Rocky Hillside

"Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?"

"No," I answered.

"That is a very serious defalcation," he said, "but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around . . . . These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?"

"Yes."

. . .

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are half people and half bicycles."

I let go a gasp of astonishment that made a sound in the air like a bad puncture.

. . .

"Are you certain about the humanity of the bicycle?" I inquired of him. "Is the Atomic Theory as dangerous as you say?"

"It is between twice and three times as dangerous as it might be," he replied gloomily. "Early in the morning I often think it is four times . . . When a man lets things go so far that he is half or more than half a bicycle, you will not see so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot on kerbstones. . . "

-- from The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

A rain jacket that is waterproof and costs less than anything Showers Pass makes. Image by RevoltPuppy. Some rights reserved.

[This is an update to my original review. A more recent post about the jacket is here.]

I think Showers Pass knows they have a problem with their Touring Jacket, and they have a bullshit way of addressing it. Here's the response I received from Showers Pass when I asked about the seams leaking:

To keep this jacket at a price point of $150, we chose to seam tape the most prominent seams. The Elite 2.0 jacket is our fully seam taped 3 layer rain jacket. If you want to return your jacket directly to us we can offer you the Elite 2.0 for $125.

Some comments about this response: a) They admit they cut corners to save money, i.e meeting a "price point" is more important than actually making the bloody thing waterproof. (How about telling customers this before they purchase the jacket? Perhaps Showers Pass should advertise the Touring Jacket as "darn expensive but not profitable enough for us unless we make it leaky.); b) The jacket would work right, i.e. actually be waterproof if they had made it better; c) the Touring jacket isn't waterproof but if I am willing to pay even more, roughly $275 total, I could get a jacket that will do what the Touring jacket is supposed to do.

And what the heck are "prominent seams"? The ones the customer will see in the store? Seams which would make the customer think the jacket is waterproof?

I'm disgusted. Showers Pass sells a leaky rain jacket and uses the defect to upsell a customer. It's bullshit.

Here's the bottom-line: I'd like to return the bloody thing and get something better made and better designed for touring.

Here's why . . . .

After years of using non-cycling specific rain gear, I finally decided to buy a rain jacket just for biking. Several reviews and the information on the Showers Pass website convinced me to buy a Showers Pass Touring Jacket. Suits aside, I had never spent so much on much on a single piece of clothing, but Showers Pass sounded like they should know what they were doing and did it well:

Inspired by the challenging rides and weather of northern California and the Pacific Northwest, we have been combining top-notch fabrics with innovative, functional design elements since 1997. The result? Truly superior cycling outerwear.

When the jacket arrived, I was ecstatic. Deep pockets, extra long flap in the rear, room for another layer, great vents, and sturdy material. Riding in it in the cold and light rain was wonderful.

Then, within a week, part of one cuff fell off.

=> Read more!

Yehuda Moon by Rick Smith & Brian Griggs.

Not just bike groups. True for any grassroots advocacy groups. Sometimes it's wise to create a "fake" shell group as a strategy, but most of the time "working together" means moderation, compromise, and mediocrity.

Julie and David from recyclingtheworld.us are in northern Canada:

[M]osquitoes were as thick as in a Deep Woods Off commercial while setting up camp. There are so many it sounds like raindrops hitting the tent. Swatting the inner tent makes them sound like a maddened swarm of bees.

This bike touring stuff can be trying.

When New York State Parks charges me $26.75 for a sodden, tiny, rutted tent site, I feel gouged.

China eventually outlawed special "foreigner prices," but New York feels quite comfortable hitting out-of-staters for an extra $5. Then there's the mysterious $2.75 "service charge" that no one can explain. It can't be a booking fee: I paid in the park office.

There's a lake nearly a mile away, but the beach is closed. Showers aren't warm. We were awakened by grooming at the adjacent golf course.

• Gerty and I took the White Pole Road on our trip through Iowa. Not exactly Disneyworld but interesting and fun. The history of the Road is an good example of the history of auto roads in the country and contained this tidbit: "Iowa then made history and set a record in road building when ten thousand farmers engaged in building a 380 mile road out of existing lines of dirt road in one hour flat . . . ." Wonder whether it's true.
• Numbers and a scary chart on Chinese auto sales.
• If it's not a hoax, another demonstration that some police officers are real nutters: NYPD Officer Stopped Cyclist For Wearing Skirt. (Yes, I'm not sure I believe this.)[via BikePortland.org]
• [Also via BikePortland.org], the story of a driver who purposely hits a cyclist who turns out to be an off-duty cop. It's long but interesting. Most interesting, I think, is that all vehicular assault charges were dropped.
• Freewheeling, in the context of a book review, discusses his view of "the divorce" of reason and religion. I agree and would add that religion is not the only counterbalance to materialism. I think we, as a world, would benefit greatly if we genuinely valued something other than what we can buy. Unfortunately, sometimes discussions (not Freewheel's) of non-material values lapse into the binary choice of materialism v. religion.
• Democrats and jobs: not going to happen. Robert Reich visits Washington.
• Brad DeLong says, "The task post-crisis is to actually create the high-quality savings vehicles people though they had before the crash--not to spray-paint lead bars with gold, but to use a real philosopher's stone to create real gold bars themselves." I wonder whether this has every really been done.
• Julie and David at recyclingtheworld.us are now both riding CruzBikes. CruzBikes look a bit taller than many recumbents and have front wheel drive.

When discussing politics with more conservative folks, what amazes me is how much we disagree about the facts. Not about policy but about what actually happened and what is actually happening.

Yesterday, I heard a story -- apparently well-accepted -- that goes like this . . . Obama banned American oil companies from drilling in our coastal waters but allowed foreign companies to go ahead. In fact, so the story goes, he flew to Brazil to award a Brazilian company $2 billion to get them to drill for oil in our waters. "That says all you need to know, doesn't it?" (The story appears to be a version of this one on snopes.)

The big puzzle to me is why, when someone hears a story like this one, something in his or her head doesn't say "Hmmm. That sounds a bit odd to me. Maybe I should check it out." Instead, many people don't pause to question, they just store away one bit of nonsense after another until they have built up a collection of craziness that they believe represents reality.

And the craziness is self-reinforcing. Once a couple screwy tales are in the pile, the next screwy tail is even less likely to be questioned. (Though I am still baffled to hear, nearly in the same breath, continual recourse to "it's just commonsense" arguments interspersed with stories that anyone with a bit of commonsense might question.)

The last couple days, I have refused to engage in political chit chat unless we begin by agreeing that we will use evidence to determine the facts. Unbelievably, this is viewed as utterly unreasonable. For example, everyone knows that the stimulus had no positive effect, all nutrition studies are bunkum and contradictory, cutting taxes and the government budget will lead to lower unemployment, government regulation is bad, and inflation is either rampant or will soon be rampant. Nothing -- no data or numbers or papers -- are worth looking at if they contradict these "facts."

I feel as if I have fallen into the middle ages.