Honky heaven

Honky nuts still in the tree

I don't know what the correct name is for these things, but as kids, we called any sort of large nut a "honky nut". What I think of as a proper honky nut is about the size of the last section of your thumb, and vaguely spiked. They're heavy enough to throw at other kids, but light enough to not hurt too much (unless you cop one in the eye). We used to collect them by the bucket load at school and have honky nut wars between teams of kids. Until last week, I'd forgotten all about them.

Honky nut highway

Out Concord way is what I'll now call the Honky nut highway - it's a stretch of road lined with honky nut trees. When I went through last weekend, all the trees had shed their nuts, and the bike lane was periodically covered in what could only be described as dunes or drifts of nuts. A street sweeper must have been past in the last week, and I'm glad - the little buggers are deadly. It's bad enough running over one when on the straight - your front wheel will skip an inch or two one way or the other as the honky night fires out the side under pressure. Hit one as you're cornering, and you have about a 99.9% chance of hitting the tarmac. The only remedy is to get the hell out of the bike lane and ride in a clear patch on the road - especially on corners.

I wonder if there are any Police accident reports for bike injuries that read "brought down by honky nuts"?

You too can learn English

Rearn Engrish

But perhaps not from this place.

A short rant about missing links

Bike path around Hen & Chicken bay

 Contrary to the opinions of some, the bike infrastructure around Canada Bay is not too bad. It's not perfect - but then, what is? There's enough paths around the foreshores to keep you moving for days (on foot) or hours (on a bike). The paths go through parks....

Hen & Chicken Bay - going north

....and meander around the water's edge. It's lovely.

Oops - where did the road go?

Except for where the paths disappear for a while. Above is an example - there are a few places where properties go right to the waterline, and the path just stops. It doesn't loop around the front of the houses or follow a side road - it just stops. Dead.

Is that a path I spy on yonder shore?

It does start up again on the other side, which is where those cars in the distance are parked. But how to get from A to B?

The missing link

Or in this case, from F1 to F2 ("F" standing for "where the fuck is the path?"). Out this way, there are lots of headlands jutting out into the harbour. Think of them as fingers extending from a hand. Down the middle of the finger, there are bones - these are the main roads to the end of the headland - the grey bits. Around the edge is the water, and along the water runs the bike paths - the green bits. The main roads are on the whole bad places to be - lots of traffic, bad road surfaces and bike lanes that just disappear from the surface of the Earth in places; like aliens came down and scooped them up.

The death ride

Your only option in one case is to ride out to one main road (to point C1 - as in "Crap! This is awful!"), ride along the road with all the nasty traffic (with drivers going "get off the road, you moron") turn onto another intersecting major road and then find a side street that takes you back to the bike path. There are no side roads that you can take to get between C1 and C2, and amazingly enough, due to the shape of the road system, you actually have to ride partly back in the direction you came to get to the main road. Thanks to about 80 metres of missing path, you have to take a diversion of nearly one kilometre.

Unfortunately, the powers-that-be are completely ignoring missing links like this. It's just too hard.

The road to the Gongoloids

The solution is probably to build a smaller and cheaper version of this, which is the scenic route to Gongolia. Before the cliff fell in and they built this new road, I used to think it was fun to drive on the old road at night (with a full moon) with the headlights off for part of the distance. You'd get a much better view out over the ocean without the light from those silly headlights getting in the way. If you tried that in a Ford, you'd end up upside down in the ocean. And possibly on fire as well.

Damn, blast, bugger

Blogger doesn't want to play ball tonight - it won't let me upload any photos. I had a nice post all prepared, along with pictures, but now it will have to wait until the tech heads get their crap together.

Greenpeace really doesn't get it

Don't ask me why, but I have been reading a 2008 Greenpeace report called "energy revolution". It's a fascinating read - it's also now the basis of an IPCC chapter, so it's worth digging into.

In the introductory section on page 13, there is this paragraph:

It is important to highlight that in the Energy [R]evolution Scenario the majority of remaining coal power plants – which will be replaced 20 years before the end of their technical lifetime – are in China and India. This means that in practice all coal power plants built between 2005 and 2020 will be replaced by renewable energy sources. To support the building of capacity in developing countries significant new public financing, especially from industrialised countries, will be needed. It is vital that specific funding mechanisms are developed under the international climate negotiations that can assist the transfer of financial support to climate change mitigation, including technology transfer. Greenpeace International has developed one option for how such a funding mechanism could work (see Chapter 2).

