A friend at work, Charles Fletcher, has taken on the St. Paul Metermaid Society as a personal quest. We have a couple of unmarked parking spaces in front of the school where I work in downtown St. Paul and, for a couple of years, those space were exactly right for a pair of motorcycles per space. Since they were unmarked and unmetered, it made sense to park there. Eventually, the local metermaids decided to ticket bikes in those spaces with a different irrational penalty each time. Last year, Charles decided to fight them. So far (almost 20 tickets later), he's winning, but it's a solo battle and I suspect he will eventually lose.

With the crazy delusion that American motorcyclists might someday has balls as big as French motorcyclists (http://ukfrancebikers.com/2010/03/14/french-motorcyclists-more-angry-than-ever/ ), I wonder how we might add some fuel to Charle's fire? Ever since watching M Moore's Sicko (and hearing the expat American say "In France the government is afraid of the people; In the US you have exact opposite."), I've wanted to remind someone in government that they are our poorly performing employees. Maybe if a few risk-taking motorcyclists started this off it might turn into some kind of democratic movement. I know, what a freakin' daydream.

Nice work. It looks pretty cool. Being old and illiterate, I'm not sure how the email reply system is going to work, but it seems like it ought to be an improvement from the Yahoo! site. Thanks, Ray.