They've all scone - just like that

When I was a young bloke, morning tea ("smoko") was part of the daily pattern of life, and scones were a regular occurrence at morning tea.

(As an aside, I wonder how many shearing sheds now come equipped with fancy coffee makers? Back then, you either brought your own coffee in a thermos, or put up with whatever instant muck was available in the shed. Or you had tea. Have shearers also been infected with the fancy coffee virus?)

I can't remember the last time I had home made scones - probably decades ago. Sure, I've had them in tea rooms from time to time, but never as part of a work break and freshly made on the spot.

I had a go at making them last weekend, using a Delia Smith recipe for buttermilk scones. Of course I had no buttermilk, and used plain old milk instead. They seemed to be a bit dry, but they came out fine. They were gone in about 10 minutes.

I just had to repeat the exercise this weekend. This time, I had buttermilk, but not enough butter. Ah well, they seemed to work when topped up with margarine. I felt that the batter was just a little bit dry, so I put in a teaspoon more buttermilk. The scones rose all right - they pretty much exploded upwards. And then they fell over like a tower constructed by dodgy Pisan builders. I used the smallest cookie cutter that we have - maybe they would have worked better if I'd used the next size up...more base for the height.

And who cares? No one. Once broken in half and smothered with jam and cream, they were scoffed in minutes.

Good BBC doco

If you've got a spare 50 minutes and are interested in the fall of the Ancient Kingdom in Egypt, this is worth a look.

Cyclists and third party insurance

Being election time for local government, it's policy silly season. The Tele ran a story today on the Living Sydney candidate and their policy to force cyclists to take out third party insurance.

I'm not against cyclists having insurance - I buy cyclist specific insurance every year that covers the whole family, and I'll continue to do so as long as we're all cycling regularly. You'd be a bloody nong to ride a lot and not be covered by insurance of some sort. If my experience is any guide, the more miles you do, the greater the chance that you'll be coming off - either through your own fault or someone else's.

I haven't had to make a claim on my insurance yet, even though I've been hit twice by motorists. I sued one bloke, and it cost his insurance company a fair whack to cover my medical bills and time off work. I was a bit tougher when the next bloke hit me - I wasn't damaged badly enough to bother with lawyering up. It still cost me a few grand in lost wages and medical expenses, but I figure it's not worth pursuing if it's less than $5,000.

So I believe whole heartedly in insurance.

However, I don't see how they're going to make cyclists travelling through the city prove that they have it. Unless they are thinking of forcing cyclists to get a number plate, which is just whacko. Do they have the power to force cyclists using public roads to register? I think not - that would be a state government prerogative.

By the way, I had a look at the Living Sydney website in order to have a proper read of their detailed policy on this matter. Click on this link to see their policies - I promise you won't be disappointed.

(Hint - there's nothing there - just a typical management wank diagram - the sort dreamed up in strategic planning sessions).

The libertarian streak in me also says that taking out insurance as a cyclist should be a purely voluntary decision. On the whole, cyclists don't do a lot of damage to other road users. They're usually the ones who  come off worse in a collision. Sure, the odd pedestrian gets knocked down once in a blue moon, but does that mean that hundreds of thousands of cyclists must then be forced to do something because of the actions of a few? I haven't hit a pedestrian yet, but that is due more to my vigilance, situational awareness, reactions and sixth sense for pedestrian stupidity than anything else. One day, The Force is going to fail me, and I am going to clock some idiot really hard - of course they'll be texting and not looking as they run across the road against a red light at the time - but that won't make me feel much better as I impact with the concrete.

Bugger me

It's local government election time soon, so signs are appearing in front yards and election guff is being stuffed into letter boxes.

The first political pamphlet hit the letter box this week. Bugger me if this isn't the most straightforward bit of electioneering for local government that I have ever seen. All these guys want to do is fix our footpaths, give us somewhere to park when we go to the shops and spruce up the local shopping strip (which is a complete dump by the way).

There's no mention of the usual bete noires of local government - saving the whales, the Palestinians, no nukes, federal industrial relations policy and so on. In short, everything that local government has no control over and no responsibility for.

It's nice to see a return to things like the three Rs - roads, rates and rubbish. I can't wait to see what the other mobs are proposing.

Blow me down

Blow me down, if we don't get yet another storm today. Trees down, probably places without power. All the usual stuff that happens when the wind blows hard.

It's days like today that I normally try to split from work a bit early to avoid the worst of it. Of course, Sod's Law had to kick in today. I left early, rode during the worst of it, just about killed myself battling the head winds...and then an hour after I got home, about the time I would normally be leaving.......dead calm. Not even the merest zephyr of a breeze.

I'm so knackered, I'm almost falling asleep standing up.

Scolded by a cop

I had the unusual experience this week of being scolded by a motorcycle cop - whilst we were both in motion. He didn't pull me over - he pulled up alongside, lifted his visor and told me that although I was breaking no laws and had every right to ride where I was, I shouldn't be doing it!

Here's the background.

I was riding through The Rocks, which is a heavily pedestrianised, historical, touristy area. The roads are narrow, twisty and speed limited to 40km/h. Most traffic never gets up to that speed - there are too many speed humps and pedestrian crossings for vehicles to ever get over about 30. Plus there are all the tourist buses crawling along, taxis looking for fares and tourists blundering around in cars (looking for a non-existent parking spot) or on foot (taking photos of the various sights).

The road itself has also been excavated in quite a few spots of late to lay cables and repair pipes, and the crews that do that never fill the trenches in properly, so you've got these canyons running every which way across the tarmac which are hell to ride in or ride across. Where there aren't any tarmac canyons, there are sunken manhole covers and pit hatches.

I upset this particular cop by taking a wide line when I hit one particularly bad stretch of blind corners, tourist bus activity, canyons and manholes. You've got two choices as a cyclist - ride to the left of these hazards, which would mean weaving in and out like a drunken Irishman staggering between pubs (and putting yourself in the door zone), or riding to the right, where you can take an almost dead straight line and are well out of the door zone.

I of course always plump for the safer option, which means I am blocking the lane. Did I mention it's also a double white line area, which means no overtaking?

Since all of this is on a slight downhill slope, I have no problem getting up to 35km/h without any effort. I usually don't go any faster, as I don't want to slam into the road canyons that I can't avoid any faster than that. This cop though wanted to go faster than 35 - he wanted to go 40, and he was mighty annoyed that he couldn't overtake.

Normally, the cops are telling us to slow down and take it easy. To not speed like maniacs. Due to the truckloads of glazed eyed tourists in this area, going 40 is always a risk. Just before he overtook me, I kept well to the right to avoid a gaggle of Asian tourists who were stepping out onto the street from behind a van without looking. Common sense says you just don't ride right up alongside cars when this sort of thing can happen.

