Signs of the Biking Bubble?

Personally, I say "No way" to a biking bubble. It's so damn obvious as a way to get around most cities and towns, it will only continue to grow. But the signs are growing of a biking bubble. Special bike sections of clothing Web sites:

Brooklyn Industries Bike Shop
Urban Outfitters Bike Shop

Emails about bike-friendly jeans from Barney's:

Weekend Inspiration

Pretty stiff crowd.

Mel Gibson in Happier Times

I'm guessing there aren't similar photos of Mel over Lawrence Taylor's shoulders, or Goldberg's shoulders.

The man is a loon.

The famous boat captains

You'll want to click into this one...

Photo of the Year

Speaks for itself

Site of the day: The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator

It's just what it sounds like. It'll take anything you write and translate it into something a 12 year old using AOL instant messenger could understand.

Here's an example:

Me: "Hi, how are you? What are you up to today?"

Translated: "HI HOW R U?!?!??!! LOL WUT R U UP 2 2DAY??!!??!?! WTF LOL"

Anyway, you get the idea.

Check it out here.

LeBron's leagacy in Cleveland

We all know that the people of the Greater Cleveland-Akron area are not happy with LeBron "taking his talents" to Miami, but I personally didn't know how bad it is now and will be down the road. Last night at the Indians-Yankees game, a fan in a Lebron James Miami Heat jersey caught the business end of obscenities and worse from the bleacher crowd at Progressive Field. It got so bad that a security guard had to usher the man out to avoid altercation(s).

Without a doubt LeBron's exodus leaves a bad taste in Cleveland. I can see why he'd want to leave; he wants to win right now and not have to wait (although the Cavs had the best record in the league last season). The way LeBron left was a huge slap in the face to Cleveland Cavs fans everywhere and he may not be forgiven in the heart of rock and roll again.

In other LeBron news, apparently a story about LeBron and his entourage in Vegas was pulled off of ESPN's LA website. LeBron and all his boys were having a good time in the club (he had 4 security guards positioned at his table and 2 roving guards) and he was talking to basically any female that would approach, provided he gave the OK to his security detail. I guess he was playing "ghost basketball" around the club, pretending to make lay-ups, taking jumpers and following through with his right hand and leaving it hanging in the air, even pretending to dribble around the waitstaff.

What a complete tool.

Once in a Lifetime

I felt like a little Talking Heads this AM and found this video, I don't know if it's the original music video for the song but it's pretty sweet. Enjoy.

Wild Weather

Senior field analyst, Thos. Reed, was at it again tracking down an awesome photo of a funnel cloud over Narragansett Bay last Saturday. Check out the image and weather description below. What’s up with all the cyclonic activity in the Northeast recently?
Just south of the Newport Bridge (RI), a monstrous cloud turned off the lights over Narragansett Bay last Saturday. Notice the funnel (center) that actually touched down between Castle Hill and Beavertail Lighthouse! Moments later a white wall of torrential rain, 4' waves, and gusts to 25kts reduced visibility to 100ft! Photo:Matthew Cohen

If you capture any wild weather photos over the Summer, please send them our way.

Why I Love Open Source

One of the reasons I love open source (click on the image to see the text more clearly):

Weedo

Articles from legit (Reuters) and illegitimate (Murdoch WSJ) news sources abound regarding the potential full scale legalization of marijuana in California. Despite being from one of the illegit news sources, the graphic below espouses the pros and cons. On the one hand all of those arrests are costing a lot of taxpayer dollars, the spike in SoCal points to the influence of Mexican drug cartels operating on the wrong side of the border on their own or through alliances with American gangs, and there is clearly demand for the product which could equal crazy government revenue for an insane deficit situation.

But on the other hand, what happens to the people whose plants disappeared as a result of these raids? And by people I mean gangs. With guns. Who kill people. Especially when their source of income dries up. Something to consider.

Fantastic Goal Celebration

Someone commented on Dave's Football blog where I found the video that Joe Buck would have a heart attack if he saw this.

Someone please send Joe the link to this post.



Sorry, that was mean.

Cold War Intrigue

Russia is blowing up the news wires lately.

TCD pretty much broke the "sleeper" Russian spy ring.

Phil clued us into the heat wave, but forgot to mention the mechanism of Russian heat related death: getting bombed on Vodka before jumping into rivers to cool off and eventually drowning. I guess it really isn't ever warm there.