They are talking about a timeframe of between 2005 and 2050. As we all know, China and India are growing like topsy. They are getting rich like no one on this planet has gotten rich before. There are all sorts of estimates out there as to how long it will be before China overtakes the US as the largest economy in the world. If you believe the numbers in Wikipedia, income per person is between $4,283 and $7,518 per head. At China's current rates of growth (and if they can maintain it), that should double every 7 years or so.

So in 2017, income per head should be about $15,000 (using the PPP numbers). In 2024, they'll be up to $30,000 per head. In 2031, it will be $60,000 per head. Now I doubt they can maintain double digit growth above a certain income level, but you get the picture. In 20 years or so, they will be richer than we are today (Australia's current income per head on a PPP basis is just under $40,000 per person).

Here's my question - if the Chinese are growing so rapidly that they'll be richer in 20 years time than we are today, why the hell should be be transferring money to them now so that they can build wind farms? If we simply stand back and let them get rich, they can afford to undertake environmental programs off their own bat.

Duty First

Royal Australian Regiment

I like this. Duty First - that either resonates with you, or you have no idea what they are on about.

More on soft cycling

I hope I didn't sound too mean and rough in my last posting - it's not all about vanquishing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women. But it has to be realised that when you get a few blokes together for anything, things soon get competitive. I do the odd social ride from time to time with some people who are a decade or more older than I am, and even though those rides are very slow and cruisy, there are many times during those meandering rides through the suburbs where anywhere from a few riders to half the pack will put the hammer down and blast off ahead. Then they'll reach an obvious waiting point (like the top of a hill or a major intersection) and stop for everyone else to catch up. We'll cruise again for a while, then a few of the blokes will get edgy and off we go again. It's not racing - it's just the fitter blokes pushing each other out to the edge of their performance envelope.

After all, I cycle because I want to be fit. I'm not going to get fit just ambling around everywhere - you need to be pushing yourself on a regular basis in order to improve your fitness. I prefer riding with people who are a bit fitter than me - not a lot fitter, just a bit fitter. That way, I'm always being pushed, and pushed harder than I'd push myself if I were alone.

That photo of Tony Abbott gives you no context - sure, he was leaving the fat cops for dead. However, for all we know, he might have been blowing out a few cobwebs going up that hill, where he might have stopped and waited for them to catch up.

And that's another thing - everyone has their preferred climbing pace. Some like to drop down through the gears and spin up at a slow pace. I can't stand that - it drives me crackers. I prefer to go up a gear if I can, put the hammer down and power over hills as hard as I can. Sometimes I crack before I get to the top - that's life. But I still enjoy giving it all I've got, and trying to get over whatever is in front of me as rapidly as possible.

Soft cyclist of the week award

From The Letters page of the Aus today:


The picture of Tony Abbott's security guards struggling to keep up with him on their bicycles raises a question about personality traits. As an experienced cyclist, Mr Abbott should know the etiquette requirement that you don't ask more of your riding companions than they can give.


Norm Neill, Darlinghurst, NSW

Norm, that's crap. The purpose of cycling is to blow the other bastard out of his socks. You ride to the point where you break the competition. Typical letter from an inner-city, hand-wringing wanker.

How Greenpeace gets their stuff into IPCC reports

An interesting bit of digging by Climate Audit this week.

Back in 2008, Greenpeace published a report called "Energy Revolution - a sustainable global energy outlook".

The Greenpeace Project Manager and Lead Author was one Sven Teske. He's part of the Climate & Energy Unit at Greenpeace International.


On May 9, 2011, the IPCC announced:


Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.


On 14 June 2011, the IPCC released the full report supporting that statement.

It turns out that our Greenpeace friend, Sven Teske is one of the authors of that IPCC report, and the scenario repeated above was based on the 2008 report he wrote when he was wearing his Greenpeace hat.

Interesting how one hand washes the other.

Lesson for old codgers in how to add captions

Add caption

The new Blogger editor has some nifty add-ons that I only just noticed recently. The first is the ability to add captions to pictures. When you click on a picture, it allows you to resize the picture, change how it is justified and add a caption. That's the red box at the top.

I noticed today a "location" button as well - it allows you to map the location of the post. I think it only works for the entire post, not for individual photos (which is a pain, since I take photos all along my rides). Still, it's getting better all the time (or should that be, "more intrusive"?)

