You would think leaving the Feed alone for a couple of days would have provided more than a few links, but some of what did come through was … vile. Need to take a shower to get the images out of my mind kind of vile. And yes in spite of having been doing this for over 3 years, coming up on 4 soon, there are still things that make me wish I hadn’t read them. I’m not going to tell you which links fell into that category, but as they are pertinent to the mission of this blog, you will get to see them.
Up first is a rather banal story we read about in WoaB all the time with a twist. Bicyclist Killed by Drunk Driver in Manitowoc County Did you catch the twist? “The suspect has been arrested on felony charges” They actually arrested the driver and filed felony charges without going through nine miles of red tape, because when a cyclist is killed by a drunk driver it’s just like anyone else that’s killed by a drunk driver. I don’t know if I would call that “progress”, but it is an improvement.
In the UK, local authorities are considering banning semis from a road where a cyclist was killed when he avoided a huge pothole and was hit by a semi. Lorries may be banned from road on which army cyclist killed I saw a picture of the pothole in question, and it occupied almost the entire lane the cyclist was in and a bit of the oncoming lane as well.
In Oz a cyclist was injured in an unknown type of wreck, possibly a high speed single vehicle wreck. Cyclist injured, woman killed as Easter road toll rises To avoid given as much as we know at the moment, watch the road conditions and adjust your speed to what’s safe.
Still in Oz, a woman is assaulted by 2 people in a car, with multiple reports. First the car-head interpretation of the event Cyclist injured after alleged hit-and-run In spite of language that clearly describes an assault in the third paragraph of the article, the incident is labelled “accident” in the first paragraph. Other outlets get it right. Woman seriously injured in bicycle incident and Cyclist ‘knocked from bike’ on freeway I love the first sentence in that article:”A woman has been seriously injured after being pushed off her bicycle by an idiot in a moving car this afternoon.” So we run the gamut from car-head to rational to emotional over the same story. I can’t fault the third article for being inaccurate, just a bit over the top, You’re not supposed to call people that do idiotic things “idiots”, because they sometimes just have a brain fart, and do things without thinking. This was not one of those cases, this was premeditated to some extent and required thought and effort to carry out, but you still shouldn’t call criminals “idiots” until they are convicted. Final link Cyclist seriously injured by two men in highway attack Good levels of detail, just the facts with no excessive emotion added. Thumbs up for the article, thumbs down for the perps.
And that’s 2 days worth of Feed after filtering. I know, I’m contacting the people that run the search for me about missing articles that are pertinent to the subject. I think in their zeal to remove the bull riders and motorcyclists which they did a very good job at they managed to also eliminate about a third to a half of the bicycle reports, both on wrecks and on infrastructure and lifestyle. I don’t mind doing a final filter with human eyes, that’s what I’m here for.
Billed @$0.02, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 