Then late last week Russian President Dmitry Medvedev lost it after a dam producing hydro power in the Northern Caucuses was attached. But don't worry, he assured workers of their personal and professional security. From the horses mouth:

"Law enforcement and security agencies and [energy] companies, as well
as the government, must do all they can to make sure that such things do
not happen again. If they do, none of the law enforcement, security and
energy company chiefs will keep their jobs. All of them will be sacked."

And finally, the finest paper in the land (NY Post, by the way) dropped this bomb shell on us


NEW Russian spy Anna Fermanova was apparently trying to smuggle night vision goggles that are considered munitions by the defense department because of their high power out of the country. According to her "this is just funny," but she's "freaking out right now." Likely combo.

Now, if only all of this Cold War action would revive quality Bond plots I'd be happy once a for all. And keep the Russian spy babes coming, please.

Mark Herzlich Excited To Get Back On The Gridiron

“Yeah it is a shock because going into a season, you’re ranked high on draft boards, people are looking at you to win the Butkus, to do this stuff and then you come out and get called to the doctor’s office, to the oncology center and you’re told you’ve got cancer. So within 20 minutes your life completely changes. And not only that, I was told I would never play football again, that there was a 70 percent chance that I would even live for the next five years." BC Linebacker Mark Herzlich

For those of you who haven't heard of Mark Herzlich, he's a talented BC linebacker who was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer, after the 2008 season in which he was a first team All-American (plays like a total savage). Herzlich courageously overcame stacked odds and is now cancer free and ready to take to the field, something that did not seem be an option a year ago.

Herzlich was down in ATL for ACC media day and caught up with 790 The Zone to talk about his fight with cancer and his outlook on the 2010 season. Full interview here.

From the archives...one of the best photos ever

For the uninformed, that's Dirk Nowitski, Steve Nash and Mark Cuban

Helpful venn diagram

Don Draper as Drawn by The Wall Street Journal

Thus far, I don't believe that TCD has weighed in on the start of the 4th Season of Mad Men. Here's a portrait of Don Draper as if he'd been drawn for a Wall Street Journal article (if you haven't seen the first episode, the WSJ reference is a minor, minor spoiler).

Wikileaks - if you're not following this story, you should be

This is one of the most fascinating news stories in a long time. I'm not talking about the 92,000 classified military documents that Wikileaks leaked, I'm talking about the Wikileaks itself. To me, no other organization (if Wikileaks can be called an organization) is as polarizing as Wikileaks. Fundamentally, it has a valuable mission; in practice it can be a dangerous breach of national security.

For those of you who haven't been following this, Wikileaks is an organization led by Julian Assange (an odd looking, vaguely Norwegian dude) that procures and publishes - from a variety of sources - classified and private documents. It's agenda is simple: to provide transparency.

It has broken a lot of stories from across the globe including corporate and government corruption and military operations. For me, it really came into consciousness when it published a 15 minute video of US soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians and Reutters reporters. It was disturbing footage.

Its latest leak was HUGE. As I mentioned above, it procured and published 92,000 classified US military documents that paint a bleak view of the Afghan war and point to inaccurate reports from our government and military.

Let me be clear: I, and TCD, am not taking a position on this story. Wikileaks fascinates me as much as it terrifies me and it really shows the power of our now totally connected world. We are going to see a lot more stuff like this pop up and a lot more secrets revealed before anything is able to be fully locked down.

No matter what you think about this, you have to imagine that the US government would love to get its hands on Assange. I wouldn't mind seeing video of that conversation leaked.

Chicken or The Egg - Laid to Roost

Sorry, my editor wrote that headline. But the oldest question in society - the 2nd oldest being What was the best thing before sliced bread? - has been answered.

So, which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?

The Chicken.

There's some boring stuff in this video about a protein that comes from Chicken's ovaries making the case, blah, blah, blah.

Bottom line: Sometimes knowing the answer is less satisfying.

Mott the Hoople and David Bowie "All the young dudes"

More ingenuity

I posted a story last week about a homeless man who broke into a bar that had gone out of business and reopened it successfully before getting discovered and arrested. Anyway, similar ingenuity below.

Infographic: The Mobile Market

Over 4 billion people have mobile phones and only 22% from developed markets (click on image to zoom in).



Read full story from Online Media Gazette

Catfish aren't bright

I'm not going to lie, this mildly interesting story became a lot more interesting to me when I discovered I was reading it on jeffbridges.com. That's right folks...Jeff Bridges - "the dude"

Anyway, here's the story: This guy in Kansas saw a basketball bouncing strangely around in his lake so he went to investigate. He discovered that a huge catfish, confusing the basketball for food, now had the thing lodged in its mouth and would probably die if he didn't help remove it. So after failing to pull the thing out, the guy's wife sliced the ball open and they removed the deflated corpse and the fish was free. Here are the photos to illustrate the story.

