18th annual Chicago naked bike ride

Maybe ten years ago I was watching my Saturday night movie when I heard a lot of yelling down at the street level.  When I ambled out to the balcony I saw that it was a bunch of cyclists, rounding onto State Street from Kinzie, across the river to Wacker, Wacker east to Michigan and turning north on Michigan and disappearing behind the Wrigley Building.  Well, well, no big deal in the summer there are constant running races and cyclists and what not as we Chicagoans try to squeeze pleasure out of every second of our short summer.  But wait, it appeared that they were all wearing some kind of pink body suits, and remembering something I had read in the entertainment section of the paper and peering down from my balcony, I realized that this was Naked Bike Ride Chicago on its annual frolic.

I think it's pretty much a Chicago thing.  Googling around I saw mentions of it in a few other cities, but none of them appeared to have been holding them for 18 years as the Chicago naked cyclists have.

At the end of the parade there were several cop bikes with flashing blue lights and looking towards the east there were cops holding up traffic on State and Wacker so that the cyclists could cycle unimpeded.

This is nice.  This is how gummint should work.  I imagine when the nakeds first approached the cops to let them know what was going to happen so that there wouldn't be, I don't know, pandemonium, likely there were some cops who thought the hell you are, but somewhere there were wiser heads and they thought these guys are going to do it anyway, so let's just make sure nobody gets hurt out there,  I think there is a theme behind it, something about ecology and biking, but mainly it's just to pedal naked (actually some people are wearing their underwear or costumes, but that's fine too, it's a free country).  People who come across the event unaware are sometimes shocked but generally they applaud the cyclists.  This is the way gummint should be.


There is some cooperation between like members of the same species, and there is that thing where that goofy bird perches on the back of the hippo and eats the bugs off its teeth whereby the bird gets a meal and the hippo gets a dazzling smile, but I think basically it is red in tooth and claw.  The thing is when kitty brings in that cute dead birdy, well, we say, she doesn't know any better, when we bit into the apple in the garden she was likely snoozing in the sun.  What's bad about people is we know better, but we do a lot of evil anyway, and worse, a lot of the time when we are doing evil we think that we are doing good.

Remember checks and balances.  How wise,they told us in the fifth grade in those scratchy movies where people wrote with feathers, were the founding fathers to figure out a system where one side can run roughshod over the other (likely thinking of Adolf, fifteen years in the past but still casting that long dark shadow).  And now that is gone with one side holding all the levers and not playing nice, and almost all of them sycophants to a psycho leader with the brain of a dull child.

Meanwhile in Singapore, the brutal leaders of North Korea are the sensible, prepared, side.


Movie recommendation for Old Dog, Bottle Rocket.

Hoosier pals coming into town on Monday, so I won't be posting again until maybe Thursday,