Flat out fixing flats

Another day, another flat. Actually, two flats. Amazingly enough, the second occurred at exactly the same place as my last one - I'll have to check that stretch carefully for glass and stuff next time I go past.

The first flat was the result of a puncture patch failing to stick properly. That was the cause of one of my recent flats too - and when I got home and found that out I was ready to kick a few things around the backyard. I was starting to think that I had a shard of glass stuck in the tyre that I hadn't managed to find, but as soon as I put the tube into a bucket of water, bubbles were shooting out from the side of the most recently applied patch.

I've never had this problem with patches before. My prime suspect is the glue - my old tube ran out and I got a new kit not long ago. The old stuff stank - you could get high just by looking at it. The new stuff has no odour and no psychedelic properties. I'm wondering if it's been toned down and therefore doesn't bind properly with the rubber.

My new patch kit also came with sand paper for roughening up the tube - the old kit contained something that looked like a miniature cheese grater, and it really ripped up the rubber.

Either way, it seems like the old stuff was much better.

My resolution for tomorrow is to stop being such a cheap bastard and to go and buy three new tubes. The current ones must have 20 patches between them.

Monday photos

I was up so early this morning, I was sure I was going to be taking the most incredible dawn photos. Then I stuffed around for a long time, and missed the best part of the sunrise. Looking back, I have no idea what I did between waking up and leaving that consumed so much time.

One of those industrial/architecture shots that you find in big coffee table type books on architecture. Here, you get it for free. I was trying to get the sun rising behind the Centrepoint Tower.

I'm not sure that's any better.

Here's a photo I prepared earlier. I dug it out of the archives whilst perusing the photo albums tonight.

Some of those cars are almost as old as some of my regular readers. And I bet they're in better shape too.

One of those days...

Woke up this morning and thought a nice Sunday ride would be a good idea.

Dressed up, packed my kit, walked out to the bike and.... found the back tyre was flat.

Couldn't be bothered changing it. Climbed out of my gear and went back to bed.

Eventually crawled out of bed and fixed the tube, since I'll need a working tyre to get to work tomorrow. I then got really enthusiastic and washed and degreased the bike.

Went to put the back wheel on again.

Tyre was flat.

It wasn't a rogue bit of glass trapped in the tyre - it was one of my useless patching efforts. Time to buy some new tubes - the old ones are starting to get patches on top of patches.

Teenagers

There I am, sitting here in front of the computer last night reading this and that.

Teenager looks over from his blood thirsty first person shooter game and looks at the article I'm reading.

"Who was Steve Jobs?"

Oh, for fuck's sake.....

Congestion heart failure

I bet you're thinking, "Idiot - it's congestive heart failure". Nope - the above photo is about pedestrian congestion at peak hour when trying to get out of the city...

....and this photo is about heart failure. Ahem. It's bloody difficult taking a photo like this when ascending a grade like this in the rain. Especially when I put my foot down as I went around the bend up ahead and the back wheel broke out and went sideways. Brand new tyre as well, with tread - my legs were feeling mighty powerful and rested that day.

It's a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll

AC/DC re-enactment.

Like I said - a lot of people standing around watching other people standing around.

AC/DC remake

When Les Kenfield played the bagpipes in the classic video clip for AC/DC's Long Way to the Top, there weren't a lot of women in rock and roll.

But today he will be part of a re-creation of the video clip which will be nearly all women. The female rock and rollers will do a psychedelic interpretation of the Long Way to the Top clip - filmed on the back of a flat-bed truck for the music show Countdown - for the Sydney launch of the Tasmanian Mona Foma arts festival

I rode past this today - it was just a bunch of people standing around on the back of a truck doing nothing whilst the film crew faffed around.

I took some photos, but haven't had a chance to upload them yet. I'm sure they'll show a bunch of people standing around on the back of a truck doing nothing whilst the film crew faff around.

Had better days

1. Dropped my socks in a water puddle in the shower at work
2. Tore a hole in the crotch of my trousers
3. Computer blew up
4. Ran out of shaving gel

Thankfully, that was the worst of it.

Now for some upside - go and watch the rather incredible education video at this link.

The Mark of Chain

Teenager eyed my calf the other day and suddenly got all excited - "Hey, is that a really cool tattoo on your leg".

Nope.

It was a grease mark from where I'd leaned up against the front cog, which left an arc of black teeth up my calf. It was the Mark of Chain. Or perhaps the Mark of Cog. It's certainly the mark of a filthy bike that needs a wash and degrease.

Teenager wandered off all disappointed. I went to the bathroom where it took a good five minutes of scrubbing with a stiff brush to remove it.

Lopsided

Check out this lopsided backpack. Just hopeless.

Speaking of which, I loaned Junior one of my backpacks recently - a medium sized daypack.

When I handed it over, all the excess straps had been bundled up tightly and wrapped with black electrical tape. I could jump up and down and ride at high speed and the pack didn't budge, rattle or have any flappy things flapping off it.

It was returned with straps flapping in all directions.

