Close run things

Man, I wish I had a head mounted video camera so that I could capture more of the stupidity that I see around me each and every day. For instance, the driver of the dark car on the right heading towards me had a mobile phone in her left hand (clamped to ear) and a cigarette in her right hand - and she was waving the cigarette around as she talked with her hands. Neither hand was anywhere near the steering wheel. And we wonder why the death toll on the roads stubbornly refuses to decline.

A near wipeout with a bike courier who was going way, way too fast for his own good and mine. The speed limit in this spot is 10km/h - no one on a bike goes that slow (I get the wobbles and almost fall over when going that speed), but we generally don't exceed 20km/h, which is a reasonable pace given the plethora of pedestrians in the vicinity.

This dick was going much faster than that. He was riding "furiously". He needs to have "fuckstick" stamped on his forehead.

Several hundred good reasons to ride to work

Most days, the traffic into town flows fairly well. Sure, it's not always moving quickly, but it does tend to move.

Not today. Don't know what went wrong, but the road leading onto the City West Link was a car park stretching back about 1km.

For me, it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the birds were not being run over by speeding trucks and my new back tyre failed to puncture once. Not so for the poor buggers fuming in traffic as they attempted to get to their places of employment.

Sure, cycling is hard work. You get wet, hot, drenched, windblown and have to put up with occasional mouthful of flies in summer. Flat tyres happen. Ball rash can be a problem. Calf muscles cramp every now and then at 3am when you're peacefully passed out in bed. Fate sometimes dishes out a rendevous with the road surface. But it's almost never, ever frustrating. Raised blood pressure has never been an issue when I've been in the saddle.

Live long, and relax.

Too many damned bikes!

Where did all these bloody bikes come from? For the last few weeks, the weather has alternated between wet and cold and miserable and stinking hot and nasty. Today, it was almost perfect. I cruised around The Bay at lower than normal speed, just soaking up the atmosphere and savouring being outdoors before being locked in an air conditioned dungeon for the rest of the day.

The nice weather seems to have brought out every other person with a bike in Sydney. It was a bloody traffic jam of two wheelers all the way into town. Overtaking was a big problem because of the sheer number of bikes in front.

I'm going to go back to driving if it gets any worse.

Nice, quiet, gentle killers

How much crap can one read in a day without wanting to punch a hole in your computer monitor?

On the Fort Hood killer:

''The whole family is in a state of denial,'' Mr Hamad, 65, said. ''We don't believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it's not him. He's very quiet, gentle.

Ah, fellahs, although he was a shrink, he was in the Army. The main purpose of the Army is killing people and breaking things. When you join any branch of the military, you do so in the knowledge that one day you may need to ventilate people and blow things up. Yes, even those that have comfy, rear echelon desk jobs are occasionally called upon to lug a rifle around and blat at the enemy. It's part and parcel of the work environment.

One of the interesting things I used to observe as a Reservist was the process of putting on and taking off your "green head". The "green head" was the mindset and outlook that I adopted when I pulled on my uniform. It was quite different to my "civilian head". It usually took me an hour or two to put the green head on, but it could takes days to completely take it off after an exercise.

Here's the thing - when you don that uniform and enter the company of other soldiers, your personality changes. It's a Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde kind of thing. I doubt my family would have recognised me if they'd seen me running around the shrubbery for a week with an M-60.

I'm normally laid back and relaxed to the point of catatonia. I'm a live and let live kind of bloke.

However, put the green head on, and I'm ready to lay waste to entire civilisations. The problem with people who say that someone was "quiet and gentle" is that they've never seen them with their green head on. Or in his case, his Jihad head.

To give you an example, one of our favourite drinking chants used to be "atrocity, atrocity, atrocity". Picture 10, 20 or more blokes standing around with beers, then chanting that at the top of their lungs, sculling their drinks and then running around yelling and tackling each other and generally causing testosterone fueled mayhem. The outcome was generally bits of broken furniture and the odd split lip.

