I plan to resist the urge to exclusively use this blog for posting videos, but for those who haven’t seen it, here is a great clip created by a professor to both demonstrate and explain how the “fair use” principle of intellectual property works. I smell a test case.

[link]

In the ultimate exploration of the niche culture that a big city offers, I spent 9 hours last Sunday watching films all linked through the theme of the bicycle. I highly recommend checking out the Bicycle Film Festival if you are one of the 16 cities it travels through (not by bike, unfortunately). For the $20 day pass, it was a great deal; I saw more short films than ever before, and had the unique experience of being part of a crowd that moaned at the mere mention of a 12% grade.

In what now seems to be an inevitability, I felt a nationalist appreciation when the National Film Board was represented with with The Bicycle: Fighting AIDS with Community Medicine, as well as my usual political appreciation for publicly-funded arts. Similarly, I resisted the urge to cheer when a team from Ottawa was represented in a film on bicycle polo.

Some links to interesting projects featured in some of the films I saw:

• Ghost Bike Project, bikes which are spray-painted white and permanently locked to signs around New York City, each one a memorial for a cyclist killed by an automobile. I had seen one of these and had no idea what they were. Pretty spooky, and a reminder of the statistic I recently read that more than 250 cyclists were killed in NYC between 1995 and 2006.
• Parking(ing) Day, an annual event in many cities where parking spots are converted into temporary parks.
• The Los Angeles Burrito Project, where volunteers deliver burritos to the homeless in LA via bicycles
• Africycle and Village Bicycle Project, organizations which send unused bikes to Africa. Several films touched on how the mobility and independence which bikes bring have a huge impact on developing countries.

A trailer for the festival itself (here is the link if the embedded video doesn’t show up):

The headliner, a great film about snowboarding and “cycling” [link]:

A popular Youtube video by director Lucas Brunelle, who had a longer film at the BFF which had hearts pumping and the crowd cheering [link]: