Ok. so it’s nowhere near spring. But I got this mailer for the first big (and biggest!) bike ride of the season, and it made me very happy. Even though the ride itself is a giant, crowded, somewhat unpleasant mass of humanity.
I’m not a particularly (or, at all) religious person, but for some reason I always light a menorah at chanukah. If I recall correctly, I bought this menorah in college, for less than $20, and I’ve been dutifully packing it up and moving it with me for the last 15 years.
This weekend, when I wasn’t traipsing all over Roosevelt Island with the 365-ers, I was at a giant food expo for hours on end handing out samples of these cakes (it’s my dad’s company). They are soaked in liquor, which makes them very, very awesome.
and yes, my feet are killing me.
I will hopefully have snapped out of the mindset that causes me to try to feed these to everyone who comes within 3 feet of me by tomorrow.
Meb Keflezighi, the first American man to win the New York Marathon in 27 years, seen here approximately 250 yards from the finish. I will post more marathon photos soon (within the week), but I took a ton and I have to go through and selectively edit (to say the least).
This past Sunday, I decided to be adventurous and meet up with some folks that I had only previously “met” on Twitter. In particular, brooklyn by bike had organized a ride from grand army plaza to coney island, and since it was such a beautiful day, I decided to join her (and almost 20 other people) on the ride. It was great. I actually biked down from my apartment to grand army plaza before the official ride, so I had 10 miles down before we got started. I also decided to finally experiment with my “homemade” camera mount on my bike, which is essentially just one of those gorillapod tripods wrapped around my handlebars with my canon point and shoot attached. The footage ended up not being too bad, and once I sped it up so that you could see the entire trip in under 5 minutes (and turned the volume way down low so that your speakers aren’t destroyed by the overwhelming wind sounds and our sped up chipmunks-on-crack talking), it’s kind of fun to watch. I was going to set it to music, but youtube has gotten really good at spotting things that need licenses and, well, I’m not creating my own track, so it’s got little to no sound. There are also some still pictures at the end of the group. Enjoy!
UPDATE: new soundtrack added via youtube’s audioscan service. all legal and everything!
and, if anyone’s interested, here’s a map of my trip from the upper west side to coney island. I skipped mapping the trip back to prospect park, since we followed the same route down (having trouble embedding from google maps at the moment, so a static image will have to suffice). Red line was my solo ride to brooklyn, orange is the group ride down to the beach. And I would totally do this again!
You might think that I’m all up on what’s going on with the economy. I mean, I work in corporate finance and everything. But the massiveness of what’s been going on has utterly confounded just about everyone I know. And no one knows what the hell a credit-default swap is. All in all, I’ve found that the guys over at NPR have really gone out of their way to make the entire thing understandable. Last week, they put together the third in their ongoing series of This American Life episodes on this crisis, bad bank. This is a follow up from the first episode, giant pool of money, and their first follow up, another frightening show about the economy. You can download the current episode for free, and the archived shows cost 95 cents to download, which is totally worth it.
In addition, the guys who put together these shows have a podcast that airs three days a week and a companion blog, planet money.
If you want a clearer understanding of what’s going on, I highly recommend all of these. Heck, the podcast guys got an interview with Geithner last week that’s been cited all over the interweb.