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.