A certain type of person will understand why I got upset.

Crusty eyes

I had one of these trees in a backyard once, and I still can't remember what they're called.

But I do know this- see all those white hairy things hanging from the flowers? At this time of the year, the trees are utterly covered in them, and there are plenty of these trees around. Which means oodles of those hairy pollen things floating around.

I rode down a local road recently and one lane was completely blanketed in the things - the road had turned a whitish-yellow.

And so when I ride, the damned things end up in my eyes all the time. Which means waking up with crusty eyes and a runny nose.

It would be so much easier to wrap myself in a cocoon and never have to interact with all this horrid natural stuff.

How much do you know about stuff?

Try this exam. It's only 33 questions. Took me about 5 minutes.

Hat tip to Sean Linnane.

---

PS - I got 30 out of 33. There were two questions that I had no idea about, but I screwed up on my third wrong answer.

The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%.

Vodka, bikes and stockings don't mix

Dr Gordian Fulde has an article in the Tele every week, cataloguing the drunken idiots that are carted into his emergency ward every weekend. I try and read him every week.

Also we are seeing an increasing amount of intoxicated bicycle riders at night, often with no helmet. This usually results with them falling off, just like the 28-year-old salesman who broke his jaw by hitting the road hard.

Probably riding a single speed or fixie.

When I was at uni, a mate had a party at a bar with a theme of "Dirty Doctors, Naughty Nurses and Perverted Patients". All the women dressed as doctors and most of the blokes dressed as nurses - it just turned out that way.

The bar was on the opposite side of the campus to my college. After getting full of vodka jelly shots, dancing the worm on the floor etc etc, the bar closed and I had to get home.

A mate and I both had our push bikes, so we decided to race across campus.

It was a shockingly fast race - we were both very fit and totally plastered. We rode like maniacs. Err, actually we were maniacs. We somehow managed to get across the campus alive, and then I clipped a low fence with a pedal when I was just metres from home (and victory).

I went down on the tarmac - hard. I wasn't wearing a helmet of course.

But I was wearing stockings under my dress.

Fishnet stockings.

I ripped off more skin in that crash than any crash I've had since. I probably lost more skin in that crash than in all the others combined.

Trouble was, I was shitfaced and not feeling much pain. So I went to bed.

When I woke the next morning, a scab had formed on the abraded skin.

And glued into that scab was the remains of my stockings. And my sheets.

I now had to get the stockings off.

Combine a king sized hangover with peeling off scabs and stockings and bits of fused in hair, and then scrubbing out the bits of gravel and sand and then rubbing iodine into the open wounds - it doesn't bear thinking about.

By all means ride around drunk - just don't do it in stockings.

Pricks in BMWs

What is it about fat, middle aged wog males in convertible BMWs? There I am, signalling my intention to turn right at a roundabout, meaning I've got right of way over oncoming traffic. I see this silver BMW coming towards me quite fast - when I am committed to the turn, I deduce that he's got no intention of stopping. He's seen me, but he's in a car and I'm on a bike, so I guess he thinks that gives him right of way.

If I had been a less experienced cyclist, I would have been a hood ornament. A badly messed up hood ornament - he must have been doing 50km/h. I know that it doesn't matter if you're in the right or not - you'll end up being the one in traction. Just brake, give them the finger and stay alive.

As I gave him the finger, I noticed he was yapping on his mobile phone too. He saw me alright - the arrogant prick just didn't want to stop, and he didn't care if he killed or injured me.

I like BMWs as cars, but I really hate some of their drivers.

Rooted

I put in a long day of reasonably hard physical labour on the weekend. On Monday morning, I was utterly rooted. I hopped on the bike, and could hardly move. I wasn't particularly stiff or sore - the legs simply had nothing to give. There was nothing in the tank. I had a problem with a clogged fuel filter in the car last year - you'd put your foot to the floor and nothing would happen - the fuel pump simply couldn't deliver more than a trickle of fuel to the engine. That's how it felt.

What pleased me no end was that I did the work with a bloke who was about a decade younger than me. He didn't even show at work on Monday - he was too knackered to leave the house, and he takes the train to the office!

Strange thing is that come Monday afternoon, the legs were on fire. I blasted home in record time. It was as if the morning lethargy had never existed. It was the same again today going to and from work - I've been riding like it might be my last ride ever, not worrying about crawling out of bed tomorrow and climbing into the saddle at oh-dark-hundred.

The body certainly works in mysterious ways.

Now that it's warming up again, I'm striking a terrible problem in the way home - barbeques. I'll be charging up a long, slight hill and I'll get a big whiff of steak and chops wafting over someone's fence. It's a terrible thing to smell when you're hungry and riding hard - the urge to stop, jump the fence and make off with a chop or two is irresistible. I've been getting home feeling utterly ravenous thanks to those barbecuing bastards on my route home.

There's hope for us yet

From the Silly today:

But it is the loss of faith in the federal government that is most striking. Only 30 per cent of people believe Canberra can be trusted to do the right thing - a sharp drop from a 2009 high of 48 per cent when Kevin Rudd was in power.