Bourke St cycle path

Victoria Rd, Balmain

Having read a fair amount of abuse regarding the Bourke St bike path since it was opened a few months ago, I thought I'd ride it today to see how it stacks up. After all, it's not really fair to abuse the hell out of something if you haven't given it a go.

We've had lousy weather here for the last week - wind, rain and enough low cloud to make it dark at noon. I had to use the "lighten" feature in my photo editing software in order to make most of these photos viewable - and by "lighten", I mean crank it up by 50%.

ANZAC memorial and ANZAC bridge

It wasn't a great day for cycling - once again, about the only people who were out and about were those walking dogs. It was a good day for putting on a Tour de France video and watching top athletes cycling through France in the heat of summer.

Somewhere in the Sydney CBD - Hyde Park on the right

Getting to Bourke St wasn't the easiest - I haven't splashed out on a GPS for the bike yet, and my navigation skills are rubbish. I used to live in the East, and walked up Oxford St more times than I can count, but I still couldn't remember which street was Bourke St.

Oxford St with mad fixie rider

I ended up riding too far up Oxford St, completely missing the Bourke St turn off. Thankfully, the bus lane is really wide and even better, there were no buses around today (it being a public holiday). I rode part of the way with the mad Asian bloke in front of me. No helmet, earphones on, music up loud, fixie - in other words, all the hipster accoutrements. He also had bandaids all over his face - presumably from stacking the fixie into something. Some people - hipsters in particular - have no brains to lose from crashing without wearing a helmet.

Korean War memorial

I had absolutely no idea that there is a Korean War memorial in Moore Park. Then again, it was unveiled years after I left the east.

Korean War memorial - Kapyong

The link above explains what it's all about. Due to the really lousy light today, the wording on the battle monuments completely failed to come out. The one above reads "Kapyong".

Somewhere in Surry Hills

The intersection of Bourke and something. Nice looking house.

Bourke St cycle path

Right - after about an hour of riding, I finally round the Bourke St path. I was quite surprised - it's quite straight, doesn't have much of a gradient and it's a really nice leafy street to roll down at 25km/h. The bike path isn't built for racing - it's built for cruising, or perambulating. Going 30 km/h would be way too fast - but I didn't feel the need to go fast. It's just a really cruisy piece of work.

I wasn't even annoyed at the long wait at the traffic lights at Cleveland St. I was very chilled (and I'm not referring to the rather brisk weather).

Some bloody big apartments in Surry Hills

From what I can gather, the whole idea of this path is to service all the new residents in this mini-city of apartments that has sprung up at the bottom of Bourke St. This used to be industrial land - a brownfields site.  It's now home to umpteen thousand yuppies. I rolled past the Bourke St Bakery, which is obviously the inner-city hipster place to buy sourdough. The queue stretched out the door and partway down the street. Everyone in the queue was a hipster - they looked at me like I was an alien - which I guess I was. I wasn't riding a fixie with stupid little handlebars and a beret and a corduroy jacket.

The overhanging trees and all that reminded me a lot of Canberra. It's a really nice area to meander through.

Pedestrian crossing, Bourke St, Surry Hills

Much of the squealing about the bike path centred around the loss of car parking. I'll post some video later - what I noticed is that there was no shortage of parking. Sure, a number of car spaces were obviously lost, but there was still plenty to be had. From what I could see, most of the parking was lost to build up the spaces around pedestrian crossings, like the one above. Notice the green, garden thing poking out into the road to stop people parking right up next to the level crossing? I bet that's the thing that ate the car spaces. If that's the case, the spaces that were taken were the really dangerous ones that block sightlines at pedestrian crossings, meaning they should have been eliminated whether a bike lane was built or not.

More green space around a traffic light controlled pedestrian crossing.

Temporary Australians

Like all bike paths, this one had its share of uncaring pedestrians that strolled across it without looking. At least I only spotted one pedestrian walking ON the bike path - something that really annoys me. That's a good way to put two people in hospital.

Taylor Square

My biggest gripe is that when I turned around and came back, the thing just petered out on the wrong side of Taylor Square. It soon became obvious why I had missed the path when coming from the city - there are no signs anywhere (that I saw) telling you where to turn to hit the Bourke St path. The best way to describe the path is that it's a path from somewhere (a stack of apartments) to.... nowhere.

Bike tourists

Miserable day for a bunch of bike tourists to be seeing the sights.

