Thought number two

After spending most of the day horizontal in bed with a sore neck, I got bored and shifted to the couch in order to lie horizontal whilst watching John Wayne in Red River.

Out popped thought number 2.

How did black and white movies affect the way people of my generation and older in terms of how they see the world?

This is how I saw the US when I was a kid - through black and white westerns that we watched on Saturday afternoon. I always thought of Texas as being really dry and brown and dusty, since that's how everything looks through the filter of black and white.

I was 10 minutes into the movie when I thought, "Hang on, why would you be driving cattle to an area which is bone dry and has no feed?"

So I had a quick look at Google images for images of the Texas prairie.

Gee, looks nothing how I imagined it as a kid. I never even thought that Texas could have wetlands.

How many other things that we take for granted today have been similarly distorted by the way we viewed them as kids on the idiot box?

Thought number one

I've been in bed all day with a bung neck - that's whiplash for you. Seems to last forever. Just when you think you're over it, back it comes for another dose.

In between strange dreams brought on by powerful drugs, I had a few thoughts. Here is number one.

How long will it be before our streets are cleared of signage? Can you imagine what the average street would look like with the sides completely cleared of all poles and signs and other clutter?

Ponder this. Signs have been put up everywhere to provide static or dynamic information to drivers - Stop signs, street names, No Parking, traffic lights and so on. However, with ever increasing accuracy from GPS, and improvements in localised broadcasting, how long will it be before all that information can be projected inside the car? If you have a Head Up Display in the car, why not transmit traffic light information from a box on the side of the road to the passing cars?

It's already done that way with trains in Europe - with things like the GTV going 250km/h, the train is moving too fast for the drivers to see trackside signals. Instead, signal information is passed to the train from an aerial embedded in the track. If the driver fails to brake for an upcoming stop signal, the train automatically brakes the train.

I guess that will take all the fun out of running red lights.

The same could be done with No Parking signs and so on. The car tells you that you can't park in a particular spot, or that you're going past a school so your speed is limited to 40km/h.

The GPS is already reducing the utility of street signs. I wonder if councils in 20 years time will bother replacing street signs as they rust and fade away? Or will they too go the way of council provided drinking troughs for horses on the main street?

All this smacks of intrusive, nanny-statism to me, and I am sure most people of my generation and older would reject it. However, the next generation seems to be more at ease with technology intruding into their lives, so putting it into practice is more a question of politics than technology.

Whilst I can see this as a great way to limit the ability of fucktards to ruin my day, I'd rather face the odd knuckle dragger in a car than have the state intrude into our lives any further. Better to have a moron behind the wheel than a million morons in the bureaucracy trying to control every facet of our lives.

The beauty of a bike of course is that it is much more difficult to fit such a system onto a bike - battery power to run all those hi-tech gizmos is the first limitation.

Which makes the bike the last bastion of freedom on our roads.

Runny, shiny people

A non-Ninja jogger, out for a run around the Bay. What a beautiful day it was - 33 degrees, blue skies, no breeze, low humidity. This guy was all decked out for running at dusk in his shiny, reflective stuff - no chance of crashing into him after dark. Unlike the fucking ninjas, who walk or ride around dressed in black from head to foot without a single item of reflective clothing to mark them out from the surrounding trees.

Check out his calf muscles.

Laid back

I spotted a rare breed today - a non-upright cyclist commuter. I see the odd one on the weekends, being ridden for sport or pleasure, but only rarely do they venture out onto the roads during working hours.

This bastard was quick though. I had a hard time catching him and keeping up, and his action seemed to be so effortless and smooth. He hardly seemed to be working at all, whilst I was building up a nice case of sweat and puffing.

Whilst I like the idea of them, I prefer sitting up a foot or so higher and being able to see over the traffic. That's just my thing.

Prams, dogs, gumbies

Gumbies. Gumbies with prams. Gumbies with dogs. Gumbies with prams and dogs. This clip shows 30 seconds of my life that I'd like back.