The problem with these wet, soggy fish that write for the SMH is that they've never experienced this kind of thing. The politically correct, metrosexual Arts graduates that make up the journalistic population have never done the Green Head thing. If they had, they'd realise that quiet, gentle people are quite capable of mentally switching gears and doing some incredible or terrible things.

Food exports good, food imports bad

I heard the other day that Australia grows enough food to feed 80 million people. We export enough food to feed 60 million people - the equivalent of the UK.

Another way of thinking about that is we only eat 1/4 of what we grow. We export 3/4 of what we grow.

Consider then the SMH getting upset when our supermarkets start selling - the horror - imported food.

It comes as consumer and industry groups have accused supermarket giants of lowering standards of fresh produce, particularly by shunning local growers in favour of cheaper, imported produce.

I remember a concept known as "comparative advantage". If the Chinese are better at growing cabbages than we are, but we are better at raising cattle, then it makes sense for us to import Chinese cabbages and for the Chinese to import our beef. We both gain through this process.

So what is the problem with us importing a bit of food, given how much we export? Remember all that nasty wheat that we sold to Iraq? Remember those poor sheep that we flog to middle eastern throat slashers? Remember all that lovely, expensive seafood that we sell to the Japanese, such as our best quality tuna for sushi?

Another case of those geniuses at the SMH failing to light up the single brain cell that they share.

Spot the dot

Ha! Bet you thought I would be posting a picture of something dirty, didn't you?

The last few years have seen an avalanche of small and interesting innovations when it comes to cycling. This bloke has a small reflective dot on the back of each shoe - each is about the size of a 10 cent coin. When you pedal, the dots go up and down as your feet rotate, and the movement draws the eye - especially at night.

It's a small thing, but if it's enough for a car driver to pick you up at night from behind, it might save your neck (unless the driver is pissed - then you're rooted).

Lots of little things like this have crept into cycling without most people noticing. They are not the result of government mandates or OH&S legislation - they are generated by people having a brain wave and either producing and marketing a new product themselves, or it being introduced by one of the major equipment manufacturers who see such innovations as giving them an edge in a very competitive market.

It's just one of those little indicators as to how the free market constantly improves our lives in little ways - in ways that sclerotic, centralised, ham-fisted bureaucratic government never can.

Phew, dodged a bullet there

Good thing this was not I.

Turnbull advisor quits over Hitler video.

After all, what sort of juvenile jackass makes Hitler videos?

Wide load

The RTA likes to tell us that "the road is there to share".

Bit difficult to share the road when you fill it from side to side.

Passing shadows

No, I am not intruding on the turf of the new and improved Shadowlands. I just liked the effect of chasing my shadow in this short clip.

Inept, incompetent, incomprehensible urban design

I have this thing about riding on the footpath - ie, I don't like doing it. Apart from the footpath being for people who are on foot, travelling on the footpath is annoyingly slow, and they tend to be lumpy and badly maintained - and that hurts my bottom. Footpaths are not for me.

There are times though when one has to lay one's principles and buttocks aside and take to the footpath. The only place I do it is around the Slip Inn in the CBD.

The shit-for-brains planners who have the CBD under their purview obviously have no fucking idea of how people are using the streets and bike paths that they have planned. They sit in their ivory towers and plan how people should do things. People take one look at what has been built, go "That is utter shite", and they go elsewhere.

The planners of course immediately think that there is nothing wrong with their plans - instead, the people are defective. Things would work properly if only we had the right sort of people.

I am one of those defectives.

The planners have built a bike route from the Pyrmont Bridge that goes up King St into the heart of the CBD. That's fine if you have a death wish, and work in the heart of the CBD. For those like me that work in the northern end of the CBD, the better option is to avoid King St and go left onto Sussex St. A planner with half a brain worked out that there would be a need for a route to the north, and so a bike lane starts a few hundred metres north of the King & Sussex St intersection.