Bike fuel - tastes better than diesel

I completely stuffed up my eating times before I left, which meant I ran out of energy about 3/4 of the way home. That required a stop for a chocolate mud cake muffin - which really hit the spot. I know most people would say, "I can't eat that - it'll ruin my diet". My attitude was, "If I don't eat it, I won't make it home. I will expire on the side of the road somewhere".

How would I describe the bike path experience?

Before I went, I was very sceptical that the Bourke St bike path was worth the bother. I regard most of the Pyrmont bike route as an expensive disaster, so my opinion of Clover Moore and her minions was not high. In fact, I'd sooner defend a group of rock spiders than Clover most of the time. No, all of the time.

Except now. I have to say that the path was a revelation. I was really deeply impressed at how good it is (apart from the opposite camber at one point). I think it's worth keeping. 

Oh gawd, I've just realised that this means if the path is threatened, I'll have to go along and protest with a bunch of stinking hippies and hipsters. I knew I shouldn't have gone for a ride today.

Sunday photos

The Bay

Stretched the legs again this afternoon with an hour's worth of riding in between storms and showers. It was a bloody awful day to go for a ride - the wind was howling in from four different directions at once, and rain pelted down at regular intervals. The only people out were those walking dogs. Which was great - a day without prams on The Bay is a great day indeed.

Cycling into Balmain

Hey, I've discovered that I can add captions to my photos. Woopee! Just for fun, I rode up the main street of Balmain. I haven't done it for a few months - the only reason I decided to was because Tim Blair had a laugh at bike lanes this week (which I also found pretty funny), and I thought I'd re-examine the premier bike lane in Australia's greenest suburb.

Christ on a bike, I'd forgotten what an awful piece of shite that bike lane is. I took some video of it, but I really don't want to bore you with 10 minutes of atrocious road surfaces, cracks like the Grand Canyon, cars and trucks parked right across the bike lane and the best part - the fact that most of the paint marking the lane has faded, making it the Magical Balmain Disappearing Bike Lane. What a fucking crock. And to think, the Green Mayor has managed to get himself elected to state parliament on the strength of his environmental credentials. I'd like to chain him by the ankles to the back of my bike and drag him the length of the Balmain peninsular.

Zumbo

I was so annoyed at the complete arse-fuck of a bike lane that I took the back streets home - and discovered where Adriano Zumbo has his shop. For those not in the know, this bloke did well on Masterchef (beats me how well or which one - I rarely watch it). The only reason I know of him is that I met a bloke that works for him - he spent about 10 minutes slagging him off as a terrible boss (a really nasty bit of work apparently) and a fairly ordinary businessman (mum and dad apparently put up all the money). That said, I thought I'd pop in and get something sweet for a post-ride scoff. He might be a rotten bugger, but his food has a good rep. By the time I got turned around and got across the road, the bastards had closed! Oh well, I'll go back there another day.

Iron Cove bridge bike path

Like I said, not a great day to be out walking or on a bike - I had most bike paths to myself. It was fun zipping across here with the wind at my back - I was racing the cars on the bridge next door, and not doing too badly.

The old Iron Cove bridge

A bit of engineering history for you.

Drummoyne pool, looking rather green

The Drummoyne pool closes for the winter months, which is why it's gone a rather virulent shade of green.

Pompeii and climate change

I'm doing something different this weekend - hitting the books instead of hitting the blogs. I'm reading a splendid edition of "Pompeii and Herculaneum - Cities of Vesuvius" by Michael Grant. It was first published in 1971 - 40 years ago.

From page 91:

"In the absence of fireplaces, charcoal-burning braziers were employed to heat the houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Heating presented a severe problem. For it can be perishingly cold at these places, with a strong wind from the north-east; one wonders, looking at houses of such a kind, whether the winter climate must not have been at least a little warmer in antiquity".

Better mark this bloke down as a denier.

Saturday photos

I'd forgotten all about this panorama that I took last weekend. That was about the last time we saw sunshine down this way.

How to get rid of annoying fruit bats and flying foxes

There are some parts of NSW where the population of fruit bats and flying foxes is so out of control, it makes life a complete misery for local residents.

But worry now  more - I have the solution!

Wind turbines.

The surest, fastest, messiest way to wipe out an endangered species without any Greenie complaining.

On the road again

Went for a proper ride on the bike today - a bit over 90 minutes. I thought that wasn't very long, and as I am slow again, I didn't go very far. I didn't think it was a lot of exercise.

