Tour de Fat was held this past weekend in Golden Gate Park, bringing us the usual array of burlesque, twee, beer, and freak art bikes engineered to fuck people up. And that was fun and all, but the real show was watching a tower of lumber crash down on some poor sap's head after a rousing game of Giant Jenga. Seriously, I can't believe this isn't being played in Dolores Park every weekend. Just look at how amped the crowd got:
The Hot Dog wasn't impressed…
Anyway, there's only a few more months left for the losers to give themselves concussions before it gets gross outside, so someone should whip one of these Jenga sets up and drag it to the park pronto.
Improving upon the city's already steller green transportation infranstructure, someone painted these handy buffalo sharrows around Golden Gate Park. So should you ever decide to take one of the city's pet bison out for a stroll, you and the passing cars will know that it's okay for you and your 2,000 pound friend to Take The Lane.
We gotta admit: we're not particularly stoked on the new separated bike lanes along JFK in Golden Gate Park either. We love the fact the city is trying new things, and separated lanes have typically worked well in other cities, but they aren't really panning out in Golden Gate Park. People park their cars in the lanes, use the lanes as sidewalks, have made the approach to stop signs difficult, and people clearly have no idea how to park in the new spots. That's not to say the idea should be dismissed entirely—not at all. The city could put up new signage explaining the situation, install a curb between the bike lanes and the parking spaces, or actually stripe out specific spaces for people to park. You know, address the problems.
But KRON's Stanley Roberts! Fuck! People are Behaving Badly, you see, and those people are the government experimenting with improving our transportation. Grrrrrrrrr, Stanley mad!
Naturally, Stanley took his amazing voice and the camcorder he bought off eBay with all the milk money he's been saving up and interviewed a couple of angry (grrrrrrrr) dumb-dumbs in minivans about the problem. And guess what? They hate bicyclists! “Where should bikers be a bikin'?” In the middle of traffic, where they've always been biking. Obviously!
I don't know what my favorite part of the video is: when some green thing claims her door will now get sideswiped when she opens it (because, that's not already a problem on roads without bike lanes. Plus, she wants the American Privilege of opening her door into cyclists, not traffic) or when Stanley doesn't interview a single cyclist, urban planner, or someone who might actually be in favor of the lanes.
