Weekend Bike Excursion!

...well, maybe not.

Let me set the mood. Open this in a new tab, so the music can soothe you into a reading mood.

Alright, now that we're in that happy place together, let's discuss the day.

The weekends usually give the perfect opportunity for me to conduct one of my weekly cycle excursions to parts unknown (within the Stillwater city limits), but when I woke up, bright and early this afternoon I noticed that winter had finally found me. The temperature outside was barely pushing thirty degrees and dark gray clouds hung low in the frigid air...no good.

So, being the coward that I am, I chose to stay inside. But rather than hang you out to dry, I thought I'd better at least write a post about my own cowardice, and maybe even end it with a nice picture of some of the snow/sleet which fell later in the evening.

















Hey, look at that. I guess I'm done.

A Vegan Thanksgiving!

...or, "Why I don't want to do that anymore"

Last week we had the great tradition of Thanksgiving, a time when we can all get together with our families, eat ourselves into a coma, and celebrate the short period of time (one day) that we (Americans) weren't being bastards to the native American indians. We do this by eating what "they" say to be a close facsimile of the meal shared between the early American settlers, and those to whom the country rightly belonged. This is a holiday which is steeped in the sticky muck of false "tradition," making it a subconsciously obligatory meat-fest in the process.

It's about six in the morning right now and I'll be the first to admit that I'm too lazy to look up the statistics about how many turkeys and chickens and pigs are killed for this one day. I'll tell you, it's too many. For what purpose do we do this? I don't know, tradition? Bah. When we all realize that thanksgiving, christmas, the fourth of july, are all just normal days with someone's arbitrary cultural significance tacked on, we can start to move on and leave the shackles of the "holidays" behind us. Just because it happens to be a day which some people call, "Thanksgiving," don't let that be an excuse to blindly follow in the synchronized killing of millions of animals. Spend the day with your family, if you must, but don't ever let arbitrary cultural inventions rule your life.

To end on a slightly lighter note, here's the video of Sarah Palin, discussing Thanksgiving as, behind her, live turkeys are killed and drained of their blood. Enjoy.

Name Change and Redesign

...rendering the blog only slightly different, but much more awesome than it previously was.

So I've realized that, since I've gone in a new direction with the whole thing, that it was time to change (among other things) my old title to the new extravagant, yet elegant new name for the blog. Of course I wanted to choose something that would be more on topic with the blog's nature, and I think this one works well. Velo, which Google tells me is french for bicycle, gives it a bit of European class and alliteration as well.

I've also finally changed from the default font to some sweet Trebuchet action, so the blog is officially and permanently sans serif (ooh la la, more french!).

This is the dawning of a new era, and I think that we're going to see some swanky new developments around here, so stayed tuned, dear readers, and enjoy the magic.

Vegan recipe of the day!

Happy Rice!

Ingredients:
Rice
Happiness

Directions:
Cook rice, make rice happy, enjoy happy rice!

A lovely trip to Yale

...which turned into a five-hour, 65-mile, spoonful of pain.

Here are some of the photos from my recent bike excursion to Yale, OK. The scenery in Oklahoma is fairly homogeneous, but some of it is okay, I guess.

A good example of the desolate roads which are perfect for distance cycling.

No, it's not just a cliche, this is 99% of Oklahoma scenery.

...and this...

Photographic proof that I actually made it there.

Bonus: Nonplussed cows staring directly at me.

The smells of Stillwater

...the inexplicably smelly city.

I was riding around town today, commuting between my apartment, campus, and my third place, the local hipster coffee shop...Oh geez, I'm still in italics, aren't I?

Hold on.

Much better. Now, as I was saying, I've been on my bike quite a bit today, and I've noticed something a bit odd about the air. So far I've ruled out the following hypotheses:

1.) Love is in the air - I happen to know for a fact that this one isn't the case. Love, when in the air, tends to smell a bit like a gitmo cell: a distinct sense of disillusionment and lack of freedom. Stillwater today smells more like corn dogs and poo.

2.) The dawning of a new era - I would like to believe that after the Obama election, that the birds would be happily singing, people would be whistling merry tunes, and the mirthful creatures of the forest would be out and about, happily coexisting with humans, making apple pies and hanging American flags around. Subsequently, the inevitable smell of animal droppings would surely be drowned out by the smell of hope. This, apparently, is also not the case.

3.) Carnival in town? - Also no. I mentioned before that the offensive odor was that of corn dogs and poo, but I purposefully didn't mention that these two smells were very distinctly in different parts of the city. I bring it up now to disprove the carnival hypothesis, because the two smells coincident would be clear and distinct proof of the existence of the carnival--evidence which would be clearer than the sight of large, dangerous machinery being operated by disheveled disillusionados. (Holy crap, I thought that I made up that last word, but it's totally checking out with the google spellcheck. Yay for me.)

4.) Impending danger - This is my last good hypothesis, and, being the only one left standing, is obviously the correct one. (Yay for the scientific method!) I was almost hit by a car today...but no, that can't be it.

Looks like I'm safe, then. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to bike home in the dead of night, without head or tail lights, down a busy street, with only my limited wits and a pretty good caffeine buzz to keep me safely on two wheels.

See you tomorrow.

Critical Mass-querade!

...do you see what I did there?

I was very exited about this month's critical mass. Not just because it was promised to have the highest turnout of this year, or even because I didn't have any homework to worry about that night. No, I was excited about this particular critical mass because it happened to fall on October 31. That's right, it was going to be the halloween edition of critical mass. Because there's nothing hipsters like to do more than dress up and annoy cars. Let's get going.







About half of us showed up in costume, I was there dressed as a creative writing teacher because this year I had the scraggly-man-ponytail to properly pull it off. But there were some pretty impressive costumes, which were then made more impressive by the fact that the people in them were able to cycle with, for example, ninja turtle hands and mask on.

Again, nothing too special about the ride, we had enough people this time to storm Perkins road, probably the busiest and most car-choked roadway in Stillwater. Tons of appreciative honks, a few a-hole frat boys yelling obscenities (that's what they're here for, it seems), and no major accidents.

Well, we lost two people. But we're assuming that they're okay.