Flash and Chrome OS have not been playing nice lately and I have had several mild computer crashes lately, but I had one last night that just wiped a bunch of stuff off my little Chromebook and put me dead in the water for hours when I got up this morning. Seriously, every site was asking for something to show I had been there prior or my password(s), none of my subscription sites were responding (those will take a pair of e-mails to get me back on) all because I had 3 tabs open with multiple Flash advertisements in them.
Now compound that with a sinus headache because I have been dealing with an allergy attack (during January in the Northern Hemisphere!) and got a secondary infection in the old snot factory, and things just got miserable. I have been up twice so far today, about 1100 for some hydration and pain meds and about 1600 because I was sick of being in bed. But not being in bed is so uncomfortable I might just end this post at any moment and go back to bed. Then again we are having spaghetti and meatballs for dinner in a few minutes…
Oh, yes, the original topic for today was supposed to be… POLITICS. Specifically with one side being so opposed to anything resembling bicycle infrastructure in the US, why haven’t I made more noise about that in this blog? One reason is because of gerrymandering the people who do this are quite literally in a lifetime office that is theirs until they either die or decide to leave it. My Congressional district goes almost to Texarkana but a couple of miles away that district goes out by Paris, and a few miles in the other direction the district goes out past Terrell. My area is strongly Democrat, but we have been “represented” by the GOTP for almost 15 years now. There are almost 40% of Texans who are Democratic, but the people that make up our “representation” in Congress are 25 GOTP and 11 Dem, not even close to the population. And I’ll give you 2 guesses as to which group thinks (actually says out loud when they think people are not listening) that bicycle infrastructure is “inspired by Satan”. Yep, the people who are “representing” me.
At the moment there ain’t much I can do about this situation. The current state legislature is if anything gerrymandered worse than the Congressional Districts which had to be drawn under Federal approval prior to the Voting Rights Act being gutted by the SCOTUS. The Texas legislature was not as subject to the pre-approval process and we ended up with small areas that were packed with blue voters in the middle of urban areas getting attached to rural areas with less than 1/20th the population density with the zoning lines going down the middle of a street but not extending to the buildings on either side until they got to strongly GOTP but sparsely populated areas where they were unlikely to encounter anything except livestock and Republicans.
And all the “feel good” I had built up prior to the spaghetti is now rapidly leaving my body as I have been out of bed almost 3 hours now and I want to go back to bed and watch the episode I recorded of Mythbusters.
And TV and a warm bed sounds better than posting to a blog, sorry.
PSA, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 