A Thousand Times No

While walking across town yesterday afternoon, I noticed a dark brown satchel sitting in the middle of a showroom window for a leather repair store.  I walked in and asked how much they wanted for the bag.  At $150, it was too cheap to be an authentic luxury label bag, and too expensive to be considered a genuine bargain as a fake.

But the damage was done — I was inside the shop.  The next thing I noticed was a table full of women’s shoes, all previously worn.  One of the leather experts in the shop explained that these were all shoe people had brought in for repair but had never returned to retrieve.

I picked up a pair of nearly new Nine West slip-ons and flipped them upside down.  The shop had replaced the tread on the shoes, and resurfaced the tall, chunky heels…with Vibram, the miracle substance that keeps people like me from tearing through shoe soles in just a single season.

“Oh, wow,” I said, cooing over the repair job, “these heels are done in Vibram.”

“You know about Vibram?” asked one of the people working in the shop.

“Best stuff, ever!” I replied enthusiastically.  Which made me okay by them.

Of course, the shoes came home with me, along with an abandoned Coach bag that needed a replacement strap.  When I got home, I chanced across a story in the Washington Post that described how tony Washingtonians were elated to discover chic couture castoffs during a Goodwill fundraiser at the French embassy last week.

“That’s Goodwill?!” one woman gasped as a model wearing an impeccably tailored French wool suit peacocked down the runway.

The chocolate-colored, satin sheath gown!

That velvet, midnight-blue suit!

The mink, oh, that MINK!

Eschewing any facade of fashion ennui, members of the crowd cheered and whistled and clapped for the clothes they loved.

Oh, ladies, please!  Where on earth have you been all this time?  Thrift is the new black, dahling, so take a number and get in line.

I just completed the final workout for the second week of Couch to 5K; for the moment, I’m still on the wagon.  My shins have not splinted, my ankles have not rolled, and my knees have not given out…yet.

I’ve been trying to baby my joints by making my movement as fluid and unjarring as possible.  The result, at least for the time being, is that I don’t look like I’m jogging so much as making a quick beeline for the ladies’ room whenever I step up the tempo.  But I’m pain-free so far, which is pretty much all that matters to me.

The measured, gradual pace of the program has been a godsend.  My muscles and respiration are fine, but my joints, tendons, and ligaments will always pose the threat of insurrection, no matter what activity I happen to pursue.  (After three ankle sprains, multiple cases of shin splints, and one MCL tear, I know it’s no idle threat.)

My friends who are really athletic have told me that slowly progressing towards running longer distances is as much a matter of negotiating a truce with various connective tissues as it is a matter of strength and stamina.  I’m hoping that my legs continue experience diplomatic immunity from injury in the weeks ahead.

Hmmm, perhaps this is the point at which I’m supposed to release the doves in the air?

Just how rough was this week for the American economy?  My neighbor down the hall is in the financial services industry; at the end of last year he seriously weighed an offer from Bear Stearns before turning it down for an internal promotion at his firm.

A friendly, charming guy who works hard and plays harder, he’s hosting a blowout in his apartment just now — nothing fancy, but quite audibly cathartic for him and his guests.  I can hear that a couple of his buddies are already well along on some serious benders.  They definitely seem to be trying to put this week as far behind them as they can, as quickly as possible.

No matter how hard they pound back the drinks tonight, come tomorrow morning, the party with the worst hangover will still be the Federal Reserve.

If the 35W bridge is back up in Minneapolis, it’s a good day.

The bridge is back.

It’s a good day, a really good day.

I began assembling some slides for a public presentation that I’m giving next week, and needed to start dropping in photos for a bit of visual interest.  Not just any photos, mind you, but reasonable illustrations of some of the things I’ll be talking about: goldfish, pigeons, rats, dogs.

I could scour the Intertubes for these sorts of things, but it’s faster to work from a searchable collection of stock photography.  Securing rights from the major players like Corbis or Comstock is simple enough, but the cost of keeping things street legal can immediately run into hundreds or thousands (!) of dollars.

Which is why I dropped by Stock.XCHNG, a free stock photo site.  I’ve been able to gather attractive, compelling images for several slide presentations there in the past, and they came through for me once again on this talk.

It’s definitely been the best experience I’ve had on any stock exchange so far this month.

After the past week, I don’t think the words “privatization” and “Social Security” are going to be playing together in public again any time soon, do you?

Wow, somebody got up on the wrong side of the pallet this morning…

Somebody in Dublin whose real name we don’t actually know, but who first stumbled upon this site over a year ago by Googling a search string involving certain anatomical acts and certain American cyclists.  Somebody who appears to have left a genuinely heartfelt comment noting, among other things:

In the universal scheme of things, you might someday want to be afforded some grace and leeway by humanity in general.

That’s all well and good.  But things start to get a little creepy when our reader in Dublin begins to circle back to this website, like a dog returning to its own sick, by Googling the pseudonym employed in the comment (along with the aformentioned act and cyclist).  This happens several times over the course of more than a year.