Hooray. Most people have finally figured out that leaving things to government does not produce a land of milk and honey populated by unicorns. I've been inside government - I've been a bureaucrat. I know what a completely screwed up place it can be, and how little most public servants care for the public they are supposed to be serving. There are exceptions, but in the main they are lost in a tide of indifference and arrogance.

What I want to know is who that 30% consists of. Can we round them up and deport them to North Korea or Cuba?

Monday photos

Sunlight over the water, Moses style.

Ninja cyclist (dressed in black from head to foot).

The alternative (yes, we can see you from a mile away).

I don't get it

According to the Greens, urban consolidation is a good thing and urban sprawl is a bad thing. Higher densities are required in our inner suburbs etc etc.

If that's the case, why are the Greens vigorously protesting against every medium and high density development in our area? Why are they doing their best to make apartment developments uneconomic by imposing stupid zoning restrictions on them, and forcing developers to include "affordable" apartments?

I just don't get it. Is it that they want higher densities, but just not where they happen to live?

How do you view this story?

From the SMH:


WASHINGTON: The counterinsurgency tactic that is sending US soldiers out on foot patrols among the Afghan people, rather than riding in armoured vehicles, has contributed to a dramatic increase in arm and leg amputations, sometimes with the loss of multiple limbs following blast injuries.


The number of US troops who had amputations rose sharply from 86 in 2009, to 187 last year and 147 so far this year, military officials said, releasing a report on catastrophic wounds.


Of those, the number of troops who lost two or three limbs rose from 23 in 2009 to 72 last year to 77 so far this year. Only about a dozen of all amputations came from Iraq; the rest were from Afghanistan, where militants are pressing the insurgency with roadside bombs, handmade landmines and other explosives.


Officials said genital injuries also have risen significantly, but they did not give specific figures.


The sharp rise in severe injuries came as a build-up of foreign forces expanded the counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to protect civilians, win their support away from insurgents and help build an Afghan government the population will embrace. The soldier on foot is at greater risk for severe injuries, the report noted, ''and the injury severity [in Afghanistan] confirms this''.


A study by military doctors found that while the severity of injuries was rising, fewer soldiers were being killed in action.


As terrible as the loss of limbs is, it's bloody marvellous that the lives of so many badly wounded soldiers are being saved. The medical care our soldiers get these days is absolutely amazing. To keep someone alive on the battlefield after they've lost three limbs would have been viewed as a miracle 30 years ago.

Never mind the pants

The SMH had a story this week about "shoddy army uniforms" tearing in the crutch area during operations in Afghanistan. In the paper edition, the story was accompanied by a photo of a digger with a hole the size of a dinner plate in the front of his pants.

As far as I am concerned, this story is about 25 years too late. Same thing happened to me on an exercise when we were still running around in jungle greens - in the days just before the camo uniforms came out. I used to drop lots of weight during an exercise. The pants had some adjustable loops on each side where you could take them in or out a few inches, but that was never enough given how much my waist contracted over two weeks. I'd usually have to resort to tying a loop of string around the belt buckles to bring them in by more than the designed minimum.

On one assault, the string broke, my pants slipped down a bit and as I leapt over a log and the crotch ripped from end to end. You don't let something silly like that slow you down - we finished the assault, and then regrouped and took stock. I was a bit uncomfortable, as I was lying on my guts and I wasn't wearing any undies. My tackle was one with nature, so to speak.

It's at times like those that you develop a sudden paranoia about ants. Big ants.

But it was all OK - we got back to our position without nature gnawing on my nuts.

The trouble began after we came in through the wire.

A female officer decided to attend our de-brief. Normally, you sit or squat down in a semi-circle around the patrol commander for this sort of thing, but I thought it wiser to stand up and try and keep the flaps of my pants reasonably close together.

The officer didn't like that idea. She wanted me sitting down like a good little boy. My section commander knew the score, and tried to reason with her quietly, but she was the type that preferred to be officious rather than sensible.

So I sat down.

At the front.

With my legs crossed.

My platoon commander had wandered up behind the female officer to listen in. He quickly noticed I had gone commando and was letting it all hang out. He nudged the platoon sergeant next to him and they both disappeared behind a tree quietly cacking themselves laughing. My section was sitting around me grinning like idiots, their teeth gleaming through the cam cream. I just sat there like a serene Buddha, waiting for the whole thing to be over and wondering whether I'd be better off wearing the filthy spare pair of pants currently mouldering away in my pack or sticking with what I had on.

Finally, she noticed.

The de-brief ended in mid-sentence.

She started to bawl me out for flashing my tackle at her, then realised that she'd ordered me to sit down there against the better judgement of my section commander. It was then a case of "exit, stage left" for her, and we didn't see her out bush for the remainder of the exercise. Hanging around with half naked savages was not to her liking.

Infantry life is bloody hard on clothing - you're better off just having a good system for quickly replacing the gear that's been shredded and torn by normal operations.