Some perspective on the summer's current heat wave...

Apparently it's far worse in Russia where more than 1200 people have died this summer trying to cool down in various bodies of water. Not only that but people's shoes are literally sinking into melting tarmac as they try to walk around.

One map I saw put their average temperature about 10-20 degrees F above normal. We complain about the heat, but they have one of the hottest air masses - the Middle East - supplying their weather patterns with degrees.

Info from chartporn.org

Octopuses Are Smart*

Great interactive graphic and article from Boston.com on the intelligence of Octopuses. As a believer in evolution, and further, a believer that humans are by no means the end point of evolution, but rather a stop on the way to even more evolved beings that will one day make us look like single-celled organisms in comparison, I love reading about the intelligence of other creatures.


*Funnily enough, I meant the headline as a joke "knowing" as I do that the plural of Octopus is Octopi. Turns out, I was wrong, at least in part. Octopuses is perfectly acceptable as a plural, as is Octopi.

Burgernomics: The Big Mac Index

To the left is a chart from the Economist that shows the relative cost of a hamburger in a number of different countries. Having been to Norway, I'm in now way surprised to see it top the list. Still, in a country where a single beer costs upwards of $17, the $7.20 prices actually seems reasonable.

Of course this is the Economist and fun isn't had without a more serious point being made:

The index is a lighthearted attempt to gauge how far currencies are from their fair value. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), which argues that in the long run exchange rates should move to equalise the price of an identical basket of goods between two countries. Our basket consists of a single item, a Big Mac hamburger, produced in nearly 120 countries. The fair-value benchmark is the exchange rate that leaves burgers costing the same in America as elsewhere.

The History of The Beatles as told by their hair

From Flowing Data:

Floatopia

One of our contributors or fans may have reported on Floatopia already, but I don't care, it's so awesome that it deserves at least two posts.



Taken from sdgln.com

Back in March, thousands of San Diegons (still don't know if Ron Burgundy was right with that one) participated in what is now known as Floatopia. This awesome event took place because back in 2007 lawmakers imposed a one year ban on drinking on the beach in an effort to clean up beaches and cut down on public intoxication, etc. One year later, the city voted on the ban and it is now a law. The law states that nobody is allowed to drink on the beach, but nothing was said about being in the water. Some 6,000 people armed with floats, awesomeness and tons of canned domestic beverages showed up to celebrate this loophole in the law. Police arrested a couple dozen people for public intoxication and EMTs treated several others but other than than Floatopia went off without a hitch. Apparently nothing has been done about the law as of yet and people are still enjoying the loophole.

I still haven't been to this magical place yet but I plan on going. I have been to Seacrets in Ocean City, and anyone who has been there knows that it's pretty similar to this scene in Diego, but I think it's still worth a look.

Arcade Fire "Rebellion" - nice track

No question these guys are a weird band...but they've got some great material too.

Memorializing Tim Tebow - Alabama Style

Love this video game cover

Check out the full story at SB Nation.

I like this...YouTube teaming up with Arcade Fire to bring high quality live music to the site

YouTube is now in the live event streaming business (were they already and I just didn't know?). Starting with Arcade Fire's August 5th show at MSG, YouTube will be offering live streaming events through the site with high quality sound, multiple camera angles and some user generated material.

Here's more:

"Unstaged" promises incredible online features that wouldn't be available even to those who dropped the cash on tickets and fought their way through mobs at MSG. At certain concerts, for example, YouTube fans will be able to vote on encore performances for the band to play. Viewers will also be able to switch camera angles, and judging from the preview below, it looks like YouTube users might get the best seats in the house. Plus, even if you missed the show, the concert in its entirety will be available for streaming soon after it's over.

Full story and promo video here.

Brits take weird measures to get people outside

In an effort to get its increasingly lazy citizens out of doors, Britain has taken this odd step: giant grass couches. Since the average British family spends 43 hours a week on its couch even in summer, they felt that getting them outside, even if only to an outdoor couch would have positive consequences.



Here's the full story from Fast Company.

Top 10 Most Dangerous Airports

Aside from JFK, I've never flown into or out of any of these. And now I'm glad. The pictures all look like something out of LOST.

Great videos too if you click-through to the original post on Web urbanist