Windy Wednesday

Why do clothing companies adopt such strange names these days? What happened to using your name, like Thomas Pink, for your clothing company?

The knicks (shorts) being worn by this bloke are made by Cannibal. I'm sure cannibals would love to chew on his sleek and muscley legs.

This bloke has knicks by Capo. Is the Mafia moving into cycling? Again, his legs are very smooth. I am still firmly in the hair-legged camp. Note the clean lines on their bikes though - no panniers for these dudes. They'd rather suffer the discomfort of a backpack than admit that they have joined the ranks of the commuter. There's a strong sociological/psychological element at play here. Those that train or race on weekends abhor the idea of panniers - it's like a tow ball or a roo bar on a Porsche. By avoiding panniers, they maintain the idea that they are lightweight, low drag racers.

Racing to get home. I didn't sit on the back of this pack of hubbard for long - just long enough to get this photo.

See the lady with the arrow pointing at her head on the middle-right? She had a paddle in a padded bag strapped to her back. Up the creek without a kayak. That's different.

Notice the bloke on the left hugging the pole? Typical behaviour of those of us with cleats - it's easier to lean on something than click out of the pedal - and you get a faster take off.

Insane cow in a car

I had the small pleasure this morning of witnessing a near run thing from close up. I was approaching a set of lights with a Hilux to my right. The lights went orange, and the Hilux stopped.

The driver of a black sports car of some sort that was tailgating the Hilux almost rear ended the Hilux, and the idiot tailgating driver immediately leant on her horn to complain. I look over my shoulder, and beheld a furious woman behind the wheel of the sports car. From the expression on her face, and the set of her shoulders, I could see that she was incensed that something as lowly as a Hilux would impede her progress. Unfortunately, the field of view of my camera is too narrow to pick up the near impalement of her radiator on the silver tow ball of the Hilux.

When the lights went green, the black sports car took off, swerving closely around the Hilux and then went speeding up the road.

Not long after, the woman spotted a parking spot, and proceeded to park very badly. She parked so badly, she had to drive out and then reverse in again. However, in doing so, she came shooting out of her parking spot without looking my way. If I had been a bit faster, she would have run me over. If there had been a car in front of me, she would have T-boned it.

She was, in short, a fucking idiot. Nothing worse than a combination of entitlement, aggression and poor driving skills behind the wheel of a relatively fast car.

The thing that got me is that if she was nuts enough to take on a Hilux - the indestructible beast of the road - how would she react to a bicycle getting in her way?

Tuesday hot rodding

Damn this bloke on the fixie was quick. His legs were something else - watching him pedal, it looking like a bunch of fat pythons were having a root under his skin. I sat on his tail for all of half a minute, and then I was spent. Gone. Rooted.

Nothing like having the advantage of rolling into a green traffic light to jump the group. Wouldn't have made much difference, as the last two in this pack were complete hubbards.

Check out how fast the guy in front is pedalling - that's what it looks like when you're doing 50-55km/h on a nice downhill. His lead didn't last though - like many a cyclist on this route, he failed to apply enough power going up the next hill, and he was easily reeled in.

More Monday photos

Photos? Sorry, I only have one cool photo today. I liked the single cloud hovering over the city, which is under that big ball of light in the middle of the photo. Not often you see just one cloud over the CBD. Unless a building is on fire.

Monday

Monday. A day when the muscles are rested and the body is feeling good after a weekend of naps, nanna naps and afternoon sleepy-sleeps. Monday is the only day of the week when I feel like this. From here, it is all downhill. Well, actually the body starts to feel more and more wretched because of all the uphill. If I was only coasting downhill to and from work, I'd be feeling as fit as a fiddle all the way to Friday.

So we start another short series of comments on cyclists seen out and about today.

I don't get the riding in sandals thing. I guess it is ok for short distances, but the soles are not stiff enough for laying down the power when required. Bike shoes hardly flex at all, so when you push your leg down, all the power goes through your foot and then the shoe and then to the pedal and that makes the cranks go round and round that much faster.

Nice pair of knicks. These ones read "Army Navy Air Force", and as is right and proper, the Air Farce gets the bottom slot, right next to the bung hole.

What? That's not a bicycle. Damn right. I passed three of these things in quick succession this morning. All of them stunk to high heaven. That's part of the downside of riding - you get lots of air, fresh and foul.

I also went past my 3rd random breath test in 3 days. Tomorrow, I should stop at the pub on the corner, order a pint, tip it over my head and then ride past the cops at the RBT as close as a I can and see if any sniff me and start chasing me going, "Oi, pull over".

Where are the Greenies complaining about pollution?

I've blogged time and again about how much cleaner our air and most of our rivers are these days than when I was a kid. Controls on industrial waste, scrubbers on power stations and enormous improvements in motor vehicle engine management systems have produced great improvements in air quality. I know - I breathe in large quantities of it every day as I ride to and from work, and I can tell you, it's quite breathable.

Then we have pollution in China. This series of photos is quite incredible (thanks to Watts Up With That). I've visited the old steel plants in Wollongong and Newcastle (when it was still running) and they were nothing like this.

Nothing quite explains the cheapness of life in China as these photos.

Safety Nazis are out to kill you

I was not the only one riding home in the wet this week. However, I was the only one pulling over several times to wipe what I thought was stinging sweat from my eyes.

