About the name of this blog

Although I've been doing this Scranton Sunday Times route (designated by the Times as Route 62226) since early 2007, it took me until today to get around to figuring out all of the necessary mouse potatoing involved in starting the blog.

The main reason for the delay had to do with the fact that I wanted the blog's name to be Northeastern Pennsylvania Bicycle Messengering. I didn't feel that I had a right to start it - or do anything else resembling calling myself a bicycle messenger - until after doing at least some part of the actual delivery by bike at least once.

I'm happy to report that a few weeks ago, I finally got around to doing that. I'm still waiting until I get around to fixing up a devoted-to-the-purpose bike (with the right kind of homemade newspaper pails, etc.) before I can begin to _regularly_ bring it along on Sunday mornings and use it to more _significantly_ replace my walking, running and motoring through the route. But, when I brought it along a few weeks ago and used it to do the few streets that I'd been gradually figuring out how to do by foot (the mode that I'm still generally using on those streets for the time being), I _technically_ crossed the line into having partially fulfilled my pipe dream of being a bicycle messenger.

I've said from the start that this route might not ever be more than "partially" a bicycle-messengering route. The combination of the Sunday papers being so fat, the still-cheap gas and especially, the short time window, makes it most practical to use a motor vehicle as a "mother ship", with a goal of motoring as few of the segments as possible and parking in several places throughout the route to do as many of the segments as possible by foot or by bike.

The other carriers that I've happened to see on their Sunday deliveries in Clarks Summit, apparently motor to virtually every house (which _still_ requires _running_ perhaps 3 miles, my guestimate of the total of all of a 180-house Clarks Summit carrier's - Clarks Summit being an excellent-tipping town - trips from his or her car door to each tipper's doorstep on which to place the paper). Motoring to virtually every house like that is a method that I did too for a long time at first, and I still do it on about half of the segments of the route, because figuring out how to minimize the motoring and still finish within the time window - even for a forceful spewer, such as myself, of propaganda about how cycling is often faster than motoring - takes a long time (although I'm making progress on it fairly steadily) and is not as simple as the more-carfree-than-you-or-me faction of the cycling community would have us believe.

In particular, I predict that due to my above-mentioned use of motoring, this blog will get attacked by the red-light-running, sidewalk-trespassing (like in the photo accompanying a Sunday Times article a few months ago about an outfit in Scranton that beat me to to the punch, by a few months, of introducing bicycle messengering to Northeastern Pennsylvania - but if that's what they call cycling, they can _have_ the distinction), experience-largely-limited-to-city-centers, greenybaby-archleftist faction of the cycling community.

They'll claim that I'm not a "real" bicycle messenger. They'll deem me ineligible for the messengers-only free beer at The Handlebar out in DZBLtown. One of them has even already said that he'd like to spike the Frost Farm's trees.

But the pedestal of ignorance that this never-loaded-a-honey-wagon-in-their-life faction of the cycling community is on, overlooks the fact that their beloved city-center bicycle-messengering outfits, too, depend on motoring. The deliveries that those outfits do by bike are - just as much as yours or mine - but one cog in an overall-logistics wheel that would not function without its motoring cogs.