Kevin Kelly  I came across a reference to Kevin Kelly recently. Kevin is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Adventure Cycling sends out an e-newsletter called Bike Bits, and in the latest issue there is mention of Kevin's This I Believe essay that appeared on NPR recently. He mentions the many times during his cross country bike trip that strangers offered to help him. Each night he would knock on a stranger's door and ask if he could camp in their yard. “I was never turned away, not once,”

I have developed a belief about what happens in these moments and it goes like this: Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided offers degrees of humility, indebtedness, surprise, trust, delight, relief and amusement to the stranger.

Kevin maintains an interesting website. There is a section called Cool Tools: A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. It includes a couple of bike-related articles: Six Great Long-Distance Bike Trails Without Cars and Adventure Cycling, about the many routes developed by that group. He has also published his book of haiku written while riding cross-country in 1979, Bicycle Haiku

Street Use is about “ways in which people modify and re-create technology.” He also contributes to a blog on the Wired site, Geekdad.
posted by Bruce Wright at 12:20 PM #