not pay attention to the road and plowed into me when I had the right of way and was looking.

Yesterday’s fatality, Henry Haley, was elderly and according to the Globe not too healthy. Yet that was an unnecessary death and he might have had another decade or more of enjoyment and participation coming. The cyclist, identified by the Herald as 22-year-old Julian Paul Cavarlez-Flores of Randolph (probably a 15 to 18 mile bike ride), apparently had no chance to stop when Haley stepped into traffic against the light and not in a crosswalk.

The cyclist’s being legally in the right doesn’t bring Haley back any more than it will keep Cavarlez-Flores from forever replaying the panic and impotence at the appearance and impact. By the bye, he remained, tried to help and cooperated with police. Witnesses said it was Haley’s doing.

Here, I’m huge on multi-modal transportation. Search the cycling posts on this spot and at Marry in Massachusetts to find posts on Boston’s cycling defects and advances, on the Moving Together and Rail-Volution conferences, and on efforts to make ped/car/bike transit safe and inviting for all. Some of the ideas we are finally copying from Europe (think NYC’s separated walker and cyclist lanes) will make big leaps in that direction, but they will be a long time coming.

Let’s leave aside the wild-eyed get-off-my-road attitude of overly aggressive and overly entitled drivers. Think instead of the attention factor. Through what appears to be a combination of dull wits, low process capacity or perhaps just laziness, most us don’t make the effort to keep others on the road safe.

Try any American beltway or interstate to see this in action. A long and wide cascade of red tail lights, often with spots of squealing brakes and tires, occurs regularly. That’s no act of God. Instead, most of us drive right in front of our cars’ hoods. Were we looking a little farther and wider, we could see this truck cutting of that car, a sudden slowing a few hundred yards away, a state-police car off in the right shoulder, or drivers blocked up behind some slowpoke in the far left lane.

Ideally, there’d be no tailgating and no mass surprises…if drivers took in the horizon and looked up from their hoods. Yet, doing that requires brain power, of the type nearly all of us can perform if we choose. There are many ocular messages and a few aural ones involved. We can’t be twisting the CD player dial or reaching for a map or watching the GPS display. We actually have to pay attention and use our processing power all the time.

Cyclists should do that too and in self-preservation, most are better at it than drivers. The potentially fatal hazards — almost entirely from inattentive or hostile drivers or from pedestrians — are constant in the city.

Consider tinted windows, which I consider hazardous both to the driver and to those around the car. Drivers lose some visibility in any darkened condition. Far worse is the elimination of field of vision for those beside or behind in the constant turning or lane changing conditions. Many of those tints are just too deep for safety and an annoyance to fellow drivers.

For a cyclist, tinted windows can be super-dangerous. On streets, even those with painted bike lanes, there is a constant risk from gormless drivers suddenly flinging doors open into traffic. If they knock a cyclist into traffic or if the pedaler hits the door, it means serious injury and even death. Dooring is a far greater cause of death and injury to cyclists than collisions between bikes and pedestrians.

The self-defensive solution is for cyclists to process constantly. It is not the option most drivers consider in their metal cages. Every parked car may contain a driver or passenger about to throw the door open without looking (violation of state law, by the bye). That processing does not mean cyclists can take their eye off the road ahead or to either side. Instead of slowing to pass as legally required, many drivers blow the horn as though that suddenly will make the bicycle disappear.

As I go by various transit methods, I am pretty sure that city cycling has a similar effect as hard crosswords. Both (particularly cryptics in the latter group) make the brain process more information, keeping it sharp. Ideally, everyone would regularly be a driver, walker and cyclist too. Dealing with the spatial realities of each could give us both insight and empathy to the others.

Pity that Mr. Haley died from the collision. Yet, this is such a rare event that it got and likely will continue to get media coverage locally. In contrast, cyclists injured by drivers are not news and those killed by a car or truck driver tend to hit the neighborhood weekly only.

It’s too glib to note that the common-sense prevention is to watch where we walk, rdrive or bike, as well as obey those pesky laws and regulations about traffic lights, crosswalks and turns. Instead, some of us are compelled to extreme caution by the abandon of others. I think of River Street in Hyde Park from Cleary to Logan Squares. On this always busy road, pedestrians of all ages, with and without their children, stride suddenly between parked cars and traffic, with no attention to the nearby crosswalks. As a dad who drilled it into my three sons never to assume drivers are looking out for you, I remain astonished that parents would risk their kids’ lives constantly. I bike and drive that stretch cautiously.

