party people

The rest of the household went out to a Halloween party at ManRay. On a Wednesday. At 10:30. If I didn't have to work tomorrow, I might have gone, but I'm pretty much ready for bed now, so no big fun for me. Eric was dressed up minimally, but had on these Clark Kent glasses and has just bleached his hair and he looked shockingly like this guy I used to have a huge crush on (and did, eventually, do the nasty with). So it was creepy looking at him all night. I had to ask him if he had any percings, just to be sure that the resemblence was only above the neck...

Busy week again. I've got a big meeting on Friday in which I think I'm going to have to tell them something that they don't want to hear. But I've got to say it and I've got the backing of a state representative, so I'm not terribly worried. As long as it doesn't snow or freezing rain on my way there (it's about a 15 mile bike ride there), I think I'll be fine.

SCUL was great on Saturday. Not so much the ride, which was quite short and derby-filled, but the award ceremony before the ride. I actually got an award. I got the Stone Cog award for "embodying the spirit of SCUL". Pretty damn cool, if you ask me. Especially since I'm such a wallflower at these things. The trophy is the best - a tower of bike gears and axles welded together in a particularly pleasing sculptural shape with a plaque and everything. I now have two, count 'em, two bicycle trophies. I'm so cool!

life as we know it

Wow, it's been a while. It's been so long that my browser had forgotten the address of blogger...

So, yeah, I've been insanely busy. I'll be working full time for a couple of weeks while Tim is off campaigning for his Senator pal. It's a lot of work to be a bike advocate! The police education program is going full steam ahead, and we got a contract to make a national version for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Damn! I think I'm going to try to learn Flash to make it look spiffy.

The Critical Mass Halloween ride was a wash last night. I don't know what's wrong with some people. We're going to need a few people to do some organizing, as much as we prefer to avoid it. I wish I had the time...

I'm trying to make myself go to SCUL tonight, as it's the last official ride of the year. But it's pouring and I'm so damn busy, that I might just go for the closing ceremony and then head home instead of riding. I miss the gang, but I'm just so burnt out on biking stuff lately. I got a nice little distraction last week when my roommates and I went out for dinner and saw a free showing of Jackass the Movie. I vehemently opposed going, but I had a hard cider on an empty stomach and was completely unable to coordinate myself enough to figure out another movie to sneak into. So I went and I actually really enjoyed Jackass. There were definitely some really stupid bits, but there were a lot of really funny, and not so violent, stunts. Plus, there were bicycles :)

You know, one of the reasons that I don't post as much as I should here, is that Blogger has a lot of glitches. I still haven't figured out what is wrong with the archive list on the left side of the page. Some people can see it but I can't. And then there is the problem that every time I want to post Blogger/my browser gets stuck and I have to log out and back in to post. Grrrrr.

plenty of pixels

Sorry about the complete lack of posting goodness in the past week. Just been pretty quiet, and that last post about the war pretty much said it all. I did forget to mention that our long lost roommate finally returned from his overseas mission playing computer games. Yay! Because of this I've now been sucked into playing some of the video games that our new roommie brough with her. The snowboarding game is pretty cool, even in my opinion. And I also just found a pretty nifty 3D generating program called Groboto. It is primarily a building block type program, but it has some pretty bizarre tools and forms. You can create images that look like they're straight out of Age of Empires, or you can do some amazing organic fractal looking stuff. The problem I've got is that I can't seem to be able to export it so that I can use it in a more powerful rendering program like Bryce. If I can get it working, I'll probably use the images for graphics on my temporarily abandoned Random Turtle Productions site.

Tomorrow, I get to testify (well anyone can, really. Want to come?) at a state legislative hearing about pedestrian and bicycle safety. I have no real idea what I'm gonna say, beyond the fact that people are woefully uneducated about the rights and responsibilities of bicyclists. I'll probably play up school-age education, with a hint of police education for good measure.

4 out of 5 FBI agents agree

The war on terrorism is a failure. Apparently, in both FBI and CIA internal studies, last year's war on Afganastan is officially a bust. According to an article in the New York Times:

"Classified investigations of the al-Qaeda threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States ... Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."

Another article on Alternet.org goes into detail about how badly we did at accomplishing the goals that were espoused by the US warmongers. And guess what, we're about to do it all over again. More and more, this country seems like it's stuck in some made-for-tv movie.

Speaking of movies, anyone notice how the highly acclaimed "Wag the Dog" has suddenly disappeared from the TV guide listings?

grey, green, and orange

It must be fall.

I'm spending more and more time inside, and it makes me a little mopey. Though I've been staving off mopeyness these days with advocacy, letter writing, mapmaking, and lots of junk food.

I didn't make it to SCUL this past weekend. But I did do some tabling at the MassBike tent for Harvard Square's Octoberfest. It was ok, but we need to be more organized to appeal to more people.

