Rocky Hillside

Image from for the love of bikes.

• Maid Marian Muffins as written up by for the love of bikes. Reminds me of this pic.
• This seems cool. An auction of stuff that was once on the walls at the deceased Handlebar Grill. Not sure why Breckenridge Brewery killed the Handlebar but selling the body for charity is a good move.
• Schools once offered classes on driving. Why not offer classes on cycling? Mobility, health, and a lifelong fitness habit. At least some do.

• Photos of Toronto's 2011 Blessing of Bicycles on Bike Lane Diary.

  I wonder how the Bike Blessing spirits and the Car Blessing spirits get along. Do they join hands or engage in pitched battle? Most days it seems like the latter.(The photos are by Martin Reis.)

• Why are there so many red underwear stores in Tokyo?

Image by Ojisanjake from his blog: More glimpses of unfamiliar Japan.

Jake (of the spectacular blog, More glimpses of unfamiliar Japan) says that rituals for car blessing and driving safety are common at shrines in Japan.

We need a day to honor the innocent civilians our mercenaries kill.

And, maybe we need another holiday to do whatever is appropriate for our mercenaries so the mercenaries don't get confused with the drafted butcher, baker, and candlestick makers we honor on war-related holidays.

I'm willing to bet that whatever my neighbor has been vacuuming or blowing for the last 30 minutes could be handled with a broom.

I'm also willing to bet that a guy with a Cheney bumper sticker who spends his days shooting squirrels off his bird feeder doesn't give a shit what I think.

Interesting. Not unexpected that older drivers drive unsafely.

Yet, perhaps this research suggests a remedy.

[R]esearchers . . . using a novel method to gauge how well people drive, have concluded that serious errors are alarmingly commonplace. “We are seeing a ubiquitous increase in driver errors with age,” said Kaarin Anstey, a psychologist at Australian National University and lead author of the report, just published in the journal Neuropsychology.

Dr. Anstey and her co-author, Joanne Wood, administered a battery of cognitive tests to 266 adults ages 70 to 88 and asked them about their driving history — standard stuff. But then the researchers took their subjects out on the road for a 12-mile swing through urban and suburban Brisbane in a dual-brake car. A professional driving instructor in the passenger seat directed the driver for part of the route, but for about a quarter of the course, the driver had to follow signs and find his or her own way to an unfamiliar destination. In the back seat, a trained occupational therapist observed and recorded everything from unsignaled lane changes to speeding to abrupt stops.

. . .

[T]he so-called critical errors — in which the instructor in the front seat either had to grab the wheel or hit the auxiliary brake to avert a crash — quadrupled among the eldest drivers, compared with the youngest. Those ages 70 to 74 averaged less than one critical error during the nearly hourlong excursion; those older than 85 averaged almost four.

One interesting thing is that these were healthy, independent seniors who were tested as free from dementia and Alzheimer's.

This suggests to me that part of the dangerous driving/loss of mobility problem could be addressed with another round of driver's ed or testing.

My Ten Years in a Quandary AND HOW THEY GREW by Robert Benchley.

I was astonished to find that someone wrote a book with this title and that that someone wasn't me.

Just the local TV news. No wonder people have irrational fears. It was like a parody of a news show.

The lead story? Hooligans attack a Dunkin Donuts and steal doughnuts and drinks!

From the NYTimes:

On Thursday, in a report on the “CBS Evening News,” [Lance's team mate Tyler] Hamilton said he had seen Armstrong inject himself with the banned performance-enhancing drug EPO to win those Tours. A full interview with Hamilton will be broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes” on CBS.

“I saw him inject it more than one time,” Hamilton said. “Yeah, like we all did. Like I did many, many times.”

The evidence was there but gullible people didn't want to look at it.

Michele Bachmann has a law degree. She went to Oral Roberts Law School.

I wonder what classes are like at Oral Roberts Law School.

Eschaton:

I'm quite happy bashing the media, as usual, but I think they're getting a bit of a bum rap. They're covering the deficit in large part because both major political parties are mostly talking about the deficit. If some charismatic politician with the ability to get people to point some cameras at him spent more time talking about jobs and coming up with policies for jobs and talking about those the media would be talking about that too.

Remind me again why I vote for . . . . Ah well.

A demonstration in favor of University of Denver having a library.

The University of Denver has become a punchline among the young people who chat around our dinner table. ("For every student, there's a different reason to love DU." But all of them love the fact that they will never see the library.)

