did ride my first Brevet, a 200km brevet organized by the
CCRiazor from A Coruña. Doing something like that has been in my personal
todo list since I started cycling (or, at least, since I started cycling
a bit more seriously). I guess having Super Randonneur (George Tellalov)
and the Randonneur of the cyclades (Sascha Welter) as friends helped a
bit with that desire.

I've to say that I totally fell in love with the whole Brevet thing.
The spirit, the people, the smooth ride (I was really really lucky about the
weather)... everything was just perfect. For sure one of the best experiences
I've had in my life.

Cyberpunk cycling

A couple of days ago I went on a ride in the morning. One of the usual routes
I do around Lugo, first going southeast towards the mountains, thenabout the opening of another Borders superstore crammed with lattes and Sudoku instead of Foucault and Zola? No. Try a Carnegie Corporation report . . . from 1930.

The battle is as much about culture as it is about cash. "It's almost as if there are two tracks of bookselling, the commercial and the literary," muses ABA president Mitchell Kaplan in an interview with the Voice. (Disclosure: As an author, I've read at many of these chains and indies, and my work has been promoted by ABA's Book Sense.) The founder of the Miami-area Books & Books, Kaplan started from a sheer love of what the Carnegie report pronounced dead: books as things-in-themselves. "When you lose an [independent] bookstore, you don't just lose the place," Kaplan explains. "You lose