Welcome to the blog

Welcome to my blog. This is the third home for my blog which has moved from an adult dating site, to MySpace, to WordPress. The major theme of this blog will be bicycle safety, how not to get hit riding a bike on the roads. I will be linking to many news items from all over the world, but mostly from the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
Right now I’m going to let you know a bit about how I think. First of all I’m not one of those car-hating bike people. I love cars and always have. It’s the mess people make with cars that I’m having a problem with. Motor vehicles create lots of problems even when nobody gets hit with one, like pollution, obesity, vast chucks of land being paved over to give people a place to put their cars when they aren’t using them (parking lots) &tc. Let’s face it, cars are a mess when not used properly, and our culture is extremely car-abusive. How many people do you know who drive on trips of less than a mile? Most of the people I know do, and that includes a lot of people who should know better.

There is a major supermarket just under a mile from here (0.99 miles, but that is still less than a mile) and all my neighbors take their cars even just to pick up a loaf of bread or quart of milk. I walk. Now this doesn’t mean I’m running for some kind of ecological sainthood, after all I could ride my bike. But I like walking, walking is good for me as long as I don’t try to carry the entire store home in my reusable canvas tote, and it’s free. I’m making modifications to my wife’s bike to carry large amounts of groceries home from the store because otherwise it makes our backs hurt to carry them on our backs. I have my own bike that I’m doing pretty much the same to. except I’m also making it capable of carrying my camping gear for a week. This way we can carry bulk items that are too heavy to carry in the totes or in backpacks.

When I don’t walk I usually ride a bike, except when I have to take a bus to get somewhere and not be out of breath and sweaty, like when I visit the lab rat keeper AKA as my doctor. I’m one of those people who tests medication to make sure it’s safe for you to take. It’s a heck of a deal, I take meds that could kill or injure me, but I get treated for free. Otherwise my hypertension (fancy word for high blood pressure), would go untreated and I might be dead from a stroke or aneurysm by now. The drug companies get something, and I get something. I think it’s a fair trade.

Anyway, starting tomorrow I’m going to be giving you the Feed, a digest of all the bicycle wrecks I can find, or rather that Google Alerts can find. I present each story with it’s link(s), and then tell you how to avoid a similar wreck if possible. When I report stories from the UK it mostly isn’t possible to tell you how to avoid a similar wreck because they don’t tell what happened in the wreck, they leave out one of the “W’s”, you know “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How” that you learn in basic journalism classes.