DU has never been a very good school. But now it has given up any pretense of academic respectability. Imagine a university without a library. Well, no need to imagine. DU is ditching its library.

As I mentioned earlier, the University of Denver plans to get rid of its library in favor of a study hall with a cafe and virtually no books. The old library building will become the "Academic Commons."

I was happy to see a demonstration against this idiotic idea today. The demonstrators I chatted with are not rabble rousers. They were (tragically) sincere. They really thought that their demonstration might make a difference. Hearing a couple of them talk made me want to immediately go take over the provost's office just to vindicate their (misplaced) faith that people who speak truth to power prevail.

I have yet to hear anyone speak in favor of the trustee's plan, but the trustees apparently didn't ask the faculty for its opinion. (I'm happy to be corrected on that point, but I think it was presented as done deal. Why would the faculty care about the university's library?) Or the students. Or the librarians. Or the staff. They may have asked fellow trustee Pat Bowlen.

(Where is John Gilbert's daughter when you need her? Margot Gilbert is a trustee but apparently useless on this issue.)

Perhaps the trustees are gambling that if you have a good hockey team, no one will care about the education or research part.

Are people really that stupid? Maybe.

(Oh, and Nancy Allen is a quisling and possibly a fool. And she knows so much about cutting edge technology that her DU web page is littered with Microsoft Frontpage garbage.)

If I read again of "silent music" or any metaphor involving the word "fruit," I shall barf.

Also, if I can read a poem aloud as a prose story (though the poet has oh so cleverly broken the sentences into fragments and arranged them to look like lines of poetry), its barfo time.

California's Diablo Nuclear Plant. Image by dirtsailor. Some rights reserved.

Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant.

From a good report by Miranda Spencer at FAIR on the one-sided media coverage of nuclear power v renewables:

One might imagine that the Fukushima disaster would prompt a more critical look at domestic nuclear power ambitions; instead, U.S. corporate media seemed largely to sympathize with the industry. Insensitive headlines blared: “Nuclear Push May Be in Peril” (New York Times, 3/14/11), “Japan Crisis May Derail Nuclear Renaissance: Damage to Reactors May Already Have Doomed Push for New Atomic Power Plants” (L.A. Times, 3/14/11); “Shaken Industry: Tremors from Japan Disaster Rattle Future of U.S. Nuclear Power” (Houston Chronicle, 3/18/11). CNN’s Gloria Borger (3/17/11) commented that nuclear power “just suffered a really bad blow by this, given what happened in Japan.”

These and other pieces in the aftermath of Fukushima relied heavily on establishment pro-nuke figures such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, his deputy Dan Poneman and Nuclear Regultory Commission chair Greg-ory Jaczko (whose job descriptions include promoting as well as regulating nuclear power), along with the Nuclear Energy Institute trade organization and nuclear plant owners such as GE and Exelon.

Meanwhile, the voices of environmentalists or nuclear opponents were seldom heard. (One exception, Rep. Ed Markey, who supports a moratorium on new plant construction, did appear multiple times.) When they were, the discussion tended to be in the “he said/she said” format, pitting opinion against opinion without much context or additional facts.

One place where I disagree with Miranda. She says "But as documented by Journal editor Jason Mark (Fall/07), 'There is a striking amount of unanimity among the leading environmental organizations that nuclear power is not a smart way to address climate change.' Rather, as anyone following the 'green' press knows, they advocate renewables, energy efficiency and conservation."

I have little doubt that enviro groups "advocate renewables, energy efficiency and conservation." Unfortunately it would be quite hard to characterize the mainstream groups as genuinely anti-nuke. I think this is largely because they are thoroughly captured by the Democratic Party, or at least by the mainstream liberal goal of appearing "reasonable."

We used to be involved in unprovoked, moronic wars, ignoring environmental regulations, doing nothing about climate change, imprisoning people without trial, and giving irresponsible tax cuts because the President was an asshole and a moron. What's the explanation now?

From the NYTimes:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy.

A NATO spokesman apologized for the child’s death. . . .

The district governor, Abdul Khalid, said he had feared a Taliban attack on the government center and had called for help from local Afghan security forces. At the same time, there was a raid, he said. “American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him,” he said.

“People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes,” Mr. Khalid said.

. . . .

When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy’s village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans and throwing rocks at police vehicles and the Hesarek government center, according to the district governor and the headmaster.

