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WE GOTS INFORMATIONS: MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW, AND LESS, ON THE BICYCLING RESEARCH PAGE DRILL FOR KNOWLEDGE AT THE ENERGY & TRANSPORT HUB THE I.C. ENCOURAGES COMMENTS, EVEN COMPLAINTS AS LONG AS THEY AREN'T TOO RUDE. EMAIL: ROBERT AT INDUSTRIALIZEDCYCLIST DOT COM READ A HURST BOOK |
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| WHAT ELSE IS UP: Stefan Schultz, "Peak Oil and the German Government: Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis," Der Spiegel, September 1, 2010. Campbel Robertson and Jack Healy, "Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico," NYT, September 2, 2010. Sounds real familiar. Fignon dead at 50. WHAT 'THE FED' DOES. FRESHLY SPRAYED DISPERSANT, AUG. 25 (Tulane U. Real-Time Spill Reports). Linda Hooper-Bui, "A Gulf Science Blackout," NYT, August 24, 2010. Whose Gulf is it? "Serious cycling? No thanks." |
Graphic from Joe Stiglitz, The Big Picture, via Corrente.
Yesterday, a mere cracking of the front door of a highrise called the Independence Plaza in downtown Denver unleashed a heavy buzzing noise from inside the building. Vuvuzelas! Around the corner in the building's expansive ground floor common area, a 36-inch TV fixed to a huge marble-covered pillar was blasting out the Spain-Germany game for anyone within eighty yards to hear. About fifteen or twenty folks were camped around the pillar with their eyes glued to the screen. The group seemed to lean heavily toward Spain. There was a lot of nodding of approval when the ref decided not to award a German penalty kick in the second half. Meanwhile, across Germany, dudes were smashing their steins against their skulls. With all this awesome world sport going on, not to mention the ecological armageddon and all the rest of it, you may not have noticed that the ol' Tour de France cranked up about a week ago. Juan Pelota vs. El Pistolero. Part 2. Not quite Spain versus Germany but good stuff. Lance Armstrong is a little older -- way, way old for a pro racer actually -- but, I would bet, also a little closer to his uber-self after another full year in focused training with that scrawny little target in his sights. There's been plenty of drama already, with a zillion crashes, a peloton protest resulting in a neutral finish, and a Parix-Roubaix-like cobbled stage on Tuesday in which L.A. flatted on the stones and lost a bunch of time despite a furious chase. He solo'd valiantly after using up Popovych but couldn't match the even more relentless pace at the front, where most of his G.C. rivals were motorin' to the finish behind the likes of Fabian Cancellara, smelling blood in the water. And not just any blood. Lance said: "Sometimes you're the hammer, and sometimes you get nailed. Today I was the nail." It'll be interesting to see how the rest of the Tour goes for him after that energy-sapping ordeal. Reconstituted Cadel Evans seems to have a good shot of winning it all at this point [that all turned out well...]; even if Lance falters completely [It wasn't a meltdown ... but the old champ is clearly ready to hang up the cleats ...] the race seems to promise a lot of dramatic action to come. Just be glad there are no vuvuzelas in bike racing.
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I love dirt. Love that stuff. There are a number of reasons for this love of mine. First of all, dirt is the stuff of life. Without dirt there would be no plants, no animals, no people and no lemon-flavored ice cream. In some sense just about everything we need depends on the tiny skin of dirt that covers the earth. Necessarily, dirt is also death. And the death in dirt makes life. It is literally the miracle of reincarnation at our feet. Technically, it is really soil, and not dirt per se, in which the power of life and death resides. Soil could be defined as the place where Death, Life, Minerals, Air and Water coexist. Without one component or another it's no longer soil, although it may still be considered dirt. All soil is dirt, but not all dirt is soil, see. I could draw you a Venn diagram. There is another reason for my love of dirt. It is on dirt where the brilliance called mountain biking takes place. A human, balanced on a bike, on a mountain. What?? ...
