Knobheads in fast cars

Yesterday delivered to me an all time classic knobhead. I had the camera on me, and I am cursing that I did not take it out and get a photo of him.

I had just pulled out of the office and found myself sitting at some lights behind a silver 350Z. The driver had one arm out the window in what looked to be a very uncomfortable, but cool looking pose. Then I noticed two more things - the hand out the window was holding a smoke, and the other hand was holding a phone up against his ear. The lights went green, and somehow he managed to get to the next intersection by juggling the smoke, phone, steering wheel and gears.

Then he flicked his smoke onto the road.

I then had a decision to make - did I pick it up, ride up beside him and drop it in his lap, exclaiming "You dropped something mate", whilst making a sharp right turn to get out of the way of his suddenly weaving car as still burning cigarette attacked his crotch, or just ignore it and hope that he develops lip cancer.

I took the chicken's way out, mainly because if I did chase him and do the cigarette dumping thing, I would have then been trapped at a set of lights that are nasty on a bike. They are lights that are so bad, I ride a block in the wrong direction to avoid them.

So he got away with it.

God I hate tossing wogs in sports cars. I had better go apply for a gun license.

A cure for depression

As I was perusing the Spectator today, I spotted a snippet about how Dr Johnson used to walk to Birmingham and back in a day (32 miles) to ward of depression. I have no idea where he was walking from, but it was a 32 mile round trip. The reasoning given is "that there's time to think, and gradually unfold, while the rhythmic action sorts out the mind, calming nerves and easing pressure."

The same could be said for spending an hour on a bike. Not a stationary bike, but a proper bike - one that thumps along at a rate of knots. I don't find perambulating around at the speed of a slug to be very restful or enjoyable, but belting along at a pace that keeps my heart rate up at about 75% of maximum capacity or more is wonderfully therapeutic.

It doesn't have to be cycling - rowing, swimming, walking or kayaking would do the same. Skiing is even better for clearing the head of all work related rot and pressure. The reason I favour cycling is that it is something that I can do for at least an hour without undue discomfort. I couldn't swim nonstop for an hour.

Slime

Here is a close up of the fattest slug that I have found in the kitchen to date. If this thing was sitting on my big toe, it would pretty much cover it completely. I tried sprinkling salt under the front of the dishwasher tonight, and no slugs have appeared. I'll have to pull the dishwasher out tomorrow and check underneath. It will be pretty gross if it is a slug breeding ground.

Yuck

The tide was out a bit this morning, and boy, did the mud stink as I rode past. I don't normally get to ride around at low tide, so the smell has never bothered me in the past. I don't know what it is that is collecting in that mud, but it is black, yucky and putrid. A good place for developing three headed fish.

The other thing that worries me about riding around here is that if you have to swerve of the path (to avoid a stupid dog or pram), there is no guard rail and a sharp drop into the water. The water of course is generally less than a foot deep, and it vaguely conceals lots of pointy rocks. I always make a point of taking it easy when coming up behind people, and I always try and pass on the right. Going nose first off here would not be fun.

Slug fest

I don't know what it is about the new place, but it is over run by slugs. At first I thought they were coming from this drain by the back door, so I tipped in half a packet of slug pellets and waited for the corpses to pile up.

No such luck. The little blighters kept on coming. There are big ones and little ones and in between ones, and no matter how many I squish each night, there are another half dozen there the night after.

I am trying another tack tonight - I have laid an impenetrable line of salt across the lintel of the back door, so we'll see if any try to get in that way. I think they are sneaking in under the back door, but J is not so sure. She thinks they are coming up through the cracks between the walls and the floor, which is why I am looking at one in the office as I type this.

I think they are coming in the back door as we have a rug inside the door and it is now criss crossed with slug trails. If you look at it in the right light, you can see a plethora of silvery trails all over it - you could drop a 20 cent coin onto the rug and it would land on a slug trail - there are that many of them.

I trod on one the other night - in bare feet. I didn't mind stepping on it, but I hated the fact that it stuck to my big toe and would not shake off. It's an awful feeling, especially if it's a big slug, which it was. I can put up with lots of things, but standing on slugs is not one that I am particularly keen on experiencing again.

Ugh.

Riding to work

Whenever I say, "I cycle to work", people go "Oooh, that must be terribly dangerous and scary".

Well, to put it bluntly, it's not. The greatest hazard that I faced this week was failing to unclip my foot properly as I slowed to a halt and I almost fell over whilst still clipped in.

Most of my ride to work is undertaken on either totally segragated cycle paths, or along cycle lanes that have been painted on the side of roads that are not too busy. I ride over the ANZAC Bridge, but when I state that, most people think that I am riding in one of the four traffic lanes. Suicidal I am not. The ANZAC Bridge has a lovely, wide cycle/foot path down one side, and it's about as wide as a normal car lane.

I have crashed on the bridge - I hit a bit of packing foam as I was doing a sharp turn at the end of the bridge and the front wheel went out from underneath me. The same nearly happened again today when I hit the remains of a rodent that had been squashed onto the road, except that I was not turning quite so sharply, so the bike simply bounced sideways a bit as I went over the red and grey lump of ex-rodent.

There are still a few hazards on this bike path, like the RTA never bothering to replace blown light globes in a spot where it is impenetrably dark at night, and the odd idiot who walks on the wrong side of the path where bikes are prone to hitting 50km/h or faster as they belt down off the bridge. But those hazards are easy to deal with and none too common.

Craning for a look

There seem to be plenty of cranes around the place as new buildings go up, but you never see a crane being erected or dismantled.

Well, today I got my chance. There is a building site just below the ANZAC Bridge, and they have just started putting a crane together. The first step seems to be to lay out all the parts, and to then assemble the boom with a smaller crane. I'll have to see how far they have progressed tomorrow.

Earth hour?

The SMH has got itself into the poop over the Earth Hour fiasco by publishing photos of Sydney at night taken a few days apart, and claiming that they were taken before and after the Earth Hour.

I have decided to chip in with my view of the city at night from my old office window. Unfortunately, my camera will only allow a maximum shutter time of 2 seconds, so all I got was the tail lights of a car going by. This is how Sydney usually looks from the suburbs out where I am - gloomy.

More cars coming in

Those of a greenoid mentality would probably be having kittens after seeing this photo - another car carrier being docked under the ANZAC Bridge. I stopped and watched it come in for a few minutes this morning, thinking it was a view you don't see every day. A ship being worked in by a couple of tugs with the Harbour Bridge in the background.

The state government wants to shut this part of the port down and have all car imports sent somewhere else, which makes sense to me, but it will be a shame if the harbour stops being a working harbour and is left to be overrun by stinkboats and weekend sailors. You need the odd ship coming in every few hours to put the fear of God into the stinkboat drivers. Running a few over every year also makes sense.

Bludging?

I had a late start this morning - jet lag and all that. As I was zipping around the Bay, I spotted a council truck parked in the car park, with one worker reading the Telegraph and the other doing not much at all.

It was around 9am, so for all I know, they were on a break. However, given the state of Council infrastructure on their side of the Bay, there was a little voice in the back of my head going "They're bludging - that's what the Leichardt area is such crap compared to Canada Bay. The staff sit around doing nothing instead of fixing up the pot holes etc".


Then again, if I was going to park and have a smoko, I'd park where they did. The view across the water is pretty good.

I thought about writing to Council about it, but knowing how useless they are, I'd probably never get a reply, so why waste a stamp?

A movie I want to see

If only.

Has daylight savings affected the gravity in Perth?

Perth has recently suffered through a bout of daylight saving, which might help to explain why the traffic never moves when the lights turn green. The extra hour of daylight (or whatever it does) must have left most of the population sleep deprived, since most are clearly nodding off when they stop at the traffic lights.