Oh, and did I mention that I almost bowled over a cop last week doing just that? There is a police station in the Rocks, and they park their vehicles on the street. A young cop walked around the front of a police van and stepped out in front of me without looking first, and I narrowly avoided an "assault police" charge by swerving hard right. He was about as surprised as me. I've learned my lesson - I stay well away from the cars in this area. To cap it off, tourist buses drive through that spot all the time, and they are too wide for the road. It's not unusual to be approaching one of the blind bends and to find a double decker bus coming at you on the wrong side of the road. It's horrible when there's a car next to you trying to overtake, and they suddenly desperately want to get out of the way of the oncoming bus - except you are next to them. No thanks. I'm not getting squashed that way.

After he told me off, I respectfully replied (using his rank) that there was no way I was going to comply - that it simply isn't safe to ride in the zone he wanted me in. He frowned his cop frown - the frown they get when civilians don't comply with directions - and told me off again. I pointed out that there was a bike lane coming up ahead, and that was a safe zone to ride in. The bit we had just been through had no bike lane, and riding to the left is simply stupid. I noticed he wouldn't ride his motorbike where he expected me to ride my bike.

He then gestured at his speedo and said I was going to slow.

Then he noticed that we were doing nearly 40 - the speed limit - and I was able to hold a sensible conversation with him without breathing hard. He frowned at me once more, hit his right indicator and shot off up a side street. Conversation over.

On the way home yesterday, I passed a different motorcycle cop in almost the same spot where I was told off.

He was ticketing a driver for speeding!

Which paper would the ABC prefer?

News from the UK:

A Freedom of Information response obtained by The Commentator website has revealed that the BBC buys more copies of the Guardian than any other national newspaper. Nearly 60,000 copies of Rusbridger’s rag could be found in Beeb buildings between April 2010 and February 2011, over 10,000 more than the Daily Mail. That’s despite the Mail having a circulation approaching ten times that of the Guardian.

Any bets on what the preferred newspapers at the ABC would be? Somehow, I doubt The Daily Telegraph would top the purchasing list.

How not to grow garlic

I'm a bit of an anarchist when it comes to gardening - whatever grows, grows. It's survival of the fittest in my backyard.

I watched a cooking show last year where in one episode, the chef visited a couple of teenage boys who were growing garlic in their mum's backyard and selling it at the markets. I thought that if they could grow it, so could I.

So next time some garlic sprouted in the pantry, I pulled the cloves apart and planted them.

And then pretty much forgot about them. Sure, I had a look at that spot every few months to see if anything garlicky was poking up, but nothing ever seemed to come of that experiment. I guess I planted them at the wrong time of year, or in totally unsuitable soil.

Earlier this week, I started digging the garden over. The annual anarchy is coming to an end - it's time to napalm the lot and start again. Since each garden bed looked like it was a combination of expired tomato plants and weeds, I've had no compunctions about digging it over in the dark, as there appeared to be nothing left worth saving.

I was digging the last bed over today when I spotted some white bulbs. I thought nothing of them, as I dig them up every year. But after turning over the last shovelful, I had a close look at one.

It was clearly a baby garlic head - instead of being one smooth bulb, like an onion, it had lots of little bulbs poking out the sides - each destined to be a clove of garlic. After at least 6 months (maybe longer), the little bludgers had finally decided to make something of themselves.

Too late. 99% of them are now in the bottom of the green waste bin, and I'm not going to bother with ferreting them out and replanting them.

Gobsmacked

We had a bit of a management reshuffle at work a while back. Responsibilities for various things got shuffled around. I have a pretty reasonable grasp of the detail of what most of the managers around me do, so I was rather gobsmacked this week to discover that one of them had almost no grasp of one function that he had managed for about 4 years.

Let me give an example to illustrate.

Let's say you work in a pub. Six months ago, jobs were shuffled and you became the bar manager, and the bar manager moved over to manage the accommodation section.

One day, the ex-manager walks into the bar and sees a bin full of empty bottles, and goes berserk at one of the bar staff.

"Why aren't these bottles sorted by colour? We've always sorted out glass recycling by colour, as that's what the recycling company demands."

You look at the manager oddly. When he handed over to you, nothing was said about sorting empty bottles by colour. And there never appeared to be any need to do so, as the big empty bottle skip out the back in the car park isn't partitioned into clear, brown and green glass anyway.

All the other old timers look at the ex-manager funny too - they've been there for years, and they've always just thrown all the glass into one big skip.

Being a bit puzzled, but slightly unsure, you climb up and peer into the skip in the car park - it has no partitions, so sorting by colour would be a waste of time.

You check your records going back years - the paperwork you have from the glass recycler has no mention anywhere of glass recycling. There is no chance that 5 years ago, you were indeed getting a partitioned bin, and this changed when you took over without you knowing.

You ring the manager of the pubs down the street and ask them how they recycle - they all do it like you are doing it now (mixing the glass) and laugh at the suggestion that bottles have to be separated.

Your final call is to the glass recycling bloke, who is silent for a few moments when you ask about colour sorting. He's puzzled - why are you asking? You tell him about the ex-manager. He explodes with laughter - so loudly, you have to pull the phone away from your ear.

The final check is to search the records for the first order form for a recycling bin. You find it. It's for a single, unsorted bin. The name and signature and phone number of the ex-manager are on the paperwork. He supposedly ordered it. He supposedly managed it. And he had no idea about any of it.

And then he gets on his high horse and tells you that you are doing it all wrong.

Just gobsmacked.

Two views

Amazing how quickly the weather can turn. On Wednesday morning, it was warm enough for me to shed my jacket after 10 minutes and I rode home in just my jersey. On Thursday morning, it was fine and bloody cold. Friday morning was blustery, but by the afternoon, it was blowing a gale. I saw lots of people walking home with wrecked umbrellas, just putting up with getting wet.

Worth a read

Patrick Moore on the facts and fiction of climate change

Patrick Moore played a foundational role in organizing Greenpeace, perhaps the world's most famous environmental activist group. For several years, he served as the chairman of its Canadian wing. However, he eventually became skeptical of the direction which the group was taking, and disassociated from it.

Trying to explain things to teenagers

Teenagers. They know everything. There's nothing they can learn from adults. Really, there isn't. All that extra life experience you've had, all those successes and failures - that counts for nothing. Because they are smarter than you.

