A gentleman and a scholar

Who else would dress like this? Tweed jacket, albeit without leather elbow patches, and proper trousers with elastic things to keep his cuffs out of the chain. And proper leather shoes (brogues perhaps), rather than the "stupid" clicky-clacky things I wear. Not a square inch of lycra to be seen.

It gladdens the heart to see fellows like this making an appearance. It means cycling to work is getting all boring and mainstream. This bloke is lucky enough to live close enough to work that his daily journey is unlikely to leave him lathered in sweat. I will stick to the lycra, as I have 15km to ride each way (or 25km if I take the roundabout route) and that includes a few mean hills.

However, if you are just a stone's throw from where you want to end up, hopping on a bike can be better than walking - even if you are wearing a suit. It certainly beats looking for a parking spot in Sydney (and getting gouged for the privilege of parking). At this rate, we'll start to look like Copenhagen in about, oh, 300 years.

Qantas and carbon offsets

Posted this comment at Andrew Bolt today:

According to the Chicago Climate Exchange, carbon offsets are currently selling for 10c per tonne. I used the carbon offset calculator at the Qantas website and it calculated that my upcoming holiday will generate 1.452 tonnes of CO2. Qantas want to charge me $13.80 for this. However, that would cost me US$0.14 if I bought offsets from the CCX. A further question might be why Qantas is charging 100 times the going rate for carbon offsets.

Yes, it was windy yesterday

It's been a stormy week here in Sydney. Thursday was really blowy. All sorts of rubbish had blown onto the path over the Anzac Bridge (stuff blowing off the back of utes and so on) and a bit of it was flying around as I went past. Here's a foam lid trying to decapitate me.

We have lift off.

It's jinks to the left...

And then comes back to the right to take me unawares from the side.

Speaking of blowhards, here is a wogged up Seat Ibiza. If you look under the P plate, the label says "WOGSPEC".

Fully sick try hard.

Catching without trying

Damn this Picasa software. I want to do a time lapse that does not take too long to flick through. If I use one option, the fastest it will let me turn each slide is 1 second. If I use another option, the slowest it will allow me is 1/6th of a second. One is too slow, the other too fast. I reckon about 1/2 second would be just right.

Anyhoo, I caught a red light runner this week after giving him a one minute head start. Actually, I did not give him that start - the traffic lights did. I've timed it from where he jumps the lights to where I overtake, and after waiting a minute at the lights, I caught him 4 minutes after pushing off.

The silly thing is that because he had such a huge headstart, and had disappeared from view over a hill by the time I got going, I thought I had no chance of catching him, so I wasn't even trying! I was just rolling along at slower than normal pace, as I had no one alongside me to race.

It just goes to show that the things that will get you to your destination faster are fitness, power, stamina and patience. Real men don't need to jump the lights.

"I can't hear you"

I pass a lot of pedestrians every day on my too and from work. I go past at least a few dozen whilst going around The Bay, and hundreds once I get into the more densely populated paths of the CBD.

Most of them are considerate and aware of their surroundings and they'll move to the left to give me room to pass if they see me coming, or hear my bell as I come up behind them.

And then there are the occasional festering dickfaces who act as if they own the path. Fuck, there are days when I get to the end of my trip and I start thinking how to attach a holster to the frame of the bike.

The following short video shows me and another cyclist having a small run in with a fucking earplug wearing Ninja with shit for brains. Note how she is dressed in black from head to foot (because black is more flattering on your fat arse). These types like to dress like an invisible Ninja and then walk along unlit paths at night on the wrong side of the path, and then get upset when joggers fail to see them and slam into them.

The gist of the story is that she was holding a position on the path which prevented anyone from getting by. Both me and the bloke in front were ringing our bells and yelling at her, but she refused to budge.

As the bloke in front slipped past, she gave him a superior, shit-eating grin and tried to excuse her moronic behaviour by pointing at her iPod headphones and saying, "I can't hear you".

My retort was, "Well, take your fucking headphones out".

Seriously, some people are that stupid. If you can't hear what is going on around you because loud music is blocking out incoming sound, remove the music. Or get used to the idea of always, always hugging the left hand side of the path.

But don't try and use the excuse of, "I own an iPod; therefore I am entitled to act like a fucking twat".

Classic global warming debunking

From Talking About the Weather, via Anthony Watt:

The last mistake in the UN report that I will delve into today features a photo of the Hawaiian Islands with a menacing caption about sea levels – trouble in paradise! Here is the text from the caption: “In Hawaii, as the ocean continues to rise, flooding occurs in low-lying regions during rains because storm sewers back up with saltwater and coastal erosion accelerates on beaches. Source: L. Carey.”