Some stupid flipping council has decided that because there is a risk of cyclists colliding with drunks, idiots and window lickers outside a rowing club, cyclists should have all sorts of impediments placed in their path. Council obviously didn't think that if you want to reduce the risk of a cyclist collecting a drunk standing around outside the club, the best thing to do might be to discourage packs of drunks from standing around outside the club.

Now I don't mind crawling past the club at walking speed. Sight lines at this location suck, and I've had a few close calls with moronic cyclists coming the other way at warp speed on the wrong side of the path - ie, mine. But what really, really fucked me off was the way this gumby with pram and dog walked through the traffic barriers..... and then stopped to have a chat with her friend.

Walk as slowly as you like - I don't mind. But don't stop for a chat in a fucking choke point, you gumby, especially when you have a path blocking dog and a path obstructing pram. I had to give her a very polite "Get the fuck out of my way" in order to get her fat arse moving again.

Note how she allows the dog to walk on the opposite side of the path to her, thus obstructing the path for anyone coming the other way. I've seen a few joggers almost go arse over tit in situations like this - they don't notice the dog leash until the last moment, and they have to vault over it or do a face plant.

The worrying thing is that we allowed this woman to breed........

Pedestrian gumbies

I am an equal opportunity hater. I hate idiots, gumbies and window lickers of all types.

One of my pet peeves is pedestrians who are too stupid to know how to jaywalk properly. Here's the deal - if you are going to walk out in front of me, at least throw a token glance in my direction. These idiots crossed the road without looking to their left, and did so just metres from a cross walk. They are also crossing the road diagonally, so they have no idea what is coming up behind them. Road kill waiting to happen.

The thing is, where I used to work down near a big legal chambers, the road was covered at 5pm in jaywalking barristers who were all head down, phone to ear, crossing road against the red and then looking unhappy when I missed them by a millimetre.

Gumbies. Everywhere.

More gumbies

As much as I love the bike lane that runs down Lilyfield Rd, I detest some of the bus drivers that I have to share the road with. Some are considerate, and others are just arseholes in a hurry. The legal speed limit along here is 50km/h. I can do that by just rolling and not cranking the pedals, since it is a good fast downhill. Keeping up with the traffic is not an issue - but there are always those that want to go 60 in a 50 zone, and that includes bus drivers. I can do 60 too, but being a reasonably law abiding chap, I tend to obey the speed limits to a certain extent.

Anyway, here is bus driver in a hurry overtaking me.

Up ahead on the left, there is a parked bus. The lanes are not that wide, so the bus on the left is intruding well into the bike lane, and the bus going down hill in front of me is drifting into my lane, making it a tight fit.

It's hard to tell from this screen grab, but when the speedy bus passed the parked bus, the gap was about one foot. I have ridden with some fools that would try to shoot that kind of gap - they are not long for this world if they try that too often. They have some stupid sense of entitlement that says, "This is a bike lane, I should be able to ride in it unmolested". Nice in theory, deadly in practice.

Because as soon as speedy bus gets past parked bus, he pulls hard left to stop and collect passengers. If a bike had shot the gap, the cyclist would then have been squashed into the kerb by the second bus. Ouch. But these things happen.

And now we have our morning gumby. From time to time, I stretch the morning ride by going out to Abbotsford and working my way through the back street - essentially I am perving at real estate. Watch the Mercedes gumby and try and work out why she made such a crap job out of reversing out of her driveway and then moving off.

Simple answer. Had a coffee cup in one hand and was trying to steer with the other. Prime candidate for Gumby of the Day.

Sundry gumbies

A failure to follow the rules - using the drops at 25km/h. Tsk tsk. Fail. (This is a rather esoteric bit of snobbery that I am firmly in favour of).

