Rich Mintz  

Recently I learned from Lifehacker that the US Mint sells dollar coins in bulk and ships them to you for free. The Lifehacker tip seems pretty silly (if you’re willing to go through all that trouble just to get a few frequent flyer miles, maybe you should, you know, get a hobby), but I love the idea of dollar coins, and after I saw the propaganda sign at left this week while in Washington, I just ordered some.

The point of the US Mint direct-ship program is to get dollar coins into circulation. The financial case for this is plain: a dollar bill lasts for 18 months, and a dollar coin lasts essentially forever. And anyone who’s ever lived in any other country, where coins are in wide circulation that are worth actually useful amounts of money (UK pound coin = $1.60; 2-pound coin = $3.20; Canadian 1-dollar coin and 2-dollar coin roughly at parity with US), where you can actually buy more than a candy bar with coins, you miss the convenience right away.

New York City, where money slips through your hands like sand, would seem to be the natural place for dollar coins to circulate heavily. I’m going to do what I can over the next month to make that happen, and I promise to report back.

Since someone asked me today: I ride a Gary Fisher Nirvana, probably 1999 or 2000 model year.  I bought it new at Peachtree Bikes in Atlanta and I think I paid about $650. It’s more or less identical to the bike you see at left, even the same color (blue) — I stole that pic off a Craigslist ad because I don’t have a picture of my bike handy. The Nirvana has been discontinued, and Gary Fisher was bought by Trek last year, but Trek still makes a line of bikes with the Gary Fisher name.  Probably the Gary Fisher Fast City line is the closest thing they sell now.

(Note: the advice I’m going to give below comes out of the mouth of a lay person, which is to say that even though I bike a lot, I learned almost everything I know about bikes from reading what other people have written on the Internet and from, you know, riding bikes.)

This style of bike is called a “hybrid,” which means it combines some of the features of a mountain bike (wide tires, upright riding position, heavy frame) with some of the features of a road bike (chiefly the gears you need for higher speeds). If you’re going to ride in a city like New York, you gain more from a heavy frame (for sturdiness) than you lose in speed. Also, I’m a large person, and I feel more comfortable on a heavier bike, and I definitely prefer an upright riding position. Earlier in my life, I owned bikes with those curly racing handlebars that forced you to hunch over, and I always feared I would fall off.

My bike is 21 speeds (3 x 7), but I could do with much fewer. I almost never use the lower set of 7 gears, and I would be satisfied with either one of the other sets of 7.  Given that I’m mostly a city rider, and that New York City is largely flat, it’s rare that I’m either climbing something really steep, or speeding down a hill.

I have an upgraded seatpost (the tube that the saddle sits on) with springs in it to provide some shock absorbency; the salesman recommended that because I am a large person. I have a small round side mirror attached to the end of my left handlebar tube, so that I can see when someone’s coming up behind me on the bike path.

Also, because I ride in New York City, I have all the accessories required by law: the standard reflectors; a red taillight in back and a white headlight in front; and a bell. (They ticket here if they catch you riding without.)  I also have a flat metal rack in back (over the rear wheel), onto which I tie my briefcase, cloth sack of groceries, etc. with 2 bungee cords.  And the helmet, of course, which I almost never ride without. I don’t use pedal clips, leg clips, or anything much else. In winter I ride with my coat on and wrap a muffler around my face. I’ve ridden in falling snow and it’s fine.

I recently replaced my saddle because, after lifting the bike by the saddle one too many times, my old saddle started to tear off its housing.

I lock my bike up with an ordinary Kryptonite-type Master lock, which sits in a bracket that’s bolted to the seat tube, flush with the plane of the frame like a letter D (or a backwards letter D, when the bike is facing left) inside the triangle of the frame. I always lock the front wheel along with the frame, since it can be popped out easily. But to be honest, I don’t worry too much about bike theft, now that New York City has become so safe.

I chose this bike because a salesman at Peachtree Bikes asked me what I was buying it for, and I said “commuting in the city [Atlanta], but I’m not looking to become an enthusiast, I just want reliable transportation that doesn’t intimidate me.” He steered me to this, and I haven’t had any regrets.  It’s not the sexiest bike in the world, but it gets the job done.