Take our frying pans for instance. We bought some cheap, non-stick ones for frying eggs and things. When Junior started cooking for himself, I pointed out our extensive range of plastic spatulas, and explained how they had to be used to avoid scratching the non-stick stuff off the frying pan.

A year later, my fried eggs and bacon are sticking to the bottom of the pan like it was coated with super glue. So I decide to investigate.

It turns out Junior had been using my BBQ-mate, which is designed for scraping all the burnt, baked on muck off the BBQ hot plate. It's great for scraping immolated sausages from a BBQ, and it doubles beautifully at removing the non-stick coating from cheap frying pans. Using a plastic spatula was obviously too wimpy.

We now have new frying pans.

The BBQ-mate is hiding in the shed. We'll see how long it takes him to scratch the blazes out of the new ones.

The ugliest newspaper in Britain

Pat Condell in another excellent rant.

As I've noted previously, Fairfax source quite a lot of their stuff from the Guardian. But more than just content, I believe the Guardian mindset has totally taken over at the SMH and especially The Age. Which is one reason why they're going down the tubes at a rate of knots. It's not the internet - it's the content, stupid!

Blowing in the wind

100km/h gusts reported on Sydney harbour. Icy rain flying horizontally. Temp dropped 8 degrees on the way home.

Interesting night to ride home to say the least.

Nit picking, sanctimonious twat

At the end of Lilyfield Road, there's a spot where I really get the shits if a car is parked in a particular spot. In order to get onto the bike bridge that crosses a very narrow road, you've got to go up a pram ramp that breaches the kerb. I hate it when cars park too close to that ramp - or park partially across it. There's not a lot of room for mistakes, and you have to be aware of fast moving cars turning into Lilyfield Road from Victoria Road. (I realise this means nothing to non-locals. Let me put it this way - it's a nasty corner where it's really easy for a cyclist to get cleaned up by a car if they don't watch what they are doing).

I was heading for that spot recently when I spotted two cars parked partially across the ramp - enough to be partly but not completely blocking it. I started to steam up; but then I noticed that the drivers were out of their cars exchanging details. They'd clearly had a minor bingle when crossing the Anzac Bridge, and had stopped in the first convenient location to sort out their insurance. Fair enough. There really was nowhere else of them to stop.

So I let it pass, manoeuvred around them and kept going.

As I descended from the bridge on the other side of the road, I noticed that a cyclist had stopped and was berating the drivers. I felt like yelling at them to get a grip; to wake up and assess the situation - but I knew they'd never hear me across four lanes of busy traffic.

So let me just state there that I think that cyclist was a sanctimonious twat. There are times when other people are in the wrong, but circumstances dictate that you give them a free pass.

Digressio

A writing technique I must attempt at some point.

Photos

After watching a few episodes of The Men Who Made Us Fat, I was out of bed at sparrow fart and on the road.

It was pretty dark before 0600hrs - so dark, I had to stop and plonk the camera on a convenient fence post in order to steady the above photo. Haven't seen the water this flat and still in ages - there was hardly a ripple for miles.

I thought this bloke was going to wipe out pedestrian after pedestrian with that wide load on the back. However, he handled it pretty skilfully, and didn't whack anyone whilst I was following him. The pannier that the box is sitting on seemed to have some sort of electric motor in it - he hardly had to pedal at all.

The harbour was lined with photographers this morning to capture a cruise ship coming in.

Thar she blows.

And that's the view the people on the ship would have seen. Just lovely. It was worth freezing my balls off for.

The men who made us fat

I'm watching this series on Youtube after reading about it in the Spectator.

I loved this snippet about Earl Butz, Nixon's secretary of agriculture, who had to resign after saying to journalists that what black men wanted was "tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit".

I can't understand why he felt the need to put "black" at the start of that statement. Everytime I walk into the bathroom lately, I find that Junior has left the heater on full blast.

Anyway, enjoy the series.

Screwing the client

I just had a horrible thought.

The former principal of the law firm Keddies is being dragged through the courts at the moment in an attempt to reclaim money that he gained by overcharging his clients. The amount of overbilling is in the millions.

Keddies was bought out by Slater and Gordon.

Julia Gillard worked for Slater and Gordon when she was "young and naive".

I've known a few lawyers who have worked for big firms - the pressure to bill is intense. Just about everything you do has to be charged back to a client. Opening mail, reading emails, photocopying, shifting a file etc etc etc - it's all billable.

Gillard was sleeping with her client, Bruce Wilson, when she was at Slater and Gordon (and young and naive). Now I've known a few people who have had work related liaisons, and some of them have been prone to having a bit of nookie during the working day. This has ranged from checking into a hotel for an extended lunch break to a quickie on the fire stairs.

So, here's the thoughts (prepare to flush your brain out afterwards).....

Let's imagine Gillard was so taken with Bruce Wilson, that she might have entertained the thought of a bit of rumpy-pumpy during office hours. After all, she's human like the rest of us (I think). If she followed through with that, would she have been pressured by Slater and Gordon's billing policy to bill the AWU for that time? In other words, would they make you screw your client for screwing your client?

SMH - still hopeless with numbers

The SMH ran a story by Georgina Robinson this week regarding the Mayor of London getting hung up on a flying fox. As Georgina told the story, Boris "was left dangling on a zip wire 40 metres above the ground".

The story came with a video and some photos. Judge for yourself whether Boris was left dangling 40 metres or 4 metres above the ground.

The article also mentioned that "He spoke to the crowd, which had gathered beneath him", which would be a bit difficult if he was 40 metres up in the air. Ever tried to have a conversation with someone 40 metres away?

"I see carrots"

Spent a sleepless night on the couch last night. I was happily watching a movie when Number 2 called out to me around 11pm - he'd gone to bed feeling a bit off, and had woken up and chundered all over himself, the floor rug and his bed.

After washing him off, I stuck him in our bed with a bucket - there was no way he was going back into his bed. I went back to the couch, and settled in for the night.

I didn't want him in the middle of our bed - not if he woke up at 1am and needed to puke again.

Which he did. And he missed the bucket next to our bed. Thank goodness for floorboards. He proceeded to repeat that about every half hour until 0800hrs.

I dragged the floor rug out to the backyard this morning to hose it off. As I was hanging up the washing, Number 3 decided to inspect the damage. He peeled back the folded over rug and gave it a close inspection.

"Daddy, I see carrots".

And I'm sure that won't be the last time you see them either.

A few links

Here are a few linkies. For some reason, links show up properly in IE with this new template, but not Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Trust me - each of the things in italics below is a link.

Dumpster catches fire and melts streetlights - full time climate alarmist blames global warming. Seriously - did the alarmist not stop to think for a minute about how hot light bulbs get when they've been on for a while, and then consider why light fittings don't melt every day?

