CicLAvia on Wilshire Boulevard - Success!

The mighty Wilshire Boulevard was a no-car zone for the better part of the day Sunday.  Six lanes of bliss, it started from One Wilshire Blvd. downtown and stretched all the way out to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).  Along the way - the DWP handed out free water (maybe an effort at PR - there's been some grumblings about the department's financials), and every cafe, sandwich shop, and eatery was crammed with customers who'se bikes were inelegantly piled outside.

We've had several CicLAvia's now and the consensus is (1) people love them and (2) they give small businesses along the routes their biggest one-day revenues of the year.  Grumpy car people complain about the street closures (just as Cockatoo, a non-runner, complained about the marathon route disrupting the part of the city with the fewest runners), but they can be consoled by it only being one day.  Also, maybe their co-workers will be a little less hard to deal with Monday after a lovely Saturday on their bikes.

On a side note, during my normal bike-commute home we've noticed that at least west of Vermont, the lane next to the curb has been painted BUS LANE.  I looked up at the street sign and saw that during rush hour it's reserve for buses but BIKES OK.  Hello!  A nice, safe lane without malevolent car people trying to pass you and missing you by inches.  Now, we can just glance back once in a while to make sure no buses are coming and pedal on home.  So much better than the sidewalk.  (Which is legal here, if not preferable.)

A win-win.  And was it my imagination that there were more bike-commuters Monday?  Did CicLAvia open a few eyes as to what's possible, even in Los Angeles?

Al Roker's Weight Loss Book, "Never Goin' Back"

We picked this up at the library Tuesday after work, finished it Wednesday evening, and posted this three star review on Amazon Thursday morning:

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One star off, obviously, for the misery meals that take up a quarter of the book at the end. The paper they're written on looks tastier, which is saying something since my copy seems to have been printed on Grade Z coarse newsprint.

The second star off comes from this nasty whiff of rich guy entitlement. Heaven help us if we've become so strident and polarized that we see Al Roker as "The Man," but the upscale gym memberships and private trainers and the exotic cleanse therapy are assists unavailable to obese poor people. Which is not to say Roker was wrong to take advantage of these things, it just places this book at a far remove from the the societal aspect of obesity in America, the link between poverty and obesity.

He mentions trips to Paris without mentioning the French Paradox - why they tend to be slimmer. One suspects it's because they wouldn't dream of eating the "food products" one would see advertised on the Today Show. (Per capita they eat HALF the sugar we eat; the Italians even less.)

Still, Mr. Roker is quite pleasant and an agreeable television presence. Congrats to him for getting on top of his weight issues. The image of his spouse berating him and making faces when he reached for a piece of bread was pretty grim; it's pleasing to read that he's happy now.

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But did we give the book enough thought? Did we think Oh, it's just a light-hearted, mini-memoir of a semi-famous, affable glutton who gets food religion and changes his ways? Something in us thinks we should have delved deeper into this....

And yet, only a churl would see something sinister in the way he seems to ignore the wicked role the Food Industrial Complex plays in the American obesity crisis. It's as if Roker's afraid to say the obvious and plain thing, that almost any "food product" one sees advertised really isn't food at all. (I exclude the nice people at the Chilean Fruit Board with their seasonal pitches.)

And surely only a curmudgeon would attribute this reticence to corporatism, to his delight and willingness to be part of The Machine. A line from the book really annoyed us. Roker talks about how 95% of dieters fail. "Maybe," he offered, "the 95% should occupy Dunkin Donuts against the 5% who are successful." Ha! Funny, see, 'cause that means the young people in Occupy Wall Street, who weren't reticent about expressing their unease with the power of corporations and gross income inequality, were apparently losers.

So now Roker's Hugo Boss suits are the right size to pass management muster, and he's married to / merged with an appropriately corporate spouse. (True company people, the spouse stopped snarling to him about his weight because it was "ineffective", not because it was unkind.)

Knock it off, Cockatoo! He's America's beloved weatherman, for gosh sakes!

Hope there's some of that Hagen Dazs strachiatello gelato in the store tomorrow; they were out last time.....