Peace Bike visits exurbia; minor right-wing shitfit ensues

I ought to be getting ready for the Failin' Palin Comedy Hour that looms tonight, but instead I'm recovering from today's Peace Bike outing!

You all love the Peace Bike, and today I took the hulking velocipede on a field trip to Wilder, Kentucky. (The picture here is of the Peace Bike in Covington, Kentucky, in 2006.) Wilder is predominantly not exurban - but the portion outside I-275 is, and that's where I encountered the ravages of the Far Right.

I pulled onto St. Johns Lane, riding the Peace Bike and carrying the Eyewitness Cam. (One of my hobbies is photographing roads.) A Wilder public works truck followed within a couple minutes. I thought nothing of the truck, as it pulled into a lot near the end of the road.

But as I was heading back towards the main highway, the white truck followed me. I pulled over, and the vehicle pulled up beside me. I could hardly hear what the 2 men in the truck were saying, because the truck was loud and my hearing loss hadn't improved. But they informed me that someone on that small road had called them to report that I was photographing their property.

Whoever told them this was lying. I did photograph the road but no private property (other than what would've been visible looking straight ahead on the road). Anyone who sees the photos when I get them up can see that the photos are of the road (which is public) - not of private holdings.

And it was obvious that the complainant called the public works people before I even photographed anything on that road - because the truck appeared so quickly after I turned onto that road, and the road isn't that close to the center of town where city services are based.

It's obvious I wasn't present on or photographing private property, because why else would someone call the public works department? There's a reason it's called public works - not private works.

Only a big fucking crybaby would lie to the public works folks about something like this. It's a crime to make false reports to the police, so I guess they figured they could get away with it if they bawled to the public works department instead.

This is reminiscent of a similar exurban incident in March 2007. On Holds Branch Road, which straddles Covington and Taylor Mill, Kentucky, an angry man approached and launched a tirade about me using "his" road - even though I was on public property. Several years earlier, there was an episode like this when I had a work assignment in the nearby suburb of Villa Hills, in which some grouch ordered me to leave a public road and "go back to Amsterdam."

Because public roads belong to the people, we are within our rights to use and photograph them. If some dickwipe doesn't believe in this right and is willing to lie to city workers about what I was doing (by falsely claiming I was on private property just so there'd be an excuse to chase me away), fuck them. Fuck them clean up the ass with a broken salad fork!