I have long thought that when it rains, the rain gets into the foam padding on the inside of my helmet and washes out all the accumulated sweat in the form of a super-salty brine, and it is that brine which has been running into my eyes and causing me to pull over with excrutiating pain in one or both eyes. Apart from regularly washing my helmet in order to remove the salt build up, I figured there was not much else I could do.

This week, I discovered the real cause of my eye aches. I peeled off the foam pads that sit against my forehead, and there under the pads was the remains of a safety sticker. What had been washing into my eyes was not old sweat - it was old glue. No wonder it hurt like buggery.

I'm sure the sticker had some useless Safety Nazi warning on it - like "Do not use this helmet as a serving vessel for hot soup", or "Unsuitable for wrestling badgers", "Do not set fire to this helmet whilst wearing it".

If that glue had run into both my eyes whilst descending at speed, the outcome might not have been pleasant. Think traction, skin grafts and metal things holding your bones together.

I have now removed every Safety Nazi sticker from the helmet, and scrupulously scrubbed every bit of glue off the liner. I think I will now go hang out at the offices of these awful Safety Nazis, and ride over the first one to leave work. I will then claim that I was blinded by the glue from one of their stickers, and failed to see them - even if I just happen to run one of them over in the lobby of their palatial office complex, and even if that lobby is on the 19th floor.

Friday photos

In the beginning, we start at the end. Here's a nice view of The Bay. I sat on a bench here, watching the birds diving for two-headed fish whilst fixing a flat. I put a brand new puncture proof tyre on last weekend, and it lasted four days before Sydney's awful roads taught it a lesson - "Your fancy, hand made German tyres are for wimps".

The double pannier look. Panniers are becoming more and more noticeable. When I started commuting, most people wore a backpack at most, using it to carry a clean shirt and some socks and jocks. Now, I see enormous panniers that could be used for a continent crossing expedition being lugged too and from town bolted to many a bike. I subscribe to the old rule that the bigger your backpack, the more crap you'll pack into it. I purposely bought a small pannier for the bike in order to keep my load as light as possible.

I get the feeling that this bloke was commuting to a job in Balmain. He's dressed in his work clothes - right the way down to his black shoes.

Yakking on mobile phones whilst on the road is not the sole preserve of drivers.

I always have a quiet chuckle when I see earth moving machinery strapped to barges for work around the waterways. It looks like the boat launching deck at the UTS rowing club is having a bit of a facelift.

Arty photo

I stuffed up when getting the camera ready for a shot and took this by accident.

Pretty cool if you ask me

Cop with no sense of humour

This story could have been soooooo good:

Teen muggers zap man in buttocks

"Occasionally we have one or two pop up here and there," he said.

"It's unfortunate that people think that this is another way to arm themselves in the community.

"It is alarming that these sorts of things are out there. Apart from the fact that they are illegal, they can cause serious injury."

No, you stupid plod - it's not "alarming". You were supposed to say that it's "shocking".

Barefoot, tattoo'd and wet

OK, the first video is slightly interesting because it starts out with a big drop of water in the middle of the lens that distorts the picture; then as I roll down the hill at about 50km/h, the wind pushes the water away and the picture clears.... clears enough to see the rain pissing down and the water flying up from the tyre of the bike in front of me. The rain drops were so large tonight that going faster than 50 was out of the question - they hurt too much when impacting on my face.

I am no longer surprised by the people I meet on the road. I am sure that before long, I am going to cycle past someone wearing a purple Carebear suit.

I need to drink more often

This is the second RBT that I've been waved through two days in a row. Obviously the cops manning these drunk stops have never walked past the locations in town where the bike couriers hang out on Fridays and drink like crazy.

I wonder how wobbly I'd have to be before they'd consider pulling me over?

I have given up trying to edit these videos in Picasa, and gone back to Windows Movie Maker. I might have to consider splashing out some dosh on a proper editing package.

As for the camera that I am using, if money was no object, I would buy a VIO POV 1.5 megapack, which retails for $US629.

Since I am not made of money, I have gone with an Oregon Scientific ATC3K "action camera", which I bought online for $AUS220.

I didn't have any problems mounting it on the handlebars, and the quality is passable. It really does seem to be as rugged and waterproof as the advertising blurb makes out - I have accidentally dropped it on concrete, and ridden in heavy rain a number of times without a hiccup.

On the downside, I don't like the limited field of view, the poor image quality or the fact that it is too heavy to mount properly on a well ventilated bike helmet. You also need to spend more money on a proper SD memory card (I got a 4GB card for $34) and a set of rechargeable batteries (I bought 4 and a charger for $80). So all up, you are facing at least $330 to get setup.

However, as it largely has the market to itself at this price point, you either buy one or you don't. Now that I have it, I wouldn't ride without it.

If you don't feel like shelling out $330 just yet, I suggest you wait a while and see if they release a new model with better image quality.

Thursday photo essay

Wayne Swan pushing a few bags of free cash into the CBD. Line up for yer $900.

I bet this is how most of us will feel in a few years when it comes to paying off the bills that Kev and Woin are running up on our behalf.

"I've got lawyers on my arse!" (Carroll & O'Dea are a law firm).

Ms Casual on a very relaxed looking bike. Not all commuters are lycra clad speed freaks.

