Talk of bicycle infrastructure dominated last evening’s “Cities, Cycling, and the Future of Getting Around” forum last night at the Newseum.

Recently, I've spent a great deal of work-related time on the Fox News Channel's video page, and have found myself oddly, embarrassingly drawn to the frank weirdness of The Mike Huckabee Show. Huckabee is rather charmingly poor at hosting a talk show, although his odd physiognomy--his regulation-size head protrudes, turtle-like, from what appears to be David Byrne's big suit from Stop Making Sense--supplies a welcome distraction during slow moments. My fascination with the show's unique Tea Party/sub-Last Call with Carson Daly-talk-show aesthetic--well, that and my childhood viewings of Love Connection--explains why I was unable to resist clicking on this video of game show icon Chuck Woolery on Huckabee's program.

There's plenty to talk about with Woolery--who had a top 40 single entitled "Naturally Stoned" back in 1968 before becoming the original host of Wheel of Fortune and, yes, blessedly, Love Connection--but the governor was eager to move into serious territory. "Talking about love connections," Huckabee segued, "there are a whole lot of people who are having a hard time finding a love connection with Congress right now. And from what I understand you're one of them."

Woolery did his familiar twinkling, endearingly smug bit in affirming Huckabee's grouses about the IRS and lawyers and Congress-not-even-reading-bills. He even opined as to how "Washington needs to be afraid of us." It was all kind of par for the course; the bummer part came when Woolery couched his "coming-out" in the hackneyed Ed-Begley-Jr.-Is-Going-To-Get-Me-For-This terms of contemporary conservative Hollywood. "I'm sacrificing my career by coming out as a conservative," Woolery told Huckabee.

Some of us here at The Avenue are always poking our heads into each other’s offices and referencing great “metro” songs, ranging from the obligatory anti-sprawl anthem “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders to PJ Harvey’s romantic “You Said Something” to Art Brut’s witty defense of public transportation in “The Passenger.”

Always choice, despite their vintage, are songs by Talking Heads.  David Byrne, the band’s lead songwriter, embraced space and geography in many songs with scales ranging from neighborhood, to municipal, to metropolitan, to the super-regional and national. Much has been written about these spatial references and Byrne’s astute attention to the built environment around him—as well as his recent interest in cycling city streets and designing urban street furniture.

Yet now Byrne, a Rhode Island School of Design drop out and serious intellectual, has outdone himself with a wonderful essay on the elements of the "perfect" city. These run from such subjective qualities as “sensibility and attitude” to items any urban planner could love: “density,” “mixed use,” and “parking.” He also extends the analysis to include a number of elements not so intuitive, ranging from “chaos and danger” (Bryne likes a little looser, “fluid and flexible” sort of order in his cities) to “boulevards” (not too wide, please) to Berlin’s sense of humor. And he cites an old joke that says “you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German” and adds, “if it’s the other way around you’re in hell.”