We hired a 5 door Hyundai, which is really a stretched go-cart with a car radio installed. The engine capacity is somewhere around that of a jug of beer, and it couldn't pull the head off you average badly poured beer. Nonetheless, I quickly found that I was the new drag racing king of Perth, even when put up against cars that had more cylinders than I have toes.

The other effect that daylight saving might have had is that it has messed with the gravity, and if you take off too quickly, you might litterally take off (like that drilling rid thing did in "Armageddon"). Drivers have been told to tread lightly on the go pedal in case they find themselves overtaking the space shuttle in low orbit.

It's not like I am a hoon at home. I drive a 2 tonne thing that runs on diesel and is optimised for pulling sheep or tractors out of bogs, not for pulling off from the line in a cloud of shredded rubber. I didn't think I was driving any faster than usual, except when I noticed that after pulling away from one set of lights, I was through the next intersection about 300 metres away before the car beside me or behind me had cleared the intersection I had just left. If they are putting anything in the water, I can guarantee it is not Viagra.

I felt better after I heard a similar complaint from several other people. I am amazed I made it a week without blasting into the back of the car in front at the lights. I just have this thing about having the car in gear before the lights go green, so all you do is pop the clutch and move off. It's not rocket science. But it seems that in Perth, you can't pass your driving test if you leave the car in gear at the lights. In fact, it appears drivers are being taught to pull on the hand brake, turn off the ignition and take a moment to re-apply the lipstick.

If they install any more traffic lights, it will take people so long to get to work that when they get there, it will be time to drive home again.

Bouche?

J and I had the pleasure of being treated to dinner at Perth's finest French restaurant recently, the judge of what is the finest being my brother, who knows a thing or two about these things. Strangely, for a fine frog establishment, it is tucked away in the very non-frog suburb of Wembley. The only less likely place to find an eating hole of this calibre would be if if was located in the middle of a public housing estate.

Once I got over my initial shock of the location, I was pretty happy with the actual restaurant. It is french enough inside without going in for some horrible Louis XIV type decor with lots of gilt, antiques, wigs and severed heads. It is quite contemporary. I don't know if that is by design, or if the owner despaired of finding any french furniture in Perth and just went with what he could get.

Before we went, I read a few online reviews. All of them raved about the place, but one stated that the owner was quite snooty and rude, and another complained about the small serving of duck (even if it was excellent duck). With those warnings imprinted on my eyeballs, we went eating.

The only thing that I can really say about the place is that the menu was downright wierd. Wierd in a good kind of way, but wierd none the less. It had changed since my brother and his wife were there last, so they were swimming without bearings as well. Apparently the menu was originally in french only, and Em had to rely on a friend to translate the menu into English for her before she could order. The only problem being that I can't believe that bucketmouth knows any french at all, and I'm assuming he just made it all up.

Still, that wouldn't matter as you could poke your finger at just about anything on the menu and find that something interesting and tasty had arrived on the plate in front of you. Well, up to a point. I went for a rabbit thing as any entree (it was Easter after all, and by eating an Easter bunny, I was trying to save some poor fat kid from getting even fatter on more Easter eggs) and then the special. I will get to the special in a minute.

The entree was kind of like one of those Indian fried parcels that are shaped in a cone, except that it was not full of curried rat, but instead nicely shredded bits of bunny meat. I have no idea what came with it, except that it was interesting, tasty and nice. I don't know if I would eat it again, but that's mainly because there were plenty of other interesting things on the menu.

The main on the other hand was a bridge too far. It was monkfish (from NZ no less), topped with scallops, but sitting on a bed of roasted pork belly, along with a very rich brown sauce (presumably derived from the pork belly).

Now monkfish (from NZ) is an odd thing to serve in Perth, given that it had to travel 1/4 of the way around the globe to get there. Given that fresh is best when it comes to seafood, they could have had more sense and cooked something that had been flopping around the kelp locally the day before. Monkfish is also an odd kind of fish. It's white, but it doesn't flake like whiting. I wouldn't run across a bed of burning coals to eat it again.

The scallops were very good, but the whole thing was murdered by the pork belly. It was good pork belly, and it would have been fine on its own, but putting the two together reminds me too much of the Mr Creosote restaurant scene in "The Meaning of Life" - just mix it all up in a bucket. I am sure there is a food critic somewhere that will salivate over the combination to the point where their fingers start to slide of the keyboard, but it was not for me. It left me feeling odd afterwards, and my stomach is not easily upset. Big thumbs up for trying, but big thumbs down for the result.

Dessert was also a bit hit and miss. I ordered a poached pear tart, and what I got in essence was a bit of pear jam thinly smeared over a huge, sugary lump of pastry. I wanted a big, fat juicy pear to wash away the taste of the main course. Instead, I got a big, dried lump of pastry, with a bit of melted ice cream on the side.

Disappointed.

Em however allowed me to share her cheese platter, which was lovely as all that I had done with my dessert is smash up the pastry and push it around the plate a bit. The cheese platter was so much better than the dull cheddar-and-brie things that pass so often for cheese platters in this country. It had a lovely brie, a pungent rind washed cheese and a good, strong blue. Unfortunately, the last two always give me mammoth cheese dreams if had before dinner, so I had to largely abstain. All that I got to do was try a nibble of each, but the rind washed one was so powerful, I could still taste it at 3am. I drank a bucketful of water that night to try and wash the dry, salty, pungent taste off my tongue. I think that stopped me from having any dreams.

All in all, although it was a bit of a disaster for moi, I would love to go back. The only way to create great dishes is to heroically throw things together and see what results. Most will fail, but some will shine through. This place struck me as one that if it gets it right, it really gets it right, and if it fails, it really blows it. There is no safe, mediocre middle ground. I salute that kind of ethic.

To heroic failures, and hopefully a better feed next time!

Losing my virgatory

Flying Virgin - welcome to purgatory.

We flew cross country on Virgin, and I'll never make that mistake again. Yes, the tickets were cheaper than Qantas, but then goats piss is cheaper than beer and I choose to drink beer.

Where do I start?

The root cause is Virgin's desire to be a particularly hip and youthful airline. That's great if you are a hip 21 year old flying from Sydney to Melbourne for a bit of weekend clubbing, but it's a bit of a drag if you are a family with two kids that just wants to survive a coast to coast holiday. Especially when the rear third of the plane is stuffed with people like you - families with one to three kids in tow, mostly under the age of 5.

Kids over the age of 5 aren't too hard to deal with - give them a colouring-in book and some pencils, or even better, a multi-channel in-flight entertainment system, and they are set. Kids under that age are more of a problem - particularly those under 2. They don't understand the need to be strapped in for takeoff and landing, and they don't want to sit down while the hosties are pushing a trolley full of meals and drinks up and down the aisle. In short, they are a nightmare to fly long distance with.

All that can be remedied though with a bit of thought. We flew back with Qantas, and the flight was a dream. For starters, Qantas used a jumbo, which had more legroom, more seats and more bulkheads against which to stick families up against. It also has a row down the middle of the plane with 4 seats across, which is magic for families with kids. It also had seatback screens in every seat, which made flying the entertainmentless Virgin look very much like catching an old STA bus to Muckinboodin with little more than an old drunk with a guitar and harmonica for diversion.

Qantas also feed you, which helps. Virgin does as well (if you pay more), and after I read the list of ingredients on the thing that I bought, I will not be buying any more. I would prefer to eat 9 quarterpounder meals from McDonalds than face another Virgin "meal".

The biggest problem though was the hosties. In the quest to be young and hip, Virgin have solely recruited young and hip hosties. They look great in ads, and I am sure they look great in nightclubs, but the are completely out of their depth with kids. They just have no idea, mainly because they don't have any. I discovered that only one hostie on our flight was a mum, and she seemed to be trying to keep that a secret from the other staff in case they ganged up on her and got her fired for being a breeder. How old fashioned! Spocking out sprogs! Don't want to fly with her, thanks very much.

