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I popped up in Athens to face a phalanx of police riot shields. In LA, Stephen Spielberg's mother showed me her wall of fame to her son (it's on the way to the restroom). Then there was Occupy London ... and the $10/night Kung Fu hostel in Hong Kong with its Changi prison aesthetics and crazed woman who refused to budge from my bunk bed … SPOT PLANKING: One of the funnest things you can do in Geneva at the Gagosian Geneva gallery. Thanks to Johan @Gogo for being a great sport! My latest escapade was a complete departure from anything I've done before - the Damien Hirst Spot Challenge - a kind of global scavenger hunt where you had to dash around visiting 11 galleries showing his Spot Paintings (NY-LA-London-Paris-Geneva-Rome-Athens-HK), and as a reward, receive a print personally dedicated to you by the older YBA himself. It was one of the stressful and exhilarating adventures I've ever undertaken. The full spot-by-spot journey is thrashed out on my art s...

Continuing my "tales of the uneggspected" in CountyKerry: having been dismissed from my first ever waitressing gig, I now prepare to talk my way into a serious stint on the steamy side of the swinging door...  r ead "Doing the Dishes in County Kerry" Part 1 Head chef Bruce co-assembles the Taster Plate,  a personal smorgasboard of all the sugary offerings al dia . "You need to turn it around in under 2 minutes," said sous chef Tommy.  My life as a trainee chef Mulcahy's Restaurant and Bar, Ireland 1998 After my three-week waitressing career sank like a lead meringue I found myself out in the drizzling rain looking for a new job, and more pressingly, a new place to sleep. Kenmare suddenly took on a grey, miserable pallor, a trick of the brain when life takes an awkward turn. Bummer. I was still frazzled by being fired, though it wasn't the first time in my life. I argued that really, I never wanted to be a waitress; it was just a wa...

Avoiding banana lounge butt (except when typing this blog) and stingy things like these ... Story on the Wayback machine here .

UPDATE: Yoga really works!  Some exercises to fix your back Right: What I need right now ... the Yamaha-owned onsen Tsumagoi (means "Love your Wife") in Kakegawa. Those are my green-tea-soaked tootsies about 2 weeks ago ... ... AND I don't mean pickpockets, hijackers, or even Bangkok tailor-made shirt touts (the best in the world - the touts, not the shirts, which fall apart after 2 washes). I mean: look after your back when dragging suitcases, sleeping in hostels, stepping off strange and uneven curbs (kerbs downunder), and yes, biking around like I've been doing for 5 weeks. After 2 weeks customer evangelizing in Singapore and another 3 in Japan , I'm reporting to you flat on my back, after putting it out on my last day in Tokyo. I was simply folding a blanket and when POW! A sharp, throbbing pain above my left hip. Somehow, I managed to get back to NYC - bracing myself and dragging two bags and a small backpack through Tokyo's train and airport ...

Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Houses, Oak Bluffs. They're not all pink ... I'm just back from a weeks riding on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket with 40 or so cyclists, courtesy of Friday Friendly Tour Company BikeandtheLike and 5 magnanimous Bike Friday customers. I have these customers to thank: Sue, Glen, Leo, The Knables, plus Charlie (he must be inside getting some chowder) for sponsoring my visit to the Cape How magnanimous? I cajoled them into signing up for a Friday Friendly trip in the Berkshires, but due to the recession? Hills? The tour was undersubscribed, and thus cancelled for this year. A bit of fast webgotiating and within an hour I had them switched to a completely different Friday Friendly tour company, $400 less expensive, and subbing my attendance to the tune of $100 each. "If you can get them to sponsor you, I'll kick in the rest," said Suzy the tour operator. Of course, my part of the bargain was to write a full multimedia...