Over the weekend, I also came up with my preliminary checklist of priorities for bicycle advocacy. The order is relevant, but not set in stone. I think it's a good starting point for coming up with a vision for bicycle friendly transportation design planning. While this may be reinventing the wheel (spoked, of course), it was important for me to break it all down into categories that I could put in an order of priority. This isn't a perfect list, call it a rough draft. In planning for transportation, facilities should be designed with these priorities in mind:

1. safe for all users
2. accesable/comfortable
3. environmentally responsible
4. convenient/efficient
5. inexpensive

With transportation being so intricately connected with everything we do as a society, and with it currently being a major problem area (traffic jams, serious accesability issues, and unbelievable death rates caused by dangerous behavior) I think that this may be a really good time to seriously reconsider our transportation policies. And I think that bicycling advocates can play a major part in addressing some of these issues. If we look at a broader picture, we cyclists may be able to tap into a huge collection of advocates who share an overall goal. This would give us a big, booming voice, rather than the tiny (but muscular) voice that we currently have.

where is the line?

There was an editorial in the Boston Globe today which brought up the ethics of medical experimentation on captive subjects. In nazi Germany in the 40s, medical experiments were conducted on subjects who were given no choice in the matter, and were heartily tortured in the name of science and for the "good of mankind". Given some thought, most people will quickly come to the conclusion that subjecting an unwilling victim to pain and misery for research purposes is immoral. My question is this: Why do people suddenly do a 180 with their ethics when the victim's DNA composition varies by more than 1 percent?

As most people are well aware, some of the other members of the primate order are within just a couple of percentage points of human DNA. Chimpanzees, specifically, have a cognitive development that is estimated to be roughly similar to that of a 4 year old human (in linguistics, mathematics, social relations, and self awareness). Jane Goodall, of all people, is quoted as saying ''As a mother, I would do anything...to save my child.'' as a begrudging acceptance of medical experimentation on chimpanzees. Whe I hear this, I have to wonder if she would be willing to sacrifice another human child to save her own. Obviously, the life of a human child is indeed important, but why is an individual of another species so much less important that we would consider torturing it acceptable behavior? Modern researchers have the resources to develop medical solutions to disease without the needless abuse of other "higher-level" life. Why don't we concentrate our energies on developing more ethical medical models, and leave the other inhabitant's of this planet unscathed? It's gotten better in the past 20 years, but people are still making excuses, and it's most definitely not a priority.

Obviously, as ethical humans, we do have to draw a line between higher morals and our human instinct for survival, but I am continually shocked that we, as a society, have chosen to draw the line so close to our own species as to exclude all other forms of life.

If anyone is interested in this debate of ethics, I highly recommend a book called "Defending Animal Rights" by Tom Regan.

bully

In the same 24 hour period, the US (via Ari Flescher) publicly stated that we would be happy to see Saddam Hussein murdered, while we also want to be given immunity from the International Criminal Court so that we can get away with this sort of murder. It's amazing how obnoxious we've gotten. We not only refuse to support a world court, exatly the sort of thing that could readily deal with people like our long lost buddy bin Laden, but now we are trying to bully individual countries into signing agreements allowing the US to be exempt from the court's jurisdiction. If we keep this kind of thing up, you just know that there's going to be a huge backlash throughout the rest of the world. We are fast becoming the new enemy. And the few of us who are intelligent enough to say "Hey! Wait a minute!" are being stifled by not only the media, but by the police as well. In one location, the police started a spy file on a woman simply because she had a "Free Leonard Peltier" bumper sticker on her vehicle. And with our new police nation, courtesy of the homeland security whitewash, millions of dollars of our tax money are being spent spying on peace groups. PEACE groups! People wandering around wearing butterfly costumes and toting handmade cardboard signs that urge the US to stop killing people and singing hymns are being classified as extremest criminals.

The chief of police in Washington DC has openly declared that his policy is to arrest people who have not committed any crime, just to get them out of the way. This policy just recently saw the mass arrest of people in the area of the WTO meetings in DC. As an example of how widespead the "premptive" arrests were, the some of those tossed in the wagon included a Washington Post reporter and Oliver North's official photographer.

When are we going to grow up and act like a civilized country?

bloat

I've been taking the past few days off of stuff. I really needed some of that "downtime" that those in the business world so covet. The whirlwind that was my September is over, and I'm feeling back to normal now (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable...). I'm now spending time going through all the reading material I picked up along the way to Minnesota and Maine. In looking at it all it really hits me that activists really need to collaborate more often instead of reinventing the wheel (and the spokes, and the brakes, and the blinky...). So many people are working on so many similar and related projects, not just in the bicycling world, but very few know what everyone else is doing. So I've decided to make an effort to put together a broad view of where we want to go, who is alredy heading there, and what they are riding (metaphorically, I mean!). My problem is that I can't decided to just do it, or if it would be better to do a bunch of research first...

Having nothing to do with research, I managed to drag my ass to the SCULympics event last weekend, and had a blast. I actually wish I had participated in more competitions. The bike limbo looked really fun, and, after a few modifications to the bikes (like removing the seats and flipping the handlebars upsidedown) a few pilots managed to ride under a 30 inch bar (that's only two and a half feet)! The event that I thought that I had a real shot at was the donut eating event (while riding a bike). I figured with my many years of practice, I'd be a pro at eating a donut faster than anyone else. I was surprised to discover that it is significantly more difficult than I ever imagined, especially since one of the elements that I hadn't prepared for was the military style heckling by the audience. I've always said that if I was subjected, for some unimaginable reason, to a real boot camp commander yelling in my face, I'd completely break down in hysterics. Well, that's what happened when my SCUL buddies did this while I was stuffing a donut in my mouth. So, sad to say, I didn't even place in the top three in the event. Oh, well. Next year...