Friday Grab Bag: Wet, Wet, Wet Edition

I understand that it snowed in Washington yesterday: lovely, sticky snow, up to six inches deep in places. We love to complain about snow in Washington, about how it snarls our traffic, springs our students from school, inspires manic trips to the supermarket. And yet I love it. Or, loved it. The chances of a little snow visiting Oxford fall somewhere between slim and "When an English tennis player next wins Wimbledon."

Instead, we get English sunshine. We've had gallons of the stuff this week, enough to cause flooding in some of the places that were flooded last summer. ("Let's see that war spirit again," reads the headline over today's Oxford Mail editorial, exhorting readers to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of the deluge. I expect we will soon be taking in some ragamuffins from East London to keep them safe from the Blitz.)

The English take rain as a matter of course. It runs off them like, well, like water off a duck's back. They grin and bear it. Well, bear it, anyway. They're not really a grinning people. I've become stoic myself, except when it comes to cycling. I hate biking in the rain. Unless you wear a rubber suit that you strip off at your destination, you will arrive wet. And because my bicycle seat seems to be made out of a sponge, even when it's stopped raining--even after I've squeezed the seat as much as I can to wring the water from it--I spend the day walking around with a moist crotch. ("Moist Crotch"? Wasn't that Spinal Tap's under-appreciated seventh album?)

Of course, what I should do is wrap a plastic shopping bag over the seat, like so:


That's what most cyclists in Oxford do. For some reason, I can't bring myself to do that. I just tell myself that it will stop raining soon.

The Darfur Flies
At any one time, dozens of lectures on a variety of arcane topics are being offered in Oxford. That's one of the great things about the university and about my fellowship: I can drop in to whatever I like and fill up the old brain pan. Yesterday I attended one on Darfur, co-hosted by my fellow Fellow Meera Selva. Meera covered Africa for the Independent and wrote about the troubled area of Sudan.

Like many Oxford lectures, it attracted a diverse group: students, academics, journalists, former aid workers, people interested in free cookies. Most interesting of all, though, were the four or five officials from the Sudanese embassy in London, who sat in the front row, vibrating with anticipation. As soon as the lecture was over and question-time started, the communications minister leapt to his feet. The Darfur crisis was misrepresented in the Western media he said. How come no one writes about the good things happening in Sudan? I'm sure President Bush feels the same way about Iraq. What about all the people who aren't being killed every day?

BritNews RoundUp
A tourist council in Suffolk is reprinting one of its brochures after someone noticed that the cover has a photo of a girl picking her nose.

Which married media star has fathered a love child? This column in the Daily Mail doesn't say. But he ought to be pretty easy to find. According to the photo that accompanied the story, the father has very dark skin and a big question mark in the middle of his head:



The dirtiest hotel in Britain is in Oxford, according to users of TripAdvisor.com. The Nanford guest house was described as "squalid," "horrendous" and a "total and utter dump." The owner of the guest house is keeping that war spirit: "I don't give a damn what TripAdvisor says," he told the Guardian.

Cats in the news, Part I: A man in Wales was arrested for murdering his girlfriend after police secretly taped him confessing to his cats. "I don't know if they can prove it or anything," he allegedly said to one. Unclear whether the cat is cooperating with police but given how duplicitous they can be, I wouldn't doubt it.

Cats in the news, Part II: A Bournemouth cat named Sgt. Podge takes a mile-and-a-half walk every night and waits in the morning in the same place to be picked up in the car by its owner. "I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets," said owner Liz Bullard. Great. A cat with a carbon pawprint.

And just so my dog Charlie doesn't get jealous: A Hungarian scientist has developed a computer application that can translate a dog's barks. Sadly, it translates them into Hungarian, and what good is that?

Gargoyle of the Week



Sorry, haven't the slightest idea where I saw him, but he reminds me of Tom Hanks.

Have a safe and happy weekend.