The death of the piano. Fun factoid of the day - the average life span of a piano is 80 years.

Duck confit - recipe of the day. Next time I have a free Saturday morning, I'm going to drive out to the Flemington Markets and visit the duck man. Cheapest ducks I've found so far.

Don't abuse staff at a drive thru, video tape them and post the results on the internet. You'll get fired. I don't know what was going through the head of this bloke. OK, you don't like the political stance of the owner of a business - fine. Don't buy their products. Write to the owner and tell them what you think. But to abuse blameless drive thru staff? And to record it as well, even when the staffer tells you that she's uncomfortable with you doing so? That's the height of gutlessness. Kudos to the drive thru lady - talk about calm and cool under fire.

A nice little video to start the weekend. This is produced by CANdo. For some reason, Fairfax have their knickers in a knot about, but they never show an equal amount of concern about organisations like GetUp.

Sir John Keegan

Well I'll be. One of my favourite writers has died.

Obit here.

I think I've torn my man boobs

I had to make a change on the bike last week - the mini-pannier had to come off. That meant returning to riding to work with a small back pack containing clothes and things.

The pannier didn't weigh much; and neither does the back pack. However, just the small adjustment - that small shift of weight - has had some decidedly odd effects.

For starters, the first time I got out of the saddle to really hit the pedals, I sat straight back down again as the back end felt like it was about to wobble off. The bike was flipping so quickly from side to side, I thought either the back wheel had collapsed or one of the rear stays had cracked or a weld had split. Nope. It was simply the removal of the weight represented by the pannier. When you stand up, you throw the bike from side to side as you pedal. The weight of the pannier slowed that motion down quite considerably. With the weight gone, I was throwing the bike all over the place.

Then I started having trouble cornering - I almost smacked into a few kerbs because I wasn't leaning over hard enough. Previously, the weight of the pannier would pull the bike over - now, I have to work at pushing the top of the bike down when going fast into a corner.

I'm sure an engineer could explain the impact on the various forces governing the bike, but the really strange result has been what's happened around my chest. After a few days, it felt like my pecs (at least that's my description of the things under my nipples) had detached from the underlying muscle and that every intercostal muscle had been ripped. I also got a bad attack of what I thought were stomach cramps.

It turns out the "stomach cramps" was actually my abdominal muscles protesting at having to do some unusual exercises. Again, just that small shift in weight off the rear meant different stomach muscles were being used to balance the bike and counteract my leg movements.

Things seem to have settled down now - I managed to get home without scraping any concrete off kerbs with my pedals, and the "cramps" have disappeared. But how weird is that? You shift about 800 grams of weight, and all hell breaks loose.

Just desserts

I really have a strong dislike for tradies in utes. They always seem to be furiously speeding from one place to another, and I've had multiple close encounters at Stop signs, roundabouts and traffic lights where they've blown through without giving way. Yes, some cyclists do that (1 in 7 was my count this evening), but if a cyclist runs a red light at 30km/h and crashes into a car, they'll come off worst, and it's all their own fault. If a ute runs a red light at 70km/h and hits a bike, it's game over for the cyclist - and it isn't the cyclist's fault. For people who work with tape measures, tradies also have a hard time judging distance - they're some of the worst offenders when it comes to ripping past me with a few inches to spare.

So I was quite delighted this morning to find this tradie pulled over by the Plod. The most annoying thing was that I'd blown my nose a bit further back down the road, so I didn't have the opportunity to leave a calling card on their bonnet as I went past.

Down the crapper goes another green dream

World's biggest eco-toilet scheme fails

That loud clunk...

That loud clunk you just heard - it was a brass monkey losing a ball.

Crikey, it's arctic here at the moment.

Robbed

I've been putting off buying some new bike shorts for some time, but finally relented last week after holding a pair up to the light as I hung them on the line and discovering that they were so worn, they were nearly see through.

Not a good look.

I trotted down to one of the local bike shops and tried on many nicks and found the only two pairs in my size that fitted properly. One was what I would call "mid range quality", and the other was upper-middle quality. One level below the pro-level. Both were from the same manufacturer.

I wanted to get something decent - the last ones I bought were dead cheap, and they fit terribly. I got two pairs from the same brand (not the same as above). I couldn't work out whether I needed the large or XL, so I bought both. The large squeeze my legs so badly, it feels like they are always falling down (the elastic is tight down towards the knees, and it pulls in that direction). The XL pair fit like a potato sack.

The latest additions to the wardrobe fit much more comfortably. The upper-middle quality pair fit like a glove. The cheaper version isn't quite that good, but they are a vast improvement on the potato sack.

Now for a price comparison.

The cheap and crappy knicks cost me $60 in a shop.

The mid range ones cost me $90.

The really good ones cost me $180.

I got home and looked them up in a few web stores.

I can get the really good ones on line for the same price as the crappy knicks. That's right - the same pair of good quality knicks that are just over $180 in a shop are $60 on line. And that's from an Australian web shop that is renowned for being pretty good.

I guess I'll never be walking into a bike shop and buying knicks again.

The CFMEU, and other crap you find in bike lanes

The CFMEU have been barricading the gates to the Barangaroo development each morning for the past week. I've got no idea what their problem is. However, I have a problem with them - they've decided to take over the bike lane for their protest zone, marking it out with flags and filling it with fat unionists.

The first time I rode through here, it was almost pitch dark, and I nearly slammed straight into the flags and a few dopey union thugs in dark clothing. Given how they love to strike whenever safety is a problem on a work site, you'd think they might know a thing or two about assessing site hazards, reducing risks and traffic management. Then again, maybe not. These morons don't seem to understand that the bike lane is there to separate bikes from traffic - to reduce the chance of a cyclist getting hit by a car. Forcing cyclists into the car lane is a recipe for disaster.

I tried sticking to the bike lane one morning, which was a bit of a mistake. One of the fatsos stepped backwards without looking and I had to brake, skid and slide out onto the road between the flags. Not a bad effort, given I was toodling along at 40km/h. Just glad it was so early, there was no traffic.

Whinging union members are not the only thing to be found in the bike lanes down that way - some taxi drivers have a bad habit of either parking in the lanes whilst awaiting a fare, or driving along the lanes in an attempt to pass other cars on the wrong side of the road.

If one of these taxi drivers crashes into the protest, it really will be Peak Stupid.

Mist and early morning starts

Posting has been a bit light of late because I've been so knackered each night. I'm lucky if I can avoid falling asleep on the couch when I get home, only to drag myself off to bed at 2200hrs at the latest. I've been starting well before dawn some mornings, which means very little photography in the inky blackness. Or the misty mistiness.