I followed one lady home tonight who was riding shoeless. That might have been because it was pissing down with rain at the time, and she decided her shoes would be better off travelling home in her waterproof saddle bag. One thing I did noticed is that she had a huge tattoo on her back. I could only see a few inches of it as her shirt rode up, but it was a lot more than a simple set of arse antlers. I have the feeling she had something like a big dragon all the way up her back - yet when we stopped side by side at the lights, she barely reached my shoulder.

Discrimination

Look at how these three cops at this RBT treat me - they don't even wave me through - they just step out of the way, laugh, and ignore me. The thought of pulling over a cyclist for a breath test is hilarious to them.

Many decades ago, when I was a decadent uni student, I went to a birthday party that was themed "Dirty doctors, naughty nurses and perverted patients". Most of the blokes, including me, went as nurses. Most of the women turned up as doctors. It was a dirty, perverted night. For some reason, I ended up racing Yellowbeard back to college on our bikes. It was dark, we had no lights, and I am sure we were wearing sunglasses.

I was full of shooters and vodka, and I failed to take the gap in a low fence made out of coppers logs. One pedal caught a log, and down I went at high speed. Being drunk as a skunk, the landing on the asphalt didn't hurt that much. I went up to my room, pushing a bent bike, and passed out in my nurses outfit.

The next morning was not good. I had torn a lot of skin off both legs, and the stockings that I was wearing were now embedded in a thick crust of dried blood. It took about an hour of soaking and peeling to get them off.

Let that be a lesson to you. Drinking and cycling don't mix.

Not so squeezy

How brave are you? Would you shoot the gap below at 40km/h with nothing more than a thin smear of lycra to protect your skin?

Me? Not in a million years. I definitely would have done it 25 years ago, but time has taught me how fragile the human body can be, and how fickle are the fates.

If you wouldn't put your life on the line to zoom through that gap, imagine how it must feel when a bus goes by at 50km/h and leaves you just that amount of room - or less.

That's what happened on the T-way a few weeks ago, causing the cyclist to go postal on the driver. I can handle it when the bus driver is forced by circumstances and traffic into giving me very little room - but how would you take it if someone did that to you deliberately? Check out the size of that bus, and the closeness - it could snuff you out in the second. And if all else failed, I could bail left and go over the kerb. On the T-way, the only thing on the other side of the cyclist was a concrete wall.

All I can say to my fellow cyclists is this - don't get mad. Get a video camera like mine, and get even.

Close run things

Man, I wish I had a head mounted video camera so that I could capture more of the stupidity that I see around me each and every day. For instance, the driver of the dark car on the right heading towards me had a mobile phone in her left hand (clamped to ear) and a cigarette in her right hand - and she was waving the cigarette around as she talked with her hands. Neither hand was anywhere near the steering wheel. And we wonder why the death toll on the roads stubbornly refuses to decline.

A near wipeout with a bike courier who was going way, way too fast for his own good and mine. The speed limit in this spot is 10km/h - no one on a bike goes that slow (I get the wobbles and almost fall over when going that speed), but we generally don't exceed 20km/h, which is a reasonable pace given the plethora of pedestrians in the vicinity.

This dick was going much faster than that. He was riding "furiously". He needs to have "fuckstick" stamped on his forehead.

Several hundred good reasons to ride to work

Most days, the traffic into town flows fairly well. Sure, it's not always moving quickly, but it does tend to move.

Not today. Don't know what went wrong, but the road leading onto the City West Link was a car park stretching back about 1km.

For me, it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the birds were not being run over by speeding trucks and my new back tyre failed to puncture once. Not so for the poor buggers fuming in traffic as they attempted to get to their places of employment.

Sure, cycling is hard work. You get wet, hot, drenched, windblown and have to put up with occasional mouthful of flies in summer. Flat tyres happen. Ball rash can be a problem. Calf muscles cramp every now and then at 3am when you're peacefully passed out in bed. Fate sometimes dishes out a rendevous with the road surface. But it's almost never, ever frustrating. Raised blood pressure has never been an issue when I've been in the saddle.

Live long, and relax.

Too many damned bikes!

Where did all these bloody bikes come from? For the last few weeks, the weather has alternated between wet and cold and miserable and stinking hot and nasty. Today, it was almost perfect. I cruised around The Bay at lower than normal speed, just soaking up the atmosphere and savouring being outdoors before being locked in an air conditioned dungeon for the rest of the day.

The nice weather seems to have brought out every other person with a bike in Sydney. It was a bloody traffic jam of two wheelers all the way into town. Overtaking was a big problem because of the sheer number of bikes in front.

I'm going to go back to driving if it gets any worse.

Nice, quiet, gentle killers

How much crap can one read in a day without wanting to punch a hole in your computer monitor?

On the Fort Hood killer:

''The whole family is in a state of denial,'' Mr Hamad, 65, said. ''We don't believe he is capable of doing something like that. I was amazed and shocked, because it's not him. He's very quiet, gentle.

Ah, fellahs, although he was a shrink, he was in the Army. The main purpose of the Army is killing people and breaking things. When you join any branch of the military, you do so in the knowledge that one day you may need to ventilate people and blow things up. Yes, even those that have comfy, rear echelon desk jobs are occasionally called upon to lug a rifle around and blat at the enemy. It's part and parcel of the work environment.

One of the interesting things I used to observe as a Reservist was the process of putting on and taking off your "green head". The "green head" was the mindset and outlook that I adopted when I pulled on my uniform. It was quite different to my "civilian head". It usually took me an hour or two to put the green head on, but it could takes days to completely take it off after an exercise.

