Bean day, and a weird Feed

Today is Bean day at my house. This is the day when Mrs. the Poet goes to clean the church and gets home late so she doesn’t have time to cook dinner, so I make dinner instead. There is a dish that I really like that takes so long to cook that if I want it I have to make it, a Cajun-style 3 (sometimes 4) bean and rice meal. To give an idea of how long this takes to cook, the last step is adding the brown rice to the pot 2 hours before the intended serving time, and sometimes we have to delay dinner because the rice isn’t fully cooked yet. Because of the way beans cook and because we have one member of the household that doesn’t like rice in her beans I have to get them mostly done before adding spices which gets done 20-30 minutes before adding the rice. So for a dinner that is due to hit the table at 1800 I start preparations about 1030 by warming 10 cups of water in a microwave for 15 minutes while I add the beans to a crock pot that is warming up. Doing this takes an hour out of the cooking time as I used to have to wait for the pot to get hot and bring the water to a simmer after adding cold water to the pot with the beans. It is really an easy dish to prepare if you’re going to be in the house all day long to stir the beans every so often. I’m the only person that works at home in our house so because I like this dish and I have to be at home all day anyway I get to cook it. I used to try to cook it on the stove, which was a real hoot trying to adjust the heat input between the 1 and 2 setting on the dial, and there’s no way in the world to cook this on my camp stove.

Up first because of a freaky coincidence is a report on a DUI hitting 2 cyclists in Baton Rouge. Cyclist dies after being hit by alleged drunk driver and A Cyclist is killed Saturday night while riding down Perkins Road and Friends mourn bicyclist killed; call for safety and Cyclist dies after being hit by alleged drunk driver Now here is the freaky coincidence, Goodbye, Batman… That blog post was on my dashboard as I was preparing to compose this post, and I clicked on it because… I don’t know, I’m a bit of a comic book geek and I know people that think of their comic book obsession as like an addiction? I think that blog post and those news articles are about the same person. Anyway hit-from-behind but the driver hit 2 cyclists, meaning there was not enough room on the road for that drunk and any bicycles and him not hit one. The usual rant about drunk drivers should be handcuffed to the steering wheel as their cars get run through the shredder and recycled, only this one should be pumped full of Red Bull and Monster Energy first so he’s alert when he takes his last drive.

In the most deadliest state in the US to walk or ride a bike, another victim of hit-and-run. Dade City bicyclist hurt in hit and run Another FL hit-and-run with nothing that could identify the make or model of the weapon vehicle in the debris from the wreck. All they have for sure is a light green paint job, which may be changed at any time in the future…

Moving a bit north from FL a GA cyclist is killed by cops. Cyclist dies after collision with Savannah-Chatham police vehicle The fact that nothing was said about the cyclist not having lights or reflective clothing indicates to me that the cyclist had done everything in his power to make himself visible on the bike and got hit anyway by a driver not paying attention to the roads. Since the mode of wreck wasn’t given I can’t say what you could have done to avoid a similar wreck except not ride a bike in Savannah GA. More VIDEO: Garden City cyclist dies in collision with Metro police van and Bicyclist dies after collision with police forensics van near Savannah also SCMPD forensics vehicle hits bicyclist I finally got a picture I could see rather than videos and that bike was hit from behind. I couldn’t see reflectors or lights but if there was a light it would have been turned off after the wreck and there was no lightsource directed at the bike from the camera so any reflectors would not have been visible, The reflective trim on the firefighters’ gear was not reflecting much so a bike reflector that was not pointed directly at the camera would not have been very visible at all.

A CA single vehicle wreck that was on the property of a skate park, as I read the link before putting it here it wasn’t stated if the kid was riding in the park itself or just on the property. Boy injured at skate park, airlifted to hospital Since the mode of wreck wasn’t given, just the injury, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this might have been mitigated with a helmet.

Also from CA is a cyclist shot by LEO for refusing to stop. LA deputies shoot man after foot chase If the cops try to pull you over while you’re riding your bike, pull over and stop. And for gawd’s sake don’t pull up your pants…

Moving a bit up the coast to OR a transient cyclist trying to get across a freeway is hit and killed. Bicyclist Killed Crossing I-5 Identified I consider this as much an infrastructure failure as I do a stupid act on the part of the cyclist. We have created walls across the landscape that are impassable without access to a motor vehicle that grants the ability to go 10 miles out of your way to get across this highway. Now I don’t know if this was a 10 mile or 1 mile detour or if there was a crossing point nearby that the cyclist didn’t know about because it required local knowledge, but I’m still placing partial blame on a hazard created by the high speed highway with limited access to cross it. And a lot of blame on the cyclist who was trying to cross it by riding salmon. Another link Cyclist killed crossing Interstate 5 near Cottage Grove

A semi-legal ICE-assist bike is hit in Oz with near-fatal results. Quick CPR gives man his chance Nothing about the wreck except that it happened at a “dangerous” intersection, so the best I can give you is intersection protocols to avoid.

Infrastructure! news from Chicago. Women drive, walk and ride the El, but what about bikes? The answer is that using a bicycle for transportation in the US is something very similar to an extreme sport, requiring extensive safety equipment and special gear just to survive a trip across town. Extreme sports are an almost male-exclusive territory.

Legal infrastructure in PA. New bill could make drivers give bicycles 4-foot berth This would be an improvement over the 3-foot laws many states have passed, but I’m concerned about the provision “as long as they don’t interfere with traffic” as that could be interpreted as the cyclist was “interfering” with traffic just by being there, as in the Reed Bates case in Ennis TX .

A call not to hate in Enn Zed followed by three comments that are all about hating cyclists. Time to move beyond bickering over bikes

Apparently drivers in Oz are “confused” by separated bike lanes. Safer cycling flagged

And final link is to a shocking revelation in the NYPD investigation of a hit-and-run fatality of cyclist Mathieu Lefevre. Trucker Struck Mathieu Lefevre With Driver’s Side Tire Before Leaving Scene That’s right, NYPD had video of the wreck showing the driver’s side front tire running over the cyclist before the driver left the scene. Not only that but that was the second time the truck hit him, the first being with the passenger side front bumper that caused the cyclist to go to the pavement, then he was run over by the driver’s side tire. But in this link NYPD File On Slain Cyclist Contains Photos Of Family, None Of Crash Scene we find that NYPD was more concerned over the activity of the victim’s family than actually doing something about the guy that drove the weapon vehicle…

And that’s all the links I have today.

Billed @$0.02, Opus

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