The Oxford Bike Cull

I think my favorite abandoned bicycle in Oxford is the one I saw locked to a fence in the shadow of St. Mary the Virgin church, not far from the Radcliffe Camera. It's a mountain bike whose best days are far behind it. The paint is chipped, the frame is rusty, the chain hangs limply and the front wheel is bent into a shape that resembles a Mobius strip. Some ill-intentioned passerby had to exert a lot of force with a boot-shod foot to deform the rim in such a creative fashion.

You can still make out the brand name of the bike, though. It reads "Optimist."

There are bikes like that one all over Oxford: forlorn, derelict, transformed through neglect or violence from efficient modes of eco-friendly transportation into rusting hulks.

Rusting hulks that take up perfectly good space, for almost as hard as finding a parking space for your car in Oxford is finding a place to lock up your bike. Local transportation researchers estimate that 20,000 cycle trips are made into Oxford's central area every day. In the wild a diverse assortment of organisms--from mammals to beetles to microbes--make corpses disappear. When it comes to old bicycles in Oxford, however, the great circle of life seems not to work.

Then I read in the Oxford Mail that the city had promised to remove derelict bikes. Obsessed as I am with these bikes--whose are they? how do they fall on such hard times? what becomes of them?--I knew I had to tag along.

And so on a recent morning I met Paul Coles at the Covered Market, the 18th-century shopping district he manages for the city. Paul's job takes him between the Covered Market and a weekly outdoor market a few blocks away at Gloucester Green. He knows these streets, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that he remembers each and every bike he passes, his bosses decided he should walk the streets of downtown, choosing which bicycles would be cut from the herd.

“People say pigeons are pests but the abandoned bikes are a real problem," said Paul, 42, as we headed out onto Market Street. In his hand he clutched a quiver of yellow zip-ties. We were joined by another city worker, Mark Massingham, 43. “Tag that," Paul said, handing Mark a zip-tie and pointing to a green Royale that was locked to a lamp post. "That bike’s not been touched for a while.”

Mark cinched the plastic around a brake cable, up near the handlebars. Later in the week a crew would retrace the route and use an angle grinder to cut the lock of any tagged bicycle before taking the bike away. Serial numbers would be checked against registered bikes and the bikes either scrapped or sold.

Paul had several theories about where Oxford's abandoned bikes came from. He said most of the owners are students who paid so little for the bikes that when they graduate and move away they can't be bothered to bring the bikes with them. Others lose the keys to the locks or return to find that the bike's been vandalized and just consign it to its fate. (Click below for video of our escapade.)

We turned on Turl Street and then left at Broad Street, the wide thoroughfare fronted by Trinity College. Long metal racks bristled with bicycles and Paul and Mark moved through them like gardeners dead-heading flowers, palpating tires to judge how long it had been since a bike had been ridden. Some bikes had been relieved of their wheels and saddles and resembled carcasses picked clean in the desert.

A decrepit bike doesn't necessarily mean an abandoned bike, however, not if it's functional. “A lot of people keep old bikes," said Paul. "No one wants to nick an old bike.”

I asked about something I had heard: that gangs of thieves steal bikes in Oxford to sell in Cambridge and bikes in Cambridge to sell in Oxford, creating a neverending pipeline of purloined bikes that are shuttled between the two college towns.

"No," Paul said, "I never heard that."

The iron fence around the church at Magdalen Street was covered in bikes, so many that some cyclists had taken to lifting their bikes three or four feet off the ground and chaining them in place. “That bike ain’t got a lot going for it,” said Mark as he zipped a tie to a shattered mountain bike.

"I’m just amazed at where people put cycles," said Paul. "There across the road, there’s one to the bollard and one to a lamppost." His gaze shifted. "Look at that: That is a traffic light.”

That's one of the things that bothers Paul. Abandoned bikes take up good spaces, forcing cyclists to lock their bikes to street furniture or to lean them against walls in the city's narrow lanes, forcing pedestrians to walk in the streets.