The looks of disdain and "why did I get rostered onto this flight" were legion. I'm surprised that none of the kids were rundown by an enraged hostie pushing a large trolley. They just didn't get it - all these mewling, screaming, dribbling, fighting, yelling, vomiting, pooing rugrats. And I bet they signed up thinking they'd be carting Ralph Fiennes around the sky....

Qantas on the other hand, got it. They had a high percentage of old boilers on the flight, plus a good smattering of asian hosties. They seemed to dote on the kids, probably because they all had a few themselves.

Screw you Branson, I'm going Qantas from now on.

Your boom trap is rubbish

There is a canal that leads into the bay that I cycle around each day, and because the canal goes through grockle country, it is usually full of rubbish that the wastoids have carelessly discarded. The last time I saw this much rubbish in a waterway was the Shatin river in Hong Kong, and it lived up to its name.

Some local authority therefore came up with the very bright idea of putting a floating boom thingy across the mouth of the canal to scoop up all the garbage as it flowed down towards the Bay. A little boat chugs up every now and then and picks up all the rubbish from the trap at the end. It's a neat little system.

Except when some idiot unties one end of the boom, as has happened here. I really despair at a government that stops law abiding people like me from bearing arms and roaming through the suburbs shooting litter bugs and bogans. People spotted outdoors in flannel and uggboots really do deserve to be shot on sight.

Not much good in a drought

J did a conference thingy recently that was partly sponsored by Sydney Water. They were giving away all these environmentally friendly shopping bags that amongst other things, contained a water bottle.

Now I thought this was a great thing, as my current bike bottle is two years old and so covered in road grease and oil that I can barely hang onto it. And it doesn't taste that great any more. And the lid is loose, so I end up with half the contents down my front when I have a drink.

So the fancy blue Sydney Water bottle was a godsend, except for one small design floor.

The lid doesn't fit.

How about that? Sydney Water produces a thing for holding water, and it's no good. What does that say about them as a company? That their pipes leak like a drunk on a Friday night? That they couldn't organise a bomb blast in Baghdad?

I did manage to get the lid on at the end, but it involved the use of a considerable amount of force - so much so, that the bottle was a few inches shorter by the time I had put the lid on.

We thought this might have been a one off, so J checked through more bags.

All of them were like this.

Their marketing people should be shot.

Where did all those cars come from?

Wonder why the roads get more congested every year? Here is one good reason - two car carriers tied up at White Bay. You rarely see two tied up at once, generally because when one unloads, it tends to fill the entire wharf with vehicles.

One of the ships that comes in regularly is owned by some mob called EUKOR. The first time I saw the boat, the name was partly obscured by trees and I though the name was FUKOR.

Nice.

Reasons to ride

This is a small section of the City West Link in the morning - most days, the traffic is hardly moving when I zip past here. If it is moving, I can keep up with it or beat it on this section.

There are mornings when I really have to drag myself out of bed and crawl onto the bike. My bum hurts. My legs ache. My throat is raw. My fingers are cold. My knees hurt. My eyes can barely stay open.

Then after about 3km, the blood has started to move, the pains have faded and I cycle beside this - hundreds of cars parked nose to tail. It's at that point that riding makes sense. Stuff the arguments about pollution and saving the planet and all that horse-wallop; I simply feel good going faster than all these bastards. It is a simple pleasure. I'm faster than you are - naah, naah, naah.

Then about 30 seconds later, I hit a big hill, and suddenly I don't feel so fleet anymore.

Not enough concrete

I don't know what it is about Leichardt council, but they really are a useless bunch of wallies. Some council worker came around one week and stuck a council notice of some sort on this pole between the bike and pedestrian paths around the Bay Run. I don't know what it said, as the writing was too small to read even when walking past slowly. Duh.

A few days later, the pole was face down in the dirt. I take it that the addition of about 15 grams of paper and sticky tape was too much for the foundations, and over it went.

The lump of concrete on the base is about the size of two clenched fists. If I was putting one of these in, I'd use a wheelbarrow full.

I guess the lazy sods dug the smallest hole that they could get away with between lunch and smoko.

I miss my digital TV

We are stuck in a house without an external aerial. I suspect it used to have one, as there is a suspicious looking outlet in the lounge room, but a quick scan of the roof determines that we don't have one anymore.

I bought some cheap rabbit ears, but they aren't good enough to pick up the digital signal, so our set top box is useless. It either works or it doesn't - the manual talks about a "reception cliff", where the signal drops from good to nothing just like that. We are at the bottom of the cliff.

It's been nearly two weeks now, and our TV viewing has gone to hell. We no longer get widescreen format. The picture quality makes it look like the TV is smeared with vaseline. The sound is attrocious - like the speakers are at the bottom of a bucket. SBS is no more, so Top Gear is off the air. No ABC2 either, so we don't get kids shows all morning.

The worst of it is that we can't record two channels at once, and time slip TV. We'll often start recording at 8.30pm, then sit down at 9pm to watch our favourite stuff with no ads - we just skip through them. That world is lost to us now.

I am waiting for the agent to gee up the landlord about installing an aerial. If he doesn't pull his finger out, I might have to pay for it myself. Such are the buggers of renting.

It's flipping free mate!

Getting rid of the VCR has proven to be a complete pain. Some bloke came past and picked it up this morning from the verge, then came back a while later, knocked on the door and asked about the remote control. We fished that out and handed it over, and he then returned half an hour later asking if it was the right one! He pretty much expected us to also provide him with fresh batteries for the bloody thing.

For crying out loud! It's rubbish! It's free! If I could have been bothered, I just would have driven it straight to the tip! It's a bonus mate - don't push your luck.

God, I'd hate to work in any area connected with social security. The sense of entitlement would be horrendous to deal with.

The sooner we bring back poorhouses, the better.

The washing machine

No swim this weekend. I spent yesterday emptying out boxes of stuff, which meant huge amounts of dust going up the nose. The remedy for that is a dip in the ocean, which I attempted to do this morning.

Just one problem - the ocean was a total washing machine. No one was swimming. A few idiots were attempting to surf, but the conditions were terrible. Waste of time to even get wet.

Bugger. Hope that isn't the last attempt at a dip for the season.

Lord of the flies

There is something rotten in the neighbourhood. When we moved in, I noticed that there were a lot of flies buzzing around the backyard. More than the last few houses that we have lived in. So I trotted down the road to our favourite hardware bazar and purchased a $10 fly trap.

A week later, it is 2/3 full of huge, horrible looking green flies. The instructions say to empty the contents into the bin or a deep hole in the ground and to refill with a sachet of green fly attractant, but I'm not going anywhere near the bloody thing. I took the easy option and simply went back down the road and forked out another $10 for another trap.

Within 5 minutes of activating it, it had a fly.

I don't know what is going on around here, but the flies are bloody ridiculous. Mao would have a fit if saw them. It's not like I see them anywhere else when I am out and about. If there was a general plague of them, I'd be overrun everytime I walk up to the shops, but there are none out of the front of the house. It's just the backyard.

I figure the previous occupants simply buried a huge amount of dogshit just under the surface of the garden, and the flies are surfacing after a few weeks of incubation. Bastards. And I'm not going digging for it.

Just can't give it away

I finally relented last night and put my VCR out on the kerb for the 6 monthly bulk rubbish collection. That means we have gone from a two VCR family to one, and the one remaining one gets used about as often as our bulk rubbish gets collected. I bought the blasted thing about 10 years ago for $200. At the time, it was a good unit - one of the first models with 4 heads or some such dribble. The bloke I bought it from got a well paying job with Cisco, so he wanted to flog it a few days after he bought it and buy a better model with his new found cash, so I got it cheap and still in the box.