I tried an experiment today to see if I can end the week feeling less wrecked - that meant cycling in at a kindler, gentler pace. The sort of pace you achieve when you fit mudguards to your bike. It was actually pretty hard for me to ride slower than normal - I had to concentrate and work on easing up. It didn't always work, but I did my best to ride like someone with mudguards.

The results were interesting - on the last section coming home, I was bursting with energy when tackling the last few hills. I really wanted to tear up them like no tomorrow, but I resisted and took them gently. I wasn't sweating much when I finished - if anything, I was cold. The legs feel good - totally free of the usual aches and pains. Even the pain in my knee has subsided.

There's just one thing missing - I'm still thinking about work, and the problems of the day. A hard ride does one thing very effectively - it wipes the mind of all your troubles and tribulations. I sleep very easily after bashing myself silly on the bike. I stress not at all. I actually have neck tension at the moment from the crap I had to go through at work today.

So it's a choice between sore legs or a sore neck. Stressing the body or stressing the mind.

I think tomorrow I am going to ride to and from work in the red zone. This dawdling along at mudguard speed shits me.

A few links

Why I feel sorry for Cav. Ah no, this is nothing to do with the best looking Cav returning home safe.

The Olympic road race - more on why the poms failed to win.

Behind the scenes technical look at how they televise the TDF.

Quads

Oh. My. Goodness.

Those words above are supposed to be a link. I can't get links to come out in a different colour. Stupid new theme.

Old shoes, new shoes

My old shoes died completely this week. Sure, they've been getting pretty manky for a while, but they really turned their toes up this week. I went to clip into a pedal in a hurry, and the cleat slipped off the pedal. I was putting enough down force on the pedal at the time to almost crush my nuts against the saddle as my foot slipped off, and the side of the shoe gave up the ghost and split from the upper down one side from heel to toe as the shoe twisted off the pedal. I had to ride home with one shoe half hanging off. And a sore nut.

As you can see, they were pretty worn by that point. The constant scuffing of the shoes against various bits of the bike had worn right through the outer layer in a number of places. If they'd lasted any longer, they would have become extremely well ventilated.

The wear on the cleats was something else. See how on the left, the bottom bit is worn to a point like a chisel? That's supposed to be rectangle shaped. The nose of the cleat has been worn down by constant clipping in and out until there's almost nothing left.

That's what a few years of commuting will do to your shoes. Commuting (for me) involves a lot of stopping and starting. There's at least 15 sets of lights between home and work, and chances are, most of them will be red when I reach them. By contrast, I can go for a weekend ride for a longer distance and period of time, and unclip only 2 or 3 times. The bloke who served me in the bike shop was stunned at the amount of wear on both the cleats and shoes. I guess I'm a bit of a tight fisted bugger when it comes to spending money on certain things.

Wet crack

A slightly unpleasant side effect of riding in the rain is getting a wet bum crack. You can prevent this by installing mud guards - but they are strictly for poofters. If you walk into a proper bike shop and ask for mud guards, the thin-as-rakes pro-racer staff will beat you over the head with the nearest hard object to hand (possibly a bike frame or a pump) and throw your unconscious body into the street. And they'll staple directions to the nearest bike shop for poofters to your forehead. Misunderstandings of this sort could be avoided if mud guards were produced in one colour only - pink. Then it would be quite clear who was allowed to install them.

Getting an icy cold crack wash first thing in the morning is a function of two variables. The first is the volume of water on the road. A light sprinkling of rain might make the road surface wet, but you need a critical mass of water on the road before it starts to adhere and flick off your tyres in sufficient volume to douse the hairy behind bits.

The second is speed. At low speed, your wheels won't be turning fast enough for any water that has adhered to them to flick off with any pace. Water needs to flick off vertically and travel for at least 6-8 inches if it is to fly far enough to give you a constant douche. However, at 50km/h, I produce a rooster tail tall enough to reach my neck. I could draw a graph to illustrate the interaction of road surface water volumes and velocity, but it would probably look like a couple of mud guards - and I don't want to go there.

You might think that pouring a steady stream of cold, dirty water down your crack early in the morning is about the most unpleasant thing that could happen to you on a wet day. But you'd be wrong. By far the most unpleasant thing is extracting your wet, smelly riding gear from your locker at work and climbing back into it at the end of the day. It's cold. It's clammy. It's probably spattered with mud and other unidentifiable road debris (just think of all the snot that cyclists blow out of their noses each morning...and where that ends up). It definitely reeks. It's about as pleasant as smearing your body with cold porridge.

And this is where we sort the hard men from the soft.

Knobhead in a ute

It's nice to know that some drivers aren't just pricks to cyclists - they are pricks to everyone else on the road.

Take this bloke in the ute. There was an obstruction in the bus lane, so the buses were pulling out to get around it. The bus driver indicated he was changing lanes, but the bloke in the ute just bulled ahead and blocked the bus, rather than letting it in. Everytime the bus driver pulled out a bit, the driver of the ute pulled ahead to block the bus out.

The ute driver didn't just do this once - he did it again at the next set of lights.

The big surprise to me was that this idiot was driving a Toyota ute instead of a Ford.

Shopping before supermarkets

One of the nice things about living in a suburb full of wogs is that there is a good selection of wog shops. As in places that sell wog food. Cramped little emporiums crammed with cheese, hams, pasta, bread, olives, funny wog drinks, canned tomatoes and so forth. And also crammed with little old wogs speaking in tongues.

Unfortunately, due to things like having to go to work, I get to visit these places a lot less often than I'd like. I managed to squeeze in a visit to one shop this weekend, and it was just as I remembered it from my last visit. I couldn't pronounce the names of any of the goods properly, I was about the only English speaker in the place, and it took about half an hour to get served. Even though I was third in line.

Which leads me to my thought of the day - how time consuming shopping for food etc was before the rise of supermarkets. 80% of what I wanted was behind the counter - I couldn't select it myself. I had to point at what I wanted, dictate the number of slices/weight/length of cheese, and wait for the ham to be sliced, packed, weighed and the cost written down; wait for the cheese to be hacked off the wheel and weighed, packed and costed; wait for the buffalo bocconcini to be drained, packed, weighed and costed; etc etc etc. Then the cost of the whole lot had to be tabulated - the cost of each item was written down on the wrapping of the first item I selected, and they were then added by hand. Buying 8 items took 10 minutes - after a half hour wait.

