UPDATED: Yellow Manta Ray Execution Day!

Go here
and read the post entitled 'She Shines'

This is my Podling, and he is a miracle.
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When I was a kid I rode my bicycle everywhere. This made me a target for the neighborhood bullies, because the bike I was forced to ride was a huge dorky clunker of a thing*, made even dorkier by the addition of apehangers, banana seat, and a sissy bar by my father. It was slow, it was fat, it looked like clownshoes and unfortunately, it was indestructible. I used to go over to the lot where the kids had build a dirt course and 'accidentally' leave it lying around. Pretty soon one of the boys would 'steal' it and start doing jumps with it and letting it go down the hills by itself and crash at the bottom. Not a scratch. Not a dent.
Rotten, unkillable bastard bike.

What the thing did, between having to make fast escapes from marauding kid gangs and simply trying to keep up, was give me legs like a draft animal. I had to work twice as hard as the spiderbike kids just to make the big, heavy sonofabitch move, and we lived in a hilly neighborhood. When I finally, finally got a normal bike (a white Schwinn Suburban 10 speed) I could make that thing FLY.
But here's the bike I really wanted, little design whore that I was:
pix from this site:http://www.lostamerica.com/
go here NOW.

...A Schwinn Stingray. And to this day I want this bike. Unfortunately, so does every collector out there, and they're being bought up and cut apart by the dozen to make these:



...Lowrider bikes. Something I also desperately need.
What can I say; once a design whore, always a design whore.

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I went to Seattle with the Stainless Steel Amazon a few weeks ago for a nice 'girls day out'...and it was nice. Seattle is still cool. It's still recognizable as the town I once lived in. Except for one significant absence: where did all the winos go?

I keep coming back to this at odd times ever since I got back. It really bothers me.

Back in the 80's, Seattle had a very visible, very large homeless population. You could see them on the hillsides beneath each highway ramp, underneath each bridge, inside and next to every abandoned building and tunnelled beneath every overgrowth of blackberries on every vacant lot. There were entire villages, with pathways. It was like a city within a city, a third-world one.
Not now.

Seattle has turned it's commercial downtown into an enclave of shiny, happy condominiums and cheery street art. There are nowhere near the number of abandoned properties that there once were, and very little land goes unused nowadays. That might have something to do with it...but how much? Seattle is a huge city. The police are finite. I wasn't spanged once, and as I've advanced into middle age I have become a bum magnet. Nobody. And I saw nobody..no schizos, no shopping cart people, no urban campers, no bums in doorways, nobody. It was strange.

I won't lie and say I miss them because I don't. I was a single woman with an infant (and no car or income) trying to navigate the streets back when Seattle was slap-full of predatory homeless. I was easy prey and made very keenly aware of this fact every minute I lived there. It didn't matter if I was on the sidewalk, riding public transportation or inside my 'secure' building-ha!-or not. I resented it like hell.

But nonetheless, a huge population of human beings has simply disappeared off the face of the earth, and whether or not I liked them I'm still weirded out by it. Really weirded out.
Can anybody answer this for me?

Anybody with something other to say than 'Soylent Green is peeeeeeepul" that is.

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*this bike:

...of course nowadays the stupid thing's worth beaucoup buckolas because it's a 'classic'. the picture doesn't really indicate the sheer mass of this monster, though...it was like a fucking parade float and it was made of solid pig iron. and you know what? i'd still have it crushed. bastard got me beat up more than once. quite a bit more than once, in fact. they wouldn't even let me park it near the cool bikes in the bike rack at school. *snif*