While I don’t currently own a bike, so I couldn’t join in the ride, I did wander down to Westlake Plaza today to catch the gathering of riders for this month’s Critical Mass ride.
I got there a bit before the official 5:30 gathering time and spent the next half hour randomly walking through the assembled bikers, snapping shots as I went — here’s the Flickr photoset.
One of the guys there had an LED messageboard bolted on to the back of his bike that scrolled the message “CRITICAL MASS www.seattlecriticalmass.org We’re not blocking traffic. We ARE traffic!” as he rode along. I thought this was pretty nifty, so snagged a quick video of it while he was talking with a couple other bikers.
Interestingly enough, when I got home, I spent a couple minutes working on cleaning up the audio of their conversation. Apparently there’s been a bit of dissent in the ranks, with a few different factions (with only a 23-second audio clip, I don’t really know what the dispute is about), and these guys were egging on the guy with the sign to step up and take control. Click on the picture to the left to watch the video (704kb QT .mov or 2Mb higher-quality version) and hear their conversation.
Okay, so yeah, I’m being a bit silly. There really was no audio in the clip, at least, nothing usable for any purpose whatsoever, just noise. The audio clip is actually from Braveheart, it just happened to be the right length to fit the video clip, and the juxtaposition of the two amused me. :)