Goodbye, Blue Sky

Hello, Merkin Peddlers!

People keep inviting me to some new social media site or other. I am happy lurking on Reddit and sharing my cat photos on Instagram and never reading the comments anywhere. I have tried to cut back further, but I get lonely. I have had friends on one screen or another since I was a teenager—on Bulletin Board Systems, Usenet, and other flavors of communication—long before smart phones and social media. “Screen friends” have always been real friends. (You can read my essay from Better Than IRL: Finding Your People on the Untamed Internet if you want to read more about this subject.) I’m still chat daily with a friend I met in a chatroom thirty years ago, and I try to visit yearly; Another friend I met first online is

Hannah, the WanderFinder

and we try to have an outing every month or two. Her Substack is a great read!

While the Internet can be a hellscape, I think much of that comes from allowing ad revenue. Back in my day there were no ads, and no money, and somehow there was a dot com boom anyway. But there was no vested interest in keeping you glued to a screen, scrolling past ads. Once pop-up ads appeared like a bad case of herpes, the fun was over. Trolls who had one been banned were now a source of revenue, and their money was as good, or better, than anyone else’s. This was before money was speech and corporations were people, two things I still can’t type without thinking I’m in a Douglas Adams dystopian comedy, which maybe I am.

A wonderful thing I found thanks to the Internet is the work of Stephen Berkman, who created the lost photographs of Shimmel Zohar. You may have seen this purported photo of a discreet merkin salesman around the web:

And of course it’s fake, but the amount of love that went into creating this marvel of verisimilitude is astounding and brilliant in its own right. He takes simple jokes like a Blind Mohel, and conjoined twins connected at the mustache, and brings them to vibrant life. Read the article first, then peruse the photographs. They are a delight. Every time I look at his beard, I laugh.

Also delightful: Outdoorsy, the newsletter of the Philly Inquirer, once again included my letter in their “Your Outdoorsy Experience” section!

And while we’re on art, if you’ve visited the beach or a boardwalk, you’ve likely been harassed by gulls. Artist Jamie Wyeth recreated the seven deadly sins as sea gulls. We can all imagine gluttony, but the other six are just as delightful.

If you remember my visit to the Chestnut Neck Battle monument, it gets short shrift when we teach the American Revolution. Shipwrecks from the battle were identified, recently. This article also taught me that 50 American revolutionaries were murdered by loyalists and British troops as a result of the battle. “Bayonetted in their sleep,” is how the article describes it. The Wikipedia article for the “Affair at Little Egg Harbor” has more details. My visit to the monument is below.

Because I post a lot, and they get quickly lost from the front page, I made a section to collect my favorite posts, which you can peruse here:

Best of Pluck

And some bicycling content. I picked up my new fat tire bike build from Pedder’s this week! It’s a Surly Ice Cream Truck, which is also my new dancer name. Steel frame, which hopefully will not crack, and a great fit. It’s a small frame, which suits my 5’7” body better than the medium-size Wendigo. Fuji sent an entire new bike for my warranty replacement, and I am selling it on FB Marketplace if you want a capable fat tire bike. You can see the measurements on Fuji’s website.

This is the Surly, which I have not named yet. I was thinking “Riddle of Steel” but that’s cumbersome. “Tank” is rather generic, but fits. It’s a tank. I’ve included some crappy photos of Old Nog, the shy blue heron at Timber Creek, and a sharp-shinned hawk I caught sharpening their beak while the Carolina wrens nearby had a tizzy.

I found a new-to-me trail that I love, about an hour drive away. It’s worth the trip. Maurice River Bluffs, as the name suggests, has some elevation! In South Jersey! A miracle. The trails are clearly marked, and split for bikes and hikers. Although as the video shows, 3 people walking their dog decided that climbing up a downhill section of the bikes-only path was a good idea. I didn’t plow into them, but if I hadn’t stopped to judge the decline of the hill, it would have been ugly:

I don’t bike on hiking-only trails, but I’ve found too many hikers who feel entitled to walk on bike-only paths lately. Here’s a nightmare in action… let’s all be safe and courteous out there.