Today I had to take my car in for service on the way to work (involving going to the lot in downtown Brooklyn, calling a tow truck, waiting for it, riding over to Gowanus and dropping off the car, and then heading to work). I had the brilliant idea of biking instead of taking the subway, and it turned out very well — by the time I got home tonight, I’d ridden 12 1/2 miles (more than I thought it would be) and I didn’t even feel tired.

As usual, the hardest part was getting on the damn bike. Once I did that, everything else sort of fell into place.  I confess I walked the bike up the steepest part of the Brooklyn Bridge incline, but I don’t think that’s even a problem, since by then my heart rate was up in the fat-burning zone anyway. The ride to work through Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights and over the Manhattan Bridge was very nice, under perfect skies and shade trees. I detoured past the bike shop on Court Street for a minor repair (and to pick up a bike horn, since after all horns aren’t just for clown bikes, and a saddle bag).

The ride to work was almost 7 miles, but it didn’t feel like it, and after my ride home (about 3 miles, including a detour to the ice-cream truck) I feel like I could go out again, which is the whole point — make your body hungry for exercise (and, after it, watermelon and seltzer) and you end up in a virtuous cycle that brings your weight down and helps you feel better. (I note I’m feeling better on less sleep than usual.)

Tomorrow if the weather holds I’m going to risk something even more ambitious: I have a meeting in the East 80s, then have to pick the car up in Gowanus, and I’m considering doing the whole day by bike, which would be something like a 20-mile day, probably more miles than I’ve done in a day since the last time I rode from Belmont to Walden Pond, which I note was during the Reagan Administration.

I’m happy to announce that, thanks to an unusually soft market for parking, my car will be leaving its home in downtown Brooklyn and joining me in Manhattan at the end of the month. No, we’re not moving in together, but my car will be living only a few blocks away under the FDR Drive and we’ll be able to spend a lot more time with one another. I’m so happy!

So after a long experiment with GQueues (a well-planned, well-executed program), I’ve now moved back to Things. It turns out that given how much task-switching I do and how little “margin time” I have, being able to efficiently manage today’s task list is more important than anything else, and Things handles that better. More news as it develops.

Glimpsed through the window of the British International School in Kips Bay, evidence that the indoctrination of the subjects of the realm begins at a very young age…

For a few years in the middle of the last decade, I was a partner in a technology startup company in New York. We didn’t make the millions of dollars we were hoping for, obviously, but it was a great experience, highly recommended if you’re of an entrepreneurial temperament. The details of our business deserve their own post, which I’ll do another time, but this weekend, walking around the Seaport where we had our office, I came upon this rock:

Here, at the foot of Peck Slip, is where my partners and I would come to get out of the office, away from our staff (and sometimes from each other), and hash out this or that or the other problem that was threatening to dash our young business on the rocks.

And here’s the view across the river, of downtown Brooklyn, and upriver to the Brooklyn Bridge:

If you need a place to think, this is about as good a place to think as any.

Also worth note: look at all the sand and driftwood that have washed up right at this spot, which must be a natural point of impact for estuarial tides:

Yesterday we took a walk up the East River, from Pier 17 all the way up — well, when we set out, we weren’t sure how far we’d go, but the East River Esplanade just kept staying interesting, so we walked all the way up to 34th Street. I hadn’t been up that way in years, and I don’t think I’d ever been above Canal Street. The park is looking good, and the construction of the new boardwalk/bikeway and park sections is well underway, and in some stretches already complete.

There’s now a signposted bike route circumnavigating the entire island (with a diversion from the shore in East Harlem, and another in Washington Heights), which I’d like to try some summer Sunday when I’ve trained myself back into that kind of shape. The real news, though, is what’s happening on the Lower East Side and in the east teens. East River Park between Houston and the twenties is gorgeous — well-kept, well-used, and (unlike the Hudson River park) fronting a very active waterway, with the opposite shore close enough to see. Here are a few highlights:

At 34th Street we took the new East River Ferry home, down to Pier 11 via four or five stops in Brooklyn. If they can get the service hiccups under control (today I waited almost an hour for a boat, for no particular reason anyone could explain), this will become an important part of the transit network. Bikes are welcome for an additional $1, and I could imagine taking the ferry to work (at 34th) from time to time just for the hell of it.

