Bike the Drive pics I am too cheap to pay for

I get emails from the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation with offers to buy pictures they took of me from Bike the Drive, the Memorial Day event where they close off Lakeshore Drive for five delicious hours and allow bicyclists to turn it into their personal pedal-powered paradise, a description that is almost too illiterative to allow to live but which I am leaving in because it's exactly that annoying to receive these emails. They're a kind of betrayal. First, although they strongly encourage you to sign up for Bike the Drive and pay your $40+ fee for the privilege of not choking on petrol fumes, and even deliver a t-shirt and number to stick on your helmet, they hardly enforce the helmet sticker on the road. (I'm told you need one for rest stops, which I took advantage of when I got to the southern end of the course, at the Museum of Science and Industry at 57th Street, so perhaps they're at least good for two bananas, a fig newton and lemonade, especially if you didn't think ahead and bring water or sustenance.) The sticker is there, I must then surmise, so they can photograph and identify the bicyclists, photos which they then turn around and sell to said cyclists. I apologize for the second round of alliteration. That stuff gets in your blood something fierce. That leads me to second: I didn't ask to be photographed, and it's not like I could have opted out when they had at least four photographers at different ends of the course. Do I look like the poster boy for Chicacoland cycling here, with my wraparound sunglasses, uncool helmet and fold up bike at six o'clock on a Sunday morning? No? Well, safety demands my picture be taken just in case of... well, JUST IN CASE.

Third, these photographs aren't cheap, and the Chicagoland Bicycling Federation already have my money, which they took from me in order to charge me more money for photographs I didn't ask them for. Sounds like capitalism at work. The only way it could get better is if at rest stops they only sold me bananas with pictures of me on them eating other bananas. On second thought, perhaps it's best not to give them ideas.

I really do like the idea of photographs, even if I think I look like I've been photoshopped onto the bike I'm riding. It would just be so much cooler if they included the photos in the price of the event. Afterwards, instead of them pushing emails out to all participants with offers to sell them photographs, they send out gentle reminders that, hey, we all had fun, didn't we? And, by the by, you can download pictures of yourselves from our website... look for them by your helmet number, which we've handily catalogued using the same OCR that turns your scans into an editable Word document.

Like so many things technological, this is so much easier in my mind than in actual practice. Still worth doing, though.