Our behavior in many cities and most the nation being what it is, we end up adjusting the mechanics to cope as best possible. That’s why we have sidewalks and here a few inconvenient bike paths and increasing mileage of bike lanes. We have to protect people from each other far more than civility and reason would otherwise demand.

I don’t know that we’ll ever get to the fully separated and pretty safe car/ped/bike lanes here. Yet that is more likely to happen than that other solutions — hard traffic enforcement. If word got around that Boston’s blue boys charged drivers with running red lights, cutting off or j-hooking cyclists, threatening pedestrians in crosswalk chicken and such,  we’d see a very different transit environment.

Forget that.

Instead, the crowds have competing calls of blame for bad walkers and bad pedalers. The real problems are streets not yet set up for multi-modal transit and drivers creating a wild-west-style roadway. Here’s betting that we patch the signs, paint the lanes and separate travel areas long before we force drivers to behave.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, drivers, Boston, pedestrian, Henry Haley, bike lanes

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Blemished fruits and vegetables separate humans philosophically. Much like admiring a pretty woman or handsome man, even the plainest of us demands more of the objects of our voyeurism than we provide.

I am in my 30th year of shopping at Boston’s Haymarket, 32nd if you count college days when I lived in Cambridge for a bit. I absolutely adore the rickety stalls on Blackstone Street. Also, much like my family members, I have a broad view and make allowances.

Not all are so forgiving.

I recall my late mother-in-law tsk-tsking over my Saturday harvests when she was on one of her protracted visits. For example, I’d bring back a full flat (12 pints overflowing of strawberries) and separate and clean them. A few pints would have a couple of moldy berries.

Sylvia would give a loud and long, “What a shame!” with great sincerity. While I paid 30¢ or perhaps 50¢ per pint, she thought I would have been better off paying $2 or $3 a pint in the supermarket. True enough, there were unlikely to be any moldy fruit in those. Then again, they would be half white and as tasteless as packing peanuts.

It would be the same with those tomato-like objects supermarkets stock and sell, the more or less permanent things, hard and vaguely pink, with no scent or flavor. Yet, they too would be without blemish.

I thought of her again recently as a blogger acquaintance exchanged a few emails with me on the subject. One included:

Our biggest problem with Haymarket is quality.  The prices are fantastic but often we throw out more than we eat which makes us do two things: 1) question whether the low prices are truly economical and 2) feel like we are being incredibly wasteful consumers.  I would love to try the market again but am trying to find strategies that make it truly worth it.

 

I suspect I can do what he wants, but perhaps not exactly as cleanly as he wants. Among the overlapping issues there are:

• Some vendors specialize and there are the right places to buy fresh herbs or citrus or root veggies. I can help there.
• Some is frequency. The vendors know me by face after so many years and quite a few will warn me off something that isn’t that good on a particular weekend.  He’d have to show up and greet them as though he were French for awhile to get that.
• Some is watching, particularly the college students as summer help. Be sure to see that they take the product they sell in plain sight. When they bend out of sight to a hidden box, that’s often trouble. Hear how the Asian-American women yell at them if they try that.
• Accept that the cheapest is sometimes the riskiest. Most fruits and veggies and half or a quarter of supermarket prices. That written, it makes sense to scan the Thursday grocery fliers; sometimes the supers have a great loss leader like 77¢ a pound black grapes that you may not be able to top at the Haymarket. Mostly though if the green beans are 75¢ and gorgeous, don’t hold out for the 4 pounds for a dollar; you can be pretty sure the vendor dumping goods at absurd prices has stuff bad or about to go bad. Many would rather dump that, but a few will appeal to greedy shoppers.
• If you want to get serious about a trip, walk through the front and then the back of the market. After all, it’s one long block and two perpendicular short half-blocks. See what looks good and fix the prices for your favorites on the way. Then swing back through with the bags you remembered to bring (I use a huge messenger bad for most stuff).

