Perhaps the greatest thrill LL experienced during the inaugural madness wasn't chatting up Joel Klein at the 9:30 Club, or accosting Ben Affleck at the HuffPo ball, or even sitting yards away from Barack Obama as he was sworn in.

Nope, it just might have been cruising through the Third Street Tunnel on his bike.

Now, LL is aware that said tunnel was the site of much misery on Tuesday, as a holding pen for holders of inaugural tickets denied access to the Capitol grounds (cf. "Purple Tunnel of Doom"). He means not to make light of their suffering.

It's just that it's not every day that you get to ride your bike through an underground interstate highway artery and take advantage of a fabulous shortcut across the Mall. LL was prepared to bike as far east as 4th Street NE to get around to the south side of the Hill, where he was supposed to gain access to the ceremony, but he decided to give the tunnel a shot when he passed the Massachusetts Avenue ramp. It cut a good 10 or 15 minutes off his commute.

At the time LL came through, around 8:15 a.m., the lines up to the purple/blue entrances were still rather orderly, and he was able to zip right through. If only he had a video camera to remember the moment...but blogger Nikolas Schiller did! Experience the thrill:

Outside of the Busboys and Poets coffeeshop at 14th and V Streets NW, there's a large plexiglas box filled with shoes. It's called "The Empty Shoes of War," and each pair of shoes symbolizes an Iraqi civilian killed in the war. As a volunteer for Code Pink, local blogger and activist Nikolas Schiller had helped out with the event where the memorial was unveiled.

So when Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi whipped his shoes at President George W. Bush yesterday, Schiller was struck by the podiatro-political nexus. As he writes on his blog, "Last night I was reminded of the shoes in the memorial and conceived the idea of putting up a small guerrilla thank you note as a way to publicly thank al-Zaidi for doing something millions of people around the world would love to do if they were given the opportunity."

He put it on the plexiglas box:

The mysterious practice of "air-locking" continues. Nikolas Schiller documents a case of a bike locked in a tree. It's a fixie, so I guess air-locking is getting hipper. Or, as Mike Licht supposed, perhaps this person just put hydrogen in their tires by mistake and only managed to attach the bike to the tree before it floated away. 

[Previously: Artful Bike Suspender, Who Are You?, Art Bike Turning Into Parts Bike, The Art Bike Vanishes]