Why?  Search me.

One thing is clear, though — it’s not on a mission of grace and leeway towards humanity, as evidenced by the following comment on yesterday’s post that was held for moderation by my spam filter (Eircom, 83.70.200.241, 23:20 GMT today):

listen to you. Who gives a shit about
any of this crap. did you screw the crane
drivers wife or anything? no…. but every little
pathetic detail of your meaningless life you gotta bore the entire fucking internet with.

STFU Homo. So what if you have aids.

My dear friend in Dublin, nobody’s holding a gun to your head and making you return to this site.  These repeated visits are clearly quite tiresome for you.  Perhaps you should consider taking a deep breath and searching for more stimulating reading material elsewhere.

In the meantime, you might want to give it (and yourself) a rest from here on out.

Today was Bike Philly day, and quite a day it was.  As a person who is not of the morning persuasion, my biggest accomplishment for the day may well have been managing to get out bed shortly after 5am to meet up with dozens of other ride marshals in the dark at Eakins Oval, in front the the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I was assigned to be part of the team on the Strawberry Mansion Bridge, a glorious specimen of 19th-century ironwork perched high up over the Schuylkill River.  We had assembled in the wee small hours so that we had time for prep work in setting up the course: placing traffic cones, erecting signs, and chalking up the streets.

I started with a couple of enormous, fist-sized chalk crayons.  Within minutes, I was left with nothing but tiny chalk nubs — and blue-tinted hands that looked like they had been trapped in a powder room overrun with Smurfettes.

The rest of the morning, I was on my feet.  Standing at the fork in the road at the north end of the bridge, I was working with another marshal to keep the flow of traffic moving smoothly in opposite directions.  In these situations, the best surprise is no surprise: nobody clips another rider’s wheel, nobody skids out, nobody falls over.  I’m happy to report that absolutely nothing happened.

Watching thousands of riders go past, a few did manage to stand out.  The woman rolling by with a big smile and her pet chihuahua in her handlebar basket.  The guy on the wicked green chopper with the leopard-print seat. The man who efficiently laid his bike on the side of the rode and nimbly scrambled up an embankment to take a call from Mother Nature.  Oh, and the only individual who actually back-talked me as I was calling out directions, the guy in the — what else? — Rock Racing jersey.  (Okay, I get it, you’re baaaad, dude.  Whatever.)

After several hours of yelling, my voice still managed to stay put.  You could say I possess some stentorian pipes.  Or you could just call me a natural-born blowhard.  Either way, in a weekend filled with headlines about hurricanes, train wrecks, suicides, and financial collapses, the fact that so many of us have the health and good fortune to share a nice pedal through town on a sunny day counts as something to shout about.

I spent a large chunk of the day as a volunteer, helping to load up supplies for Bike Philly, our own fair city’s version of the ever popular, stop-the-car-traffic-and-flood-the-street-with-cyclists-for-one-weekend-morning-a-year ride (a la NYC’s Five Boro Bike Tour with its 60-second tour of the Bronx, or Portland’s Bridge Pedal).

In the warehouse where we were picking up supplies and loading them into vans for each respective feed stop on the route, things were stacked up on large, flat wooden skids.  I’ve always heard these platforms, designed to be raised off the ground with forklifts, referred to as “pallets.”  (Why the house restaurant in a local Sheraton hotel here in town is named “Pallet,” as opposed to either “Palate” or “Palette,” has always eluded me.  Was some brand manager encouraging me to lift my fork?  Color me dubious.)

While we didn’t use a forklift, we did work with a hefty manual pallet jack, which we winched up by hand under the weight of hundreds of bottles of water, numerous crates of bananas and oranges, and plentysomething energy bars in turn.  We were fortunate enough to count among the volunteers someone who had extensive professional experience in steering pallet jacks; he effortlessly shot the gap between piles of warehouse items without missing a beat, grazing a shin, or knocking over a single item.

Even his own wife was surprised, having never seen his impeccable piloting skills in action.  “I didn’t know you could do that,” she murmured approvingly.  He then nonchalantly mentioned three of four other warehousing skills he happened to have picked up along the way.

It’s always nice to be in the neighborhood when the superhero steps out of the phone booth, especially when he is good enough to help you herd cats…out of trees.

An update to my post from two months ago today:

It’s a cliché of American urban life that we say some parts of our cities are like war zones. But beyond the rhetoric, what does that actually mean?

Here are some numbers. As of July September 10th:

• Murders in Philadelphia in 2008: 166 228
• American military deaths in Iraq in 2008: 213 248

Those counts are both already too high, and too close for comfort. But here’s the twist:

• Murders in Philadelphia in 2007
  (through July September 10): 212 292
• American military deaths in Iraq in 2007
  (through June 30 August 31): 576 740

Philadelphia’s murder rate has declined during the past year, but not nearly as dramatically as the fatality rate for American military personnel serving in Iraq during that same time.

In other words, there’s a fighting chance that in 2008, there may be more murders in Philly than American military deaths in Iraq.

…I’m speechless.