Here's the thing - when you don that uniform and enter the company of other soldiers, your personality changes. It's a Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde kind of thing. I doubt my family would have recognised me if they'd seen me running around the shrubbery for a week with an M-60.

I'm normally laid back and relaxed to the point of catatonia. I'm a live and let live kind of bloke.

However, put the green head on, and I'm ready to lay waste to entire civilisations. The problem with people who say that someone was "quiet and gentle" is that they've never seen them with their green head on. Or in his case, his Jihad head.

To give you an example, one of our favourite drinking chants used to be "atrocity, atrocity, atrocity". Picture 10, 20 or more blokes standing around with beers, then chanting that at the top of their lungs, sculling their drinks and then running around yelling and tackling each other and generally causing testosterone fueled mayhem. The outcome was generally bits of broken furniture and the odd split lip.

The problem with these wet, soggy fish that write for the SMH is that they've never experienced this kind of thing. The politically correct, metrosexual Arts graduates that make up the journalistic population have never done the Green Head thing. If they had, they'd realise that quiet, gentle people are quite capable of mentally switching gears and doing some incredible or terrible things.

Food exports good, food imports bad

I heard the other day that Australia grows enough food to feed 80 million people. We export enough food to feed 60 million people - the equivalent of the UK.

Another way of thinking about that is we only eat 1/4 of what we grow. We export 3/4 of what we grow.

Consider then the SMH getting upset when our supermarkets start selling - the horror - imported food.

It comes as consumer and industry groups have accused supermarket giants of lowering standards of fresh produce, particularly by shunning local growers in favour of cheaper, imported produce.

I remember a concept known as "comparative advantage". If the Chinese are better at growing cabbages than we are, but we are better at raising cattle, then it makes sense for us to import Chinese cabbages and for the Chinese to import our beef. We both gain through this process.

So what is the problem with us importing a bit of food, given how much we export? Remember all that nasty wheat that we sold to Iraq? Remember those poor sheep that we flog to middle eastern throat slashers? Remember all that lovely, expensive seafood that we sell to the Japanese, such as our best quality tuna for sushi?

Another case of those geniuses at the SMH failing to light up the single brain cell that they share.

Spot the dot

Ha! Bet you thought I would be posting a picture of something dirty, didn't you?

The last few years have seen an avalanche of small and interesting innovations when it comes to cycling. This bloke has a small reflective dot on the back of each shoe - each is about the size of a 10 cent coin. When you pedal, the dots go up and down as your feet rotate, and the movement draws the eye - especially at night.

It's a small thing, but if it's enough for a car driver to pick you up at night from behind, it might save your neck (unless the driver is pissed - then you're rooted).

Lots of little things like this have crept into cycling without most people noticing. They are not the result of government mandates or OH&S legislation - they are generated by people having a brain wave and either producing and marketing a new product themselves, or it being introduced by one of the major equipment manufacturers who see such innovations as giving them an edge in a very competitive market.

It's just one of those little indicators as to how the free market constantly improves our lives in little ways - in ways that sclerotic, centralised, ham-fisted bureaucratic government never can.

Phew, dodged a bullet there

Good thing this was not I.

Turnbull advisor quits over Hitler video.

After all, what sort of juvenile jackass makes Hitler videos?

Wide load

The RTA likes to tell us that "the road is there to share".

Bit difficult to share the road when you fill it from side to side.

Passing shadows

No, I am not intruding on the turf of the new and improved Shadowlands. I just liked the effect of chasing my shadow in this short clip.

Inept, incompetent, incomprehensible urban design

I have this thing about riding on the footpath - ie, I don't like doing it. Apart from the footpath being for people who are on foot, travelling on the footpath is annoyingly slow, and they tend to be lumpy and badly maintained - and that hurts my bottom. Footpaths are not for me.

There are times though when one has to lay one's principles and buttocks aside and take to the footpath. The only place I do it is around the Slip Inn in the CBD.

The shit-for-brains planners who have the CBD under their purview obviously have no fucking idea of how people are using the streets and bike paths that they have planned. They sit in their ivory towers and plan how people should do things. People take one look at what has been built, go "That is utter shite", and they go elsewhere.

The planners of course immediately think that there is nothing wrong with their plans - instead, the people are defective. Things would work properly if only we had the right sort of people.

I am one of those defectives.

The planners have built a bike route from the Pyrmont Bridge that goes up King St into the heart of the CBD. That's fine if you have a death wish, and work in the heart of the CBD. For those like me that work in the northern end of the CBD, the better option is to avoid King St and go left onto Sussex St. A planner with half a brain worked out that there would be a need for a route to the north, and so a bike lane starts a few hundred metres north of the King & Sussex St intersection.

What the poo-flinging monkey rooters didn't plan for was the idea that cyclists might actually want to come off the Pyrmont Bridge, turn left and join that bike lane going north. Or that cyclists coming from the north down Sussex St might want to turn right onto the Pyrmont Bridge. The failure to link the two shows me that most planners in this city are suffering from a bad case of advanced brain death.

The results are shown in the video above - chaos and near catastrophe each and every morning and evening as dozens of bikes take to the footpath to avoid a death trap.

We'd be better off if most urban planners were dropped into a cement mixer and poured into the foundations of a new six lane highway.

Has been rockers who should grow up

I saw John Waters today. He was chasing a kid called Rusty.