What the poo-flinging monkey rooters didn't plan for was the idea that cyclists might actually want to come off the Pyrmont Bridge, turn left and join that bike lane going north. Or that cyclists coming from the north down Sussex St might want to turn right onto the Pyrmont Bridge. The failure to link the two shows me that most planners in this city are suffering from a bad case of advanced brain death.

The results are shown in the video above - chaos and near catastrophe each and every morning and evening as dozens of bikes take to the footpath to avoid a death trap.

We'd be better off if most urban planners were dropped into a cement mixer and poured into the foundations of a new six lane highway.

Has been rockers who should grow up

I saw John Waters today. He was chasing a kid called Rusty.

We were in what I would describe as a warehouse for kids. Lots of casually dressed dads were wandering around barefoot, chasing their versions of the Little Monkey up and down slides and in and out of ball pits.

Waters of course was dressed like an ageing rocker - think Keith Richards, except without the cool and the cigarette. Men with grey hair should not wear ear rings.

He was born in 1948. That makes him 61 - almost a pensioner.

Time to grow up and act your age.

How good are real estate price indexes?

Each week, I open the local rag and have a look at a table that they publish on local house prices. They always track whether prices are going up or down, and by how much. This week, prices were down 2.8% on last year.

I can't stand these sorts of indexes, as they are notoriously open to all sorts of abuse and interpretation.

I wish they'd produce an index that is based on cost per square metre - either of the land parcel or the house or the two combined.

Say you spend $750,000 buying a run down shack on a 1000 sqm block. As the shack is worthless, the land is obviously worth $750 per square metre.

A year later, after a McMansion is constructed, the place sells for $1.1 million.

Under our existing index, the real estate industry would be crowing that values are up 46% in a year. Buy now! Great investments to be had! You too can make a killing in real estate!

However, what if the house cost $500,000 to build? I'd say the owners just sold out at a $150,000 loss, and that does not include the costs of conveyancing, stamp duty and the interest on whatever they borrowed to buy and build.

Or consider a house that starts at say 200 square metres, and is valued at $800,000. The owners extend upwards and outwards, ending up with a 300 square metre house. The place sells for $1.1 million. Have they just realised a 37% gain?

Well, my index would say that you started with a package worth $400 per square metre of house. You ended up with a package worth $366 per square metre.

It's not like you are comparing the price of apples across time. I am pretty sure that the apples we were eating in 1960 are fairly similar to those eaten today (at least for those varieties like the Granny Smith that have been around that long). With apples, at least we know we are comparing roughly the same goods from year to year.

With houses, you aren't. The house my parents live in looks nothing like it did when they bought it. They have renovated very extensively, altering most rooms in one way or another. People install swimming pools, knock the back off and extend backwards, demolish pre-war fibro dog boxes and replace them with brick McMansions, demolish outdoor toilets and move the bathroom indoors (yes, a friend had to do that in the mid 1990's).

One thing we do know is that the houses that were built in the 1950s were much smaller than those being built today. Is there any real estate index that factors that in? Do any of them take inflation into account?

I do know one thing is for sure - real estate spruikers will do anything to fiddle the stats to make them look as positive as possible.

Check out this crap head

Yes, some cyclists are raving knob-monkeys. If there are pedestrians on a pedestrian crossing, you're supposed to stop and give way.

The pedestrians were not impressed, and I don't blame them.

This cyclist then proceeded to jump the next two sets of lights, which were red.

It didn't do him any good. When we got into town, he was just in front of me.

Some people are just twats.

The opportunity cost of stupid Green expenditure

Want to know where this Green madness is taking us?

Look no further than Leichhardt Council, home to a bunch of deep-left Greenatics.

Earlier this year, the council did some work on their section of the bike path that goes around the Bay Run. I watched trucks pouring concrete for days on end, hoping that a gravel section of goat track was finally going to turn into a world class bit of of infrastructure.

I should have remembered that if you give a Greenie a project, chances are they'll completely fuck it up. Here is what the path should look like end to end (the pink stuff is the freshly poured concrete):

It seems the budget ran out halfway through, so this is what half this section looks like - rough gravel that floods in winter, and is of no use to roadies like me.