Why is it that 4 out of 5 taxi drivers in Sydney are incapable of staying in their own farking lane? I work with a bloke who drives a WRX (the sort of people I would most like to shoot when the revolution comes), and he says that he is utterly intolerant of meandering taxi drivers these days. At the first sign of them wandering into his lane, he is on the lights and horn.

So I'm not paranoid.

Oh, and for those that like to have a go at cyclists thinking that they can get away with it... the next photo is me about to overtake said taxi. Not that he had done anything wrong, but if you know Sydney taxi drivers like I do, you'd realise that at this point, I was pedalling at 86mp/h. Sydney taxi drivers understand only two speeds - motionless, and Warp 9. No one ever overtakes a taxi in this town. Except me.

Very fancy bars on this bike. God, I am turning into a bike perve.

And then there is Gumby Number One for the day. The bloke in this clip cut across in front of me with no warning and no indicating. Good thing it was on an uphill section, where I was puffing along and could brake quickly, rather than a downhill section where I might have face planted into his back window.

When I got alongside him, I looked at him and found that he had a mobile in one hand and was looking into the car and fiddling with is GPS with the other. That is the position he was in when he pulled in front of me. Chances are, he never even saw me. He was much, much closer than the video makes out, especially when he was alongside me (which you can't see, due to the narrow angle of this camera).

If I had realised that was the case, I would have stopped and said something like, "Gee, you were really close when you cut me off. My bike has left a huge scratch down the side of your car", and then proceeded to apply one with a 50 cent coin.

A good explanation of the Precautionary Principle

As usual, Counterpoint serves up another juicy podcast.

Why do we still have dysfunctional families?

I've been reading about Gordon Brown's speech to the deluded, err, Labor Party faithful and I saw that he has been twatting on about "dysfunctional families". Yes, they have them too. If anything, the poms have it far worse than we do. Their welfare system seems to be cunningly designed to carry out the total destruction of their economic and social fabric. We might have too many useless and lazy pricks sitting around sniffing glue on the public tit, but at least we are in no danger (at present) of our entire society collapsing under the burden of politically correct, nanny state wank.

From what I can gather a dysfunctional family is one that includes any or all of the following:

1. Unemployed parent/s
2. Unemployed children (assuming they are old enough to be sent down a coal mine)
3. Pregrant teenagers
4. Wife beating boyfriend/husband
5. Alcoholic family members of all ages
6. Drug addicted parent/s
7. Single mum
8. A multitude of children born to a multitude of absent fathers
9. Family members who have "issues with the justice system"
10. Uneducated, illiterate slags
11. Smokers
12. People who can't eat proper
13. People who cant spell proper
14. and so on and so forth

In short, you have crack smoking, beer swilling sluts who slothed through school without picking up any education; and who have then spent the following decade or two opening their legs to all and sundry, followed by the squeezing out of a fresh generation of useless, thieving toe rags. They are now well into their 3rd generation of breeding malignant, ugly, slatternly welfare cheating criminals.

But I ask these questions:

1. Why do we allow drug addicts to keep their children?
2. Why do we allow alcoholics to keep their children?
3. Why do we pay child support welfare payments to parents who can't keep their kids at school?
4. And I could go on all night.

Essentially, I don't understand why we allow these dysfunctional families to continue to operate.

What's wrong with saying, "You are a fucking useless thieving junkie with three kids - now you have none. We've put them in a home, run by the state. If you are still alive when they are 18, and they can be bothered to see you, you can see them then. Bye."

There can only be one answer.

The state is even more useless at raising children than a criminal with no morals, no values and a daily need to inject heroin several times. The state is worse at raising children than a drunken, unemployed, wife-beating step-father. The state is worse at raising children than a mother who is drunk 18 hours a day, and brings home a different bloke to root in front of her kids 3 nights a week. The state is worse at raising kids than a lazy set of parents who feed their kids nothing buy junk food, can't be bothered to clean the house and take out the rubbish, and who loll in front of the TV all day eating pizza. The state is worst at raising children than parents who can't be bothered disciplining and guiding their kids and instilling a few morals and values.