The police opened fire . . . . A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said.

“The police had to defend themselves; therefore, they fired some warning shots,” he said.

On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.

Image from Allen Giese.

Checking in with Allen Giese again:

[We realize it's graduation weekend so finding a hotel room tomorrow] is going to be tough.

What we should have done next is start calling for hotel reservations but we decided to finish off the six-pack we bought instead.

It's all about the moment. Tomorrow will work itself out just fine. It's a Zen of bicycle touring thing; once you've slept in a city park getting a hotel room just isn't that important.

So in the cool morning air we took an easy pace north, made a couple of stops for drinks and snacks . . . got to Statesboro by lunchtime with very little sweat.

Now it was time to check into lodging. We checked a few places out and basically found only one hotel with a few rooms available.

Then Pam called one of the motels listed on the back of the Adventure Cycling map and found they had multiple rooms available at a low price. What's wrong with this picture?

. . .

The first thing we see is two guys hauling a couple of mattresses out of one of the rooms that look like post-Katrina furniture. We couldn't get back on our bikes fast enough, pedaled back to the hotel and scooped up the last three rooms.

Forget the Zen thing. I really don't like sleeping in the park.

Thanks Allen.

Image by Smile Politely.

Looks as if as long as Julie Reitz is in the State's Attorney in Champaign, drivers killing cyclists will get off with a slap on the wrist. Or more accurately, drive off with a slap on the wrist. [Via Urbana-Champaign Cycling Ventures.]

From Smile Politely:

On Monday, March 7th at 4:30 p.m., Champaign residents Cindy and David Combs were struck by a motor vehicle, leaving Cindy dead and David critically injured.

. . .

The couple was riding their tandem bicycle south on County Road 500E, just north of 1800 E, when they were struck from behind by a Honda Accord driven by Errol T. Maul. Maul struck the couple with the passenger side of his car with a force great enough to mangle their tandem bicycle and throw Cindy onto the hood of the car, cracking the windshield. There were no skid marks on the road to indicate the driver braked, and debris (shards of reflector and fender, chunks of helmet foam) was strewn along the side of the road for 75-100 yards. Cindy was pronounced dead at the scene due to multiple injuries resulting from the crash, and David was taken to Carle Hospital, where he remains in critical but stable condition.

. . .

500E, like most out-of-town roads, is straight, flat, with few visual obstacles.

It is 22 feet wide, providing ample room for a car and bicycle to pass side-by-side. It was well before sundown, and the Combs rode a tandem bicycle with a trailer attached and a tall flag mounted to the frame for increased visibility. It is hard to imagine a scenario where a motorist could miss such a distinct sight.

Cindy and David Combs. Image by Development Services Center.

The driver, Errol Maul, was looking at paperwork on the front seat instead of the road just before the collision. Maul said the cyclists were one or two feet from the edge of the road.

Maul eventually plead guilty to two traffic violations: failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident, and passing too closely. He was fined $1,000 for each violation (or $1000 per cyclist.)

An article in in the News Gazette relates heart-rending details about David and Cindy Combs. I'm going to stop with this quote: "David and Cindy's love for each other is very pure and palpable." Read the article.

=> Read more!

'coca cola vase' 1997
Vase from the Tang Dynasty (618-907)
© FAKE studio

This "defaced" Tang Dynasty vase is by Ai Weiwei. Ai is a prominent Chinese artist who disappeared after his arrest by Chinese authorities in April.

This work is from an exhibit of Ai's works at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. The exhibit, "Ai Weiwei: According to What?", will be at the Hirshorn in June 2012.

Lots of congratulations passed around Gerty's family this week for a nephew off to some sort of semi-pro hockey training team.

Is a game that employs "fighters" a sport for children? I don't think so, but I am definitely in the minority in Gerty's side of the family. That would be a minority of one.

I can't get two images out of my mind. One is from one of the few NHL games I have attended. Two junior hockey teams skirmished during a break in the game and then were encouraged to attack a fellow dressed in Red Wings gear while screaming "Kill the Red Wings!" The crowd loved it. I'm told it was a regular feature. I never went back to find out.

The other is this photo.

One of the reasons I was impressed by Obama was his reaction, during the campaign, when Clinton signed on to McCain's moronic proposal for a federal gas tax "holiday," as a reaction to higher gas prices. Obama took the politically more challenging course. He showed some leadership and pointed out that holiday would have little or no effect on pump prices, cost the government money which would lead to cutting construction jobs, and opposed it.

