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Ladyfriend

My ladyfriend is a labor attorney, union side. She also does stuff with courts and goes to hearings and files things and stuff. Then her secretary quits. And everybody quits, and she gets nasty calls from other lawyers, and flies all over tarnation taking names and depositions and whatnot. In brief, she is a troublemaker Send her an email with the words "Gouranga Gouranga" in it.

We've gone all manner of places: hong kong and macau, turkey, british columbia, peru. Some day she may develop her film and we can see pictures of these things.

Transportation

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green, 1965


Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

H.G. Wells


You might say I am a transportation activist. I never wanted to proselytize, but these are issues which affect all of us, including me. My feeling is that our current system of personalized automobile transport is dangerous and evil:
  • Car "accidents" kill a million people a year and maim millions more.
  • Cars kill millions of animals each year; our roads destroy natural habitats.
  • Particulate matter from internal combustion engines causes heart attacks, aggravates asthma, and likely has carcinogenic components.
  • Traffic congestion itself is apparently responsible for stress related heart attacks.
  • Our reliance on personal automobile transport consumes millions of barrels of oil each year; our dependence on foreign oil causes us to cozy up with unsavoury foreign governments, interfere with unfriendly states (Venezuala, Iran), and invade middle eastern countries, resulting in the direct death of over a hundred thousand people, and effectively flushing billions of dollars down the toilet. Our strategic oil "policy" has caused us, in the past, to prop up Bin Laden and Hussein, and later to renounce and attack them. It is folly to suggest that we will wash our hands now and keep them clean forever if we are not striving towards energy independence.
  • Your hybrid is no better: Whitelegg calculated that only about 40% of the air pollution (i.e. energy consumption) associated with the lifetime of an automobile is caused during driving. The remainder is associated with material extraction, fabrication, and disposal.
  • This perfectly idiotic waste of resources (oil, gas, money, life) is designed into our communities. When we seclude our living units far away from the working units, the shopping units, the food production sources, etc, we set up a situation where the only rational choice is to drive all over the place. The system is insane, but our reaction to it is predictably sane--we no longer flinch at hourly commutes, driving to the supermarket, and living cloistered in gated "communities"
  • This gravy train is near the end of the line: we are now near, or even past, peak world oil production. Oil companies are loathe to admit this because a large percentage of the value of their stock derives from their "reserves," though there are apparently no legal restrictions on how they represent their reserves, and have been known to fudge in the past, like Shell's "recategorisation" of 4 billion gallons of proven reserves.
    When transportation costs are ten times what they are now, we will probably no longer do idiotic things, like import mass-produced collectible landfill from China, but we may also have a hard time maintaining a semblance of economic activity and/or getting food from farms to mouths. If oil production drops off relatively quickly we will not have time to adjust to this situation. We can stake our strategic positions in the middle east, but it does us no good to fight for the last drops of a dwindling resource if we aren't weaning ourselves off it.
You can learn more about these issues from the world carfree network. In particular, look for the Ivan Illich article which sparked the movement in the 70's. You should also check out peakoil.org, and the writings of Jim Kunstler, author of "the Geography of Nowhere"

I have some bicycles:

  1. My 99 Bianchi Volpe, a fave for groceries, commuting, etc.
  2. The early aluminum 88 Schwinn 564, a bit more racy.
  3. The 89 Specialized Hard Rock, my first bicycle. I take this for local trips to the library or the laundromat, and for rainy days.
  4. A Peugot 5 speed frankenbike which I keep in San Francisco.
Bicycle stuff that seems kinda cool: My Bianchi and Schwinn are equipped with Speedplay pedals, which seem to be better for my knees. I suffered some kind of knee trauma while training for the Pittsburgh Marathon. I have healed, after many COX-1 and COX-2 "COX-tails." I didn't make this up, I learned it from Kaiser P: just mix the little blue pill with the little red and yellow pill, and it's all good. For inflammation, that is. I managed to run the Pittsburgh Marathon in 2003, but have not run much since then.

I've totalled 14,000 km since September 5th, 2003 (it is now April 12, 2005).

I got my wrenching learn on from free ride and Kraynicks in Pittsburgh, but I still goof a lot. Check out the panorama shots of Kraynicks shop.

Creatures

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

Immanuel Kant


I know peeps at compassion for farm animals; they're doing good work.... And then there's the hounds of GAC.

Culture Jamming

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Ray Bradbury