Why is this so?

I checked the Leichhardt budget, and on page 15 found these numbers:

Budget and Parking Management Taskforce

Bicycle plan works additional funding - $265k, dropping to $255k next year

Carbon neutrality additional funding:

2008/09 - $59,000

2009/10 - $118,000

2010/11 - $177,000

2011/12 - $236,000

Environmental education increase

2008/09 - $53,648

2009/10 - $54,616

2010/11 - $55,617

2011/12 - $56,817

Over the next 4 years, council will spend $1.285m on bike works. During that same period, it will spend $810,000 on useless green waste-a-thons. If they spent that money on bike paths, they would get 66% more paths.

Now I am not your typical wooly-headed bike riding, tofu eating, mental patient environmentalist. But I get the idea that if you build good bike paths, more people will ride bikes. If that is your idea of a good environmental outcome, then surely you'd want to maximise the number of cyclists, and in order to do that, you need to lay as much concrete as possible in the form of bike paths. But those window licking Greens on council think that they'll get more people to ride bikes by printing leaflets extolling cycling and putting hanging banners from lamp posts. Sorry, fucktards, leaflets will do nothing. Forget the paper - lay concrete.

To add insult to injury, Leichhardt Council proudly boasts that it uses green electricity. Their bill is now over $1m per annum. Since we know that green power is 10% more expensive than the coal fired stuff, we can presume they are pissing another $100k of ratepayers funds up against the lamp post in the form of green power. If they stuck to coal fired power, over 4 years, you could add another $400k to the bike path budget.

In other words, you could double your bike path budget if you dumped these insane Green fantasies. That bit of gravel in the above photo could be concrete by now if the Greens grew up and got real.

Another way of looking at it is that those idiotic Greens have cut the bike path budget by 50% to pay for their indulgences.

What a completely fucked outcome that is.

It's almost as bad as this crap from Howard "knobhead" Scruby and his gaggle of money-grubbing ambulance chasing lawyers.

Fuel the fear

Two craphead eco-nut reporters managed to get front page space in the SMH today with a story entitled:

Revealed: polluters' fear tactics on climate

I'm talking big headline, right there across the front page. The SMH should just rename itself to Green Left Daily and be done with it.

Let me re-write some paragraphs.

The SMH version:

BIG greenhouse polluting companies around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to weaken climate change laws at home and slow progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals.

My version:

BIG green lobby groups around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to strengthen climate change laws at home and speed progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals.

SMH:

In Australia, 20 companies who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.

Me:

In Australia, 20 charities who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government's Dept of Climate Change employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.

SMH:

While lobbyists for the renewable energy industry, the carbon traders and environmental groups are also becoming more prominent, the report finds that their voices ''can barely be heard above the clamour of the older, well-capitalised and deeply entrenched industries that have been lobbying on climate change for more than 20 years''.

Me:

While lobbyists for the the carbon traders and environmental groups are also becoming more prominent, the report finds that their voices ''can barely be heard above the clamour of the older, well-capitalised and deeply entrenched green groups like Greenpeace and the WWF that have been lobbying on climate change for more than 20 years''.

I don't know how the SMH can call the tactics of industry associations "promoting fear" when Al Gore has made himself a multi-millionaire by scaring the shit out of people for a decade. Tim Flannery has also jumped on the greenwagon and is raking it in by promoting fear and loathing.

As for industry having deep pockets, I'd like someone to compare how much industry has spent on campaigning against this crap as opposed to how much Greenpeace etc, plus untold lunatic flat earth government agencies have spent on trying to make CO2 scarier than Freddie Kruger.

I think they would find that industry has been outspent perhaps 1000 to 1.

Topsy-turvy world

I left the office a little later than usual last night, but not late enough to think about chasing the 1750 for a while. If I was going to see them, it would be a matter of finding a pleasant spot to stop - one with long sight lines - and waiting for them to come along.

