Another wreck practically in my back yard, and the Feed

I usually start my blog posts with a little snippet about my personal life before dropping into the quagmire of dead and injured cyclists, but today those 2 are intersecting sets. My son-in-law is a LEO not far from here in a dinky little town called Highland Village, and they had a cyclist killed on the roads there this week, that I just found out about last night from a long-time friend of this blog. I’m trying to get more information about the wreck directly from the source instead of being filtered by other media, but getting that information is not easy. Here is the link to the local paper’s version of events. Bicyclist fatally struck by vehicle in Highland Village From the comments (gotta love local news comments) the driver was following too close to the vehicle in front of her and when that vehicle moved to pass the cyclist the driver of the weapon vehicle did not have time to react and hit the cyclist from behind. I’m sure the relevant LEO have subpoenaed the driver’s cell phone records to make sure she wasn’t talking or texting at the time of the wreck, and if they haven’t they will when I talk to them about it. All they need is the phone number of the teen driver’s cell phone and an accident report number to do that.

And while I’m waiting to get some live links delivered to my inbox I’m listening to Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France Soundtrack” CD on my MP3 player (I ripped these to OGG format, an open source format that actually has better compression with less loss than the “traditional” MP3 format) and since I own the CD this is legal for me. I spend a lot of time listening to this player, as I also use it in my meditations besides just having something playing to pass the time. The stuff I meditate to is also somewhat “different” from what is normally considered “meditation music”. I listen to polyrhythmic drumming when I meditate, as it gives a number of “bright shinys” to capture the monkey mind and allow me to enter the meditative state. I used to use my arthritis pain as a focus to enter the meditative state, but I go so good at blocking that pain via meditation that I don’t feel it enough to use it as a focus any more. Other music I use ranges from “Tubular Bells” from the 70s to the entire CD of “Audio” by Blue Man Group as well as most of the early releases of Kraftwerk (the cuts that took up an entire side of an LP were the best as they had little or no lyrics to distract from the trance state). One that I use almost as frequently is a limited-edition CD called “Revel in the Rhythms” released as a fund-raiser by the Council of Magical Arts to help pay the down payment on the land we camp on in southeast TX a little south of Bastrop. This is basically a recorded drum jam taken at a revel fire during a gathering back in the 1990s that someone did as a lark and then allowed the CMA to use. Lots of different rhythms during a cut to attach the monkey to and let the rest of my mind work to make me (more or less) sane. I’m told that if someone was to examine my meditation techniques that much would be learned about my mind in specific and minds in general. I have known for a long time that even without the brain damage I’m a bit off the ends of the bell curve. You should see some of my tests from the late 60s and early 70s. Some IQ tests I took placed me in the 99th percentile in some areas, and the 34th percentile in others, what’s sometimes called a “savant” profile. Yeah, so I was “weird” before I was hit in the head with a pickup truck. That was just the pickle frosting on the weird cake…

One of the worst fears for most cyclists is icy roads. Icy roads make for a nerve-wracking commute (plus some tips) Yeah, that was me suggesting that they use a trike to de-ice the bike paths.

And it’s past time for the last report to have come in and I’m staring at an empty Feed folder. That means those are all the links I have today.

Billed @$0.02, Opus