-
A Ride by the Book: The Trans Mass Trail
Despite the interstates and commuter lines, Walmarts and Home Depots, crumbling industrial-era mill towns where longarms, brass fittings, mantle clocks and hats used to be made, despite Fairfield County’s tri-state gravitational pull, the Boston Post Road, Boston itself, urbanized and under-serviced cities like Bridgeport, and greater Hartford’s well-insured suburban sprawl, New England still has plenty…
-
Scoot d’Azure
I never really post anything here on longitude&gratitude about work, because I’m a firm believer in the separation of church and state. And I haven’t seen a constitutional exception yet that would call for the co-mingling of the Church of motorcycles, scooters, and other two-wheeled faiths with the State of my professional work life. Until Cannes. To…
-
Two Wheels Good
Waaaayyyy back in the day, as in back in the good-old “10-inch vinyl and cassette mixtape, Evil Empire/Converse hi-tops and Cold War eighties” kinda day, when I was a college kid living on Pine Street in Burlington, Vermont, I got deeply into this: (You know, other than the upturned collars and new-wave pompadours, not too dated…and Triumph…
-
Horse Trading
A fictitious Texan who lives somewhere up inside my head once said, “Wayell, comes a tahm in lahf when ev’r man has to part with his horse. Ain’t no use wellin’ up or gittin’ all senimenal ov’r’ it. Jes’ a fact a lahf. S’why the Good Lord invenned horse-tradin’. Obviously, the Good Lord hates an empty stable.…
-
Railing About Failing
It’s tepidly—tepidly—encouraging that Metro North representatives have been willing to show up in public forums this week before hordes of embittered Connecticut commuters to “listen” to what its ridership has to “say.” Tepid, because the effort’s entirely pro forma, since anyone with a cellphone and Twitter (do people at Metro North know about these technologies?) could…
-
Littered with Beauty: a Postscript
I have to say that I was so bothered by the contrail of crap that I saw along Long Lots and Hulls Farm Road yesterday (previous post) that I woke up with an itch to do something about it. There’s something to be said for taking pictures of trash: by seeing it and then documenting…
-
Littered with Beauty
Since the Arctic Vortex headed back up to Tuktoyaktuk for refueling this weekend, I decided to skip the gym and head outside for some exercise in the fresh, wet air. I didn’t exactly go for a walk, and it wasn’t quite a jog, either. It was more of a “wog,” just fast enough to break a…
-
American as Apple Chai
Well, it’s Thanksgivukkah eve, and I have to say it is kind of weird standing in the kitchen up to our ears in butternut squash, shallots, Libby’s canned pumpkin, cornmeal, sweet Italian sausage, and Knorr’sclassic brown gravy mix (we’re hosting tomorrow), and simultaneously having the kids pester us to light candles so we can hand…
-
Smart Thrones
Given that this is the age of big data, geotracking, and location-based services, I wonder what The Cloud might tell us about the confluence of human biological needs and mobile behavior. Specifically, what do people actually do with their smartphones when they’re doing their business? I don’t mean this as a tasteless scatological jest. And…
-
Burning Bushes, Burying Hills
It’s getting to be mid-November, and there are not many riding days left. The light’s getting sideways and our copper beech is already almost bare, decimated by clouds of starlings. They seem to exfoliate the mighty tree in just one or two seatings, dining noisily and creating a beech-nut hail that litters the ground below,…
Longitude & Gratitude 