Biking home today, on my regular commute.

Though, not really, because I didn't turn at the usual block.

So I'm biking a street off from the usual commute, and I wonder why I didn't turn.

And I come up and see a bicyclist on the left side of the street, biking against traffic. Wearing a helmet. In his mid-20s.

So I say, "Hey there."

He says, "Hey," in a friendly way. I slow down a bit to match him.

I say, "I hope you don't mind, and I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but did you know it's really dangerous biking on that side against traffic? Because the cars aren't looking for things moving at bike speeds on that side of the road. And that's really dangerous for you."

He stopped and looked confused. "But I thought we were supposed to go against traffic to see them better. For safety." He sounded betrayed.

I said, "It's safer if you're a pedestrian. On foot, you're moving slowly, it's fine to be on that side. But on a bike, according to law, you're a vehicle."

"Oh. Wow. Thanks."

"You're welcome. Yeah, I think a lot of people got told that in school a while ago, that they should bike against traffic, but it's really unsafe for you, and it's unsafe for bicyclists who are coming the other way. Nobody expects bikes to be there."

"Oh. OK."

"Take care."

"Yeah, have a good day."

And I biked on home, with a lump in my throat.


---

Today at lunch, melted_snowball and I were talking about the condition of being a bicyclist or pedestrian in this town, or in many places in North America. And we agreed there is no reason, other than lack of public will, for car/bike/pedestrian interaction to be as fraught as it is (particularly car/bike, but also bike/pedestrian). d. mentioned a friend's post today considering his choice to bike on less trafficked roads and to back away from engaging motorists who are being dangerous. This is come up regarding a recent grisly Toronto road-rage altercation that left a bike courier dead, though it's mostly gotten press because the motorist is a former Attorney General of Ontario charged with vehicular homicide. That situation is sad, but the overall condition of culture around bicycles is pretty damn sad too.

I want to see a lot more public will toward educating both cyclists and motorists about the rules of the road. I want to see a police blitz ticketing cyclists without lights or bells or running red lights; I want to see a lot of blitzes. I want to see a lot more adult defensive-cycling classes. (A national program recently sent a trainer-instructor here, for companies or individuals who wanted to teach cycling classes; I have heard nothing about its success or failures. And only heard about the program in take_the_lane's blog.)

But the status quo is deeply frustrating.

melted_snowball and I just took a fairly long Sunday Constitutional. We passed by the regional children's museum, which just opened an exhibit on Andy Warhol. So, it's interesting that Warhol has now become acceptable to teach to kids, which I suppose means they've built up enough socially-acceptable history or pseudo-history to paper over any hint of dangerous unacceptability? Or maybe that's just the cynic in me. We'll probably go see this some time soon to give us a better idea. As d. pointed out, the exhibit we saw with metalana in '06 did have a bit of the scary, but was fairly tame and "family friendly" (for certain values of family).

It's also interesting that they've programmed quite the speaker-series for Sunday afternoons through April, (jumping out for me: "Feb 1st – Kathy Battista, Director of Sotheby’s Insistute of Art, New York with Marie Burns and Amanda Kesner on Warhol, Wigs and Women: Identity Politics in Warhol’s Practice"). No mention of when on Sunday these talks are, though.

But I think the most interesting part of this was, one evening last week, Dave FM had a very long (3 minute?) discussion of why you should go to this exhibit and what Warhol is most famous for (Campbell's soup can, product design, "many films", no mention of sex). On the pop radio station. Which feels surprisingly subversive to me, pop radio talking about pop art.

Friday night, d. and I headed out to Drayton to see A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

It was a fun show, and I was impressed at how well it's stood up. It was probably quite scandalous for its initial run in 1962: we've got under-dressed courtesans, a bawdy house, lots of double entendres, a dirty old man, a tender virgin couple, and... well, you get the picture.

