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September 14, 2005

Comments

mapletree7

What's awful is that compared to downtown LA, PCH should be a much smoother, safer ride. But it's not.

My husband rode from SF down to Orange County a couple of years ago. He and his friends got buzzed by tractor-trailers while riding (uphill) along cliffsides.

It boggles the imagination.

Will Campbell

When I saw the name "Scott Bleifer" and his age in the L.A. Times piece yesterday I almost immediately knew it was the same Scott Bleifer with whom I went to high school. Very sad.

I've done rides on PCH from Marina Del Rey to Pt. Mugu and back on several occasions and it's just very squirrely in places, never more so than southbound around Temescal Canyon. I won't even dare.

Back in 2003 me and a friend and another serving as crew did a private fundraising ride to benefit the World Parrot Trust from San Francisco to L.A. and early in the planning stages we opted to come inland at Ventura and down Highway 126 for a finish in Santa Clarita rather than down PCH to Santa Monica because we just didn't want the hassles and close-calls that PCH never ceases to supply.

Ride safely.

Brian Hodes

i just returned from scotts funeral. very sad. i am in the begining stages of organizing a cycle "sit in" on p.c.h. to bring awareness to the public of cycle safety. i to, had a very difficult time getting on my bike after such a tragic accident. it does not need to happen.

Brady Westwater

As a person who once lived in Malibu for many years - and who enjoys bike riding, I would never ride on the majority of PCH. The constant - and daily ever changing - physical intrusions into the shoulder area forces bikes - without warning - directly into the paths of cars.

And while I - luckily - never saw a bike rider get hit - I saw a number of car accidents caused when drivers had to swerve and hit another car to avoid hitting a bike that cut directly in front of them. Not once, I might add, did I ever see any biker stop after causing an accident.

I don't know what can be done to stop tragedies like this; if I had a solution, I would have proposed it many years ago.

BarnettEffie32

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."