I think I stopped plugging it into the TV about 5 years ago when I bought my first DVD player, and have been lugging it from house to house ever since. We tried giving it away to three people last year, and all three of them turned us down. No one has videos anymore. We did up until this move, but they ended up in the skip before the removalists arrived. Compared to digital TV, they look like crap, they're bulky and they have this bad habit of going "neek, neek, neek" and wrapping their innards around the moving parts of your VCR.

The person that used them the most in our house was monkey. Shortly after learning to crawl, he figured out how to open the video cupboard, into which he then crawled and ejected all the videos therein. He had much fun bashing the cardboard cases into shapeless messes, and banging the videos on every bit of furniture in the room. He even learnt to stack them after a while, which was difficult as the cases were so bent out of shape by his earlier ministrations.

Now all we have to do is figure out how to get rid of the spare DVD player. When purchased, it was a very fine LG unit, but it has since been superceded by a 5 stack home theatre system. Loading a single DVD is so 1999. Again, we tried to offload it on three different people last year, and all turned it down.

This is terrible. People have too much crap these days. I figure that instead of shipping goats to Africa for starving peasants, we should ship our spare home theatre equipment. Given the lack of electricity, they could make much better use of most of it. Like stacking it as bricks in a new house, or using the case as a BBQ.

Or beating the neighbour over the head with a VCR and stealing his charity goat.

To AdSense, or not to AdSense

Now that Google owns this blogging outfit, it is encouraging bloggers like me to sign up for AdSense. The deal is that I can make money by putting up ads relevant to this blog.

Cripes, what type of ads would they put up as relevant to this blog? Handguns and rocket launchers perhaps? I feel like signing up just to see what their logic engine puts up.

Just turn left you idiot

Pet hate of the week - people that turn out slightly before making their turn. You know the manouvere - the car in front indicates to go left, then it swerves right before turning left. That's ok if you are in the car behind, but a complete pain in the ring if you are on a bike next to the car. It's a good way to end up flat on the pavement.

Yes, trucks and buses with big turning circles need to make that manouvere, but I have seen it on tiny little Japanese cars that look like they should have three wheels rather than four and a bubble roof. Things that have a turning circle smaller than our pram.

Someone needs to invent a nice, lightweight rocket launcher.

Sell Target shares

Did a spot of family shopping at Target today, purely because J prefers it over Kmart. I can see why. Kmart is overrun by grockles called Tracee and Brian in ugg boots and tracksuits and mullets, whereas Target is populated by people called Luigi and Guido with slightly more upmarket gold chains and fancy thongs.

Until today, I have always viewed Target as a place purely to buy clothes for the kids. Because they are cheap, and the complete lack of service means that you aren't being bombarded by 2 pushy sales assistants whilst you struggle to get the little sods to try something on that they don't want to wear. There are clothes that Mum wants them to wear, and then there are the clothes that they want to wear, and the two sets are completely non-intersecting.

Today though, I changed my mind. Now I am a guy that likes his clothes. I am not a wog-type clothes horse thought. I like English style business shirts made out of pure Egyptian cotton. My ties are all silk, some being hand painted. My suits are pure wool. If I could afford hand made shoes, I'd have them. I own no clothes that have any synthetic material in them, apart from the elastic in my socks. Apart from my Speedoes.

There is just one problem with all that - it's expensive, and the stains never come out. And the little monkey has managed to dig holes through several of my Oxford shirts with his razor sharp fingernails, and stained the rest with God-knows what. By this morning, I no longer owned a single shirt that wasn't holed or stained.

So I fronted up at the polo shirt stand and dug in. It was a revelation - shirts for $13! I normally pay about $70 for a good Country Road or Oxford polo, but I don't think I will be doing that for a few years. As much as I love their cut and cloth and durability, they don't stand up to the monkey test.

The Target shirts are of course complete rubbish. They sit badly on my shoulders. The neck and collar are all wrong. The fabric is thin crap. I'm not sure about the stitching, but I am sure a sleeve will fall off within a month. However, given that I can buy 5 for the price of a normal one, I will put up with 5 and hope that one is still wearable at Christmas.

That was the good news.

The shocking part was finding shirts that fitted. I tried on an "L" and an "XL", and found that both were a good fit, but I like to roll around a bit in my clothes, so I went for the XL. But I was stumped - there were 7 types of XL. There was a plain XL, then an XL1, and XL2, an XL3 etc all the way up to XL6. I didn't get this, since they also had XXL shirts. I am used to simple sizing - S, M, L and XL. The shops that I normally go to don't go for an XXL, so I was wondering what the fuck all these different XL sizes were for.

Then I looked at the actual cm measurements for each, and discovered that whilst an XL for me is slightly baggy, an XL1 would be 5cm larger, and XL2 5cm larger again etc until you get to the XXL, which is a mumu. I almost fell over with the shock of realising that as far as that shop is concerned, I am a small person.

I went home and had a pizza lunch in celebration.

The other bad news (for shareholders) was the location of the changing rooms. I have a very good book called "Why we buy", by Paco Underhill. It is a marvelously well written book that explains everything you never wanted to know about how shops suck you in. Everyone should read it. It has nothing to do with marketing and advertising. It is all about where to position signs in a store, what to put inside the front door and how far in the door it should be, how wide aisles should be, what lights to install, where to locate the toilets etc etc. All the boring, mundane things that make your shopping trip hell or marvelous.

Anyway, some fucking idiot decided to skimp on the change rooms and to put both the mens and womens change rooms together. That doesn't bother me, but I am sure it would put the willies up a lot of men and women who would be very, very uncomfortable about getting changed near the opposite sex. And to cap it off, to get to the change rooms, you have to walk through the bra section. Again, that does not bother me, but it would freak some men out. I'm sure it would also freak some women out to be browsing for bras, and then to have all these men walk past giving them an oggle.

I am sure that single feature is the biggest money loser that the store has. I looked around to see whether people had just dumped clothes instead of walking down through the bras to try them on. What blew me away is that all these professional managers did not have the brains to see that as a problem. A wonderful fact that Paco tells us is that if a man takes clothes into a change room, 80% of the time, he will buy them. I took some shorts, shirts and pants in, and the only ones that I did not buy were those that did not fit. Women on the other hand only buy something like 15% of what they try on.

Therefore, if you want to sell men clothes, all you have to do is convince them to walk into a change room and put them on. However, if they are too freaked to walk into the change room area, that's just money walking out the door.

No wonder all these department stores are in trouble.

So sorry to see you go

I didn't see much point in hanging onto a manual for a car that went to the tip about 10 years ago, but it was still wrenching to let it go.

Well, actually it was quite easy. I picked up the book and all the pages fell out, leaving me just holding onto the cover.

Roger did surprise me the other night by informing me that he knows where my Rover 3500S is hiding. I bought one years ago, and he arranged for a mate of his to store it until such time as we could do some work on it. Then bloody Roger got married and that was the end of that project. I mentally wrote the car off as a goner.

Now it has resurfaced. Hmm, what to do?

The 3500S is the manual version of the Rover V8. It's fairly rare, and for a good reason. The four speed is a brute to use and the clutch requires the legs of a weight lifter. Still, it makes a beautiful sound, and goes rapidly enough for an early 1970's beastie. And I still love the look of the P6 Rovers. People knew how to style things back then. Sure, it goes through the air like a finned brick, and the wind noise renders all conversation useless at speeds over 120, and it drinks leaded petrol like a cow, but what the hell. A man who doesn't have grease under his fingernails is gay.