Obama was right. At the time, Krugman, a Clinton supporter, analyzed it this way:

Why doesn't cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It's Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

What happened to that guy?

Now Obama's doing the pandering. And, in doing so, he is reinforcing Republican talking points that are divorced from reality. From the NYTimes:

President Obama, facing voter anger over high gasoline prices and complaints from Republicans and business leaders that his policies are restricting the development of domestic energy resources, announced on Saturday that he was taking several steps to speed oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters.

It was at least a partial concession to his critics, who say he has shackled domestic energy development at a time when consumers are paying near-record prices at the gas pump.

We can "Drill baby, Drill!" as much as we want and dispense with, ignore, or weaken environmental protections for our public lands and it won't make a difference to gas prices. The basic reason is related to what Krugman said about the gas tax holiday: gas prices are set by supply and demand. An increase in domestic production will have negligible effect on supply -- nearly the same as an increase in production in Outer Nowhere, and therefore make virtually no difference to the price anyone pays at the pump.

It is environmental and public policy idiocy. The best policy for energy independence is higher prices not lower. The best policy to lower gas prices is energy conservation.

These policy changes do nothing positive and reinforce that the Republican view of the world is right and that environmentalists are crazies. And they make constructive policies more difficult to implement.

Ah well.

From Dean Baker:

At this point, the data are clearly giving a warning of weakness in the labor market. It is also worth noting that many newly unemployed workers will not be eligible for benefits since they have been unemployed for much of the last two years.

I just don't understand why both parties are obsessing about the deficit. The renewal of the Bush tax cuts and the plethora of "no new taxes" pledges make actually dealing with the deficit impossible.

Moreover, reducing government spending now is precisely the wrong thing to do. It raises unemployment and reduces revenues.

And there's so much that could be built and repaired that would pay benefits in the future.

Ah well.

I know. I know. If you like his journal you can just read it yourself. But Allen Giese had me laughing again today with this photo caption:

Rest stop in the middle of no where, which was where we were most of the day.

I can't really explain why I find that so funny. But I do. I do.

But it is actually. Image by Carlos G. Casares. Some rights reserved.

I was shocked that David W. Rasmussen, dean of the Florida State's College of Social Sciences, would sell his sister (sorry, faculty positions at his college) to a Koch foundation. (And for so little! I suppose if one is a free market maniac, the $1.5 million price tag tells us what Rasmussen's school is worth.)

Today, the NYTimes relates that Scholastic Inc., a corporation that is ubiquitous in primary schools. has an InSchool Marketing division which produces curriculum materials to order.

According to the Times, the division's programs are “designed to promote client objectives and meet the needs of target teachers, students, and parents” and “make a difference by influencing attitudes and behaviors.”

Apparently the American Coal Foundation paid Scholastic to develop a unit about coal called "The United States of Energy". From the NYTimes article:

“ ‘The United States of Energy’ is designed to paste a smiley face on the dirtiest form of energy in the world,” said Bill Bigelow, an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine. “These materials teach children only the story the coal industry has paid Scholastic to tell.”

. . .

What they do not mention are the negative effects of mining and burning coal: the removal of Appalachian mountaintops; the release of sulfur dioxide, mercury and arsenic; the toxic wastes; the mining accidents; the lung disease.

“The curriculum pretends that it’s going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of different energy choices, to align with national learning standards, but it doesn’t,” Mr. Bigelow said.

“The fact that coal is the major source of greenhouse gases in the United States is entirely left out,” he said. “There’s no hint that coal has any disadvantages.”

In a statement, Ben Schreiber, a climate and energy tax analyst at Friends of the Earth, called the curriculum “the worst kind of corporate brainwashing.”

According to an article by Alma Hale Paty, the executive director of the American Coal Foundation, and posted on Coalblog, “The United States of Energy” went to 66,000 fourth-grade teachers in 2009.

From the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

There's an easy way to stop the increasing deficit -- let the idiotic Bush tax cuts expire. As an alternative, we can talk about reducing the deficit, slap poor people around, screw up social security and the environment, and not reduce the deficit.

In the interest of bipartisanship, we choose to slap poor people around, screw up social security and the environment, and not reduce the deficit.

Oh, and to show our good faith, we'll soon cave to threats to let the country default on its debts.

