journal features

what the hell, I'll cycle to Markham

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2015.08.22

I was scratching my head for something to do, today, so I hopped on my bike and went north. I got to Markham, turned right, went around the zoo, and came back down to Kingston road. Then it was the usual grind against the series of hills and the persistent headwinds. All in, a 57km trip.

One big, big improvement this time over previous trips – the straps on my pedals. I can't overstate what an improvement this was. My sustained speeds were higher, the amount of wear on my legs and feet was way down, and I had no incidents of a foot slipping off the pedal, even on some of the worst surface conditions I've seen in a long time (Steeles, this means you).

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)