Hmm.

If the state is really that bad, why on earth do we entrust it with running our education system and our health system? In the US context, this is the same state that Obama wants to hand the health system to.

You have two choices here. You can decide that the state is actually reasonably good at running things, and thus should snatch away thousands of kids (and cut off a few sets of balls at the same time) and raise them in a better environment; or you can decided that the state is utterly fucked and it should retreat from a whole host of activities that it is simply making a balls up of at present.

I've worked for the state, and seen first hand what a useless, wasteful pile of crap it can be. However, as bad as I think it can be, I really don't believe it can be any worse than leaving kids with utter wastoids. If children really are our future, and all that crap, then surely the least the state can do is give those at the very bottom a better chance than they have now.

Poor choice isn't it. Crack whores or state care. The jury could be out on that one for a while.

Cyclist meets Godzilla

Maybe not Godzilla, but a friendly little lizard. Over in WA, we used to call things like this "bobtails" or "blue tongues". Never figured out what the eastern states nomenclature is, or even if it's the same type of lizard. They're ok to pick up, so long as you grab them behind the head. We were always told as kids that if they latch onto your finger, they'll never let go. We'd catch them and then swat flies and feed them. We had no shortage of lizards, or flies. Or time to catch lizards and swat flies.

And then along came the internet.



Because I've been riding in the cool of the day for so long, I haven't come across any reptiles for a long time. I used to encouter the odd one out at Homebush on my afternoon rides, but I haven't been out that way for some time. When I first spotted it lying on the road, I thought it was a kid's toy (we have a box full of rubber snakes and things at home).

This also just goes to show how quiet are the roads that I ride down - sunbaking lizards is usually a sign of no traffic. Squashed, dried out lizards is a sign of lots of traffic.

Time lapse - two versions

I have been playing with Picasa and trying out the various features that lurk under the hood. It's easy to take snapshots from a video, then turn them into a timelapse video. I've produced two versions of half my ride - one that lasts 12 seconds and one that goes for a minute. They both show that most of my trip into town is done either in bike lanes or on dedicated bike paths - a nice, safe route. And where I am on the road, there are very few cars.







Yes, I do tend to encounter a lot of prams when going around the Bay. Most of the pram pushers are considerate, and keep to the left, but as in every group of people, there are always the idiots that sit in the middle of the path, or meander back and forth like a drunk, or who walk 2 or 3 abreast and take up all the available road space. (Disclosure - and yes, I have pushed a pram around this path a few times, so I know what it's like - and how easy it is in most cases to stay out of the way of everybody else).

So much for coldening

Too damned cold and windy to be bothered getting out of bed on Sunday.

31 degrees when I rode into town this morning (I left late, owing to an appointment with a tradesman). Hardly a breath of air. I expected to be sweating like a rather hot pig on arrival at work, but that was not to be. It was 31 and dry - most unexpected in Sydney. Normally, it's 31 degrees and the humidity is around 137%.

One thing about riding through winter is that I have maintained a tan all year round. Well, not a full body tan - more a cocky's tan. Brown forearms. Brown legs, but white feet. White everywhere else. Completely different to the kind of tan that you get lying on a beach in your budgie smugglers. All around me are pasty white people, who have spent the winter surrounded by numerous layers of warm things, but I think that is about to change.

Follow the eyes

I took a photo of this bloke to demonstrate the type of helmet that you could attach a camera to.

Then when I looked at the photo at home, I noticed where his head was pointing. Busted!

It's nasty and cruel to lock up kids - right?

Consider two stories about violent juveniles in the Telegraph today:

Boozy teens bash family over cigarette

MORE than 30 drunken teens armed with glass bottles, rocks and wooden planks spiked with nails have bashed a family of seven in an unprovoked attack.

And it was all because Cairns Brothers rugby league player Neals Biehler, 23, told a teenage stranger he did not have a cigarette to give him.