HURST HAS ALREADY WRITTEN A BUNCH OF BIKE BOOKS, STRANGELY ENOUGH |
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Like a lot of people I enjoy criticizing the so-called mainstream media. But then, like a lot of people, I turn around and get most of my day-to-day information from that same mainstream media. And if they happen to be putting out a message that compliments my world-view, I forget all about how I was making fun of them two minutes ago. You know how it goes people. Below is a short collection of on-line articles loosely tracking the Gulf disaster from the beginning in April. The list of references, complete with smarmy comments, was thrown together with the thought that I may be writing about all this some day in some venue or another and would like to have applicable citations right there on my computer machine. But maybe these could be useful to other folks out there as well, which would be great. (The BICYCLING RESEARCH PAGE and ENERGY & TRANSPORT PAGE both sprouted like this too, as personal web libraries for citations in my books, before I lost well control on both pages.) ...
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For about eight years, in another century, Boulder was my home town. Whenever I get back there it brings on a flood of bittersweet memories, all those long lost friends and old haunts. These feelings are greatly intensified by the fact that the little town hasn't changed all that much in at least 20, 30 years. Many of the same establishments we used to frequent are still around. I am happy to confirm the continued surprising existences of Tra Ling's Oriental Cafe, Bova's, Suds n' Duds, Jalino's Pizza, Red Letter Books (no way, seriously?) and especially the Full Cycle bike shop, which was started by a helluva nice guy back in the 1980s when we lived over on Pleasant Street and our housemate Tina T. worked there part-time. ...
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 An 1880s Victor safety in front of a newer Pierce Arrow shaft drive. ...
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I was listening to the NPR 7am newscast Wednesday morning, as we honkies occasionally do, and waiting for some information on The Spill, an event that is beyond historic and beyond disaster. But there's a lot of news today. A passenger jet crashes in Tripoli with only one survivor, a child (who is whisked off to a secret holding facility in Greenland for potential messiahs). Obama meets with Karzai in DC. Elena Kagan for Supreme Court Justice. A bomb in Iraq that had been placed in a corpse, killing three people and injuring many. (NPR's story called it a "dramatic attack," but that's dismally normal stuff for Iraq. It probably didn't make the news in Iraq.) There are many interesting things going on, and the Spill is hardly breaking news any more, it's understandable that one might have to wade three or four stories deep into the report before hearing anything about it. But the next story wasn't about the Spill either, it was about the Oklahoma governor touring "literally hundreds" of storm-damaged homes in his state after a recent squall. Eh? Note, not a story about a bad storm, but about a politician's pre-packaged speechifying in the wake of it. Not much of a story there. The next story was an in-depth look at ... a recent change in the federal government's hiring practices. Whoa. And the last story was about the new coalition government in England. NPR's 7am newscast ended, not a single word about the Spill. Did I wake up in ... 1984?
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As this giant oil spill overruns the National Wildlife Refuges in the Louisiana and Mississippi marshes and takes aim at Florida's white Spring Break beaches, the whole situation has been messing with my head, big-time. I've been trying to wrap my mind around this spill, as it is wrapping itself around us.
I. EVOLUTION OF A SPILL
Tuesday night, April 20, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up, blasting eleven workers to oblivion. On Thursday the burning rig sank and the search for the missing humans was called off. At this point a one-by-five-mile slick was visible on the water, and attention turned to a potential environmental nightmare. Was there a leak flowing down there at the wellhead or was this just the diesel fuel that was onboard the rig when it sank? On Friday BP told the feds that they had sent a remote control sub to look at the wrecked riser and found no leaks. The feds took the good news to the people of America: "It does not appear that oil is emanating from the hole." [Leslie Kaufman, "Search Ends for Missing Oil Rig Workers," NYT, April 22, 2010.]
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ALSO: DRILLING FOR DIMWITS, THE REFINERIES MYTH , THE RESERVES MYTH 1 & 2 , ETC.
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Wait, I'm not done alienating everybody yet. My last entry teased beginning cyclists on the path for their clothing delusions and funky anti-social face-making. Let me tell you, that one rubbed people the wrong way. In my experience bicyclists do not deal well with (they royally freak out about) any criticism whatsoever of their clothing choices. It is, like, off-limits. This of course makes such criticism a good deal more entertaining. For the record, my own bicycle stink face is an approximate cross between the Scream mask and Nick Nolte's DUI mug shot. This time around I have a message for those self-conscious two-wheeled transportationalists who would sooner stab themselves in the chest than wear lycra panel shorts: This summer when you're at the bar and the TV there happens to be showing the start of some Tour de France stage, and you and your friends start to laugh and trade insults about all those candy-colored lycra clowns you see on the roads these days, steal a moment to study the racers' positioning on their machines. This is something all bicyclists do well to learn and understand.