Farenheit 451

I was tempted to have a good book-burning in order to get rid of some crap from my shelves, but I contented myself with simply putting a box of them out on the verge for some fool to pick up. They sat on the verge for less than 15 minutes. I pity the fool.

The first to go was my one and only Chomsky book. I would not inflict Chomsky on anyone (except maybe David Hicks - he's roll over pretty quickly on his Taliban mates after a chapter or two). It was marvelous for putting me to sleep, but it had a bad habit of giving me nightmares. It was a good choice of book to burn, as no one should have to wade through his impenetrable crap.

Next to go was "Weapons of Choice" by JB. JB made a good start with "He died with a felafel in his hand", but it has been all downhill from there. I almost put two more Birmingham books out with this one. I managed to read half this book, and then gave up on it. I was then amazed to see that a sequel has come out.

The last of this batch was "Rock and roll babes from outer space", by Linda Jaivin. Her first book was fairly original, but the second was a bag of tripe.
The second batch of three included two by James Jones that are sometimes considered "classics", but I found them to be deadweight bores. They might have been shocking in 1950, but they are as dull as dishwater today.

The next was an old Hugh Mackay book. I found it interesting and fresh and new in the mid 1990's, but Hugh is now so last century. He wrote a few interesting and insightful things 20 years ago, and has been living off it ever since. I think he ran out of interesting things to say in about 1998. I wish he would shut up and retire.

Next went a book on sex that I think I got for a birthday years ago - a terrible read. After that was a Stephen Coonts book. I loved "Flight of the Intruder" and "Intruders", but after about 5 books, he lost the plot. "Cuba" went. I hung onto the others as I like to read "Intruders" at least once a year. The guy can write - I just wish he would find some decent plots again.

Then there was "The Phoenix", which was partly about the Hindenburg disaster. I don't know what the rest of it was about as I only read about 50 pages. Boring.

Then came some technical and managemetn books. I can't believe that I have lugged a book on Cisco scalable networks around with me for the past 5 years, especially since all the technology that it talks about is not sitting on a rubbish tip somewhere near you. Technical books like this should be printed on flash paper that spontaneously combusts after 3 years tops.
"The Fifth Discipline" was the biggest pile of bilge that I have tried to plow through in a while. I gave up after a couple of chapters. That must make me a completely crap manager. Naughty me. I have given up the pretence of reading expensive, weighty management texts. If an author can't boil a topic for management down into 50 pages or less, then they don't know what they are writing about.

Then there was "management redeemed", which was ghastly. A bunch of managers preening in print. This one should have been soundly doused in lighter fluid.

After that, there were two of the worst technology books I have ever read, or partly read. Sorry if you gave one to me as a present, but they are garbage. "Google" was like reading a book about the Pope by a God-mad Jesuit. After about five infuriating chapters, I gave up. I wanted a techo's book. Instead, I got a "praise Serg" book. Ugh.

e-boys was even worse. A story about Silicon Valley venture capitalists. After reading it, I decided that I never want to invent something or come up with an idea for a start-up company. It made me sick. "Fuckheads get rich" would be a better title.

The one in the middle is "Leadership", which I think was partly written by Fred Hilmer. I have no idea why he was put in charge of a newspaper company, as he can't write for nuts. Ikea construction manuals are easier and more interesting to read than his dribble.

In total, they made a nice little pile. I figured we'd put them out on the street and if they hadn't gone by Monday night, we'd have a bonfire.

Like I said, they lasted about 15 minutes before they disappeared. I should have written this review first, printed it out and stuck it on top and then seen if anyone took off with them.

A view to a kill

I have to ride over this bridge, better known as the Victoria Road death trap, twice a day. Yes, it is better than having to cross Victoria Road, which is 4 lanes in each direction of dickheads who are either in a hurry to get to work or to get home. But it is not much better.

This photo shows the ramp on one side. Note how the designer has thoughtfully included some stairs for pedestrians so that they can get to the bus stop a bit faster than going down the ramp.

Just one problem - if you lose your brakes coming down the ramp (and it is quite steep, sharply curved and narrow), then the only place to go is straight down a steep flight of stairs and straight onto Victoria Road. It is the stupidest bit of design work I have ever seen. RTA engineers put loads of effort into building run-off zones for trucks when they lose their brakes, and they do their best to build roads with low gradients and gently sweeping bends, but when it comes to bikes, only the crap will do.

Trouble is, the only way to beat this into the thick skull of an RTA engineer is to superglue him to a bike with no brakes, wheel him to the top of this footbridge and let him go.

Well, it wouldn't teach him a lesson, but there would be one less idiot putting out CO2.

Our cops are rubbish

This is the scene next to our local cop shop - it's a tip. I can't get over the fact that people are cheeky enough to walk past the front door of Mr Plod and then throw rubbish down the side of the police station. Shows you how much respect the locals have for the short arm of the law, and how much the cops care about presenting a good image to the public.

This reinforces my perception that there is never anyone there, or the useless bludgers are sitting inside all shift scoffing tea and biscuits. The Five Dock shops are just around the corner, and any cop walking to the shops to buy a cream bun or a coffee has to walk past this mess, but either they aren't paying attention, or they don't give a bugger.


And it's not like this mess is a long way from their roost. It is about 20 feet from their front door.
Good to see that all our taxes are being poured into expanding the Force with a bunch of couldn't-give-a-rats-arse types.

It also shows how often the local area commander visits. If I was the boss and I walked in and saw that mess, there would be blood on the floor and probationary constables out the front with a plastic bag picking up rubbish quick smart. The Sgt in charge would have a size 9 boot mark on his arse too.

I bet the excuse though is, "But we've got all this paperwork to get through and anyway, it's somebody else's problems".

Ah yes, nothing like an SEP to make it all go away.

No dogs

We got an interesting letter the other day from the Principal of a local school. She was writing to point out that it is illegal to walk dogs through the school grounds. Not that I care, not owning a dog.

The letter made reference to various acts of Parliament that forbade dogs being on the premises, but it missed one vital thing - what to do if we happen to see dogs on the grounds out of school hours.

I must remember to write back and ask about that. Are we allowed to shoot them? Will the Education Department give us an ammunition allowance? What is the recommended cartridge for shooting dogs? I would have thought a .22 would be too small (except for poodles) and a .308 might have the disadvantage of carrying on through the dog, across the playground and through a couple of houses. Does that mean that dum-dums have to be used instead?

Can we resort to bow-hunting if the school grounds are not large enough for the safe use of rifles? How about pistols? I don't want to carry a rifle around when I take the kids over to play, but I wouldn't object to carrying a Glock.

There is a large rubbish skip on the grounds - can I throw the dog carcases into it? Does the school want me to remove the dog tags so that they can be posted back to the owners? Do I get a reward for each dog shot? Do I have to cut off the ears in order to claim my bounty?

What about cats?

I can see they haven't thought this thing through thoroughly enough.

Slippery when wet

We had a spot of rain last week, which meant I got wet coming home for the first time in a long time. It was nice to ride in the rain, given that the air temp was in the high 20's or low 30's, so the rain went a long way to taking the edge off the thermometer.

It's been so long since I've been in the wet that I'd forgotten the impact it has on the brakes. With a car, it takes longer to pull up in the wet, but at least you have a lot more rubber making contact with the road, and the brake pads tend to grip on the brake disks as soon as you pump the brake pedal.

Not so with the treadly. I was ambling along and needed to slow down, so I gave the brake levers the usual amount of squeeze.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, which is how long it took the wheels to do several revolutions.

So I squeezed harder. The pads started to grip a bit, but it was only enough for them to go "squeak, squeak, squeak", and not enough to actually retard my forward motion.

So I gave them everything I had, which involved pretty much trying to force the levers and the handle bars to fuse together, and I finally started to slow down. I thought I was about to go into the back of a hire car when everything finally worked and I came to a halt.