I have no problem with doing that once a month or so. It's worth the wait for the excellent hams, the great range of olives, the wood fired breads and the interesting cheeses. And if you aren't sure which cheese you want, they'll slice samples off each one and let you have a taste. You can easily burn through 10 minutes just doing some cheese tasting.

But imagine shopping like that every single day. Imagine how much time it would eat out of the time between getting up and going to bed. Especially if you had to visit 4 or 5 shops to get everything you wanted.

Compare it with a trip to the supermarket, where you can select dozens and dozens of items yourself; it's a one-stop shop; everything is bar coded for rapid tabulation at the check out; almost everything you select is pre-packaged in a can, bag, carton or shrink wrap. There is no bespoke service. If you want 16 slices of ham instead of 12, you're out of luck. But the trade off is the convenience and speed. And the lower cost - a supermarket can sell millions of dollars of goods with minimal staff costs, because they don't need to devote one staff member to each customer. 

It's amazing how innovation in retail has given us lower cost food and freed up that most precious commodity of all - our time. That is something we just take for granted these days. The Soviets never allowed this sort of innovation in retail - they had queues, whilst we had convenience. 

The downside of course is having to shop in a pretty soulless environment, and having to put up with whatever the conglomerate decides to stock. They choose what you'll buy, how you'll but it and in what quantities (depending on what the market dictates). But that's how most people want it - they've chosen cost and convenience over the alternative of the old style shops.

I bought some mortadella this time - I haven't been able to face this sort of sausage for about 25 years. In WA, it's called "polony", and we used to joke that it was produced from lips and arseholes. I was fed large amounts of it as a kid - usually thickly sliced on white bread with tomato sauce. During a sojourn on a wheat bin in the middle of nowhere, I discovered that blue tongued lizards don't mind it either (when you've got sod all to do between trucks, catching and feeding lizards with flies and polony is a good way to pass the time).

Sunday lunch at boarding school consisted of a few slices of polony, a bit of iceberg lettuce, a scoop of cold, grainy, grey mashed potato and maybe half a tomato. That pretty much put me off it forever. (Interestingly enough, some years ago, I visited a relative in an old people's home. He was fed the same stuff for lunch. I had to say my goodbyes and leave at that point before I threw up).

But mortadella is to polony what Grange Hermitage is to cask wine. They're both pink and supposedly made from pigs, but the similarities end there. I bought it for the kids, but I had to try a bit myself. I think the mortadella drought is over. Good wog mortadella from a good wog emporium can conquer ancient food phobias.

One last thing - we've got a nice variety of pastry shops out this way too. Trouble is, there are so many, I always have trouble remembering which one does the best vanilla slice. There are two Vietnamese bakeries and several wog pastry shops, so the choice is pretty broad. I fluffed it and ended up in the wrong Vietnamese bakery this time - the vanilla slice was a double decker (in the style of a mille-feuille), but the pastry was soggy and it lacked an essential ingredient; passionfruit icing. I didn't even think to check for the presence of icing before purchasing - a very stupid move. I give it 2 out of 10.

Another Australian victory at the Tour?

From here:

By the way, I can't help notice that the team's sponsor, Wiggins's coach, his late father and a couple of the riders are/were Australians. So, Australia's greatest ever sporting achievement then, if it wasn't for the fact that an Australian won it last year? Oh, and the fact that they count test cricket as a sport.

And:

Wiggo's late dad - scroll right to the bottom. Sideburns clearly run in the family.

Close encounters

Another week, another close encounter with an idiot that really shouldn't be behind the wheel of a motor vehicle of any sort. When they dish out brains and common sense to people, there are always some that somehow failed to make it to the distribution point in time for their dose.

A very common collision between cyclists and cars is when a car overtakes a cyclist, and then immediately turns left in front of them (or right, if you are a yank). It's caused by motorists being in a hurry, and underestimating how fast a cyclist is moving.

And it happened to me this week. It happens often enough to me that I'm always on the look out for it - whenever I hear a car coming up behind me as I approach an intersection, I evaluate whether they are going to have a go at overtaking me and then turning across my bows. As soon as I hear some hesitation from the engine behind me, I know the driver wants to turn. It then comes down to whether they will wait an extra second or two for me, or whether they will try and gun it and get around me before I make it to the corner.

In about 95% of cases, the driver will wait - they realise that at the speed I am travelling at, they've not going to get past safely. But there's always 5% who don't have the judgement to do the mental calculations regarding closing speeds and relative velocities, or they can and they just don't give a bugger about the bloke on a bike.

I got the idiot with no judgement during the week. I could hear them coming up behind, they hesitated, held back, and then after a few seconds of waiting (as the intersection got closer and closer), they gunned it and went around me. I had to stand on the brakes to avoid going into the rear quarter panel. At times like that, I have to do my own mental calculation - if I chase the idiot, will I catch them? Will that traffic light down that side road stay red long enough for me to come up beside them, pound on their window and give them a mouthful? Is the traffic heavy enough to slow them right down, or even bring them to a standstill? Is it worth it? I've got about 1 second to make that judgement call.

In this case, I let them go. They were driving a BMW - people that drive those things are generally too stupid  to understand what they did wrong. They're even worse that tradies in Ford utes.

Is Fairfax going the same way as the Guardian?

There's a good article at Harry's Place on the death spiral that the Guardian is in. It's long, but it is worth a read. 

At some point in the past, the staff at Fairfax started to consciously or unconsciously modeled their papers on the Guardian. They came to view the Grauniad as the epitome of what we (the readers) should have, and they've rather slavishly followed where the Grauniad has led. For instance, a quick search on the SMH site for "the guardian" returns over 10,000 hits. That's a lot of recycled Grauniad articles.

The parallels between the Grauniad and Fairfax are worth thinking about. It's interesting that in both cases, they've gone out of their way to offend what used to be a core group of readers, and now they are reaping the results.

All things Green and generous

We were invited to a very pleasant little soiree recently - a gathering of friends old and new at a pub. It was a set price bash, and the guests could pay in advance or on the night.

Part way through the night, the organiser collared me and asked me to round up the cash from the delinquents. It was a reasonable amount of money to collect - a few thousand bucks. I don't know why they asked me to do it - the last time something like that happened, I did my best to spend the loot on strippers, and ended up putting it on a bar in a nightclub where we did a lot of shots. That evening kind of blacked out a bit after that. I forget which gutter I woke up in.

I was much better behaved this time though. I managed to get almost all the money together without blowing it on loose women and spirituous liquors.

Once people noticed that I was collecting cash, a huddle quickly formed around me and much moolah was pressed into my palms. I had a hard time grabbing it all without dropping any, and my brain was going 100mph trying to keep up with who had paid for whom.