We were in what I would describe as a warehouse for kids. Lots of casually dressed dads were wandering around barefoot, chasing their versions of the Little Monkey up and down slides and in and out of ball pits.

Waters of course was dressed like an ageing rocker - think Keith Richards, except without the cool and the cigarette. Men with grey hair should not wear ear rings.

He was born in 1948. That makes him 61 - almost a pensioner.

Time to grow up and act your age.

How good are real estate price indexes?

Each week, I open the local rag and have a look at a table that they publish on local house prices. They always track whether prices are going up or down, and by how much. This week, prices were down 2.8% on last year.

I can't stand these sorts of indexes, as they are notoriously open to all sorts of abuse and interpretation.

I wish they'd produce an index that is based on cost per square metre - either of the land parcel or the house or the two combined.

Say you spend $750,000 buying a run down shack on a 1000 sqm block. As the shack is worthless, the land is obviously worth $750 per square metre.

A year later, after a McMansion is constructed, the place sells for $1.1 million.

Under our existing index, the real estate industry would be crowing that values are up 46% in a year. Buy now! Great investments to be had! You too can make a killing in real estate!

However, what if the house cost $500,000 to build? I'd say the owners just sold out at a $150,000 loss, and that does not include the costs of conveyancing, stamp duty and the interest on whatever they borrowed to buy and build.

Or consider a house that starts at say 200 square metres, and is valued at $800,000. The owners extend upwards and outwards, ending up with a 300 square metre house. The place sells for $1.1 million. Have they just realised a 37% gain?

Well, my index would say that you started with a package worth $400 per square metre of house. You ended up with a package worth $366 per square metre.

It's not like you are comparing the price of apples across time. I am pretty sure that the apples we were eating in 1960 are fairly similar to those eaten today (at least for those varieties like the Granny Smith that have been around that long). With apples, at least we know we are comparing roughly the same goods from year to year.

With houses, you aren't. The house my parents live in looks nothing like it did when they bought it. They have renovated very extensively, altering most rooms in one way or another. People install swimming pools, knock the back off and extend backwards, demolish pre-war fibro dog boxes and replace them with brick McMansions, demolish outdoor toilets and move the bathroom indoors (yes, a friend had to do that in the mid 1990's).

One thing we do know is that the houses that were built in the 1950s were much smaller than those being built today. Is there any real estate index that factors that in? Do any of them take inflation into account?

I do know one thing is for sure - real estate spruikers will do anything to fiddle the stats to make them look as positive as possible.

Check out this crap head

Yes, some cyclists are raving knob-monkeys. If there are pedestrians on a pedestrian crossing, you're supposed to stop and give way.

The pedestrians were not impressed, and I don't blame them.

This cyclist then proceeded to jump the next two sets of lights, which were red.

It didn't do him any good. When we got into town, he was just in front of me.

Some people are just twats.

The opportunity cost of stupid Green expenditure

Want to know where this Green madness is taking us?

Look no further than Leichhardt Council, home to a bunch of deep-left Greenatics.

Earlier this year, the council did some work on their section of the bike path that goes around the Bay Run. I watched trucks pouring concrete for days on end, hoping that a gravel section of goat track was finally going to turn into a world class bit of of infrastructure.

I should have remembered that if you give a Greenie a project, chances are they'll completely fuck it up. Here is what the path should look like end to end (the pink stuff is the freshly poured concrete):

It seems the budget ran out halfway through, so this is what half this section looks like - rough gravel that floods in winter, and is of no use to roadies like me.

Why is this so?

I checked the Leichhardt budget, and on page 15 found these numbers:

Budget and Parking Management Taskforce

Bicycle plan works additional funding - $265k, dropping to $255k next year

Carbon neutrality additional funding:

2008/09 - $59,000

2009/10 - $118,000

2010/11 - $177,000

2011/12 - $236,000

Environmental education increase

2008/09 - $53,648

2009/10 - $54,616

2010/11 - $55,617

2011/12 - $56,817

Over the next 4 years, council will spend $1.285m on bike works. During that same period, it will spend $810,000 on useless green waste-a-thons. If they spent that money on bike paths, they would get 66% more paths.

Now I am not your typical wooly-headed bike riding, tofu eating, mental patient environmentalist. But I get the idea that if you build good bike paths, more people will ride bikes. If that is your idea of a good environmental outcome, then surely you'd want to maximise the number of cyclists, and in order to do that, you need to lay as much concrete as possible in the form of bike paths. But those window licking Greens on council think that they'll get more people to ride bikes by printing leaflets extolling cycling and putting hanging banners from lamp posts. Sorry, fucktards, leaflets will do nothing. Forget the paper - lay concrete.

To add insult to injury, Leichhardt Council proudly boasts that it uses green electricity. Their bill is now over $1m per annum. Since we know that green power is 10% more expensive than the coal fired stuff, we can presume they are pissing another $100k of ratepayers funds up against the lamp post in the form of green power. If they stuck to coal fired power, over 4 years, you could add another $400k to the bike path budget.

In other words, you could double your bike path budget if you dumped these insane Green fantasies. That bit of gravel in the above photo could be concrete by now if the Greens grew up and got real.

Another way of looking at it is that those idiotic Greens have cut the bike path budget by 50% to pay for their indulgences.

What a completely fucked outcome that is.

It's almost as bad as this crap from Howard "knobhead" Scruby and his gaggle of money-grubbing ambulance chasing lawyers.

