Photo: Solé BicyclesTwo days before New Year's Eve, Jimmy Standley was in Lake Tahoe getting ready for the inaugural SnowGlobe Music Festival, three days of tunes, parties, after-parties -- oh, and he had to sell some bikes, too. As head of business development for Solé Bicycles, Standley is one part of a five-man team bent on bringing fixed-gear bicycles to the masses. Fixies, as they're affectionately known, are bicycles at their most basic: frame, wheels, pedals, seat, and handlebars. Whereas most bikes have a "freewheel" system that allows the wheels to spin independently of the pedals, on a fixie, if …

Photo: IscanWhen the 2011 Major League Baseball season got underway last April, teams rolled out the usual promotions for fanatical fans: giant foam fingers, T-shirt giveaways, beer in unbreakable, aluminum bottles. The Seattle Mariners took a slightly different tack. At two separate Monday night home games, 5,000 fans were given bags of gardening soil, composted down from roughly 900,000 pounds of soggy napkins and half-eaten hot dogs collected at the stadium the season before. The Mariners, along with roughly 50 other sports teams in baseball, the NBA, NHL, NFL, NCAA, and several other professional leagues, are members of the Green …

Photo: thisisbossiIt's 8:30 Thursday morning in McPherson Square, just a few streets up from the north lawn of the White House, and somehow I've been duped into carrying a foldable cot over to a yellow medical tent. Such are the risks of reporting on a movement that depends heavily on people power. "Do you know anything about the solar panels?" I ask a group of about 15 Occupy D.C. protestors who are holding the day's first "general assembly" outside the tent. "I don't know anything about solar panels," replies a woman with muddy pants and a head bandanna. "But if …