Back to the philosophical part, my mother-in-law did not grow veggies and fruits for subsistence. My grandfather, William B. Michael, did and had since the Depression.  Granddad taught me many realities of vegetative matter.

By the bye, my mother said she, her brother and sister, and their mother really didn’t know there was a Depression. That is, they were not grossly ignorant, rather Granddad had them covered. He had a full-time job (48 years on the B&O). He sold Chevrolets on the weekend. He had a part-time dry cleaner and tailor shop next to the house. Then, there were those gigantic gardens.

By the time my grandmother (with neighbors, children and grandchildren) canned, the shelves lining the basement floor to ceiling has Ball jars galore and the huge freezer was full of bags of Lima beans, corn and more. Snap beans, tomatoes, pickles and…it never seemed to stop.

My mother also told of how embarrassed she had been to wear homemade clothes from her father. Then she went away to college and bought clothes off the rack. She be damned, they didn’t fit perfectly. She had worn tailored clothes until she was 18!

Many summers I worked with him from weeding through harvest on several acres. He was a great respecter of people, but also of vegetables and fruit. He taught me enjoyment of what we grew as well. If it was time for asparagus, we’d walk down one of the 100-foot rows, cutting the perfectly ripe spears. Lightly steamed minutes later, they were sublime.

I also learned to take beautifully ripe tomatoes, redolent with that slightly acrid sweetness, and if one of the gems had a spot of blight or mold, we’s cut that and direct it to a stew or other sauce. The taste and color were great. As with today, the “bad” tomatoes were far better used that way than any permanent supermarket food.

So that is another philosophic angle of food. From a man who waltzed his family through the Depression, Granddad avoided waste. He also knew sapid from insipid.  I refuse to fill my mouth with bland food as a result.

Many Haymarket fruits and vegetables are ripe and ready. The supermarkets don’t want that, regardless of the grand tastes and aromas. They need food that will ship around for a week and sit in the store for two more without showing blemishes or mold. That’s the sturdy, Styrofoam® stuff you find behind the salad bar sneeze guard.

None for me, thanks. I’ll take the lush and ready-to-eat stuff. I’ll toss the occasional really bad piece and make the most of those with minor flaws. I’m not perfect and don’t demand perfect appearance of every tomato and strawberry.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, vegetables, Haymarket, flexibility, philosophy

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Sing, Goddess. Sing the skill and glories of Quad Bikes.

Saturday, I had a second wonderful experience with them, or specifically with David. I fully expect a third of three next week.

Anyone who knows me understands how I love biking and how I can harrumph about typical bike-shop dealings. The people at Quad (on the Radcliffe quadrangle) have disarmed me. I have told drinking buddies and now expand my own song of praise.

A tip of the toupee has to go to the Weekly Dig, which published one of their typical quarter-assed guides in May. This was the briefest of sketches for a wee selection of area bike shops, comparing tune-up prices.  Quad stood out there with kind of a warning that went off for me — did their much cheaper price mean much lower quality?

I had reason to find out a couple of months later. Regular readers know I have been recovering from serious leg surgery. I’m slower than before I got an ankle-to-knee titanium tibia nail, but I kept hoping some of my diminished speed was the condition of my road bike.  So, I decided it was time to tune up the equipment as well as me and figured at $36, I wasn’t risking much. That’s about a third of what Wheelworks charges.

So, the answer to the warning is no, siree. Quad is as good, much faster and really understanding of customer relations.

Service or Serve Us

To my normal repair-shop rants, they are notorious for not meeting their promised dates, making mistakes, delivering less than you pay for, charging a lot, and far too often being arrogant or sullen or both.

In contrast, the non-profit gentlemen (no distaff staff in sight) are pleasant, even jolly, as well as highly competent. Perhaps being only in their 20s has so far inoculated them from the grumpiness of stereotypical bike-shop guys.

I could go on about the tune-up I got for my road bike. Suffice it to say it was excellent work at the best price I have seen in the past 20 years. Moreover, it was one-day service and they accurately said when it would be done.

Consider though my panic  last week. Since my operation, almost daily biking has been essential, physically and emotionally, to my leg rehabilitation as well as fitness and weight control. When my chain snapped Wednesday as I headed up the 12- to 15-degree grade hill heading home, I was a bit concerned. Then when I replaced the chain with its many thousands of miles, I was very concerned as the new one seemed fine…all except for serious skipping and slipping under load up hills. There are many hills to and from the Y, in addition to the killer alp I face whenever I want to get to my new home.