There are a few problems here. One: “L. Carey” does not exist, at least not according to the author of the caption. That would be Chip Fletcher, director of the Coastal Geography Group at the University of Hawaii. Reached for comment, Fletcher said that he was flattered that the United Nations report had found his statement in an internal department newsletter to be useful. Two: Fletcher also acknowledged that all of the flooding described by his statement takes place in areas of landfill that are subsiding.

Did Fletcher think that it might be a good thing for the United Nations to note the landfill subsidence when using a single image, and a single statement, to convey the reality of “climate change” in the islands? “Listen, the world is a big place,” Fletcher said. “I have other things to worry about than that.” Were there other locations in the islands that saw such flooding? “Parts of Waikiki have,” Fletcher said. Aren’t those parts of Waikiki also landfill, though? “Actually, they are.”

Imagine that - landfill actually subsiding over time!

How expensive can water be?

How much do you pay for the water that comes out of your tap?

I have no idea what we pay. I just pay the bill every quarter, and it rarely comes to more than $200. It's amazingly cheap, considering how long Junior spends in the shower each day, and how often Monkey goes to the toilet. For a shall chap, he wees an awful lot.

Our water is so cheap, we are completely un-bothered about wasting it. I have no qualms about having three showers a day if I feel like it. We put several loads through the washing machine per day.

But consider how expensive water becomes when it is not delivered by a tap, but instead has to be carried from a distant river like this:

The difference all this makes is enormous. Traditionally, women might have spent four or five hours a day fetching water: now they have that time free to generate income. They go to the valleys less often, bringing them into less contact with mosquitoes, meaning there's less malaria around, and their health improves in all sorts of other ways too.

No, I am not plugging a charity. Instead, I am making a point about economic development and how our lives have been transformed by cheap water and cheap power.

Those women appear to be carrying 20 litre containers. I know how heavy they are - I carried plenty of them uphills to position where we were dug in during training exercises. Believe me, carrying a 20 litre jerrycan in each hand is bloody hard work.

The charity has been kind enough to tell us that the women might spend 4-5 hours per day fetching water. If they live say 1km from the source, collecting 20 litres requires a 2km round trip. I walk unloaded at 6km/h. I think you'd be going a bit more slowly lugging 20 litres of water. Let's say it takes half an hour to do that round trip. Eight similar journeys will provide your family with 160 litres. That is all you have for drinking, cooking, washing the dishes, washing your clothes, washing your body, flushing your toilet (and washing your hands) and maybe a bit left over for watering your garden or your livestock.

That may seem like a lot, but a modern low flow showerhead still gets through 11 litres per minute. As I prefer an old fashioned showerhead that dumps water on me like a Singapore monsoon, I reckon I'd get through that 160 litre allocation on my own in an 8 minute shower.

Because our water comes from a tap, we are free to spend our days doing other things, like working in McDonalds. Even if you are only making $9 an hour, you could earn $252 a week in the time it takes to fetch that water (remember, water has to be fetched 7 days a week - it's not a Monday to Friday occupation).

The opportunity cost of that water is therefore $AUS1.57 per litre. Not too different to the cost of what we pay for bottled water. The price of course goes up the further away from a water source you live. If the family in my example lived 2km from the source, the opportunity cost would be $3 per litre.

So imagine the difference piped tap water can make to people in the third world. Forget the health benefits from better sanitation and all that - just try and get your head around the extra money that they can now earn in the cash economy because that chore is eliminated.

Now consider the next big time consuming chore in the third world - gathering fuel. Ever gone camping and had to look for and chop firewood for the BBQ? Imagine having to do that for every meal, as well as every time you needed hot water to wash clothes, wash dishes, or bathe the kids. Imagine having to do that to collect enough fuel to keep a fire going at night to keep warm. According to this book, women spend from midday to nightfall gathering firewood.

Hmm. In between gathering water and gathering firewood, that's your whole day gone.

So now we see how much of a life changer it is to move from gathering fuel to having it delivered to you, either as gas in a cylinder, or electricity down a wire. Forget the luxuries that can be powered by electricity such as Plasma TVs and air conditioning - consider the basics such as cooking on a gas or electric stove, having a gas or electric hot water system and having refrigeration for your food. Access to cheap power is a Godsend.