I lugged the bundle of loot over to the bar manager, and we counted it out.

We were two people short.

A bit of brain wracking then resulted, and I eventually worked out which faces weren't in front of me when the money was being thrust my way. I didn't know the culprits well, so I despatched one of their close friends to extract the cash.

They eventually returned with it about an hour later. In the end, they had to chase one of them down and corner them in the dunny in order to get them to part with a few readies. Apparently they are notorious for this sort of behaviour. Long pockets and short arms. Very free with other people's money, but incredibly tight fisted with their own.

The worst of the pair is a Green politician.

Thursday

I just about killed myself tonight - I decided to race a car. Silly bloody thing to do - those things have engines and suchlike, whilst I have to put up with a set of aged legs. Unlike wine, I don't think legs necessarily get better as they age. I managed to stay ahead of the car over my selected distance - a winding bit of road where my cornering ability would outweigh the car's engine advantage. Trouble is, I completely shattered myself in the process. Am preparing to go face down on the keyboard at any second.....

I wish people would put lights on their dogs. As usual, the magic of the camera has made this photo look a lot brighter than it actually was. I almost ran over a black labrapoodle puppy this week - the owner stopped at the kerb to let me pass, but they hadn't trained the puppy too well. It shot out from behind them and almost went under my wheel. I had the anchors on so hard that my back wheel was off the ground. Good thing I was on a bike and not in a car - otherwise, it would have been a flatrapoodle.

Star light, star bright - how many fucking ninjas are there out tonight?

As much as I enjoy watching the Tour, I like to read at the same time. I read One Way Road last week, by Robbie McEwen. It was great - it's the kind of interesting, well written book that should appeal to non-cyclists as well. I read about 1/4 of it online at Amazon before buying it and reading the rest the following night. I used to think that I was pretty useless for feeling so tired and smashed some nights when I got home, being barely able to roll off the couch for dinner. Then I read how the professionals feel after a hard day on the road (utterly smashed), and that made me feel much better. It made me realise that I almost never ride in my green zone (my comfort zone) - I'm always pushing myself into the orange, and occasionally deep into the red (like tonight). I enjoy it, and I can't stop it.

That got me in the mood for reading Mark Cavendish's Boy Racer. Again, I read a good chunk of it online before laying down the plastic. I read a tip about training that he received as a teenager - "Always train 16 hours per week - doesn't matter what you do, just do 16 hours".

I thought that was interesting, and then calculated how hard it would be for me to put in 16 hours on the bike a week. Depending on how many days I work per week, I'll ride between 7.5 and 10.5 hours per week - and that's not training - it's commuting. It might sound easy to add another 5 to 8 hours per week to my regime, but it isn't. There are kids to feed, meetings to attend, clothes to wash etc etc. 16 hours per week, when you work full time and have a family, is a bloody hard goal to reach!

Yes, you have come to the right place

I just thought I'd try something new. Sorry if that's confusing for you old farts.

Stupid Blogger Spam system

After seeing complaints on other blogs regarding Blogger eating comments as spam, I finally had a look in my own spam bucket.

Hmmm. Quite a few comments from Rob somehow ended up in there. Along with a lot of advertisements from India for things I don't need. Ah well.

No longer having to ride away from my own smell

Bike commuters come in two varieties - fast and slow. Those terms are relative - I refer more to the mindset of the commuter. Some go as fast as their body will move them; others meander along at a very leisurely pace. Flat out for me would be a leisurely stroll for an A grade weekend warrior.

Us flat out types tend to sweat a bit. Or a lot. My handlebars were getting really slippery one morning last week; it turned out that my gloves were totally saturated with sweat, and they were slipping on the sweat that was squishing out of them. The sweat in turn had run down my arms inside my jacket. I read a nice little description of "breathable" fabrics - you can either get wet from the outside in, or you can get wet from the inside out. One is cold and wet, and the other is warm and wet. In winter, I prefer the warm and wet option, even if it does mean slippery gloves.

Sweat eventually means smell. It doesn't matter if I wash my kit every night - enough residue builds up over time to produce a rather nasty tang. It's worse in winter, funnily enough, as the clothes don't have an opportunity to dry out as they would on a stinking hot day. Instead, they fester.

I was at my wits end last week, and then someone suggested soaking them in baking soda. I had no idea how much to use, so I threw half a cup in a bucket of cold water and threw the kit in to soak overnight. Then I washed it all as per normal.

Amazing. No more stench. 

Bad behaviour

The missus and me enjoyed a good meal this week in a nice restaurant. It had most of the things you need for a good night out - enjoyable food, nice ambience, comfy seats (to avoid numb bum), drinkable plonk and a waiter that was half competent.

The staff working at the restaurant did their best, but there's not a lot you can do about your customers. By the look of the place (a lot of empty tables), they needed every face feeder they could get.

A family of five took up the table next to us. The parents looked to be in their late 40s/early 50s. Dad pulled out an iPad and spent the entire meal reading the paper, ignoring his kids and wife.

What a twat. The waiter should have covered it in soup.

Friday

Another day, another broken down vehicle on the Anzac Bridge. In the top left hand corner, there's an RTA traffic camera. I bet everyone in the control room was looking at this scene and yelling at the bozo on the monitor who was causing traffic chaos for thousands of motorists. I once saw a bloke run out of fuel in the middle lane just before the peak of the bridge - he didn't have enough juice to get over the hump, which would have allowed him to roll down the other side and off an exit ramp. The idiot then jumped out of his ute and ran across three lanes of traffic to borrow a mobile phone from a security guard....all so he could ring his boss (the owner of the ute) and swear at him for forgetting to refuel it the night before.

Out there in the darkness is the Harbour Bridge. It's sitting under that big cloud, which to me, looked like one of the spaceships from Independence Day.

Speaking of weird things in the dark, I was annoyed this morning that a car crash failed to happen. I was cruising down a hill at about 40 when White Van Man flew past me. It was on a narrow road - narrow enough that when buses are travelling along it, cars coming the other way have to pull over to let the buses past. White Van Man was in a hurry, and a roundabout was coming up. It's so easy to tell when they're in a hurry - he was snatching his way through the gears as he accelerated.

I hate White Van Man. They are the natural enemy of every other road user.

Coming from the right (with right of way) was a tradie in a ute. I hate tradies in utes almost as much as White Van Man. Both drive way too fast in the morning, and they tend to treat cyclists as road kill. I've had so many close calls with both types that if you armed me with something small and  handy, like a 9mm Hi-Power, I'd open fire reflexively as soon as I spotted either of them on the road.