I had already arranged to bring by my over 20-year-old Schwinn Sierra (that brand’s original mountain bike, heavy and hard tail) for evaluation. So, I called to see whether they’d squeeze in a repair of my road bike as well, to find if I had goofed up the chain installation or the bike had worn components that limited me to flat land.

This was a Saturday and a typical bike shop might have said, “Sure. Get in line. We’ll give you a mechanic’s time after Labor Day.” Quad said to bring it over. Holiday weekend or not, they kept to the 1 to 6:30 hours.

I got two joys from them:

1. They diagnosed and fixed my road bike within the hour of my arrival.
2. They said my old, beaten-up mountain bike could be fixed enough to make it a useful commuter.

In honesty, my baleful countenance may have aided in the road-bike repair. David’s a great enough guy and at least as enthusiastic as I about cycling. He responded when I moaned. Rather than simply feel gratitude that they’d fix it before the end of the day,  I found that he offered to do the job immediately.

His diagnosis, which he showed me proof for, was that my old chain had married to the rear cassette cogs as it stretched and they wore down. The new chain, which I had apparently put on well and the proper length was too healthy and accurate. It slid right off the worn cogs.

Out of Service, Alas

That required a new cassette in the rear wheel. Not only did they have a compatible one in the store room, but he would do the job that day.

I asked if I should disappear for a few hours (thinking that Cambridge Common, a bar with a great selection of taps and low prices was two blocks away). David looked at me and either to keep me sober or more likely to keep my cycling vital said he’d do it within 15 minutes or so. I can’t imagine that service and responsiveness from Belmont Wheelworks or Ferris Wheels or other bike shops I’ve used.

Realistically, inserting that repair in the queue made a negligible difference to other customers but huge one to me. It counters what I had to do in one of my college jobs in a German deli. The owner there insisted in absolute FIFO service. Even if I had to wait for part of one customer’s order to grill, I wasn’t to switch to a single item for another. First come and all that…

At Quad, David did what he said. The bill was low — $40 and change for part and labor. I was road ready as well as placated.

For the Schwinn, it was my first mountain bike. It had been down a lot of hills, back when I used the downhill beast to go up hills, over boulders and down the other side. I am emotionally attached. I have given other cycles to Bikes Not Bombs and put my Girvin with the frame crack in the trash.  I’ve lugged this beaten-up buddy around. Its gears need serious adjustment and likely new cables for them and the brakes. The headset is a bit wobbly too.

David said he can get it into shape for my fall and winter riding, conditions too perilous for a road bike with 23 or 25mm tires. In the snow, that would be like walking in socks on a huge porcelain plate.

Quad, by the bye, has the rights to the many abandoned bikes on the Harvard and Cliffy campuses. Students and others lock and leave their losers rather than bother paying for help or fixing them. Quad takes those declared vagrant by the Harvard cops and repairs and sells, or if necessary, junks them. Their mechanics have lots of experience making the inert roll again. It seems my Schwinn is not as abused and neglected as many of those.

If you need a second or an inexpensive mountain or road bike, Quad is likely to have several choices. Particularly in the late fall or winter and spring, they reclaim quite a few and tend to sell them in the $100 to $250 range after rehabilitation. That’s a bargain as well as environmentally sound.

Having written for the management and business press for years before turning to tech writing, I see Quad as a big step above average customer service. Far too many companies, even little ones, seem to think customers are there for profit and convenience, not to serve and satisfy. In contrast, Quad staff grok customers’ needs. I have already told numerous people about the glories of these guys and shall continue to do so.

Not only does Quad keep me on the road, its staff give a damn about doing so.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, tune-up, cycling, Quad Bikes, Cambridge

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Public curses have their time. I place one now on the yellow-bag tosser. May he or she have perpetually clogged toilets and sinks.

Today, I experienced what we in my family drolly call a personal tragedy. That is in dual honor of Morse Peckham’s insightful Beyond the Tragic Vision as well as American hyperbolic self-pity.

Mine was a personal cycling tragedy.