Our daily power bill is a couple of bucks. It's nothing. But if you have to spend 5 hours collecting wood, when you could have spent those 5 hours frying fries at McDonalds for $9 an hour, then your daily power bill is suddenly $45.

Could you live with a daily combined water and power bill of $90?

Tap water of course depends on electricity as well, as you need power to drive the pumps that deliver that water to your door.

Our Green maniac brethren of course want to deny the benefits of cheap water and power to all of us, including those in the third world that have neither. In my eyes, that makes them swine.

We4pon - weapons grade spunkmonkey

I always keep an eye out for number plates that indicate that a baboon is at the wheel. I think I found one of them today.

"My cock is this big". <------->

Seriously, why are we prevented from just setting these things on fire, and sewing the owners in a sack with a cat and tossing them in the harbour?

Can't see Turnbull giving a speech like this

Boris Johnson. Legend.

Those shoes that go clicky-clack

Magdy Szubanski copped the rough end of the pineapple last week when she went on an extended anti-cyclist rant on some TV show that I have never heard of.

Many people claimed to be offended.

I was not one of them.

After all, I routinely rant, in much less decorous terms, at just about everything in life, and I regularly call for the summary execution of WRX drivers. An armed cyclist is... I don't know. Hopefull a good shot.

The day that we can't indulge in a good rant against some segment of the population is a day when our liberty has been crushed just a little bit more.

Part of her rant was directed at those "stupid shoes that go clicky-clack when they walk into cafes".

I wear those shoes, and I will now try to explain why.

Back when I played team sports like hockey (badly, and violently), rugby (even more badly) and AFL (incredibly badly), we wore shoes with lots of sprigs in them. The sprigs were essential for maintaining grip on grounds that were often a slough of mud with a thin coating of woe-begotten grass. I played fullback in our 3rd grade hockey team. That meant that when the opposition was attacking (which was almost all the time, as our forwards were pathetic), my task was to charge at the opposing line and tackle the bloke with the ball. Not rugby tackle, but tackle them with my stick.

Now being fast and fairly muscly at that time, and not always terribly agile, there was many a time when the tackle consisted of my hip and shoulder collecting the opposition forward in the chest at high speed and the forward then gasping for air on the ground as I took off after his mates, who now had the ball. That always involved doing a rapid 180, as I had been running away from our goal, and they were now running towards it.

On a dry ground, I found that I could pull such a tight turn with those sprigs that I could reach out and touch the grass with my left hand (the hockey stick would always be in my right hand, and I always turned to the left). Only a mental patient would play the game without sprigs. Or top caps. In my last game, I had to use a borrowed pair of shoes that had squishy toes. A stick aimed at the ball missed the ball and hit my toes, half ripping my big toenail off. After limping off the ground, I removed the shoe to find a sock covered in blood. One always wears the correct footwear.

But enough of that. I am supposed to be talking about cycling. However, I do remember those sprigs going "clicky-clack" on concrete, and no one ever said, "Why do those idiots wear sprigs?"

The thing going clicky-clack is a cleat, which is a block of metal that is screwed onto the base of the cycling shoe. That cleat is shaped so that it clicks neatly and solidly into the pedal. The idea is that your shoe is essentially welded to the pedal, so you can apply the maximum power in the right place.

I read a training manual the other day which said I should be aiming to achieve a cadence of 100 - which means my feet should be rotating the cranks 100 times per minute. My natural comfortable maximum rate is 90 - apparently most people have to train their nerves of all things to fire fast enough to work up to a comfortable rate of 100. I can go faster than 100 - I was clocking a cadence of 116 on a fast section coming home tonight, but that was me watching the cadence meter on the bike and wildly over-reving to see how high I could go.

What has this got to do with anything?

When my cadence hits 90, the legs are pumping so fast, they'd be flying off the pedals if I was not clipped in. Ever had that happen on an old push bike? You get the revs up too high and your feet depart the pedals and the pedal whooshes around and collects you in the back of the ankle. Ouch.

The other thing with cleats is that instead of just pushing with your legs, you also pull on the upstroke. That gives you a much smoother action. I often see blokes on chunky old bikes giving it their all going up hill, and if they don't have cleats, their action sounds like RR-rrr-RR-rrr-RR. You can hear it - they put the power down, then there is a gap with no sound whilst the other foot comes over the top, and then the other leg pushes down and you get an RR. But because of the nature of the mechanics etc etc, there are "long" time lags where you are putting down no power at all.