The story was simple enough as a carrier for the wonderful physical comedy and musical numbers. The only character who felt any more than two-dimensional to me was Pseudolus the slave, who was also the narrator; he's a scoundrel who drives the plot, but has second thoughts near the end about whether he should stay a slave or go through with trying to become free. The players were fine- particularly the male leads, who all did a fair amount of slapstick. The female leads, perhaps by design, didn't have as much to do in the first half, though the female love interest, Phila, carries off the role of naive well. The second half has an extended scene where everyone is running in some direction, and given the cast of almost 20, it was fairly impressive. The musical numbers had an element of, "oh yeah, that's from this too:" "Comedy Tonight" (which for me is permanently tied to the Muppets), "Pretty Little Picture," "[Isn't She] Lovely", and "Everybody Ought To Have a Maid." (which had a wonderful double encore, adding an additional performer each time).

The set was clever: three fairly ho-hum Roman stucco houses, but for emphasis the columns lit from the inside, sometimes with chaser-lights, sometimes all three houses at once.

My only complaints? The horn-player in the orchestra seemed to distract me more than the horn should've. Maybe it was just too loud. And 20 minutes intermission is too long for a show that starts at 8, especially if they hold a raffle at the end of it. But no matter, it was a fun evening with d. We've seen one other show in Drayton, Man of La Mancha last year, which was also well done. The Drayton run ended yesterday but if you're up for a drive, they're playing at the Huron Country Playhouse through the end of the August.

Does anybody have a moving dolly I can borrow so we can put our tomatoes on wheels?

Now that I've got your attention...

We've pressure-washed the deck in preparation for staining. Next step, waiting for a week of no rain, so it will be dry for staining. It's been a month, a very rainy month. The forecast is for rain on Monday.

Meanwhile, d. says the tomatoes need to be planted ASAP, if we're going to have tomatoes. We would like to put them on the deck, in the 3-foot by 3-foot homemade planter. That's a heavy amount of topsoil- maybe 650-800 lbs.

Interim smaller pots aren't as useful (says d.) because he'd have to water twice a day. Putting the planter elsewhere means it's annoying to water. So: I want to put it on wheels, so I can stain most of the deck, roll the planter onto the painted part, and stain the rest. I want to avoid cataclysmic planter failure, broken backs, or failing to stain the *(^%%^ deck this summer.


The tomatoes are busy growing under the_infamous_j's care, and dan told me today they really should be planted soon.

So is this a good plan? Can you think of better?

Additionally, does anybody have a spare pile of topsoil? d. says we need some. :)

1) Joel on Software did a wonderful demo on FogBugz this morning. I'm pleasantly surprised- it looks like a very well-thought-out piece of software. But it's mis-named. Bug-tracking is one of five tasks it tries to do well and in a novel way. The most surprising of these: along with its sophisticated-looking project-management tools, it does scary magic to turn programmers' predictions of task completions into a probability of shipping on a given date, and he even used words like "confidence distributions" and "Monte Carlo simulations" to make it sound legit. Maybe it is legit. I will play with their free demo and report back.

2) On a whim I asked for and received a second LCD monitor today. Because I've been bringing my laptop in to work just to hold the documentation, which finally got annoying. Now my programming IDE and documentation aren't fighting for the same space all the time. Big win. I feel more productive already.

3) Biking from home, downtown to the software demo, and uptown to the office felt very comfortable, even though I intentionally took more trafficked roads than I usually do, just to see how bad midmorning traffic is. Answer: not too scary. Anyhow.

4) Singstar 80's has been obtained by friends. Oh yes.

I just visited Joel On Software in response to a friend's heads-up that his latest blog entry was on AJAX/web programming. Joel Spolski is often interesting, smart and funny, even if sometimes he's totally wrong- I read the blog when I have time, which is not frequently.

I saw he's touring to demo his software company's latest project, a bug-tracking system. Just for kicks, I checked their schedule, partly to see whether they were even making it to Toronto on their 22-city tour.

They're in my town, tomorrow morning. *boggle*

(Then in Toronto tomorrow afternoon.)

It's a super-short event, but it's free and at a reasonable hour, and relevent to the kinds of stuff I'm interested in, so I registered, and there's no waiting list. Quelle surprise.