Just woke up after being totally konked out on the couch for 2 hours. By that, I mean totally snoring and drooling type konked out. Must have been a harder ride than I thought, or I've gotten very soft.

Worth a read

Go read this.

I'm not normally into poetry, but...

Iowahawk does it for me every time.

The ice bear melteth

Sydney ice bear

I had a bit of time on my hands today, so I shot down to Circular Quay to see what was left of the "amazing" melting ice bear. Obviously, I got there a bit too late. Like a day late.

Sydney ice bear

I love this bit:

How did you create the sculpture? 
The construction started in my studio by creating a plaster sculpture of a polar bear's skeleton. It was cast into bronze in the UK. We then made a waterproof box around the skeleton and the whole thing then went into an industrial-scale freezer. The freeze takes six weeks at minus 25 degrees. The sculpture at this stage weighs 11 tonnes. The block is then transported to the exhibition place, and there my team and I carve it into the polar bear. 

So in order to raise awareness of global warming, they use a massive amount of energy to freeze a huge block of ice; then they FLY that block of ice half way around the world (along with a team of carvers and publicists). They then hang around to do some TV interviews, then FLY home and start all over again.

previous appearances have been in Copenhagen, London, Toronto, Montreal and Manchester.

I think it would have been more appropriate if they'd parked a tanker at Circular Quay loaded with 50,000 litres of avgas and pumped that into a massive blow torch - that would have represented some of the fuel that this mob have used carting 11 tonnes of ice around the world by air a  number of times.

Sydney ice bear

Ironically, the ice bear sat between two outdoor cafes outside Customs House. As it was bloody freezing, each cafe had at least a dozen gas heaters going full blast to stop the patrons from getting frostbite. I could feel the heat from those gas heaters when I was standing next to the ice bear.

Sydney cargo bike

I also walked past this nifty cargo bike - not sure if I'm ready to lug the shopping home in one of these.

Well worth a read - it explains everything

The core assumption at the heart of all climate models - who is right?

Struggle

I think the best thing that The Spectator has done in recent times is to take on Mark Latham as a columnist. I'll be subscribing as long as he's scribbling.

Have a read of this piece:

In January 1992 Nixon asked to borrow Crowley’s copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, a book best remembered for the phrase, ‘What does not destroy me makes me stronger’. Nixon was drawn to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘the unbent bow’ — that without struggle in life, man grows soft and directionless.

Nixon spent much of his time thinking about the role of the US as the world’s last remaining superpower. He believed the country needed to recommit itself to the idea of struggle. Thus he saw the relevance of Nietzsche and the concept of ‘the last man’, a character so obsessed with material advancement he was incapable of dedicating himself to a higher cause (whether in the form of ideological, religious or national struggle).

‘Not only is the last man selfish,’ Nixon told Crowley, ‘but he is pathetic. Imagine not being able to achieve anything great because you have grown so soft and lax that you simply don’t have the energy or courage to do it? Material things make life more comfortable while you are here but they are just things. What defines you, what makes you who you are, is what you accomplish, and everything worth accomplishing requires a struggle. Of course, no one wants to hear that but it’s true.’

He also put in a little nark at the end of the column about Bob Carr. I searched Bob's blog today, and couldn't find the article that he wrote about. Either I didn't look hard enough, or it's disappeared down the memory hole.

Some interesting snippets from a book review

If you want to read the entire book review, go here.

I am simply going to grab a few paragraphs that caught my eye. I particularly liked the one about "foxes" at the end.

Once we form a belief, for any reason, good or bad, rational or bonkers, we will eagerly seek out information that supports it, while not bothering to look for information that doesn’t – and if we are unavoidably confronted with information that does not fit, we will be hyper-critical of it, looking for any excuse to dismiss it as worthless. 


Contrarians ... are almost always outsiders, which is not a coincidence. They don’t have a seat at the table so they aren’t subject to ... social pressures


Having settled on a belief, we naturally subject evidence that contradicts the belief to harsh critical scrutiny or ignore such evidence altogether. At the same time we lower our standards when we examine supportive evidence so that even weak evidence is accepted as powerful proof.

Doubt is the hallmark of the fox.  [foxes, who are open to wider sources of evidence, are more accurate forecasters than hedgehogs, who adhere to one big idea.]

"Foxes"’... are modest about their ability forecast the future, comfortable with uncertainty, and very self-critical. 