Fuel the fear

Two craphead eco-nut reporters managed to get front page space in the SMH today with a story entitled:

Revealed: polluters' fear tactics on climate

I'm talking big headline, right there across the front page. The SMH should just rename itself to Green Left Daily and be done with it.

Let me re-write some paragraphs.

The SMH version:

BIG greenhouse polluting companies around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to weaken climate change laws at home and slow progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals.

My version:

BIG green lobby groups around the world, employing thousands of lobbyists, are exerting heavy pressure on governments to strengthen climate change laws at home and speed progress on an international climate agreement in Copenhagen, a global investigation reveals.

SMH:

In Australia, 20 companies who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.

Me:

In Australia, 20 charities who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government's Dept of Climate Change employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.

SMH:

While lobbyists for the renewable energy industry, the carbon traders and environmental groups are also becoming more prominent, the report finds that their voices ''can barely be heard above the clamour of the older, well-capitalised and deeply entrenched industries that have been lobbying on climate change for more than 20 years''.

Me:

While lobbyists for the the carbon traders and environmental groups are also becoming more prominent, the report finds that their voices ''can barely be heard above the clamour of the older, well-capitalised and deeply entrenched green groups like Greenpeace and the WWF that have been lobbying on climate change for more than 20 years''.

I don't know how the SMH can call the tactics of industry associations "promoting fear" when Al Gore has made himself a multi-millionaire by scaring the shit out of people for a decade. Tim Flannery has also jumped on the greenwagon and is raking it in by promoting fear and loathing.

As for industry having deep pockets, I'd like someone to compare how much industry has spent on campaigning against this crap as opposed to how much Greenpeace etc, plus untold lunatic flat earth government agencies have spent on trying to make CO2 scarier than Freddie Kruger.

I think they would find that industry has been outspent perhaps 1000 to 1.

Topsy-turvy world

I left the office a little later than usual last night, but not late enough to think about chasing the 1750 for a while. If I was going to see them, it would be a matter of finding a pleasant spot to stop - one with long sight lines - and waiting for them to come along.

As it was, serendipity almost took care of that for me. The Gods of Retention of High Pressure Air in Rubber Enclosures decided to throw a shard of glass my way, and I spent 10 minutes on the side of the road getting filthy (again). I am looking forward to my new tyres arriving in the mail - the old ones are worn so thin that a nasty look could poke a hole in them.

I deliberately setup the bike so that the video camera was pointing up the road. Until I downloaded the video at home, I had no idea whether it was in any position to film anything worthwhile. It turned out to be perfectly aligned - albeit upside down.

A few dozen cyclists passed me as I sat there changing out the tube, and 80% of them slowed down and asked if I was ok, needed a hand and had everything I needed to complete the job. Cycling is that sort of fraternity. I always do the same to other cyclists, unless I can see that they have almost completed the job and clearly have no need for any assistance.

As it was, I still pushed off before the 1750 came through. They didn't overtake me, which was a good thing as I was in no shape to chase them. Thanks to my stupid pump, I could only stick 50psi in the back tyre. At pressures that low, the bike wobbles much more than usual, and I worry that if I corner too hard, the tyre will peel off the rim. It's like riding on a bowl of jelly. So I was happy to take it easy and not be presented with any temptations to put the hammer down and flog the legs into a lathered mess.

Daily blits

Hipster on motorised scooter. So what? Well, he's about 62 years old. Not quite the age group you'd expect to see on one of these. Plus the attire is a bit out of the ordinary.

Tanned. Fit. Big, sticky-outy ears. Works at ABN-Amro. Anyone at that company know someone with big ears reminiscent of Flapper?

A Libertarian at rest (no helmet). A rebel without a skullcap. Otherwise, very fit and serious looking.

One thing I have found over the last year or two of photographing cyclists is that to date, of the hundreds of photos I have taken, only one person has shown any sign of noticing me taking their photo. Either I am an incredibly sneaky photographer, or people spend most of their time in an unobservant thought bubble.

Speed

How quick can an old guy move? Well, I can do a short burst of 50km/h on my own, and that's about it - enough to hold my own in traffic until the legs expire. It helps when you have a short downhill that allows a rapid build up of speed.

It's always fun to go past a Porsche on this section.

I usually catch out a gaggle of jaywalking pedestrians on this section each morning - they seem to be completely incapable of judging how fast a bike is moving, or their brains can't comprehend that the bloke pedalling their way is doing the speed limit. They step out in front of bikes like zombies, unaware that if I can't swerve around them, my only option is to go through them over over them. It's not like I am a skinny little sod either - I am just over half a metre across the shoulders, so squeezing through little gaps is not my forte.

Knobhead taxi driver

How I love drivers that change lanes suddenly without indicating. There is a bit of rubber on this section of road now, left there after I had to lock up to avoid being squished by the idiot driving this cab

By the time I got alongside him, he'd quickly wound up his window - I guess he knew what might have been coming once he realised what he'd almost done. I was not that upset - the car in front of him had ducked quickly into the left lane, so I had a sneaky suspicion that other cars might do the same - you get a sense for it after a while. However, the first car to do it had looked then indicated. This fool didn't look or indicate - he just went.

What is the point of a "baby on board" sticker?

I have never seen the point of those "baby on board" thingies that started adorning cars some time back, even though I have lugged two babies tens of thousands of miles in the family urban assault vehicle.