In the wet, after you squeeze, the first revolution of the wheel simply wipes off he excess water from the wheel rim. The second revolution dries the rim out a bit (assuming it is not bucketing down and replenishing the rim with wetness faster than it can be rubbed off). The third revolution is when the pads start to bite.

Now the average bike wheel is a lot bigger in diameter than your car wheel, so three revolutions takes you a long way. I can't figure out the maths but it has something to do with pi and it seems to boil down to this....."aaaaarrrrggghhhhh!", which is the sound you make when you suddenly find that your bike has all the braking potential of a greased humpback whale being pushed down a playground slide.

One day, there will be a revolution in the braking systems fitted to road bikes.

I hope I live to see it.

Anyone still believe in the "broken windows" theory of crime?

I believe that the "broken windows" theory is pretty sound - if you stamp out the minor inconveniences that so annoy the honest and upright citizen, you help to stamp out crimes that are more serious.

I don't think that belief is shared by my local coppers.

There is a small empty bit of land between the cop shop and the local supermarket - it's maybe big enough to park one car on it (and a small car at that). It's usually full of rubbish, and the cops make no effort to clean it up.

Clearly, that rubbish got there by people littering. You'd need to be reasonably game to chuck rubbish away next to a Police station, but around here you don't have to be concerned as there is never a cop actually outside wandering around who might bust you. In their wisdom, the cops have papered over all the windows so that we, the taxpayer, can't see in (and see all the empty desks) and the cops of course can't see out.

What a lovely state of affairs.

Very silly riding

This video is easily the silliest bit of cycling that I have ever seen. Here was me thinking that it was naughty to start moving off from the line at the lights before they go green.

A few comments.

The road surfaces in New York look to be in much better condition than here in Sydney. Although the quality of the video is grainy, the roads don't seem to be an unending stream of potholes and badly patched potholes. You couldn't ride this quickly down an average Sydney street without the wheels vibrating off your bike.

The lanes look a lot wider, as there is more space between vehicles, even between buses. You could barely fit a rolled up newspaper between two buses side by side here, let alone ride between them. When I ride down the middle of two lanes between cars, there is often not enough room to squeeze in between two Barinas.

The landscape looks nice and flat, so they can get up to a good speed and sustain it. Given that Sydney has a hill every 50 yards, this type of thing would be difficult to do over here. Too much up and down, and not much space between traffic lights. The blocks in NY are a hell of a lot longer than those in Sydney, so there is more room to get up and go between the lights.

I've never seen cyclists go through red lights and across pedestrian crossings here like these idiots do - not even couriers. It's an interesting video, but it has been produced by complete dickheads.

J is the most amazing woman. I could write pages and pages but I'll summarise it to the top ten points.

She doesn't need oodles of expensive shop-bought boutique stuff to make our home look lovely. It's a wonderful place to come home to each night.

The kids are happy and healthy and appear to be turning into reasonably normal and well adjusted human beings.

She manages to run a succesful business from home, which she started from scratch, as well as doing most of the household stuff. Not many people have the gumption and courage to strike out on their own rather than following the herd.

She's come up with an original business idea and is pushing it through to fruitition with very little capital and outside help, yet still manages to organise all the other stuff in our lives.

In this consumer-bingeing era, she doesn't want a lot or ask for much in material terms. It's good to be with someone that thinks its more important to have more friendship and happiness, and not a new BMW to impress the neighbours.

"Community" is an over-used word these days, but J does more for the local bods and sods than most of the other goons that live in this area. 95% of the population are content to veg in front of the TV and have their "community" handed to them on a platter, not realising that people make stuff happen. J makes stuff happen. Most people watch what happened, or wonde what just happened.

She is sexy as hell and puts up with me. And I snore. Very loudly at times.

She has very nice friends. If the company you keep is an indicator of the quality of your character, then she has attracted a range of interesting and good people that she can call friends. She does not hang out with losers.

Family life is never boring. We do good stuff.

She loves me.

How to cut short a car chase

Although our local coppers have a secure parking area out the back of their cop shop, they always have a few cars out the front. I think it is partly political – it makes the station look occupied, rather than empty (which is what it is most of the time).

One of the patrol cars wasn’t going anywhere the other morning – out the front was an NRMA van and the cop car had the lid up. Don’t see that too often. There was a cop standing out there talking to the NRMA bloke - you see that even less (a cop, in the flesh, outside the station).

Why can't builders build houses?

Never buy a house from a builder. Never rent one from a builder either. I know that sounds strange (how do houses get built, if not by builders), but from what I have seen so far, they couldn’t build their way out of a paper bag.

We are currently renting a place that is owned by a builder. Let me list the “idiosycracies” for you:

The laundry is only half built. There are no bare wires poking out of the walls, but it is only one step down from that. He has put up stud walls, slapped on the outer cladding and then forgotten to complete the interior. Well, I’ll give him credit for doing one internal wall – except that the cladding is only nailed down in about 4 places. Lean on it, and the whole thing buckles.

Then there is the laundry tub. He put the taps for the washing machine under the tub – ie, you have to open the cupboard door under the tub and lie on the floor to screw on the hoses. Why couldn’t he put them up at chest level like every other house in the country? The thing that cracks me up is that he installed one tap in such a way that it bumps into the laundry tub. The only way to turn the tap on or off is to lift the tub a few inches (which is possible as it is not fixed in) and then turn the tap.

When we looked at the place, the backyard was a mess and a promise was made to lay paving stones over part of it. Yes, the stones are now in place, but I don’t think he levelled and tamped the dirt underneath properly first. The stones are about a foot on each side – I am waiting to stand on one and have it flip over completely. It is the dodgiest paving job ever.

The kitchen floor has new lino – it just hasn’t been glued down yet, and I doubt it ever will be. All the windows have locks, except for one that he forgot about. Some rooms are recently painted, but you can’t open the windows as they are now painted shut.

The rest of the house is the same – dodgy, half completed gimcrack. If his own place is like this, I’d hate to be a client.

And is the rent any less? Ha ha ha.

I want to go to the beach and not see a crash

Quite a few trips to the beach end up with me being dumped in the surf. On the odd occasion, it hurts a bit, but most times it just involves getting tossed around like being inside an enormous washing machine on spin cycle.

For some unknown reason, seeing smashed cars on the way to the beach soon after dawn puts me off my swim. I think it triggers some fear of hitting a rock whilst getting thrown around in the surf.

Why is it then that I can’t drive to the beach without having to detour around a couple of idiots that have driven into each other?

On Saturday morning, it was two goons at an intersection on Bondi Road – not more than 150 yards from where I used to live. Someone must have run the red, as one car had been nicely t-boned by the other. Thankfully, only one lane was blocked, traffic was light and I was barely delayed for my swim.

My swim didn’t go for long either – there was an idiotic chop about 6 inches in height coming across the bay, and it drove me nuts. I don’t mind swimming across a large swell – you simply go up and down in slow motion. Chop is terrible – it hits you every few seconds and this one was coming at an angle of about 30 degrees. Front on is ok From one side is ok. From 30 degrees is horrible. I don’t think I swam for more than 5 minutes.

I promised myself to do more on Sunday morning, but alas, my journey was lengthened incredibly by some idiots that had crashed on the City West Link. Now the Link road is practically a freeway at that point and somehow, some goose had crashed badly enough to block traffic in both directions, and require 4 or 5 fire trucks, several ambulances and every cop in the inner west to attend. There were so many flashing lights, it looked like a Die Hard movie. Or the Blues Brothers. The only option was to chuck a U-turn over the curb and head back the way I came and then find another route to the beach. Thank goodness for the Disco and huge ground clearance. Any dickhead in a WRX that came round that bend behind me would be stuck, unable to get the front spoiler over the kerb.

