12 Feb Feedback: bikes, books, and automobiles

Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because:

I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine.

Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon:

In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of people, including Robert Oppenheimer and Erwin Schrodinger. The store had the most complete paperback inventory west of Chicago. I felt privileged to work there at minimum wage. I have a deep and abiding love for bookstores.

Now I am an old man who still has an insatiable hunger for reading. The nearest bookstores are an hour away, and I am frustrated in them because I can’t read titles on the bottom shelves without kneeling down, which gets more and more difficult. So Amazon.ca has rescued me. But I miss my youth and bookstores.

Finally, Alicia Rius’s photos from the back seats of abandoned automobiles reminded Salem, SD, Contrarian reader Gregg Drube of The Future of Automobiles, a even more dystopic collection by autophobe Douglas Coulter on the crazyguyonabike website.

Thanks to all. Readers can write Contrarian at this address.