As it was, serendipity almost took care of that for me. The Gods of Retention of High Pressure Air in Rubber Enclosures decided to throw a shard of glass my way, and I spent 10 minutes on the side of the road getting filthy (again). I am looking forward to my new tyres arriving in the mail - the old ones are worn so thin that a nasty look could poke a hole in them.

I deliberately setup the bike so that the video camera was pointing up the road. Until I downloaded the video at home, I had no idea whether it was in any position to film anything worthwhile. It turned out to be perfectly aligned - albeit upside down.

A few dozen cyclists passed me as I sat there changing out the tube, and 80% of them slowed down and asked if I was ok, needed a hand and had everything I needed to complete the job. Cycling is that sort of fraternity. I always do the same to other cyclists, unless I can see that they have almost completed the job and clearly have no need for any assistance.

As it was, I still pushed off before the 1750 came through. They didn't overtake me, which was a good thing as I was in no shape to chase them. Thanks to my stupid pump, I could only stick 50psi in the back tyre. At pressures that low, the bike wobbles much more than usual, and I worry that if I corner too hard, the tyre will peel off the rim. It's like riding on a bowl of jelly. So I was happy to take it easy and not be presented with any temptations to put the hammer down and flog the legs into a lathered mess.

Daily blits

Hipster on motorised scooter. So what? Well, he's about 62 years old. Not quite the age group you'd expect to see on one of these. Plus the attire is a bit out of the ordinary.

Tanned. Fit. Big, sticky-outy ears. Works at ABN-Amro. Anyone at that company know someone with big ears reminiscent of Flapper?

A Libertarian at rest (no helmet). A rebel without a skullcap. Otherwise, very fit and serious looking.

One thing I have found over the last year or two of photographing cyclists is that to date, of the hundreds of photos I have taken, only one person has shown any sign of noticing me taking their photo. Either I am an incredibly sneaky photographer, or people spend most of their time in an unobservant thought bubble.

Speed

How quick can an old guy move? Well, I can do a short burst of 50km/h on my own, and that's about it - enough to hold my own in traffic until the legs expire. It helps when you have a short downhill that allows a rapid build up of speed.

It's always fun to go past a Porsche on this section.

I usually catch out a gaggle of jaywalking pedestrians on this section each morning - they seem to be completely incapable of judging how fast a bike is moving, or their brains can't comprehend that the bloke pedalling their way is doing the speed limit. They step out in front of bikes like zombies, unaware that if I can't swerve around them, my only option is to go through them over over them. It's not like I am a skinny little sod either - I am just over half a metre across the shoulders, so squeezing through little gaps is not my forte.

Knobhead taxi driver

How I love drivers that change lanes suddenly without indicating. There is a bit of rubber on this section of road now, left there after I had to lock up to avoid being squished by the idiot driving this cab

By the time I got alongside him, he'd quickly wound up his window - I guess he knew what might have been coming once he realised what he'd almost done. I was not that upset - the car in front of him had ducked quickly into the left lane, so I had a sneaky suspicion that other cars might do the same - you get a sense for it after a while. However, the first car to do it had looked then indicated. This fool didn't look or indicate - he just went.

What is the point of a "baby on board" sticker?

I have never seen the point of those "baby on board" thingies that started adorning cars some time back, even though I have lugged two babies tens of thousands of miles in the family urban assault vehicle.

For a start, you'd think that people who are that concerned with their human cargo would drive in a quiet, calm and unhurried manner - as if they were carting around a crate of unstable nitroglycerin (which is what a kid full of watermelon and ice cream can be like). The last thing you'd expect is for them to drive like they were being chased by a horde of the living dead. Which is exactly what happened to me this morning.

Cyclist in yellow pulls out to pass a ute that is turning left. As I am doing 50km/h - the speed limit - I pull out to go around him. Loon in black Lexus carrying a baby on board sign hoons past me, then immediately turns right.

All I could think was, "WTF?" Couldn't you have waited 2 seconds until we got to that corner, rather than overtaking me so closely that I could see the imperfections in your paint work?