Ha ha ha.

On the way home later that morning, I passed the scene and noticed a few patches of sand – oil or fuel spills I guess. There were no skid marks. I’m assuming some idiot in a blue Subaru WRX (which I saw parked across a few lanes) had been hooning home, lost it on the corner, hit the curb (which is quite tall at that point) and the rest is history. How they came to require so many fire appliances and ambulances is beyond me - unless he ploughed into a busload of grannies on their way to church.

The beach was not much good on Sunday – no chop, but a million blue bottles. I didn’t notice them until it was too late. No swimming, much stinging, but hopefully one less idiot on the road to get in my way next weekend.

Reminder to self - look at the tide mark when getting in the water and check for bluebottles that have washed up. When I got out of the water, there were about a million of them washed up. Somehow, I had walked right through the middle of them without noticing them or treading on any.

The tip is rubbish

My view of a tip is a big hole in the mud, half full of rubbish, covered in bulldozers pushing piles of rotting prawn heads this way and that and smothered in wheeling, screeching seagulls. Cars backup to the pile, kids and Dad jump out and everyone grabs stuff from the boot and flings it onto the tip with a satisfying crash. Occasionally things are scavenged and the car returns home half full.

My local tip is not like that – it is an “environmental waste management facility” out near Homebush. Those expecting a hole in the ground are in for a rude shock – those people like me.

Instead, it looks more like a multi storey car park with rubbish trucks parked underneath. You drive up a ramp, park and then put recycling onto sorting benches on one side and fling the rubbish into a dirty great compactor on the other. The compactor is about 20 feet deep and easily large enough to take a semi trailer whole, and there are two of them end to end. I had much fun skidding bags of rubbish across the concrete floor and then listening to them crash into the bottom of the compactor.

Half a car load of junk cost $20 to tip. I recall going to a tip some years ago and it cost half that to dump a car. I don’t mean a car load of stuff – I mean a car that we had stripped and towed there on a trailer.

Rubbish is getting more expensive by the day.

One thing hasn’t changed – the place still stinks like a million rotting prawn heads.

As for it being an interesting day out, going to the tip these days is a rubbish experience. Where's the fun in not being able to pick through piles of other people's junk? Bloody enviro-nazi's.

An interesting campaign

This guy is not my local candidate - he is running for the seat of basketweavers. Hope he gets in.

What I did find interesting was the fact that he has put together a 10 minute clip and posted it on YouTube. I don't think that's really been done much in Australia before. It's quite a well made clip, and I thought it was pretty cool to see him talking in front of a lot of local spots that I go through quite regularly.

I like the sentiments that he is expressing, but I'm not sure they will go over that well with the local populace. They are a hard lot to please, and they are solidly anti-capitalist, anti-development and anti-anyone-moving-into-Balmain. He has only been there 18 years, which is not long enough for the luvvies, and he wants to build sports fields and things like that for the kiddies, which means bulldozers and "development".

Unfortunately, he might be beaten by some green maniac harridan who will violently and loudly oppose anyone doing anything forever, and thus solve no problems.

Anyway, check out the clip, as it is the most wonderfully un-Liberal looking thing that I have seen in a long time.

Loud mouthed tools

I was sitting at a red in the city as usual, waiting for the lights to change, when a car that had the green decided to turn left from the middle lane. It wasn't a terribly dangerous thing to do, as the lane beside him was a left turn lane, so no one was going to collect him in the passenger door whilst attempting to go straight through.

However, he had to slow down to make the turn, and this annoyed the idiot in the slightly bogged up Commodore behind him. He leant out the window as he went through the intersection and yelled out something like "dickhead".

The only people that heard where the pedestrians on my side of the road (as he was facing our way) and me. The driver who annoyed him had his window wound up, was on the wrong side of the car for sound to travel his way, and was zooming up the road by the time the statement was made.

I was expecting the annoyed one to plant his foot and leave a bit of rubber behind as a statement, but that would have put him into the back of a bus. He had to be content with yelling abuse at us instead.

What a tool. Why couldn't he accept that the other bloke screwed up and had to make a turn from the wrong lane? After all, did it cost the idiot any time? No, he still got through the traffic lights, albeit a little bit slower than he would have if the other bloke had gone straight ahead, but we are talking CBD traffic and traffic lights here, so for all intents and purposes, he was not delayed at all.

Some people are just such knobheads.

Was a bridge

This was taken just up river from the Gladesville Bridge. It is the abutment of the old bridge that went over the river at this point before the Gladesville Bridge was built. It's hard to se in this photo, but there is another abutment visible on the other side of the river (if you know what to look for).

Interesting that they demolished the bridge but kept the abutments in place as small parks. This one makes a good viewing platform up to the Gladesville Bridge on the right, and it has a nice potted history on plaques about the area and the building of these two bridges.

Will there come a day when the Gladesville Bridge is demolished to make way for another structure, and we'll have two of these little parks along the foreshore?

Feel like climbing this?

This is the Gladesville Bridge from underneath. As you can see, it's a fairly tall bridge. You could sail a fair sized boat under it. I've cycled over it a number of times, and it's a fair puff of a ride.

The underside has always interested me, as it consists of a big concrete arch with piers coming out of it. The arch is pretty steep at the bottom, but it's obviously climbable as there is plenty of graffiti up the top.

Well, it looks steep from this angle, but it never looks that bad from side on. I meandered slightly out of my way tonight and went out on a peninsular to take a photo of the bridge from side on. It looks so gentle from side on, yet it is such a bastard to climb. Of the three big bridges in Sydney that I have ridden over, the Gladesville Bridge is easily the steepest and nastiest one to get over - partly because the cycle/footpath is the narrowest of the lot. If one bike is going up and another is coming down, there is a reasonable risk of collision if you aren't careful. There is just no elbow room to spare.

The road to hell

I think I have written about this road before - except this time I hae photos to prove my point. I had pulled over to take some snaps of the tarmac when this other cyclist very conveniently went past so that I could include him in my shot.

This road is in Drummoyne, and it runs parallel to Victoria Road. It is where the sensible people cycle, as the road is littered with speed humps and is not infested with two lanes of fast moving cars, buses and trucks going in each direction.

It would be a lovely place to cycle, if only they had bothered to provide a decent road surface.

The road surface where the cars drive is quite nice - more than acceptable. Then over to the left is the parking lane and the "bike" lane. Bikes are expected to keep to the left of the unbroken white line. Just one problem - in most places, there is only a strip of rideable tarmac about 4 inches wide between the white line and the surface of death on the left.

That means the only sensible course of action is to ride on the line or slightly to the right of it, which just pisses off the drivers as they expect you to stick to your side of the white line, and not go meandering out into their space.

I can't believe the dickheads that thought this idea up. The road surface in the bike lane is so bad that only mountain bikes can safely traverse it. My road bike, with its skinny tyres, is not built for roads of that quality.

Like I said - dickheads.

This place cracks me up

This shop is on Victoria Road. I love it - the Stool Shop. It makes me think of all those horrible medical soaps where a patient is given a plastic tub and told to return with a stool sample. Well, this place is full of stool samples - there is only one of each type of stool on display.

I thought this shop would last about a week. After all, can there be that many people buying stolls each week to keep the till ticking over? Obviously ther are, although I have never seen anyone in the shop fondling the stools.

I just find it fascinating to see how specialised shopping has become in this day and age.

Shoes

After several years of cycling, I have just read an article on shoes that explained everything that I ever needed to know about cycling shoes. And to think; I bought mine for the simple reason that they were the only pair in the store that would fit my fat feet. I have since found out that they are very serious shoes, and are designed to transfer the maximum amount of thrust through to the pedal via a pair of very stiff soles and uppers.