For a start, you'd think that people who are that concerned with their human cargo would drive in a quiet, calm and unhurried manner - as if they were carting around a crate of unstable nitroglycerin (which is what a kid full of watermelon and ice cream can be like). The last thing you'd expect is for them to drive like they were being chased by a horde of the living dead. Which is exactly what happened to me this morning.

Cyclist in yellow pulls out to pass a ute that is turning left. As I am doing 50km/h - the speed limit - I pull out to go around him. Loon in black Lexus carrying a baby on board sign hoons past me, then immediately turns right.

All I could think was, "WTF?" Couldn't you have waited 2 seconds until we got to that corner, rather than overtaking me so closely that I could see the imperfections in your paint work?

Would you park on this street?

After seeing this garbage truck reverse down the street and miss a few cars by inches.... I think I would take my motor somewhere else.

Drunks, dickheads and drying out

Today being Melbourne Cup day, the streets were awash with drunken idiots by the time I pushed off for home. Almost ran one down - he was crossing the street, head down as he fiddled with his phone, and he only saw me at the last minute. I was so sure he was going to look up eventually and see me and take evasive action that I almost goofed very badly - one should expect that if given a choice between doing something sensible and something stupid, some pedestrians will always adopt the stupidest alternative possible.

The pedestrians on the Pyrmont Bridge this evening were insane - they were drunkenly wandering in all directions. I have never snaked back and forth as much as I did tonight in order to weave through the staggering loons.

I can't stand the hooplah that goes with Melbourne Cup. I used to get invited to corporate lunches, which turned out to be ineffably boring. I stopped going years ago. Having actually attended Flemington and been present for the race, I have no interest in watching it 2nd hand on TV. Some events should just not be televised or broadcast. If you make the effort to go, you get to enjoy it. If you don't - you can read about it in the paper tomorrow. If I ruled the world, the second thing I would do is ban broadcasts of events like the Melbourne Cup (the first thing would be to shoot most WRX drivers).

By the way, even though I have been to the races at Flemington a number of times, I have never seen a horse. And that's the way I like it.

Of dickheads, I only encountered one today. As I was going up Sussex St, a driver going the other way yelled at a cyclist in front of him to "get off the road". Now that might be a reasonable thing to say if he was riding on a freeway and stopping cars from doing 110km/h, but he was on Sussex St, where traffic is often reduced to non-traffic; ie, a long parking lot - and speeds rarely approach those where third gear is required.

I wondered if the driver had been emboldened by recent media attention thanks to the cyclist vs bus driver incident, and thought that he had the right to shout at will. My advice to him would be this - be careful. The cyclist punching the bus driver in the face might also have emboldened cyclists of a certain bent to react in a physical manner.

As for drying out, it was blooming hot today. Yesterday, humidity was 82%, which is about as humid as it is when one is standing under the shower. Today, the humidity barely rose to 19%, but the thermometer hit 38 (according to the bike computer). My way of dealing with that was to drop a few gears and slow right down, particularly on the hills. I resisted the urge to race and overtake - that was about as hard to overcome as a junkie refusing heroin. I simply avoided over-exerting myself in the heat. The throat is still rough from being utterly parched. This is a nice change, as yesterday I could barely talk because of all the snot in my breathing tracts.

Electroguy and Man in Black

Two very different views of cycling today. First, we have an electrobike (I think that was the name stenciled on the battery). An odd looking contraption, but it proved to be remarkably fast - especially up hills. This bloke only turned the cranks every now and again. Looks like a mother of a battery though.

Then we have the Man in Black. This is the direct opposite of how I dress. I like the thought of being visible from an orbiting space shuttle. The idea of wearing a black shirt, black gloves, black socks and carrying a black backpack is as alien to me as the concept of drinking a soy latte. Sure, you might look cool and speedy, but that is of no comfort when you are lying under the front wheels of the bus that failed to see you.

Fat vs thin

I'm talking about tyres. And why I prefer a road bike with thin tyres.

In this vid, the bloke with the fat tyres gets away first, followed by the other roadie. The fat (tyred) bloke then pedals madly all the way down the hill.... and pedals madly up the other side.

But you may notice that after a few seconds, the guy on the road bike stops doing any work with the pedals and coasts. I was coasting long before he gave up pedalling. When we got to the hill, I was actually hauling on the brakes going up hill because the fat bike slowed down so dramatically.

It's all about lower rolling resistance and friction. Having thin tyres mean you can go faster, and that's what I like.

8 seconds

I followed this woman this morning because I thought her red jersey would have an interesting focal point in a time lapse video. No other reason.

Seven photos from the saddle

The humidity this morning was appaling. The cloud base was so low, planes coming in to land were obscured until the last minute by the clouds. This one was on final approach, but had only just popped out through the bottom of the murk. We get an interesting phenomena around here when the clouds are like this where the plane starts streaming two or four contrails as they hit a particular point in the cloud. However, unlike high altitude contrails, these are dark grey or even black. I have never managed to photograph one.

Know how this feels. Why is it always the back tyre that blows, which involves removing the chain, which means getting gloopy black chain gunk over every bit of exposed skin?

Love the pink shoes.

A very serious cyclist. He takes this gig much more seriously than I do. And seriously, who wears white shorts? I swear I could see his hairy bum hole through the fabric when he stood up and took off.

