On my ride today, I swerved to avoid a 3-year old boy who ran into the bike lane, in doing so, cutting off a cyclist behind me. She yelled and I swerved again. I regained my balance in time to hear her curse me out. And then, clearly after she had regained her composure, she said some ugly things about my body. (I'm not providing details.) That made me stop and dismount. She apologized. Even so, it still hurt. I said she wasn't so pretty she should be making personal comments like that. And I called her "lady" so she'd feel old. And I feel bad about that.

All this because a little child did what little children do.

All I want to say is that if you think sexist body slamming only goes one way, from male to female, that's not true. It's not enough to get respect, you have to give it too.

 6/2/2012; 12:32:42 PM.

A few threads come together.

I met Clay Johnson at Mesh in Toronto last week.

He says we are consuming a diet of unhealthy news that leads to serious problems analogous to obesity caused by eating unhealthy food.

We're like people living in impoverished areas where there's no fresh food at the supermarket, so how can we get anything but junk news.

The answer is that you have to look a little harder, but the good stuff is out there. And if there were more of a demand for it, and if there were a distribution system for it, there would be more supply, imho.

I posit that if we had a handful of people who read lots of news sites and pass on their non-junk discoveries in the form of feeds, it wouldn't take many such people to provide a service that was a serious upgrade to what is currently being offered.

News that activates your mind. Gives you new information and perspectives. Causes you to think of solutions. Causes you to feel that there is something you can do to make the world better. But please, not limited to any single point of view, whether it be political or otherwise.

But we have to be systematic enough about it so that software can be written to aggregate the feeds into a single destination. Don't worry, if one service takes off in this area, you can be sure there will be many to choose from, because the technology is very simple.

With that, I know of three people who are pushing enough links consistently to make their streams useful. Atul Arora, Patrick LaForge, and myself. (Though I see that Atul isn't pushing so many links these days.)

BTW, I'm not a purist. I pass on a little junk just for fun in my feed.

The idea of "junk news" came from this TV ad.

 6/2/2012; 10:15:38 AM.