With cleats, you get almost continuous power, because each legs pushes and pulls, rather than just pushing. That is something that takes a while to get used to.

The other thing is that they position your foot in the best bio-mechanical position. Some cyclists actually wear out their knees or snap their Achilles tendons due to bad seating and footing setup. If you get it wrong, you legs rotate in the wrong plane, and your knees go. If your stroke is too long, you can do your Achilles in. The cleat is positioned so that you push through the ball of your foot in the right plane - if you have old style pedals, the pedal always ends up under your arch, which is the wrong place to push from.

Now cleats are also an utter pain in the arse when you are not in the saddle. Walking in them is an invitation to fall over and break something, like an arm or a cocyx. I walk like I am treading on eggshells - very sloooowly and caaaaarefully.

Yes, I could take my shoes off before walking into a cafe, but in winter, that is an invitation to frost bite. Besides, some fat unfunny comedian would probably chose that moment to tread on my foot, clad only in a sock.

Sunshine, rain, hail

I really need to start looking at the forecasts more closely.

From our place, we have a good view looking north. Not so good looking south. I got up, looked north and saw plenty of blue sky. Decided it was a day for summer riding gear.

Got out the door, round the block and suddenly I could see to the north. Huge, black, menacing storm clouds were rolling towards the city. Decision making time - do a U-turn and collect some wet weather gear, or race the clouds into the city.

There's no choice really - I raced the clouds. What am I - a flippin' grandpa? I am not Kevin Rudd, always ready to flip-flop between decisions before taking the soft option. Once I am moving forward, I keep moving forward.

I just about froze my nads off going down some of the steeper hills - the wind chill was a lot nastier than usual. The result was that my balls ached all day at work - felt like I'd had a mild kick to the nuts. I did beat the rain - a few drops started coming down when I reached the office, and that was it. Victory!

Getting into work did involve being told off by a pedestrian who didn't like the path our line of half a dozen bikes took over the Pyrmont Bridge. She yelled that her particular spot was pedestrian only - I'm not sure who died and made her God. The bridge is about 50 feet wide. All we cyclists need is a lane 3-4 feet wide. Pedestrians can have 46 feet of the bride - 90% of it - if we can have our little slot. But no, the pedestrian walk hither and thither and utterly fail to keep left, so we snake across the bridge like a drunken python, picking gaps where we can find them.

Speaking of picking gaps - try to pick a gap in this lovely thunderstorm.

I was lucky - I bailed early and beat it home. That red spot in the middle is just about over our house. The rain came down so hard at one point, I could not see the house next door. Then we got a light smattering of pea sized hail, which melted within a minute. Riding through that would not have been much fun without a jacket, and my jacket was hanging in the closet due to my bloody-minded attitude at sparrow fart. If I had left the office at 5pm with all the other wage slaves, I would have been utterly rooted. Knowing my luck, I would have been right in the middle of the Anzac Bridge when it started coming down - with no shelter for half a mile in either direction.

Some days, it pays to be lucky rather than good.

Lemon cyclist

I had forgotten all about this photo of a fellow commuter, snapped the other night on the way home. You don't see many bikes like this on the road at commuting time - she is a one of a kind. Basket on handlebars is a nice touch. She's breaking about eleventy-seven rules of the fast commuting fraternity, but I'm not going to get all snobbish and knobbish here.

Her yellow jacket reminded me of the dessert that M brought over on Saturday for our lunch. It was a lemon meringue pie, made with 4 lemons and not much sugar. It was fantastic. I thought my teeth were going to pop out of the back of my head when I had my first bite - talk about tart! But that's the way I like it. We've been going to a local club from time to time when we can't be bothered cooking, and dessert there has been a disaster on every occasion. I've had their version of a lemon tart, and it was sugar mixed with a few bits of lemon rind. If you're eating a lemon tart, the very least it should offer is the taste of lemons! And if you don't like the sharpness of lemons - don't order a lemon tart! Easy! Don't bugger up a lemon tart by adding a packet and a half of sugar.

It looked like a big dessert when it arrived. M took the tray home with her - all that was left was a few crumbs. That's definitely my kind of dessert.

Proof that BMW drivers really are idiots

Proof.

Off topic, but funny.

Sly real estate agent

A real estate window in Five Dock. Look at all those "Sold" signs. Looks like business is brisk.

But hang on, why are several places listed as being sold at the same price? Easy - because they have listed the same property 3 times and another property twice.

First property - once.

Twice.

Three times.

Second property listed once....

......twice.