Knob jockey of the week - and it is only Monday. This thrusting ball monkey in the M3 decided to tweak the power pedal as he went past me, obviously signalling his annoyance with being stuck behind me for 1.3 seconds. As I went past him at the lights, I noticed he had mobile phone glued to ear. If the owner of BKW 02K can afford an M3, why can't he afford to install a fucking hands free kit? Is it because he is a screaming fuckface?

A pair of fixies, with the front one pulling a track stand. These two were quick, quick, quick once the lights changed. Had a hard time catching them. Then again, if you add the age of both of them together, you might get close to mine.

Girls, what is it with modesty pants? Look - when I have been belting along as fast as this old carcase will carry me, with sweat running into my eyes and pouring off my nose, with the lungs burning and the eyeballs closely watching the road surface for pot holes, rubbish and darting cats, and the ears alert for approaching ball-gobblers in M3s, the last thing I have on my mind is looking at your arse.

Fun places to visit

I encourage all visitors to this site to pop by and leave a comment at the Daily Telegraph's eco-blog. It isn't getting much trade - apart from me.

Quick change artist

I have always thought those wire baskets on the handlebars were a waste of time... until now.

Do bikes slow down traffic?

It depends.

It depends on the geography, the road conditions and the condition of the cyclist. An out of shape cyclist on a steep hill is sure to slow down everyone. A couple of fit ones under the right circumstances may have the ability to outpace the traffic without resorting to running red lights and so on.

The screen shots below were taken over 2 minutes and 50 seconds on Lilyfield Rd. Distance is 1.6km, or 1 mile for us old sods. Take note of the black car.

There were several times when me and the other cyclist were preparing to overtake, but we throttled back because it looked like one of the cars was about to turn left in front of us, or the road narrowed too much to let us go past safely. In other words, cars were holding us up on this particular day.

Lilyfield Rd heading into the city is a fast run. From the corner of Balmain Rd, you get a good downhill and a road bike will rapidly hit 50km/h - which is the speed limit. I've seen crazy bastards fly down much faster than that. It goes into a short uphill before long, but if you have momentum and lots of power in your legs (I have stacks of both), you can maintain a speed of at least 35km/h up the hill and over the crest. From there, it is downhill most of the way to Victoria Rd, and if you still have your lungs after blasting over the first hill, you can hammer it all the way to Victoria Rd as fast as the corners will allow.

If you look closely in the last few frames, you can see that the stream of traffic was held up by a bus up the front.

Funny. We cyclists always seem to be accused by bus drivers of holding every one up.

This is a bit of an exception though. Going the other way, due to the hills, I am usually as slow as a wet week.

Fat Albert

Some pedestrians consume considerably more road space than others.

City vs Country, part V

There was much howling and squealing in Sydney not long ago when the outback paid a visit in the form of a rather large dust storm. Some people acted like it was the end of the world.

J took one look at the storm, then the media coverage, and went "Pfft. We had storms like that twice a week during summer when I was growing up".

During our recent sojourn in the country, I partook of the annual ritual of the cleaning of the air conditioner dust filters. By that, I sat on the lawn in the backyard with a beer and watched brother in law clamber around on the roof. He went up clean, and came down filthy. By his estimation, two inches of dust had collected at the bottom of the filters over winter - a time when dust storms are non-existent down that way.

It's a chore he is well used to, having done it every year now since the relatives out that way made enough money to afford air con. Pity the cousin who climbed onto his roof and found that his motor had siezed since last being run.

How many people in Sydney bother to ever clean their filters? How many would even know how to, or be game enough to climb a rusty ladder and gambol around on the tiles?

Three degrees of Flanneration

Did you know that Prof Tim Flannery is connected to evil corporate entities such as Shell and BHP Billiton, as well as the military?

Flannery is shilling for a mob called HomeHealthCheck. They come to your house and do an environmental audit, and by the sound of things, then try and convince you to take out a $10,000 loan in order to buy environmentally friendly stuff.

The audits are done by Fieldforce Services. They are owned by UXC. UXC are in the pay of Big Oil, Big Mining and the Military Industrial Complex (BAE are a big defence contractor).

That's not even three degrees of separation.

Does economic growth bring happiness?

Over the years, I have read many articles from left-leaning greenophiles that claim that economic growth is a waste of time as people are not getting any happier as they get richer. The Greens preach that we should stop economic growth and instead promote happiness and love of the planet blah blah blah.

I developed a new theory about this today.

Whilst our incomes have increased dramatically this century, in the last 20 years or so, household debt has exploded by every conceivable measure. Yes, we are richer, but we are weighed down by a millstone of debt. The prospect of spending the rest of your life slaving away to pay off that debt must fill many with dread, and dampen down the happiness that they feel from earning more. Any pay rises that they get are swallowed by debt repayments.

Much of this debt has been taken on in order to buy into a skyrocketing housing market. The market has been stoked by stupidly restrictive land release policies which choke the supply of new housing. These policies have been enacted in the name of being green, and saving our precious bodily fluids, er, land, from rapacious developers who want to carpet bomb koala habitats with McMansions.

In other words, the Greens are doing a good job of making almost everyone in this country miserable; especially those who are currently being crushed, or face the prospect of being crushed, by an impossibly large mortgage.

So the best thing we can do is lift all planning restrictions and build like crazy. That will make us happy and the Greens miserable. The Greens love being miserable - why else would they live on mungbeans and tofu and refuse to drive cars? We should make them as miserable as humanly possible, and be happy that we are doing the right thing.