Pedestrain Day(s) in Bolivia

"What's the matter with you?! Today is Pedestrian Day; you can't drive!" shouted Jorge, an offended seven-year-old who was playing soccer with his friends on the Avenida Esteban Arze de Villa San Antonio. For just a moment, an authorized vehicle had broken through his improvised soccer field.

This is how the front page article begins in today's la Razón, Bolivia's national daily newspaper. Yesterday Bolivia cleared about 2 million cars from the streets in nine cities, calling it, officially, if not very succinctly, "National Pedestrian and Cyclist Day in Defense of Mother Earth."



Volleyball, street markets, music and dancing, kids throwing tops, hundreds of bikes (a lot of them on the freeways), people playing hopscotch in zebra costumes, old Chola ladies in bowler hats doing tai chi, etc. Of the forty or so people that got busted for driving, one was someone from the mayor's office, another it turns out, a drunken senator.

There's a video montage over here with this little article from the bbc, and maybe check out the general wikipedia article on car-free days.

As fabulous as this all is, though, it's worth noting here that Bolivia's real pedestrian event actually began last month, when over 1000 Bolivian Indians started marching 400 or so miles--from the Amazon Basin up to La Paz, at 12,000 feet elevation!--to protest a new highway through TIPNIS (Isibordo Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory) land.




some more details (English), and 16 minutes of interviews (Spanish)

related (offsite): patagonia sin represas

endless tide pools

some photos I've been meaning to post for the last month.


mono lake, on the eastern sierra



caves and beach house ruins at crystal cove


maguey flowers & Tom finds some pickleweek, gooseneck barnacles


some big sea hares!


and did you know that this creature is an anemone?
not, as I had always thought, an "anenome".
right. I know. I feel like I've been saying "liberry" all these years.



related: capybaras & barnacle geese, cacti, the snout, the obliging cephalopod, (endless pools), august moon

firmament

this will appear along with two other images as part of an article on Mormon mysticism in the next Sunstone magazine.

related: dream mine, 3 grand keys

wide conqueror

If you’re scheming something to do with old tires, looking for ideas and examples, there’s a fine line between inspiration and intimidation. Considering what people have been doing with spent tires, there’s plenty to envy in the way of resourcefulness and craftsmanship.

the GIANT robots & dinosaurs at this Tokyo tire park

there's Dr. Mars J. Läns’ Earth Tire Foundation

(Check out Mars & Rita in the studio, tricking out a shopping cart, and posing with mayors and senators.)

Inspiration Green (a beautiful and killer site!) has a page cataloging all kinds of uses for tires in art and design. Here's just a little selection.

And, finally, there's Go Play!’s fabulous open-source playground movement. If you like this, you may also want to visit Arcady's playscapes blog.

So by the time I finally found the celebrated Ray’s Tire Exchange here in town (under the Wells Avenue overpass) I already had a general idea of what I wanted to do. I was thinking of something a 40 lb kid could bounce and climb on, but also crawl under/through. Something that might get them dirty, but not that they were going to cut or strangle themselves on. Also, if I could make it look like some kind of monster, all the better.

While I was in getting the tires, Ash and Tom did a good job waiting patiently in the truck--partly because I told them this was about building something fun, and I think partly because it was an unfamiliar part of town, where they felt more inclined to sit tight than to get out and wander. Sure enough, Ray’s had heaps of them, and the perfect “whatever. over there’s the scrap pile. help yourself” attitude.

We took home 6 tires and, for now, this is what we came up with. I worked a few old bike tires into it too and, aside from those, there was no sawing or chopping of rubber or steel belts here. But if you’re looking for encouragement in this direction, here's a short, surprisingly soothing video about how to cut up tires for stuff like this.

Of course there's no guarantee that anything you make will stay that interesting for very long, especially when there's hanging laundry to play in; it gets hard to compete.

related: clothesline, toys, edward burtynsky