Suddenly those 14 "sold" properties don't seem so prosperous.

What sneaky bastards these people can be.

How is the economy going for you?

Sign of the times in Five Dock - one of two apartment blocks that are fully or partly completed, but gone bust before they could be sold.

One of two cafes in the main street that have gone belly up in the last month.

Creative input needed

Help. I am suffering from writer's block. Normally, I could script something like this in 5 minutes (after 2 or 3 hours or drinking beer) - but the muse is just not working tonight. If you can think of some snappy lines to use, or some topics to tackle, I'd much appreciate it.

I think the muse is suffering because it took me all day to work through the technical gremlins that got in the way of producing a simple, 3 minute video. The fun I had with codecs - ugh.

My blog thing is too narrow to view this properly - I suggest you follow this link to Youtube and watch it in a wider screen.

Thought number four

Some say that it is essential that we have this thing called the ABC. The government must run a TV network.

Really?

If it is so important to have a state-owned operator in the TV sector, surely it is equally important to have one in the print media?

In that case, let's just nationalise the Fairfax Press and be done with it. Pay the shareholders 1c per share - they should have no case to complain.

Or perhaps the government could setup a newspaper in Sydney and Melbourne specifically to compete with the SMH and The Age, and give the government owned papers away for free.

I'd like to see the editorial line that Farifax would take in those circumstances.

My view is that the ABC does screen a certain amount of excellent content. Much of that was bought from elsewhere. On the other hand, British Leyland also managed to churn out a certain amount of well built P-76s. Just because the useless, left-leaning, sponging jobsworths at Leyland managed to screw together one car per day that didn't fall to bits by Christmas was no excuse not to shut the whole useless fucking enterprise down when it became clear that no one wanted its output.

The ABC serves up a few lustrous pearls in a bathtub full of shit. It's high time we pulled the plug on the whole sorry edifice.

Ouch. Serious ouch.

Have a look at this....

This deserves a wider audience

An Englishman's castle.

We have an "estate" like this down the road. Thankfully, it has not deteriorated to this extent yet. If it does, I'm getting a gun licence again. I'm too old and creaky for kung fu. Dad will just have to hand over the lever action .44-40. It's an oldie, but a goody. Just check out the lead in these fat little fuckers.

Thought number three

I think I am about to run out of thoughts for the day.

We had M and Firegazer over for lunch yesterday. As there were eight for lunch, I roasted two chickens. I expected there might have been some leftovers for dinner last night, but all we were left with was a half-gnawed wing and a bit of giblet skin. M explained the attraction of the Twilight series (Blossom is working her way through the book) and Padawan Learner disappeared into Junior's cave and the two of them spent the day discussing the finer points of putting a Lego Death Star together. I think I know what someone might be asking for this Christmas.....

The plan was to set the table in the backyard and have a Sunday roast on a Saturday. However, it's been pouring down for days, and the lawn is now a swamp. We still had the chooks though.

We had a lunch like that when my parents visited a few weeks ago. Dad commented that the Sunday roast was never a roast when he was growing up. Instead, they knocked off a chook that had stopped laying, or one of the roosters, and boiled it. The birds were so old and tough by the time they were killed, they were like shoe leather. Or crows. The very wealthy might have eaten roast chicken, but the rest of the population had it boiled.

(And before you start thinking that my grandparents were just scraping by; by that point, grandfather had ascended to the lofty position of engine driver on the railways - a similar position to a Jumbo pilot in terms of pay and prestige in say in the 1970's, and was in the top stratum of society in their country town. He took a wage cut when he entered parliament as a Labor MP).

Our plan was also to serve lunch using the antique silver cutlery set that we picked up on one of our country sojourns. There were two reasons for that. First, thanks to wear and tear and kids losing them, we have a very disjointed day-to-day cutlery set. In fact, it is not a set. It is a collection of odds and ends of mis-shapen forks and odd-sized knives. It's not very "dinner party".

Second, since M writes Before Our Time, I thought it would be excellent to do the old-fashioned thing with a silver service.

Well, here is my third thought for the day.

Don't buy silver unless you have staff. As in a Butler or Maid. There was no time to clean and polish the silver, so we ate off the mish-mash of everyday stuff. I told J that we should simply get M to clean it when she arrived, so she could experience another Before Our Time moment and blog about it, but I was shot down in flames.

Maybe next time.

Thought number 3.5 - when did we not only get old enough to drink Pinot Noir, but to actually enjoy it and search the wine cellar for more bottles of it?