Teen arrested over stabbing

A TEENAGER has been arrested over a stabbing attack on two men outside a pub in southern Sydney.

An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy were attacked by a group of six males outside a Hurstville hotel on the night of September 17. Both were rushed to St George Hospital suffering serious stab wounds.

The pair are still in hospital, with police saying they are in a stable condition.

Gee, it would be so unfair, wouldn't it, to lock these little bastards up.

Just because they have no compunction about bashing a stranger over the head with a lump of wood, or sticking a knife int their guts, it doesn't mean we should deprive them of their freedom for a while.

Like crap.

I don't care what the soft heads say about rehabilitation and jail being no deterrent - I simply don't want people like this roaming around our streets. I don't give a flying fuck if they go into prison illiterate, violent, angry and mentally ill, and come out illiterate, violent, angry and mentally ill - just so long as the time between entry and exit is about 10 years. That's 10 years of people not getting clobbered because these shits are locked away.

So what about their age? If they're old enough to be roaming the streets at 3am thumping people, they are old enough to serve their time.

Tight turns

The rather speedy 1750 have posted a set of rules that I can largely live with. I think you need to ride 100 miles a week for a while before you'll get most of them.

Under prohibited activities, they list:

Unclipping on tight ramp corners – learn how to ride before attempting the 1750

I have to agree with that one. I hate getting stuck behind gumbies on the Victoria Rd overpass that can't maneuver their bike around a couple of bends. However, this back route through Pyrmont to the ANZAC Bridge is a bit more of a challenge. At present, the foliage isn't that bad - at times, the path is buried under mouldering leaves and you have to hold one arm up to push the vegetation aside as you descend.

I have never made it around these bends without unclipping. I tried once, and ended up lying on my side in a bush.

Red light jumpers

Since we cyclists are regularly accused of jumping red lights, I thought I would present this short clip showing cars doing just that. And cyclists not.

Gumbies in all directions

Gumby number 1. How clever is it to stand in a marked bike lane pulling a cardigan on, and then stepping out without looking in the direction of oncoming traffic? Almost scratch Gumby Number 1.

Then we have Gumby Number 2, standing in a marked bike lane doing stretches and so forth, and then crossing the path without bothering to look either way. This one was much closer than the video makes out - I missed running over her toes by a poofteenth of an inch.

In the fast lane

I spent the weekend dicking around with the new action camera (woo-hoo, don't you love the exciting name they give these things?) and I managed to get some results. Here's me going onto the Anzac Bridge, and overtaking the normal sluggish commuter traffic.

A few points about the camera.

The batteries that it comes with last about 2 hours, and then you need to spend $80 on a rechargeable set. Do not even think about using cheap batteries - I did, and they lasted 27 minutes. This camera really needs a proper, purpose built battery like you get in a mobile phone or a decent digital camera, but I guess they shaved $50 or more off the price by going with AA instead.

Bastards.

The second is that this thing does not tolerate harsh light conditions. If it's too bright, or too dark, it's fucked. Riding in the shade on a sunny day produces the best results. Hmm.

The third is that trying to mount it on a bike helmet is an utter waste of time. In order to strap it to a helmet, you need an almost flat, solid surface. Bike helmets are mainly air ventilation holes surrounded by angular bits of plastic and foam. It would probably mount properly on my ski helmet (which is solid plastic with a few small ventilation holes) or a motor cycle helmet - but a bike helmet; forget it. If you try that, it will bounce all over the place. The effect is like watching footage shot by someone with a bad case of St Vitus Dance.

The other thing is that a bike helmet has no side support around the ears and jaw and down the back of the head, so it yaws and pitches quite easily; whilst a motorbike or ski helmet has that snug fit all around the head, so it offers a stable shooting platform.

In short, mount the flipping thing on the handlebars.