Another city worker, Mick Bennett, had mentioned that he'd seen a ton of abandoned bikes at Carfax, the busy intersection at the far end of Cornmarket Street. Paul was amazed at what we found there: broken bikes everywhere, including a trio of bikes piled on the pavement at the fire door of a bank. Paul was about to zip a yellow tie on one when he recoiled. “These have got blue tags on them,” he exclaimed. It could mean only one thing: The bikes were tagged in last year's cull and were never removed. Paul pulled out his mobile phone and arranged for a truck and two workmen to meet him there after lunch.

A little after 1:30 Malcolm Elliott, 62, and Steve Mazey, 52, arrived. With a pull of a cord, Steve coaxed his angle grinder to life and pressed its spinning blade into the U-shaped lock that tethered a bike to a rack. A shower of sparks danced around his feet. That looks dangerous, I offered.

"I've had me trousers on fire, don't you worry about that," Steve said.



By the time they were finished, Paul and Mark had tagged upwards of 40 bicycles to be removed in the coming week. And by the time the smoke cleared around Carfax, 16 doleful bikes had been liberated from their locks and tossed into the back of the lorry.

Almost immediately cyclists started filling up the newly-empty spaces. It was hard not to think that in a year, some of those bikes would still be there.

Friday Grab Bag

Reason No. 472 It's Nice Not to Have a Car


You don't have to scrape frost off a windshield on a cold morning. You do, however have to scrape it off your bicycle seat:


BritNews Roundup
Call it pedalphilia: A 51-year-old Scottish man was convicted of a "sexually aggravated breach of the peace" for trying to have sex with his bicycle. Robert Stewart was sentenced to three years of probation for the offense. Stewart conducted his cycle seduction in a locked room in a hostel. But he probably should have put up a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Cleaners knocked several times then used a master key to gain entry, where they discovered Stewart wearing only a white T-shirt and, ahem, trying to ride his bike. Both cleaners, the BBC reported, were "extremely shocked." They informed the hostel manager, who called police.

Like me, you may have thought that in Scotland pretty much anything is fair game--those cold, dark nights, all those sheep. Bikes, however, appear to be off-limits. Ah well, different spokes for different folks.

Oh that naughty BBC, Part XVI: The news outlet apparently added the sound of crying babies to footage of newborn quintuplets it showed on its 24-hour news channel and Web site. Video of the quints was released by Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. It lacked audio. However when the video showed up on TV and online, there was the sound of crying, despite the fact the newborns, born 14 weeks prematurely, had respirators in their mouths. A BBC spokesperson told the Guardian: "[We] should not have added sound to the pictures."

Well, no duh. Reality should be good enough for anyone. The news needn't be tweaked to make it more real.

The Daily Mail's infatuation with women's breasts (and John Kelly's Voxford's infatuation with the Daily Mail's infatuation with women's breasts) continues with a story on why women's breasts are getting bigger with each succeeding generation.

A Real Renault-No
Still waiting for a call back from Publicis, the London agency responsible for Renault's "n-word" newspaper ad. A spokesperson at the Advertising Standards Authority informed me that his group had received two complaints about the ad from members of the public. "The general crux of the complaints is that the ad is offensive, inappropriate and in bad taste because of the connotations of the 'n' word," he said in an e-mail message.

The ASA issues wonderfully detailed reports of its findings. I'll be waiting to see what it does with this ad.

Gargoyle of the Week
My Lovely Wife snapped this happy fellow, who looks out from a corner of Brasenose College (which is universally recognized as the most oddly-named college in Oxford).


Keep your nose clean and have a great weekend.

Citizen Canes--or "Look Ma, No Hands"

To paraphrase John Travolta (mouthing Quentin Tarantino's words): "You know what the funniest things about England is? It's the little differences." It's the way the English say "pressurised" instead of "pressured"(as in, "I was pressurised into changing my mind"). It's the way single nouns take plural verbs ("BMW have announced the closing of another factory").