After tooling to Davis Square and then stopping in Porter on the way to the bottom of Hyde Park looking for a specific book to give a friend, I did the wise cycling citizen thing and stopped next to two Cambridge motorcycle cops at a light by Lesley.

Apparently during the full, long light cycle, a flimsy yellow newspaper delivery bag blew onto one of the two pulley wheels in my rear deraillleur. Like some silent-movie slapstick guy I stomped the pedals leading the cops at the green. That didn’t last. My chain grabbed and the rear wheel froze, replete with thudding and tire complaints.

Dismounting, I found the damage. I had never heard of such an absurd bike problem, but I wasn’t going anywhere until I fixed it.

The fix was messy and long, about 35 minutes. The bag was thoroughly enmeshed into the pulley and related derailleur parts. It picked up and smeared about the wet lube from the gears and chain. It folded into the working of the derailleur and pulley itself.

As my fingers smeared with tenacious grease and accompanying road grime, I hacked, pulled, pushed, yanked and tore at the bag pieces. The pulley remained locked and strangled. I had my multi-tool, so I could use the straight-blade screw driver and two of the smaller Allen wrenches to help. Eventually, blackened strand by greasy strand, the bag yielded and the pulley turned.  I could then pick out the smallest pieces freezing the inner gear.

I’ve gotten flats from glass residue left by clever folk who smash bottles in the street. In fact that happened a couple of times next to the Northeastern police HQ, where it seems college louts think it fun to break beer bottles in cops’ territory. I learned to avoid those couple of blocks of Columbus when I was bike commuting to Ft. Point Channel. A ruined road bike tire and tube are in the nature of $60, so this was economically less painful.

Done in by a plastic bag is a first for me. Surely a grocery-weight one would not have caught in the gears. For this one, it’s very likely that someone carried the newspaper from front stoop to work or college or on the way to the T. All it took then was for the old cigarette-butt style toss or letting the bag sort of fly toward a trash can for it to become a weapon of personal tragedy on a windy morning.

I have many flaws, which I won’t reveal here and now. Littering is decidedly not among them. I even gathered the many, greasy shards from my bike repair and hobbled in my cleated bike shoes to the distant trash can to push the mess deep into the bin.

My curse reminds me of early, culturally slanted humor from some Bennett Cerf book of my mother’s. As I recall it, two Scotsmen were staggering home after a few drams. One would stop by a streetlight every so often, bend to the pavement and stand up abruptly, angry and muttering. Finally, his companion could take it no longer and asked what was happening.  The reply was, “If I ever catch that that rascal that spits like a quarter, I’ll do him in!”

My yellow-bag tosser curse carries at least that much animus.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, litter, curse

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You want green? How ’bout those green burials?

What, you say they’re illegal in Massachusetts, which is why we don’t have that option. You say wrong.

Cross-Post Note: This appears at Marry in Massachusetts.

The cemetery (public as well as private) and funeral businesses refuse to offer the choice. There is no law and in some places a simple, easily overturned local ordinance would be the only impediment.

Don’t take my word. Come to Cambridge to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Story chapel. At 1 p.m., Mark Harris will talk about his research on and the status of green burials. He wrote Grave Matters: A journey Through the Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.

We can pretend that if we have an embalmed corpse, a metal casket, a cast liner, and then a durable gravestone, we provide some eternal presence. Of course, in our heart of hearts we know that at best those wasteful and expensive symbols for those still alive will last a hundred or maybe a thousand years. In Earth time, that wouldn’t be a single Cheerios in the cereal box of eternity.

The traditional form of nearly all cultures was to wrap the corpse and put it in the ground or a cave to dissolve, to return its elements. Really, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. That seems what we should all want.

My wife and I would like the idea of snuggling down into the earth. That was very real to me last week as I went into my first surgery and first general anesthesia. Hell, people die on the operating table!

We do no have the option citizens do in Maine, California, South Carolina and elsewhere. Hmm. Our advocates are the soft-spoken Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts.

They are nice folk, but we all have that limbo problem. There are no laws preventing green burials in the commonwealth. Individual cemeteries would have to offer or be started to offer them.

