My learned colleague, the fangy-toofed legal beagle Charles Pelkey, in his role as the Explainer over at Red Kite Prayer, discusses the shameful treatment given Café Roubaix by Specialized Bicycle Components.
Category: All property is theft
Ass, grass or gas: Nobody rides for free
It’s that time of year again, when I start ringing up editors to inquire whether come the new year they will keep flinging good money after bad by continuing to accept contributions from Your Humble Narrator.
This process always involves a bit of give and take — the editor explains what s/he wishes to take from me, and I tell the editor where and how I plan to give it. A good old time is had by all, often at the top of our lungs, and before long the spreadsheets, knuckle-dusters and restraining orders are set aside and we all go back to earning our meager livings.
And meager is all I ask. My needs are simple, not unlike myself, and I retain no illusions about the freelance rumormonger’s position on our long list of must-have items in the 21st century. (Hint: It’s more than a couple of folds down from the top of the page.)
Today, there is no more writing, illustration or photography — it’s all “content,” and a smart fella can get that anywhere.
Just ask Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and Innertubez gazillionaire. Now one of the guiding lights behind a newish venture, Medium, Williams has moved beyond the 140-character limit in search of “thoughtful, longer-form writing,” says Matt Richtel of The New York Times.
Well, not all that far, perhaps. To be sure, Williams wants more characters for his new enterprise, but he’s offering the same level of compensation — to wit, nothing. Writes Richtel, 745 words into this paean to long-form work: “A few writers are paid, with their work solicited by a small editing team, but most are not.”
Do tell.
Medium employs some 40 folks; I assume that they are taking home paychecks, though being an Innertubez gazillionaire, Williams — whose personal fortune recently ballooned by nearly $2.5 billion, thanks to his 10.5 percent share of Twitter — may not require anything so mundane as compensation for whatever it is that he does.
Well, I do, and thus you should not expect to see my byline over at Medium anytime soon.
I don’t object to writing for free. In fact, I’ve done and continue to do plenty of it. I kept a journal for a decade or so; covered cycling for free at The New Mexican (where I was paid for editing) just to get it in the paper; and have been blogging gratis for longer than I can prove (the archives back at the old home place date to 1992).
But it seems Williams is after something a little deeper than the product of a guy who is interested primarily in keeping the old editorial muscles loose by jotting down whatever comes to mind, just for the hell of it, without interference from editors, publishers or advertisers. Though precisely what that something is, the story never quite says.
There is chin music aplenty, however. Long form. Rationality. Nourishment. Holistic. The one thing that seems certain is that whatever it is that Williams wants to sell, he is not willing to buy.
Sounds irrational to me, even assholistic. Hey, yo, Williams! I got your long-form nourishment right here, pal.
Happy Labor Day, comrades
And while you’re tapping your toes to the Sam Cooke classic, remember, there’s still a State out there that needs smashing.
Welcome to the working week
It’s Monday. Know how I can tell? There’s a plumber in the driveway and my Visa card just spontaneously combusted.
One of the few downsides to living in an old neighborhood like ours is that the plumbing is even older than the residents. I think Hammurabi laid the original pipe, and the Romans handled most of the maintenance (But other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?) until the Vandals came along and ensured that the pumps would no longer work by appropriating the handles.
Anyway, the lone bathtub at The House Back East™ has become something of a wading pond, and a plumber is over there panning for gold as we speak. I expect he’ll find some.
Industrial tourism
Yesterday I visited, briefly, what the late, lamented Ed Quillen once called the Interstate 70 Industrial Tourism Sacrifice Zone. Nothing wrong with the place that Peak Oil can’t cure.
It had been several years since my last visit to the Zone, and peer as I might between the rare gaps in traffic I could detect no signs of intelligent life.
There was existence, of a sort — the Breckenridge-Frisco-Silverthorne-Dillon clusterplex remained as relentlessly active as an anthill, busily raising a bumper crop of orange road-construction cones with one pincer and separating rubes from their rubles with the other.
I was in the Zone to meet a shooter from Steamboat Springs, whose current project required the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff I’ve been evaluating for Adventure Cyclist. Time was of the essence, and shop mechanics are crushed this time of year, so we didn’t care to wait for the lengthy disassembly-shipping-reassembly process, which can involve brown-suited gorillas using the box as a trampoline in between ZIP codes.
So I drove north from Bibleburg, and Doug drove south from Steamboat, and we met in the parking lot of a Silverthorne Wendy’s, as seemed appropriate, given the locale.
We were clearly members of the same tribe — Doug was driving a black Subaru with a bike on the roof, and I was driving a silver Subaru with a bike in the back — and neither of us was overjoyed to be in the Zone, though in its defense I will note that it was not on fire at the moment.
We discussed the Divide Rohloff, cycling and our own communities’ respective revenue-enhancement models — his, a vastly enhanced network of cycling trails (Welcome to Steamboat 2013!); mine, a downtown stadium for the Colorado Rockies’ farm club and a U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (Welcome to Bibleburg 1913!).
Then we shook hands, jumped into our respective Subarus, and off we went.
Having taken the scenic route north, through Woodland Park, Hartsel, Fairplay and Breck’, I decided I owed it to science to take the interstates home. It being seven-ish I enjoyed mostly smooth sailing despite the $160 million Twin Tunnels expansion project until I approached the Air Force Academy, where I began a 40-minute crawl through three more road “improvement” projects to Chez Dog.
Those should do wonders for tourism. It certainly made me want to go somewhere. Take me out to the ball game. …
Mad Blog Media 