Heroin part VIII

Ha - you didn't think I'd finished with my little saga, did you? Too bad if you did - there are a few parts to go yet. Frankly, I'm brain dead from digesting all the research papers, and am finding it hard to whip up the enthusiasm to get to the finish line. Remember, our aim here is to try and work out whether Bob Carr's idea of a safe injecting room in Kings Cross was a good idea or not. 

Here's a bit of thinking that I haven't seen in any of the research - a simple division of the population of NSW into four broad categories. (Oh crikey, it's the BCG matrix all over again). 

In the top right hand corner, we have people like me and most of my friends and associates - and presumably most of the readers of this blog. Normal, law-abiding citizens. People with jobs and families and maybe a few speeding tickets to their name, but nothing else. They might have done drugs in their younger days (when they were party people), but now they have straightened out and are taking their kids to church on Sunday.

Below them we have the "party people" quadrant. This is where most of my group was 10-20 years ago. We were law abiding (in the main), but liked to party like there was no tomorrow. For some, that meant popping pills, doing a few lines and for the very rare specimen, sticking a needle in their arm. After a Friday and Saturday night bender, they'd be back at work on Monday, putting in a long week to pay the mortgage. Once they started having kids, the benders and the drugs were mainly history.

In the top left quadrant we have old fashioned crooks - crims who prefer beer rather than drugs. 

And in the bottom quadrant, we have the customers of the safe injecting room - junkies. We're talking about heavy drug users who support their habit by bludging on the dole and stealing from the rest of us. 

Here's my completely unscientific representation of how big these populations are in relation to each other. Various surveys have estimated that 1-2% of the Australian population have tried heroin at some point. Other surveys have estimated that there were around 20,000 regular heroin users in NSW at the turn of the century. I'm assuming that number has been stable since then.

By my reckoning, the great majority of the population are normal people. They're too young or too grown up to do drugs. The party people population is a reasonable size - that's your 18-29 demographic essentially.

The number of junkies is pretty small really. The population of NSW was over 7.2 million in 2010. We're talking about 0.3% of the population - a tiny fraction.

However, that "tiny fraction" is capable of doing a huge amount of damage when it comes to crime and the consequences, plus all the associated health and social welfare costs. People like me (and hopefully you) contribute a lot to society. We do useful work, pay lots of taxes and do our best to avoid being a deliberate dead weight drag on the public purse. Party people might increase the cost of cleaning the footpaths in our cities (ie, hosing off the vomit on Saturday morning), but apart from a few emergency visits to have the odd stomach pumped and face stitched back together, they aren't much of a drag as well.

Old fashioned crims cost plenty - fraud, robbery, housebreaking etc all adds up to plenty of money each year.

However, it's my belief that the junkies take the cake. They have the worst health problems. They are almost never employed. They have the worst social and family problems, thus requiring huge amounts of support from an army of social workers and charities. They tie up masses of Police, court and jail time. In NSW alone, the 20,000 junkies need to find up to $1 billion each year to fund their habit, and they get that by sitting on the dole and stealing from the rest of us. If you added on all the other social costs, the total becomes horribly large.

We can represent this by the wealth transfers between these groups. There is a massive transfer of wealth each year from normal people (and party people) to crims and junkies. There is a direct transfer to junkies in NSW of at least a billion through fraud and break and enter and the like (assuming you believe that junkies need at least $50,000 each per year to fund their habit). Given that fenced goods are worth a fraction of their purchase price, unless they are committing masses of credit card fraud, they would have to steal several times that amount in order to raise that billion dollars. Then there is the indirect transfers that include things like us paying for their medical treatment - and paying for somewhere for them to shoot up safely.

So, given all of the above, is a safe injecting room still good policy? What does it do to stop a junkie from walking down Glebe Point Rd when I'm having dinner in a restaurant, and smashing my car window to get at my GPS? Does it do anything to reduce the enormous burden on the public?

Control

It's been a long time since I have bothered to read anything produced by Hugh Mackay. I think he had some very interesting stuff to say back in the early 1980s, but since then, he's been repeating like a scratched record (for those of you old enough to remember what a record looked like).

I did get one interesting snippet from this book review though:

The lack of personal space can likewise be a raw psychological wound. Just as a woman needs a room of her own, a bloke must have a shed, as a refuge and a site of reflection. For many people, their car is a particularly important place, generating a sense of control not found elsewhere.