I suspect Harris will speak of the funeral biz’ tactics of saying terrible things will happen if they don’t pump poisons into our corpses and don’t bury is in the full armored vehicle of death. They even say without the concrete grave liner, it’s hard for the lawn-mowing crew. Somehow people managed on this planet for thousands of years and even learned such incredible engineering feats as piling extra dirt on top to allow for settling.

It appears we’re going to have to ask for the option. We’re going to have to say we don’t want to bury high-carbon footprint caskets and trappings, along with highly-toxic embalming fluid. We’re going to have to say we’d like to go out naturally.

I’ll be there on March 21st, likely still on crutches or walker.

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On Wednesday, the 17th, we get Nicole Freedman on the Left Ahead! podcast. She’s Boston’s bike czar, with the unenviable task of changing us from bike unfriendly.

It’s good that Mayor Tom Menino got behind cycling. It’s great that he named such a driven person to head this effort.

She’s taken the best from Cambridge’s solid cycling programs, as she described at the Moving Together conference two months ago.  There was no doubt she was starting from way behind, but she developed a master plan and is attacking it like it was a race.

She’ll talk to us about some of the things we’ve seen. That includes bike lanes whenever a street gets restriped or resurfaced. Not only does that increase cyclist safety, but it also gets drivers to start thinking of bikes and sharing the road.

She’s targeted some easy efforts — figuring out where bike racks will help and putting them there, some harder ones — cages at major T stops and bus bike racks on crosstown routes, and will tell us what her most serious challenges are.

Maybe you’re like me who bikes whenever you can. Maybe you’d bike more if you felt safer doing it. Maybe you wonder why anyone would even think of biking in Boston. Regardless, Freedman is worth a listen.

You can hear the live stream 12/17 at 2:30 p.m. or check Left Ahead! for the podcast later.

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Lackaday,  I have not been faithful to Lola.  After looking through — it is so LITE that reading is not a word to use with it — the first two issues, I didn’t even open the street box door to get the next eight.

Today though at the Haymarket, I noticed the new cover, the new promise on the 11th issue. The October low-low-Lola fairly shouts that this is THE AUTHENTICITY ISSUE (in seasonal pumpkin orange). Oh, in our jaded age, who amongst us should reject authenticity?

Pic Trick: Click thumbnail for larger view. Use your browser back button to return.

The humor here (to all but the Globe and owner NYT managements) is that Lola is thick and full of advertising. At the same time, the feeble local parent is combining sections, trimming its dimensions and throwing staff out of the troika into the dangerous economic night.

The success is not surprising under the tweaking palms of editor Kara Baskin. She has been hitting Boston FOXnews and the circuit promoting her book Size Matters.  For a trifling $14, you can “(clear) up mysteries about male anatomy, orgasm, masturbation, STDs, testosterone, impotence, sexual response, and much more.” This may not be all fluff, as the lead author is a urologist, Harry Fisch.

What is biz news is that in the print-is-dead era, a narrow, yuppie book, as the trade is wont to call a magazine, would float. A look at the box locations may clarify here. There are 125 boxes in Boston. They are where the slick and sleek sleep — Beacon Hill, Back Bay and South End primarily. There are also smaller clumps in money pouches — 43 in Newton, 32 in Cambridge, 30 in Brookline and 34 in Wellesley. Check the ads and reach for your AMEX Platinum cards, kiddies.

It’s smart marketing and positioning. The heft and ad volume look pretty good. They don’t seem to have captured the Neiman Marcus-level stores or the $45-entrée restaurants…yet.

Another savvy Lolaism is counterintuitive. Most of us are used to getting news and views online. Even for papers and magazines we get delivered, we like to read these online. Not with Lola.  The site has no content related to the maggy. Somebody smart realized the value of telling advertisers that readers have to hold it, open it and be exposed to the actual sales pitches. That doesn’t work for news, but for women’s service magazine content, it’s heap clever and workable.

So, take Lola at its word. Oops, the Baskin refers to the maggy as she. Let’s see how authentic the contents of the authenticity issue is.

The  genuineness level is about the same as a socialite’s welcome or good wishes.

Perhaps the most risible feature is the Good Deeds one. Its title is broken by an asterisk — acts of kindness* *that are easy to do. Let that roll around in your mind a bit.

On the surface, this is about helping others, but the two points for Lolaoids are 1) You don’t have to put yourself out much and 2) You can feel good, even self-righteous. So there. This is about the reader/consumer and not hoi polloi.