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On one of those perfect early spring Sundays, which brought all of the recreational cyclists out to play under a clear blue sky, I sat down on a bench by the Cherry Creek bike path and watched the parade. Oh, the colors. Virtually every rider that passed my position was decked out, head to toe, in bike-specific garb. On a weekday I would have seen a lot of riders wearing more 'normal' attire, office clothes, jeans and t-shirts, things like that, moving with no-nonsense purpose on a highly useful transportation facility. On this fine Sunday, most of the riders that passed appeared to be beginners who had spent as much on their bike clothing as they did on their bikes, and all with one credit card swipe during their very first visit to the local bike shop. The notion among new bicyclists -- and potential new bicyclists -- that special clothing is a necessary part of the program seems to be stronger than ever. A triumph for Pearl Izumi, perhaps not so much for the rest of us. Besides the clothing, there was something else that really stood out to this bench-sitter. The faces. Almost everybody that pedaled by gave me some kind of Bicycle Stink Face. BSF can take many forms. One lady rolled past, at roughly walking pace, with a look on her mug exactly like Carlos Santana in the throws of his Black Magic Woman solo. ...
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The President's announcement today about opening up previously off-limits areas of the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling [Actually only parts of the Gulf and Atlantic coast, not the Pacific. -- R.H.] also opens up a lot of opportunity for silliness in the news media. It's Reserves Time, baby!
SEE MORE OF HURST'S ENERGY-RELATED RAVINGS: THE REFINERIES MYTH , THE RESERVES MYTH 1 & 2 , PEOPLE ARE WRONG , THE CHRYSLER CHRONICLES PART 6 , FLY AMERICA , A QUESTION FOR PRIUS OWNERS , SEND IT ALL BACK , POWERING DOWN , IF EVERYBODY DOES A LITTLE ... , CONFUSION! , PREDICT-O-RAMA , THE OIL ROLLER COASTER , OUR CLOUD and more ... check the ARCHIVES. DRILL FOR KNOWLEDGE AT THE ENERGY & TRANSPORT HUB. |
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The extremely popular and useful Refineries Myth, in which an alleged shortfall of oil refineries within the United States becomes a major contributor to rising fuel costs, appears in two common varieties. The two varieties are distinguished by their objects of ultimate blame, to satisfy the widest possible range of ignorant consumers. First of all, the wingnuttery section of the country has been devouring the Refineries Myth, and of course the environmentalist is assigned the role of villain in this version. The poor companies would love to help us out by building more refineries, but those dang enviro-fascists are always getting in the way. Regulation. Stifling communist regulation. Until we can burn the environmentalists themselves for fuel we need more durn refineries! God I love driving my Durango and I deserve for it to be much cheaper than it is. On the other side of the Refineries Myth coin, the intellectually lazy brand of liberal pins the blame on the oil companies. Big Oil, you know. Big Oil operates in collusion to fix gas prices at unnaturally high levels. They don't want to build any new refineries because they want to make it as expensive as possible for me to drive my Prius. And because they're evil. God I love driving my Prius and I deserve for it to be much cheaper than it is. As with all successful myths, there is a kernel of truth in each version of this one.
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OLDER STUFF: BICYCLE STINK FACE , DRILLING FOR DIMWITS , THE REFINERIES MYTH , THE RESERVES MYTH 1 , 2 , THE GOVERNOR'S CRASH, A NEW ERA IN SIGNAGE 3, UPDATES, MIND SUCK, The PHYSIOLOGY of BICYCLING , PRAIRIE STEAMERS , LISTENING TO TAILWINDS 1,2 , UNDER THE BUS , NEW ERA IN SIGNAGE 1,2 , ONE FOOT , PEOPLE ARE WRONG , CHRYSLER CHRONICLES PART 6 , ENDED SUMMER , FLY AMERICA
ALL
OLDER ENTRIES VIA THE I.C. ARCHIVE |
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1. MIND SUCK |
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READ MORE ABOUT IT. SHOP FOR IT ON AMAZON, BARNES N NOBLE, TATTERED COVER, POWELL'S. |
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