For those of you that ski, think of them as a pair of cutdown ski boots. They allow very little movement of the foot, and the sole does not flex like a sneaker, thus allowing energy to be dissapated uselessly.

The downside is that after about 30kms, my feet swell and my toes get pinched and start to go numb. I have to do some fancy saddle manouveres at that point to take the pressure off one foot and then the other for long enough to get the blood circulating again. Either that, or find a good coffee shop for a short break.

Unfortunately, on my regular routes, there are no coffee shops (good or otherwise), so I am stuck with numb toes. I have sought out a pair of mountain bike type shoes that are soft and flexi, but they are all too bloody narrow. I do not have big feet (or long feet). I have tall, wide feet. They splay out like stumpy flippers. I can only wear two brands of athletics shoe, as only two companies make shoes wider than a D (so I am told by my local shoe salesman). I am out there on the E or EE width. By the looks of things, compared to most other cyclists, I have an extra toe on my feet. That's the only way to think of it. I am going to walk into my next cycle shop and say, "I need some shoes that will fit a guy with six toes" and see what they come up with.

Jack Black

Jack Black should stick to supporting roles. I like seeing a bit of Black, but not a whole movie with Black. Two movies to compare:

• Hi Fidelity
• School of Rock

Black was fantastic in the first as the wierd, horrible guy in the record store. A few moments of bitterness and anger here and there throughout the movie are fine, but not 90 minutes worth. I have never been able to watch more than 15 minutes of School of Rock.

Jack Black - best taken in small doses.

Getting the kids to eat

There I was at the dinner table, trying to get the little monsters to eat some food. I almost gave up and trotted out Mum's favourite line from when I was a kid - "There are children starving in Africa at the moment who would be glad of what's on your plate".

Well, Mum was saying that over 30 years ago, and what's changed? Not much, except for my reluctance to use that phrase. Mainly because the reply would be, "Well, why don't we post it to them then?"

Funny how kids were starving in Africa when we were kids, and kids are still starving now, and given the way the idiots run the place, they'll still be starving when my grandkids start sitting down to dinner.

Africa seems to exist for one purpose only - to give parents a line to use at dinner when the kids won't eat. It's not much good for anything else. Kids were starving in China when I was a young-un, but today they are more worried about the toddlers being obese than stick-babies. Just shows what a bit of capitalism and economic growth can do for you.

I was thinking about famine in Africa, and our usual response. We get charities to load up lots of trucks with bags of flour or some other staple and they go trundling off to a dusty, fly blown camp in the middle of nowhere. The dust I can understand, since it is dry, but why all the flies? Is it because sanitation is non-existant and the ground is covered in crap as far as the eye can see? It's nice that TV cameras don't pickup smell, as no one would want to watch stories about starving stick babies if they could smell what the places are like. Maybe we should ship a few thousand fly traps as well.

Anyway, the next thing you see is all these people sitting around eating mealie-mealie off a plate, and not much else. Porridge is cooked up in great big kettles.

Then I thought - bugger me, what happens over here when people are going hungry? Do we ship them a big cast iron kettle and a bag of mealie-mealie? Nope. Poverty these days seems to be about not being able to afford a turkey at Christmas. The "hungry" end up having boxes and boxes of canned goods foisted upon them.

Hope they remembered to include a can opener.

How to avoid a problem

I have just finished reading the regular newsletter from our school principal. In part, she notes that some kids want to ride bikes to school, but the school doesn't want them to do it.

I can understand the reasoning:

• space is limited for installing bike racks
• motorists use the surrounding narrow streets as rat runs
• some kids might have to cross two busy roads - roads that are so nasty, I avoid them wherever possible, and only cross at one location where I have found a fairly safe crossing point
• young kids are idiots (this was described as "developing peripheral vision").

However, I think the answer is pretty stupid - ban bikes! Instead of trying to attack the root causes, which are difficult, they take the easy way out and want kids to get driven to school. They'll weasel out of that by saying that kids can take the bus, but that's like saying paraplegics can drag their wheelchairs up and down stairs - it ain't going to happen.

I have done the school run dozens of times over the last two years, and it is a nightmare of congestion. The kids aren't too bad. The problem is the mums - talk about "developing peripheral vision". Most of them tunnel vision on their kid, and then nearly run into or over everyone else. They are useless.

One of the simplest things the school could organise would be car pooling for kids. They know where every kid lives - it should be easy enough to get a map and organise a few kiddie car pools. That might reduce the amount of 3.30pm traffic around the school, and make it a bit safer for those of us that want to ride.

Bloody beauracrats.

Soft

Cycling, particularly if you do it a lot, is one of those things that requires a reasonable degree of mental toughness. Physical toughness helps, but it's the mental toughness that gets you through. Particularly if you commute to work that way - I know that no matter what the weather is like, I have to get up, saddle up and venture out into whatever nature has delivered that day. Fierce heat, strong winds, bucketing rain, lightning, hail, freezing cold, mist and fog. I've seen it all.

If you are only cycling for training, you can give those off days a rest. Looks a bit wet? Stay at home and put a tour de france DVD in and relax on the couch. Driving to work? Well, you might get a bit damp whilst running to the car in the rain, but once you are there, life is peachy in your little coccoon.

Cars are too nice these days. We've forgotton what it is like to have cars that are leaky, draughty, lack air conditioning and break down at the first sign of rain. We used to experience at least a bit of the weather inside the car, as one window had to be wound down partly to let in fresh air to defog the windscreen. Now, I press a button and the windscreen is blown clear in a few seconds.

We've gotten soft. A trek across country used to be hard work, as it was done without air conditioning. Now, you'd just about die getting out of the car to change a flat - the difference between the inside and outside of the car being so great.

But I digress. I was aiming for 150km this week, but only made 140. Even then, I was lucky to make that, as I was going soft on Friday. I was on my way home, and was feeling a bit off. My legs felt very brittle and stringy, like a muscle was about to give up and pop. I thought about it and decided to take the short way home.

Then I got onto the flat, and started feeling better, so I decided to extend out to a different intersection which would add a few k's to the trip. By the time I got to that intersection, I was cooking, so I decided to push on for the Iron Cove Bridge, with the intention of bailing into a side street before I got there and going home a back way.

By the time I made the Iron cove Bridge, I had warmed up and was cooking. Yes, I still had some nasty hills to do, but nothing troubled me.

I'm just glad I was able to convince myself to do "one more block, one more block", and by the time I had done a few more blocks in succession, I was ok.

I think part of my problem is that I do 8 short rides per week. They add up to a reasonable distance, but going back and forth 4 days a week necessitates short rides. Going in is 14km and coming back is anywhere up to 25, depending on where I go. Given that it takes me 12km to warm up, I am doing 4 rides with stone cold legs for most of the distance. I am essentially doing lots of little "sprints". I hesitate to call them a proper sprint, as I'm really not going that fast, but I guess the pace is faster than it would be for say a constant 160km ride. I have good speed over short distances, and I can hold my own for 25km no sweat, but I don't think I have a lot of endurance. I am not going out and doing even a 40km ride in one go, let alone 80km. Those things build endurance, and they allow one to think about pace. I don't have to think about pacing much coming home - I simply push as hard as I can, limiting myself only with the thought that (a), I have to get home without a lift, and (b), I have to get up in the morning and do it again.

Interesting.

The gender mix

I've always noticed that a lot more blokes seem to cycle than women. I did a count over a few days and found that the ratio going into work was usually 10 or 20 to 1 in favour of men.

To cap it off, I then read this survey at my favourite bike shop and noted that the last question was about gender. 80% of those who did the survey were male. Which makes me think that renegade cycles does a very good job of attracting all the female customers in Sydney.