As a UU, I have to qualify that though. Our associati0n’s churches are full of checkbook liberals. Many of our pledge units don’t do squat for others directly, but their money keeps the church operating and goes to good causes. They are doing good stuff, even if at arm’s length. The walk for this or that and the chip in for special collections types are essential and positive, in their way.

The five authenticity choices this month were:

• Donate books or read to kids waiting for pediatric checkups in a clinic.
• A walk-for fund-raiser, this one for blood cancers.
• Join an anti-puppy mill/pet shop group, and maybe even leaflet for it.
• Spend a couple of hours in a big group cleaning up a park in Allston.
• Volunteer for a suburban humane society at a cat shelter.

Those are all good things. They also don’t inconvenience anyone or risk a long-term commitment. Feel good and walk away.

 Lola is at her best though in getting the privileged readers to write the copy. Consider the cover teaser promising Readers on Ditching Phoniness. Wowzers, lassies…enlightenment on a single page (12).

Keeping with its me-first attitude, Lola  rewards her authorettes. The favorite tip won a Lola handbag and Starbucks gift pack (with a $20 gift card, iced coffee bumbler, and bag of beans). This is a monthly shtick.

So in October, How Do You Avoid Being Fake? according to Lola readers?

1. Live the cliché. “…if I try to be the superhero that my dog believes me to be, then my values are aligned and the superficial wants and desires of day-to-day life don’t seem so important.”
2. Guilt trip relatives. One tipster emailed (cold, I say!) family not to send anything solid for her birthday. Instead they are supposed to figure out some unexpected good deed they could do for another. Ah, the self-righteousness  is contagious, as well as passive-aggressive.
3. Mingle with the other.  “Extend yourself to people who are different from you in terms of age, occupation, economic strata.” How egalitarian, no?
4. Goof on the blind. Volunteer at the Perkins School for the Blind. They literally won’t notice “your bad hair day…overdue mani-pedi, or…less than fabulous outfit.”
5. The winner:  Be superficial but mean it. Like a parody of a Southern Belle, Annette from Milton states, “Superficiality becomes a problem when we are lazy and apply the mechanics of social graces, but not the spirit to situations (and people) that deserve something more.”

The entire maggy is what the industry calls toilet reading. Those are the short, simple-minded snippets that take under two minutes to read and do not require analysis. It’s a formula that has been successful for many newsstand and supermarket pubs, most aimed at women.

Lola has found its audience it would seem, as well as enough advertisers.  It will probably thrive even as the Globe suffers. If your brain is crying out to be entertained but not made to work, you know where to head.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, publishing, Boston Globe, Lola

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As is my wont, I went to the annual Moving Together Conference. I’ll post some lore learned and some observations.

The first useful snippet came from Boston’s director of bicycle programs, Nicole Freedman, a.k.a. bike czar. She shared a session with Cara Seiderman, her Cambridge counterpart. There will be more on their show later, but the first thing to note is that Seiderman is the pro and we are the farm team. Freedman is working to change that.

Cambridge in an order of magnitude ahead of Boston in bike accommodation. We are still largely in the hatin’-them-Spandex-dudes cliché class. This is despite Mayor Tom Menino’s relatively new rotary joy.

Cambridge has bike lanes seemingly everywhere. They treat cyclists with respect and responsibility. Hell, they even ticket bike guys who run stop signs.

Freedman, the former Olympic and world champion biker, is, if nothing else, competitive. She wants us up and out quickly, chasing Seiderman’s rear wheel.

The former failed, fired bike czar, Doug Mink, was there as usual too. Freedman notes with affection and respect that he developed the major cycling plan she uses. Through circumstances and personalities downtown, he just didn’t get a chance to implement it. His office was dissolved; he was robbed.

She can point to many quick successes, maybe because we started from zero. That was zero bike lanes, almost no public bike racks and on and on. It’s facilities that encourage cycling and we didn’t have any.

Freedman is a perky and jolly sort. She notes with glee that she can and does plagiarize freely. Cities like Cambridge, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have done what we need to. She’ll take the best and avoid their stumbles.