There are two other, less obvious, things that I've noticed: Old people with canes and young people riding their bikes hands-free. First, the canes: A sizable proportion of the elderly here perambulate with canes in their hands. "Sticks," they're often called (the canes, not the people). At first I thought it was because the English were more likely to have health problems--poor diet from wartime rationing, years waiting on NHS lists for hip-replacement surgery--and were only able to get about with the help of a cane. In America, I thought, these people would be hale and hearty, not halt and lame.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think I have it backwards: I don't see as many people with canes in America because they go straight from walking unaided to not walking at all, or to scooting about in one of those little motorized wheelchairs.

I have no data to back this up. It's just a hunch based on several weeks' experience watching gray-haired Brits bent into the rain, firmly planting the rubber tips of their surrogate legs on the pavement in front of them. Then again, maybe it's a fashion thing. Maybe the British just like canes.

Or maybe as youngsters they fell off their bikes while riding with their hands off the handlebars. Not that I've seen anyone fall off, though I've seen plenty of young people cycle past, hands in pockets. Some move at a pretty good clip. Some pedal sort of languidly, with a cell phone raised up to an ear. (The British are addicted to their mobiles; most can't go more then 30 or 40 seconds without checking theirs to see if they've received a text.)

I've done a fair amount of research on the early days of the bicycle and being able to ride without hands was actually recommended by cycling instructors. (There were such people back then; newbies had to learn somehow.) Cycling was meant to be aesthetically pleasing and the reasoning was that hands-off riding forced the cyclist to pedal evenly, favoring neither the right leg nor the left.

I'm jealous. Ever since I was about 11 and wiped out while trying to look cool, I've kept both hands on the wheel, so to speak.

The scary thing is, it's much easier to drive a car with no hands than a bike. Not that I would ever do that. I mean, unless I was doing some really serious air drumming.

A Bright Idea

There has been a fluorescent explosion in Britain. Everywhere you go you see retina-searing articles of clothing: a sort of electric lime green color emblazoned on jackets, vests and bags. Apparently, these items are designed to keep the wearer from being flattened by a truck. (Or "lorry," as the British quaintly insist on calling them.)

Here's a construction worker in one of these "high-visibility" garments:



Here is an off-duty bus driver:


Where you mostly see them is on cyclists:



I bought my daughter a green and orange "tabard" for low-light cycling. (I love that noun: tabard. It was originally the sleeveless tunic a knight would put over a suit of armor. The English never really left the Middle Ages, did they?) I also bought a couple of safety patrol-style bandoliers for us to sling on when we take to the streets. And, of course, no cycling outfit is complete without a bicycle clip. When I lived in England as a teenager, a bicycle clip was just that: a metal anklet for keeping your trouser leg out of your bike chain. Now it's Velcro and it's reflective:



Alexei Sayle had a column in the Independent the other day about the phenomenon, and whether we will become inured to it. If everyone is in a high-visibility jacket,
will anyone be visible? Or more visible than anyone else?

I had the same thought when Canada mandated daylight running lights for its cars. Snowbirds pouring down Interstate 95 with their headlights burning certainly stood out. And now I see more cars in the U.S. driving with their lights on in the middle of the day. But if every car is like that, are we going to have to add sirens and Congreve rockets to our vehicles to make sure they're noticed?

I also worry about the environment: With all those high-visibility jackets being sold in England, surely the famed Day-Glo mines of Cornwall must be in danger of being depleted.

What's Going on in Burma?
Of course I'm not spending all my time here in Oxford snapping photos of workmen in green jackets. I'm pondering what's known as "citizen journalism," the movement to democratize the media via the Web. If you saw a shaky cell-phone video of the saffron-robed monks marching on the streets of Rangoon, or read a blog by a Burmese citizen, you experienced citizen journalism. Glenda Cooper provides a good overview of what's been going on there and how it may change the media equation.

Ad today many bloggers around the world are supporting the citizen journalists in Burma, and indeed the citizens, by posting a "Free Burma" banner on their Web sites.