I'm interested in the bit about the car, not the shed. I always on the lookout for why some people are relaxed and polite when behind the wheel, and others are complete arseholes. Perhaps it does come down to control - the less control you have over your life, the more aggro you're likely to be.

I'm pretty relaxed about most things, because I recognise that there is a hell of a lot of stuff in my life that I have no control over, and it's not worth stressing about. For that, I blame boarding school and the army - in both situations, many aspects of your life are tightly regulated. When to eat, when to sleep, when to crap etc etc. What to wear, where to sleep (if to sleep at all), how long your hair can be and on and on and on. You either buck the system (which a few people always do), or you learn to go along with it. Acceptance comes more easily for some than others - realising that you are just a tiny cog in a big machine, and the machine really doesn't give a bugger about you. Just do as you are told, paint the rocks, salute the boneheads and march up and down until your feet blister.

There's also the "greatcoats on, greatcoats off" experiences that they military constantly provides. What that means is that you are told to do one thing (greatcoats on) and once you are well and truly embarked on it, you are told to do the exact opposite (greatcoats off). This generally involves things like route marching to a certain point to be collected by trucks, only to be told when you get there that the trucks are 20km in the opposite direction. You either accept that the military is an endless series of fuck-ups, or you go mental.

This is all very Zen like, isn't it?

Saturday photos

Lots of windsurfers out this afternoon (trust me - there are sails in there somewhere).

Two ladies out for a lazy ride.

Sensible fellow - you have no idea how many loons I see riding along either texting or talking.

That didn't last long (I took the photo below during the week).

Depression

Posting has been lite of late because I've been off the bike due to a small medical problem. Nothing to do with the bike (I didn't crash) - let's just call it an "infected ear" for the sake of this story.

I haven't been able to ride because I lost my balance - I couldn't walk down the street for a few weeks without constantly drifting left and walking into shop windows. Trying to sit upright on a bike was a complete no-no, and just about everything strenuous has been off the cards. Running, swimming - even walking. I haven't been able to mow the lawn or carry the kids.

The result - blobism. I have sat around, or lain around, like a lump for weeks, waiting for this thing to go away.

As the weeks have passed, I've been getting more and more morose. I'm usually a pretty cheerful sort of bloke, but I've been narky as hell recently. I've been getting snappy at people at work and generally thinking about going postal on the people on the bus. I've slept a lot, but haven't slept well. I've even developed a couple of tics - twitchy is not a good way to be. It hasn't been a good time.

This general shitiness hasn't been brought on by the pain of this condition - it's clearly been caused by a lack of exercise. I need my daily (or twice daily) dose of endorphins. I finally got some today (I managed a short, lazy 45 minute ride) and I feel better already. The physical pain from the medical problem is still there, nagging away, but the mental blackness has lifted.

The ride today was a bit of a shocker - I'm either still punch-drunk with lousy balance, or I've lost all the fine motor control that helps keep the bike in a straight line. Normally, I can put the front wheel on a solid white line and keep it there for as long as I like, with the wheel hardly varying an inch or so from side to side. Today, I could barely keep the bike in a metre wide bike lane. I was wandering along like an old drunk.

It makes me wonder how many depressed people could be sorted out by simply making them do a bit of strenuous exercise once a day for an hour or so.

SMH picks up the killer cucumbers - but fails to mention "organic"

I linked the other day to a BBC story on how people are dying in Europe from food poisoning, and how organic vegetables are suspect. It was pointed out to me later in comments that the BBC had in fact mentioned "organic" in their story - although I am pretty sure that when I first read it, organic didn't appear at all. Either I'm going dotty in my old age, or the BBC updated the story after I linked to it. I originally read about it at Tim Worstall's site, and he was upset because it wasn't being reported that the cause of the outbreak was known - "Imperfectly cooked manure used by the Spanish organic producer".

The Guardian also reported on the outbreak, but it left this rather bland statement until the last line:

Austria's food safety agency ordered a recall of organically grown cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplant supplied by a Spanish producer thought to be the source of the outbreak. It said 33 Austrian stores were affected.


If this had been about GM foods, the headline would have screamed about the cause, and the story would have been one long call to immediately ban such dangerous foods and practices. The usual suspects from Greenpeace etc would have been quoted at length on the dangers of "fooling with nature" and "destorying the planet" and "risking the future of our children".
 
Anyway, the SMH ran the story today, and this time, I copied the entire text into notepad and searched for "organic". There is no sign of that word anywhere.
 
To me, that's just plain deceptive.