The house that Alison sat looked a bit like this, but unlike Thoreau's digs, was way more than a stone's throw from a home cooked meal and hoogs (that's hugs in Scottish). WHEN you're asked that standard contest question, "Who do you admire the most in the world, and why?" - just who comes to mind for you? Someone famous? Infamous? Completely unknown? When asked this 10, 5 and 2 years ago, I thought of the same gal each time - a friend I met in my travels called Alison. More about her in a moment. This question came up recently in a heated, though chummy debate with a couple of friends about Henry David Thoreau, the eloquent writer/philosopher/inward excursionist who's practically deified by the general public for his contribution to voluntary poverty, or rather, simplicity. Don't get me wrong - he wrote a great book, but when I read that his little cabin was a stone's throw from a home cooked dinner with a loving and supportive family - gimm...

i.e. a bike you can bring inside. Say no more. Wait! Say THIS . OK, I gotta say more ... At the Film Society of Lincoln Center's GreenScreens event on May 5, I was the lone little panelist touting the virtues of transportation you can take with you, not to mention that you can get your leg over a small wheeled bike when you're 64, 74, 84 ... Present at the screening were luminaries of the bike advocacy world including Bicycle Film Fest's Brent Barbur and Portland Bicycle Transportation Alliance frontman Scott Bricker - featured prominently in the film Veer - who came all the way over to the dark side especially for the screening. Unfortunately, the rain kept most people off their bikes and away from the event. I tried to find Scott after the show for a chat, but I guess he'd already winged it back to the west coast. Naturally I did a bit of the crowdpleasing 1-2 with the pink tikit , and raffled off a Traffic Cone Bag . Thanks to the Film Society of Lincoln C...

How does a bike lane warrior do on a Valentine's Day? Especially when fortuitously marooned in Hawaii?  Certainly keep a nice, safe distance from any chance of catching a communicable something! The closest I got to anything "coupley" was to watch people in furry animal costumes engage in foreplay ... As this year's day of "will you's?" and little square tables with a chair on either side, draws to a close at 11.45pm Blue Hawaii time, I offer a blow by blow account of how I spent it. So if you had an even less romantic day than me, read my itinerary and claim it as your own. Think of it as a companion volume to 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' or more likely, 'Independence Day'. 8am: I woke with eyes like two hyphens having spent the last two nights working til 3am on the Bike Friday quarterly newsletter. In the spirit of conquering oil addiction, I was directed to make it a new, 'low emissions' publication, with half the number...

In living the life as a professional nomad – a very pleasant term for a homeless person with a laptop and a nice change of clothes - I apparently stumbled over the border of decorum, and fortunately a friend stopped me in my tracks. Let me explain. I get hunger attacks – the kind of sugar low that some small, highly strung women complain of. Sometimes I don't honor the call of the calorie. I suffered dehydration while crossing the Yucatan in Mexico in 2004, not because of lack of water, but lack of sufficient calories to balance my electrolyes. It's called "not looking after yourself." Hey I gotta eat! I arrived at the Berkeley Bowl Market right on closing time, Dec 24. I locked my bike, bolted past the doorman and made a bee-line for the brown rice sushi-to-go just inside the door. The doorman yells, "Miss! Miss! We're closed!" so loudly and emphatically I imagined big men in blue overalls hoisting me by armpits out into the parking lot. I was forced t...

Now this is one bummer about being single - you need a permanent partner to invest in one of these! Riding the DoubleDay tandem recumbent with (happily married) Jeff Gilbert on the 5BBC Chocolate Ride in NY. See Bike Friday in NY07 for the full monty. I'm devouring a fascinating book called Singled Out - How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After by Bella DePaulo. What keeps me reading is not only an eye-opening list of discriminatory perks you get from being married in the USA (if you die, your social security benefits pass to your spouse, if you're single it goes to the state; if your spouse dies, you get a small stipend for funeral expenses, if single, your body was presumeably discovered in your lonely walk-up bedsit being nibbled by the cat and so on) but the wittiness infused throughout. It's mischievously pointed, dedicated to the cause, yet not at all defensive. When people feel strongly about something it takes a bit ...