A few ferry photos:

After a hiatus of several months, I’m back on the bike again. I got up Saturday morning determined not to let another week go by, and so my first errand was a trip to Gotham Bikes on West Broadway, where I got a new seat installed. To my surprise, riding a bike was like… riding a bike, and I picked my old habits right up, doing about 8 miles in the course of the weekend.

The bike was an important part of my weight-loss regimen last year, because it worked an incremental bit of extra exercise into my ordinary routine. Tomorrow I’m planning to get myself back on and ride to work, for the first time this year. Wish me luck!

Here I am in the bike shop:

And here I am with my bike on the A train (bike not pictured):

And here’s another guy on a bike, reminding us all that New York is awesome:

It was a nail-biter for sure; 50,000 New Yorkers gathered around their streaming video players late into the night on Friday watching the proceedings in the Senate live, and hundreds of thousands more compulsively reloaded their browsers, and another million or two watched NY1 and CNN. But at the end of the evening, something amazing had occurred: a Republican-led State Senate, in a close vote that turned on the decisions of a handful of Republicans, voted to extend the social sanction of marriage to New York’s gay and lesbian citizens, bringing us a little closer to equal treatment under the law.

“Activist judges” didn’t have anything to do with it, and this wasn’t a matter of Democratic political horse-trading, either. Most of the money in this fight came from Republicans, as did a good portion of the back-room lobbying (notably from Mike Bloomberg, who had no problem at all putting himself on the line for equality, and has proven himself yet again to be a mensch).

It’s clear from Michael Barbaro’s post-mortem in the Times that even back in 2009, there were Republican legislators who had no problem with gay marriage, but who voted against it out of political expediency. This isn’t news, but it’s nice to see it stated so unequivocally. It’s also clear that among the many people who helped make this happen, three people played an outsized role.

One was Governor Andrew Cuomo, who threw his considerable political weight behind the issue and was willing to invest himself personally in legislative advocacy of both the institutional and personal varieties. In contrast to 2009, he insisted on a tight coalition, and a tight coalition was what he got, and that made much of the difference. (We learn yet again: old-fashioned political organizing matters.) Far from hurting Andrew Cuomo, strong advocacy on this issue will only prove to have helped him politically, and not just with gay people; he’s demonstrated a willingness to cross the aisle, to insist on the issues that matter, and to use his political power to ensure they get considered.

The second was Mike Bloomberg, in this context quite a bit more than nominally a Republican (he’s the single biggest donor to Republican State Senators), who was blunt and eloquent by turns, spending more time in Albany this year than we had any right to expect him to, despite having nothing personally or politically to gain here, at least in the short term. The definition of a mensch.

And the third was Brian Ellner, head of HRC’s New York marriage task force. Ellner ran what by all accounts was an extremely professional two-pronged campaign. On the one hand, he did a better job in six months of mobilizing public figures (from all over the political and cultural spectrum) to voice their support for marriage equality than any other group had managed to do in ten years. And on the other, he was responsive and effective in the field. Barbaro credits Ellner personally, and the field campaign he ran, with turning Joseph Addabbo from a “nay” into a “yea”; it’s not inconceivable that without that piece, the whole puzzle might have fallen apart. So thanks, Brian, for what you’ve done for New Yorkers.

The true heroes here, though, are the Republican Senators who cast off the demands of politics and voted their consciences. A special thanks to Senators Kruger, McDonald, Alesi, Addabbo, Grisanti, and Saland, who might easily have come down on the other side, but weighed the issues against their personal vanity and voted the right way. Senators Grisanti and Saland, each in his own way, did New York proud with their speeches on the floor Friday night, and they in particular should be remembered.