Here, I’ll point to bike lanes. They make cycling more desirable. Cyclists ride the direct routes, which generally means the main thoroughfares and not the buckled and often slow and few paths. She’s trying to use efficiency, common sense, and cheapness, while obeying the laws.

As noted in some of the earlier years’ postings on this conference, when a road gets rehabbed or even re-striped, it has to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists unless that is wildly impractical (like stone walls in the country). That’s required to get the state and federal highway funds. Freeeman is doing her damnedest to make sure that really happens and cycling considerations don’t get waivered out.

An example of her what’s-possible and low-hanging fruit is bike paths. A few major avenues, primarily around the central fist of the city and near universities, have already gotten them. Another is in the shot above, American Legion Highway in Roslindale.

This two-plus-mile stretch of the pretty straight thoroughfare is known as a death highway in my parts of JP. There are quite a few pathetic carnival-class plush animals in colors that have never appeared in nature. Tied to phone or light posts, these memorial artifacts mark where some late night or early morning drunken or drugged up driver raced down the road before careering into a tree or median.

It has four broad lanes with trees in the middle and on each curb. Now it suddenly has a bike lane next to each curb running from Walk Hill to Blue Hill. In typical Bostons fashion, if you bike to Walk Hill Street, you’re on your own from there, but let us praise two miles of relative safety.

The stripes went down in a recent resurfacing. As you regular readers know, I can quibble, as in:

• There are no markings or signs of any type indicating what the bike lanes are.
• Drivers don’t get it and many encroach into the lanes.
• Neither side has NO PARKING signs, and many cars use the Blue Hill end by Franklin Park as a parking lane, endangering both cars and bikes.
• The newish 30 MPH limit is, shall we say, not fully in the public consciousness. Biking the route today, I estimate that the average speed was 45, with many going faster.
• Cyclists don’t yet know it is there.
• It’s not the best example of where people live to where they want to travel.
• The bike lanes are broad, as in the picture at Walk Hill (click for a larger view) where they piggyback on a bus zone, but narrow in the Northern region to perhaps 3 or 3.5 feet, not really adequate.
• The travel lanes are quite broad and should have each given another foot to the bike lane to make it safe.

All those listed, I’m delighted to see it and shall use it more. It whets the cycling appetite for accommodation.

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Regulars here or at Marry in Massachusetts know the deal. Get your lazy butts out of the Boston area and be in Lowell this weekend. This is the third weekend in July and for over two decades that means it’s the (fabulous, fun, free) Lowell Folk Festival.

In my not-so-subtle way, I continue to berate locals here for not trotting the half hour to Lowell for this. Yes, yes, I know that Lowell folk like many residents of smaller cities and towns, as well as those who live in suburbs, are provincial hicks about coming to Cambridge or Boston. We’re the same here. “Yeah, you’ve told me about it, but I’ve never been,” is typical from the insular slugs here.

If you’re real gritty, you can bike two plus  hours, but you can also take the train from North Station. Even if you insist on driving, you can park Lowell-y for about $5.

Let me be plain again. Do it!

By the bye, this is connected to the small-admission-price Lowell Summer Music Series. Those aren’t free but do have a wide range of well-known musicians and the occasional Shakespeare.

You like:

• Blues
• World
• Cajun
• Gospel
• Bluegrass
• Folk (U.S., African, European, whatever)
• Reggae
• Quebecoise

It’s all there and many other varieties. It’s non-stop on multiple stages. There are workshops. Oh, and there are a couple musical parades.  It’s free.

Can’t make Friday evening? Come Saturday. Can’t do Saturday. Come Sunday. Check the sked and the description of the performers.

We have gone from the beginning and never come home without one or more new favorites — musicians we didn’t know or barely knew whom we continue to enjoy as a result.

The warning is that the conflicts in simultaneous performances in six venues within easy walking distance make for tough decisions. Picking where to be when and sadly doing triage to decide whom you have to skip this time are hard.

It’s tempting to say you get your money’s worth. Just be sure when the pleasant volunteers come around asking for donations to keep the festival going and free that you chip in a few or five or ten bucks. You’re getting a whole day of music. At virtually every stop, you are right by the stage.

This is too good to pass up. If it’s your first time, go. You can evangelize to your friends next year.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Lowell, Boston, Lowell Folk Festival

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