The camera does not come with an SD card, so I had to poach one out of an old camera lurking in a drawer. After finding that a 2GB card was not big enough, I swapped it out for a 4GB card - which is the limit on this camera. Don't know why it won't do more than 4GB, but that is good for maybe two hours or more. I was going to shoot the entire Spring Cycle from end to end, and 4GB would have been touch and go.

The buttons are really, really hard to use - especially the power button. I hate them. Everything is covered in thick rubber to make it waterproof, but it has almost made it user-proof.

For my needs, I really need something with more of a fisheye lens. The field of view on this thing is too narrow.

Anyway, watch the video and see what you think.

Oh, and as for editing the video........

I tried Windows Movie Maker, which I have used dozens of times to edit movies of the kids. No dice. Every movie I produced ended up being 90% green screen and 10% compacted movie. Something is not quite right.

So instead, I used Picasa to edit the movie. It took a while to get used to the different settings in Picasa, but in the end, it did a reasonable job. I just wish you could use it to cut out stuff that you don't want to keep. I would have reduced this video by 20 seconds if the editing tools were better. I'm sure there is some freeware stuff out there that will do this - I just haven't bothered looking yet. Or, I could of course buy a Mac. Heh. Spent $200 on a camera and then spend $3,000 on a Mac so that you can do good stuff with the footage from that camera (if I buy a Mac, it's going to be a good Mac).

Don't think so.

But back to the video. Here's my notes. I got stuck behind a gumby, who was puffing and panting and making this slope look really tough. It doesn't really show on the video, but when you see someone with a lot of arm flex (when looking from behind), it means they are working damnably hard. This guy was suffering. I was cruising at about 50%, barely putting any pressure on the pedals (or so it seemed to me). After 5 years in the saddle, I have to say, I have a mammoth amount of raw power in the legs. If I weighed 20kg less, I would have a very impressive power to weight ratio. As it is, all that power is nullified by me carrying the equivalent of two cartons of beer with me.

So I stayed with this bloke until the way past was clear, and then I was off. Because I had taken it easy on the first half of the bridge approach, I was well rested and full of juice.

Most of those that I was overtaking are new to commuting of course, and they haven't built up their legs yet. Give them time, and they'll move at a cracking pace as well. But this morning, they ate my dust.

Not bad for an old guy.

Sunday sloth

So much for being up at sparrow fart and doing an 80km ride. Instead, I slept in and slothed around the house, cleaning the bike and sorting out my riding gear. Since the weather looks like it is going to turn nasty for a while, I had to return to the shed to pull my winter gear out of storage. It sat in storage for precisely one week.

I think the thing that put me off riding today was a lack of mental preparation. My head is now all set to summer riding mode. As far as my riding brain is concerned, winter is over, and the foul weather is gone. It's now all about heat and sweat. Riding today would require the equivalent of a complete mental reboot. That was all too hard, so I sat down in a sheltered spot in the backyard and degreased the running gear.

That took three goes. You can get all sorts of very fancy and expensive lubricants for bike chains these days, and I have one variety for winter and another for summer. The winter variety is really sticky - it's designed to not wash off on wet days. Whilst that is a great attribute, it also collects grit and grime like old mental ladies collect newspapers, bric-a-brac and china dolls. And buckets. They always seem to have lots of buckets.

So I sit down with my degreasing brush, which is a very fancy $20 brush with three types of brush head for scrubbing different bits of the cogs and links, and within 30 seconds, my takeaway container full of orange degreaser has turned to black sludge. I scrub until all the degreaser has been dripped on the lawn, rinse the bike and wait for it to dry.

Half an hour later, I repeat the exercise. This time, it takes a minute for the takeaway container to be full of black sludge. Rinse and go inside to read a book.

Third time lucky - no sludge, but the degreaser ends up looking like the Exxon Valdeez had been in the vicinity. Rinse, and admire the gunmetal grey chain and groupset. Hmm, until today, I thought they were black.

Half an hour later, apply summer lube, and pack the bike away. Make mental note to degrease more often.