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Toronto Cycling Map at iBikeTO.ca

I can’t quite recall where I read it (probably Joe Friel’s excellent Cyclist’s Training Bible) but apparently during your first year of cycling training, you need to log about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of foundation before getting serious about skill-targeted training regimes.

That’s a lot of miles, and although I have some favourite routes in the city, it’s still nice to mix it up occasionally and discover new trails.

Toronto Cycling Maps

There are great maps of Toronto cycling routes, in pdf form (here on toronto.ca) and as a Google Maps mashup (here on iBikeTO.ca).

Accessing New Routes

At Tommy Thompson Park, in pursuit of Toronto Cycling Routes

New opportunities for discovering routes are appearing all the time.

TCAT pointed me to the Bikes+Transit site, which invites Toronto cyclists to avail of new GO Bus racks for transporting cycles.  In addition to making Toronto a more cycling-commuter friendly city, the bus additions now also allow cyclists to access other routes across (and out of) the city.

You’re even supposed to use Flickr and Twitter to record your explorations. I love Flickr, so I’ll aspire to join in the photo taking. I don’t usually bring my SLR on cycling trips, but that hasn’t stopped me from taking sketchy photos and videos with my phone in the past.

Niagara trails are also more accessible now (see here). You can also take the Greyhound bus between Toronto, St Catherines, and Niagara Falls.

Is there an App for that?

Being a Blackberry user (actually a Blackberry lover), the one thing I can’t find is an app the would turn my blackberry into a GPS-enabled cycling map, for the times when I occasionally lose my way on a new route. (Apparently the iPhone has a bunch of cycling apps available!)

If anyone knows of such a Blackberry app, I’d be very much obliged. Even a generic app that would allow me to overlay a Google Maps mashup like the Toronto cycling one would be great.

Learning the Lingo

Bonus cycling link: Dictionary of Roadie Slang (the Profanisaurus of cycling, useful for a Cat. 7 like me)

Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language

When Stephen Fry laments “it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophiles don’t enjoy language,” it’s as if Michael Phelps were to lament that not enough people enjoy water. So when Stephen wholeheartedly recommended Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language, which he characterized as more playful and engaging than books on similar subject matter, I was hard pressed to say no. It’s taken me ages to find time to get into the meat of this book (strictly my own fault), but now, about two-thirds of the way through, I wanted to offer it my wholehearted recommendation for anyone who is even remotely interested in language and its origins and evolution.

Deutscher’s prose is indeed playful and accessible, his examples thought-provoking, and his subject matter fascinating: what are the forces that shape and transform language?

Deutscher mentions more than once that “These days, there are no systems of communication which are in the process of evolving their first words.”  He’s right, I suppose, but only on a technicality.  Last week I was taught the basics of a computer scripting language I’d never worked with before. Surely the constructs of some arbitrary scripting language represent one of many “artificial” systems of communication which are in the process of evolving their first “words” (and tokens).

I am writing this now as Deutscher transitions in the book from talking about the destructive forces which are applied to language (which favor economy, expressiveness, and analogy), into the constructive ones which enable new linguistic richness to blossom. Metaphor, apparently, provides many of the raw materials for new grammatical elements.

With that observation under my belt, and aspiring to be a creative force in the universe, I suddenly feel a bit better about my obsession with admiration of Roger’s Profanisaurus (a dictionary of profanity that originates in the pages of the UK’s Viz magazine, which derives cleverness and vulgarity in equal measure from a playful, multi-layered cocktail of metaphor, rhyming slang and other wordplay).

And of course there are my dear LOLcats, who reflect (again in equal parts) the absurd and absurdly rapid evolution of linguistic memes as they’re propelled at the speed of the internets. Since I’m in Ireland, and Deutscher recently reflected on the necessity of the word possessing-implying “have”, here’s a somewhat appropriate LOLCat I just cooked up  – with my cap off to Jim Condron for his help with the Irish word for “flavr.” (context here for the uninitiated)

oirish kitteh tinks: deres a flavr on meh, so dere iz.

Back to Deutscher’s book.  He spends the fifth chapter illustrating a point by employing a fictional dialogue between a cast of characters at a ‘George Orwell Centennary Conference’.  it’s a technique akin to the one I admired in Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. Actually, that’s all I have to say.  Check it out.  Go for a swim.  And apologies to Deutscher, Mellie, Fry for this rambling but heartfelt review.