I was waiting for the brake lights to go red on the van, but nothing happened. White Van Man kept on heading towards the roundabout at around 70 (in a 50 zone). Tradie in ute could see the van coming, but he also showed no signs of slowing, figuring that as he had right of way, White Van Man would stop.

Ha - sucker. That's  happened to me plenty of times. I'm in a roundabout, when White Van Man or Ute Man decides that the road rules don't apply when giving way to cyclists with right of way, and I have to brake hard and swerve to avoid a smash.

In the end, the Ute woke up the fact that White Van Man was in no mood to stop, so the Ute came to a screeching halt, skidding through the roundabout and just missing the back of the Van.

I just shrugged and went on my way, sorry that I had missed what would have been a very entertaining punch up.

The roads around The Rocks are being ripped up at the moment to lay more electrical cables. The result is traffic being diverted down the wrong side of the road by Irish lollypop ladies. Why are all the lollypop ladies Irish? Is this fall out from the economic crash in Ireland?

The people who laid out the cones weren't very generous when it came to marking the lanes. A fat arsed car, like a Ford, would be rubbing those cones along each side. That hasn't stopped the odd idiot from trying to overtake me in the morning when I'm riding through.

The cyclist above and me had a classic Irish moment this morning. We got to the last lollypop lady (having ridden down the wrong side of the road for some distance) and she waved us through. What she forgot to do was to direct us back onto the correct side of the road, so we kept on riding up the wrong side. We were too far gone when she shouted after us that we were going the wrong way. It took me a few seconds to decipher the accent, and by then, there was no turning back. The other bloke looked at me; we shrugged our shoulders at each other and pushed on, hoping no speeding buses were coming the other way.

Ah Cav.....you would have died if you'd been on the bridge with me this morning. As it was, I was just about dying of exhaustion. I spent a few moment admiring the shapely down tubes and curving forks of the lady above, and then she put the hammer down and left me for dead. I'm not used to that. Most female commuters are of the relaxed and non-sweaty variety, preferring upright bikes and lower speeds. The weekends are different - then the roadies and triatheletes come out, and the chicks are seriously fast. But not on weekday mornings. Getting blown into the weeds was a bit disconcerting.

Then again, if you put the two ladies in this photo on one end of a see-saw and me on the other, we'd about balance out.

Tuesday

It's one of those nights. I smashed myself riding home tonight, racing a bloke that was a good 10 years and 20 kilos lighter than me. He made it look easy - I got home OK, but it's hit me hard now. I'm rooted. Utterly rooted.

Just for something different, I rode west on the weekend. I ride for about 90 minutes a day, but my commute is very stop-start. I go through brake pads like crazy. I clip in and out dozens of times. That makes me fairly good at a very specific style of riding. I'm hopeless on longer rides with not breaks, so it's good to head west rather than east. I rode for over 90 minutes and only stopped 3 times (for lights) during that time. All those stops were during short periods at the end of the ride, so I did about 80 minutes non-stop. The poor old legs aren't used to doing that, but they need it.


The only downer during the ride was the knob shown above, who slowly drifted further and further into the bike lane until he almost hit the kerb. Some drivers are just hopeless.

The rain has settled in this evening, and it was preceded by heavy fog this morning. At best, visibility on the hill tops was about 100 metres. I tried to take a photo in the pre-dawn dark to show how creepy it was. This is the best the camera could do.

It was lifting a bit by the time I got into town. Just as I went under the Harbour Bridge, I spotted this photo shoot in progress. Given the huge red light on the back of the bike being photographed, I presume it's going to be used in an advertisement for the rear light.

And that's about all I am good for. Rooted.

One reason why the carbon tax is so useless

From here:

I’ve included the US emissions, because they show a very important point. If we were able somehow magically to reduce our emissions to their 1980 levels, that reduction would be offset by the Chinese gains in one single year. In other words, what the US does is meaningless in global terms.

The US economy is about 14 times larger than the Australian economy. If efforts by the US are made meaningless by Chinese emissions, how stupidly pathetic are our efforts to reduce emissions via a tax on carbon dioxide?

Saturday

I had to re-learn an important cold weather lesson this week - when expunging the contents of your nostrils, be sure to aim your nose away from your handlebars. Enough said.

School holidays have started, so traffic should be light and fast moving. Not this week - there seems to have been a prang or a breakdown on the Anzac Bridge every morning, brining traffic to a stand still. When I'm travelling up hill at a much faster clip than the cars next to me, I know that something has gone badly wrong.

Sure enough, there'd been a bingle at the first exit. It's not surprising - some drivers don't realise until the last minute that the left hand lane exits the bridge, so you occasionally see a car swerving frantically to the right just as the driver realises they're about to get off the bridge too soon. And then you get the inconsiderate morons who don't want to queue up for the exit - they duck in at the last minute, ramming their car into any gap that exists. I don't know what happened this time, but I've seen tow trucks at this spot a few times this year.

A pelican enjoying the sunset. With a couple of little pelicans (I think). I didn't stop to look that closely.

I usually hit the road in the mornings around the same time as the airport curfew lifts. We're not directly under the flight path, but we're close enough to be able to read the tailfins as the planes line up to land. We've had patchy cloud some days this week, and I spent a few minutes one morning watching the lights of the aircraft as they emerged from the clouds. It was still pitch black on the ground, but the sun was up just enough to shed some light on the clouds. It was a pretty amazing sight. I guess you had to be there, shivering on the wet grass, to really get it.

I think winter has arrived

Crumbs - either I am getting old and the cold is starting to penetrate deep into my weary bones - or it's simply getting cold. I still haven't gotten organised enough to search through the garage to find my long fingered gloves, so my finger tips don't thaw out until morning tea time. Must be the impact of the carbon tax.


At least it's dry - so far. Rain is predicted for later in the week. I haven't had a cold, wet day yet. Warm and wet or cold and dry - but no cold and wet.


I nearly smacked into two cyclists coming towards me in the dark this morning. Neither had lights or reflectors, but they were perfectly "safe" because they were wearing helmets! Idiots.


Hmm. It's very cold, and I had a dangerous experience. Putting two and two together, I get "dangerous climate change"


I punched that into Google and searched the SMH site and was rewarded with 2,470 hits. Ben Cubby was using that term again today. Well, not so much using it as regurgitating it. Oddly enough, I had a look at the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis page that his article was based on, and the word "dangerous" doesn't appear anywhere in the scientific reports. And neither does the phrase "climate change" appear anywhere in the report. It's just the cold, hard facts on how ice melts etc and how ice coverage is measured. I wonder how "dangerous climate change" slipped in there?