Of course I decided to put my "low light" orange lenses in my sunglasses this morning, and rode out into furiously strong sunlight that pretty much blinded me. It's nice having a choice of lenses for the glasses, but I always seem to choose the wrong ones.
On the way home, I also decided to leave my camera in my backpack in case it rained, and missed the best photograph of a plane passing through low cloud as it was coming in to land. The low cloud was really black, and as the plane went through it, the wingtips left two trails of black vortices through the sky for hundreds of metres. It was way cool. The leading edges of the wings also threw up great clumps of black cloud, so it looked like smoke was boiling out of the wings. It would have been the sort of photo that you'd see on the front page of the paper tomorrow.
So all I could say was, "bugger". I did a U-turn and went back to the spot where I saw the plane go over, pulled off my backpack and extracted the camera. I then stood there on the side of the road for a few minutes, as planes usually go over every 3 minutes or so at this time of day. I figured I'd be able to get a similar shot when the next plane arrived.
No planes went over. But it did start to absolutely piss down with rain, so I put the camera away and headed for home.
"Bugger" again.
Check out the footwear on this buy - black leather shoes! Don't see too many people wearing them on a bike. And with white socks! This is just so sad.
I was wandering around town today and caught this Chinese dragon assaulting guests at this hotel. Two women walked out, chatting to each other and totally oblivious to the twenty guys in red shirts banging drums and things, and the dragon prancing around outside the lobby. The dragon spat something like a firework at them, and they screamed their heads off, waved their arms around a lot and walked past me in a state talking about "what the fuck was that?"
What sort of people have never seen a dragon during the Chinese New Year? Do these people really live under rocks?
A fold up bike of some sort. I'm starting to see more of these around. They're like scooters - suddenly, they are appearing everywhere. I did a quick count today of motorbike parking spots in town and found that motorbikes are now outnumbered 3:1 by scooters.
Personally, I doubt you will ever catch me on one of these things. I think they make you look like a dick. Sorry, but they do. I am prejudiced against stupid looking things on two wheels.
And I'm not just talking about fold-up push bikes. I detest ugly looking scooters and badly designed motor bikes - particularly a lot of the cheap 250cc type rubbish that the Japs pumped out in the 1980's. Some objects scream "beautiful design", and others look like they have been put together by a gaggle of nuff-nuffs in a sheltered workshop.
Which is where this dickhead is heading, unless he finds a helmet. Having gone down hard 4 times in the last few years, I can state with authority that one moment, you are proceeding as normal, and the next, you are lying on the ground in a great deal of pain and perhaps some blood.
There is no time to grab the helmet off the handle bars, stick it on the head and do up the strap. You have perhaps half a second between when grip is lost and you impact with the road. On each occasion, I don't think I went over badly enough to smack the helmet on the road, but you never know when your noggin is going to make contact with the concrete. I wouldn't play rugby barefoot, so why would I ride a bike without a brain pan?
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