Prophets

As I sat in my balcony seat at last night's performance of the Blind Boys of Alabama and Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, I couldn't help but contrast the attitude to the concert of my community in northern Utah, with the reception I imagine this act might have received in Germany. The audience here in Utah was enthusiastic and appreciative, but no one could deny, it was also small. Verily, a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. I think a similar concert, with two such giants of American Roots music, would have drawn a much larger audience in Germany, where people have a proper understanding of what's best about America, even if they are sometimes confused by our bizarre hand gun legislation.

On another note: the date of my last Forschungsjahr post before this one is August 9, 2010. That's over seven weeks ago: a shameful lapse on my part. I don't think a blog can endure that kind of neglect in the long term. My current position at the university requires a good deal from me and in the tension between available time and the demands of an unruly faculty, my blog is the loser.

I'm still writing the posts, but only in my head. It's the time for editing, proofreading and layout that's lacking. I'm committed to continuing my work with the blog, but for the time being, it could be that posts will have to remain short. I guess I'm lucky, in that, like the Blind Boys and Ralph Stanley, my audience is a dedicated one, however small. I hope you'll all bear with me as I get through this academic year, with the promise of lots of time for aimless rambling in the next.

Blue Bikes

I picked up my Aggie Blue Bike this morning and it's a gem.



An Aggie Blue Bike is a bike that a community member can rent from the Student Bike Center at Utah State University for a three month term, renewable pretty much as often as desired. The bikes are all used, some of them ill-used, but all have been lovingly rehabilitated by a dedicated student staff. Bike rental is free, but most people have to endure a tiresome online safety quiz before they can take possession of their bike. I was lucky enough to pick up my bike at a time when the apparently finicky system was "down". I'm a big believer in bike safety, but was grateful to have been spared that part of the bike rental process.

This kind of bike sharing is not entirely without controversy in the cycling community. Depending on whom you talk to, bike sharing isn't very effective in increasing the total number of bike trips in any given area. Many people feel that money being spent to develop new bike sharing programs like the metroradruhr program in the Ruhrgebiet, could be better used to improve bike infrastructure for riders. I re-visited this blog post at Ecovelo today and found a lot of the arguments against bike sharing to be fairly compelling. But I'm not convinced that any of those arguments are really relevant to the situation here on campus at Utah State. And in any case, I'm a bike sharer now, for better or for worse.

And these kinds of programs are growing in the US and in Europe too. Germany has had a nation-wide program in place for many years, sponsored by the Deutsche Bahn and very high tech. I don't know how successful it's been, but I can give anecdotal evidence that DB rental bikes sightings are becoming more common all the time. In many European cities, Barcelona and Paris, just for a few examples, large bike sharing programs are in place and the distinctive bikes are a familiar feature of the city center. Bike sharing is particularly big in the Ruhgebiet, as the map below demonstrates: the cluster of cyclist icons at the map center is the heart of the Ruhr, from Duisburg to Dortmund and each icon represents a bike sharing program. I've never used bikes in any of these programs, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I suspect that these bikes can only be really useful to a relatively small sector of the population.



Which brings me back to my Aggie Blue Bike. It's a clumsy monster of a bike and would hardly be useful for most of my riding purposes. But I plan to use it only on campus for those visits to places like the library, Student Union or our administration building. It's more than a fifteen minute walk across campus from my office and most of the way is level, paved and ideal for rolling along on big balloon tires. If bike sharing can ever make sense, then certainly this is the proper application. I'd like to see the program grow and serve more campus community members.

And I've got an even stronger, more personal reason for wanting the program to succeed: my Aggie Blue Bike is remarkably similar to the bike I learned to ride on nearly fifty years ago. I was only five at the time and needed to mount the bike near a fence or some other object I could climb on. My feet reached the pedals, but not the ground, so stopping could be a tricky maneuver. I needed to start up on a downhill run, and if my neighbor, Mr. Corr, was handy to give me a push, so much the better. But in many ways, it was the perfect bike for a kid. It was built like a Panzer and could be ridden at high speed right into a tree, house or car without any significant negative effect. It was a real looker too with a two tone red and white paint job and my dad used a stencil to paint my name on the chain guard. When I brought up this option with the USU Aggie Blue Bike staff members, they looked a little indignant, so I backed off. If I personalize the bike, I'll have to do it without their help.