I wonder whether its better to just vote for the morons directly rather than voting for the morons who capitulate to the morons . . . . Hmmm. Another day another conundrum.

"Sitting on my trailer pad fry'in up a steak. I told the locals it was raccoon and now we're all buddies." Image and caption by Alan Geise.

Most accounts of bike tours tend to focus on weather, miles, and how the rider felt. I understand. The basic facts of a trip are the easiest to set down. Still, those ledger-like accounts become dull, fast.

Few tourists write well and write for others to read. Those are worth reading daily. My grandmother followed her soaps; I follow the 22-year old who is in ecstasy about finding a warm church basement on a rainy day.

When I read a well-written account, I feel the burden of a dismal day, the warmth of unexpected charity, or the silliness that permeates so much of life if one is paying attention.

Sometimes I can't help laughing out loud. From Allen Giese on crazyguy:

I've never been to Yulee, FL nor have I ever heard of it. I doubt I will ever be here again. In fact, I might go out of my way to avoid it. . . .

I'm sitting in my tent, squishing gnats on my computer screen because it's the only light around. Except of course the RV parked 30 feet from me that doesn't look like it's been moved in two years with Christmas lights still strung on it. I digress.

. . . After something like 550 miles of Florida coastline I think I've seen enough. I get it. It's very sandy.

[The] ACA maps want to make sure that we experience what real back country liv'in is all about. It's about logging trucks whizzing by you at 70 miles an hour with a shoulder we're riding on that is more chewed up than my dog's chew toy. . . .

Unbelievable. From the St. Petersburg Times:

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."

. . . The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions . . . .

Most universities, including the University of Florida, have policies that strictly limit donors' influence over the use of their gifts. Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was "unheard of."

Rich, selfish assholes run everything, and it's good for all of us.

The contract is here [pdf].

Image by Rupert Taylor-Price. Some rights reserved.

Gerty and I have our bags packed for a "shakedown cruise." We're preparing for our first self-supported tour together. (And Gerty's first tour ever.)

Seemed pretty simple. Get some panniers, shift the backpacking gear from packs to panniers, toss in some tools, and take off.

Not so fast! There are six bags not two. We had no idea how to arrange things between the bags (aside from keeping pairs of bags roughly equal in weight.) And, it was touch and go whether every thing would fit.

I thought I would experience a wave of satisfaction once everything was stashed away in the panniers. That "I have everything that I need right here on my back" feeling.

So far no sign of such satisfaction. More a feeling of discouragement -- how can we have so much stuff? I like to have room to just toss stuff sacks into my backpack and start walking.

Our panniers have no room for a granola bar. They look ready to pop. Repacking tomorrow morning may require a trash compacter.

Why do we have so much stuff? Traveling in a civilized place just requires more things than sitting around in the wilderness. We have a little computer, a set of minimally respectable clothes, and -- gasp -- deodorant.

And, we don't really have that much stuff. We have about 64 pounds of stuff packed for two of us. Even adding in a couple extra liters of water we'd only be at 68 pounds, which isn't ghastly. I was aiming for 60 pounds, so we're not wildly off. We've certainly backpacked with more.

Perhaps it just looks and feels like more because we have six bike bags (three sets of panniers), and if we were backpacking we'd have only two backpacks.

Gerty and I are planning a tour. Each time one of us places something in the "to be packed" pile, the other asks "Are you sure you couldn't find something lighter?" or "Do you really need that?" or, most often, "WTF! I'm not carrying that just so you can . . . ."

So, I was delighted to find a fellow who plans - PLANS - on hauling rocks around in his panniers. Should be fun to follow along. (If I have time during the divorce proceedings.)

Image by dotpolka. Some rights reserved.

Since the government's budget is just like our household budget (if you don't believe me, just ask our idiotic senators), we've developed a plan to cope, should our household income drop because I lose a job.

Though it might make sense to go back to work, jobs are not something our household can or should have anything to do with. And, in any case, we have a better solution.

We're instituting food vouchers for our home. Food is essential so this is a responsible change to ensure the continued availability of food.

The food vouchers won't keep pace with inflation, but this is a feature not a bug. Our declining purchasing power will result in lower food prices and save money. After all, if we don't balance our household budget now, eventually we won't have money for food.

We will then take the money we save and give it to our rich neighbors. Although they have plenty, we owe it to them because they have more than we do.

And in a few years, we'll be much richer.