Heart Bike Route

You've probably seen the Verizon ad of a guy riding his bike in San Francisco along a route that looks like a big heart. The guy was actually real and he did actually ride his bike all over the city like that.
Robert Krulwich of NPR tells the story of Payam Rajabi and how he landed a spot in the ad:

Last year, Payam Rajabi got a new job and had to leave Toronto and his girlfriend Clare and move to San Francisco. All that left him feeling a little down — until he came up with his upsy, downsy Valentine idea.
He jumped on his bike, opened his iPhone to a map of San Francisco, and tracking himself with a GPS, he rode 27 miles around the city, taking two and a half hours, burning 1,135 calories and carefully etching a heart shape onto a city map ...
[...] Payam's map got picked up by Cyclelicious, a geeky bike equipment site, by Uptown Almanac, a local blog, by Health 2.0, a health news site, by Iranian.com, a Persian-American site. Payam was named "Iranian of the Day," and within the year, ka-ching! An ad agency called.
It was Verizon. They asked Payam if he would get back on the bike and do the whole thing over again, this time tracked by a rigged out truck with a giraffe-like hi-cam

But there's a twist at the end ... Read the rest over at Krulwich Wonders: Here.