Fort Wetherill

I spend a good deal of time thinking about the past. Not my own past so much as the Past, with a capital "P". It's particularly in your face here on Conanicut Island, where I'm spending a couple of weeks on summer vacation. I don't know if it's the pace of development, (slow) which leaves things like a Revolutionary War gun battery facing the West Passage up Narragansett Bay more or less unchanged after 200 years, or just the fact that lots of stuff happened here, but either way, I'm constantly being confronted here with History.



I took a spin around the island the other day on my Flevobike and wound up riding through the state park at the old Fort Wetherill. Wetherill faces Aquidneck Island (Newport) on the East Passage and has been an important part of the coastal defense of Narragansett Bay, like it's counterpart on the West Passage, since revolutionary times. I was struck by a photo on exhibit there that showed the fort as it was during World War II, when it was the site of an antisubmarine net that stretched across to Fort Adams on the Newport side. The net, or the structure that supported it, is clearly visible as a series of white dots that lead across the bay, with a gap at the center that allowed ships to pass. Most of the buildings in the photo are gone now, but several have been nicely restored. The antisubmarine net is gone as well, but scuba divers still explore the remnants.



The net was guarding Narragansett Bay from German U-Boats, quite likely U-boats made by Krupp, the Ruhrgebiet industrial giant so often sited as the greatest contributor to the industrial heritage currently being celebrated with the Kulturhauptstadt activities this year back in Essen. It's true the U-boats wouldn't have been manufactured in Essen: they were made at a separate plant in Kiel, many miles to the north. But I can't help but feel some irony about the whole thing. And looking at the big picture, it's hard not to come away with a sense of optimism about where the world is today.




I guess I'm hopelessly naive in my optimism, but it seems relatively harmless to me. I quite enjoy riding my bike around the island, and in previous years I've had as much fun riding the Industrial Culture Route in Essen, Duisburg, Dortmund and the like. My plan for world peace involves lots of similarly naive dummies who like to ride bikes around and mind their own business. It's got to be better than lots of hard headed realists who want to blown other people up. In all of my thinking about the past, I hope I've managed to develop some insights as well. I've been told those who can't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And looking at these photos make me think that would be a real drag.

Still-Leben A40

The average speed on the freeways of Los Angeles can be as low as 5 miles per hour during peak traffic periods, but that's nothing compared to the average speed on the A40 yesterday. The A40, or Ruhrschnellweg, as it is sometimes called, is the main Autobahn through the Ruhr region and yesterday it was closed from Duisburg to Dortmund as the entire Ruhrgebeit sat down to a 60 kilometer long Kaffeepause. Average speed never crept above zero as the classic German picnic benches and tables were stretched end to end and the Autobahn was closed to vehicular traffic for the whole day. Not everyone was sitting down though: 1 million of the 3 million estimated participants were there with bicycles and plenty were just walking or skating or running. It was the biggest and most talked about event of the Kulturhauptstadt Year and I'm sorry I missed it.

But I've got plenty of photos, videos and even a 3D virtual Kaffeetisch that WDR has put together to help me experience the event vicariously. And I'm not sure I could enjoy a gathering of 3 million people anyway. So, I'll check out the pictures online and download a video or two. Hope you enjoy them too.

Der Ball ist rund, das Spiel dauert vier Wochen

Not for our boys though. Spain played an amazing game and triumphed in the end. So... we have to set our sights on 2012 and the Europa Pokal. Something tells me interest in that one is likely to be even thinner in the bars and cafes of Logan, UT than the World Cup games were.

In 1990, Gary Lineker said, "Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win." Not this year Gary, not this year.

The celebration at Logan Country Club after Spain's win yesterday.