I hate dealing with bureaucracies. Like I wrote earlier, it is a good thing this is not immediately life-threatening, because I wouldn’t be posting this now if it was. We are now officially 9 months into trying to get this useless lump of fat off my neck and not interfering with my life. The first delay was because the PCP I was assigned was not accepting new patients when I started trying to get a surgeon to remove the lump and had to wait until I could get an appointment to see him to get the process rolling, then it was imaging and waiting until I had the $250 co-pay for the MRI, then getting a referral and that takes us up to where we are now, with an “atypical” lipoma the size of Rhode Island on my neck and not knowing if this means I’m already dead and I just haven’t finished falling down, or if it means this is a really ugly GOP presidential candidate sitting on my neck. Whew, punctuation! It is roughly 1400 as I wrote this paragraph with still no contact made.
Up first because there are so many ads on this site that it almost crashed my computer. Woman arrested in S.F. hit and run that hurt 3 cyclists I like that they barely mention the 3 cars damaged in the incident except for the one that was pushed inside a nearby building. People are much more important than property. More SFPD Arrests Driver Who Hit Three Bike Commuters on the Wiggle
More links about the Oz sports commentator who assaulted a cyclist with his car. Bosnich pleads guilty to reckless driving which injured cyclist and Mark Bosnich pleads guilty to charge of reckless driving after cyclist is injured in collision with former Aston Villa and Manchester United keeper
Semi-local activity. DINNER & BIKES DENTON, SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2015, 7-10PM Can’t go, going to be celebrating Mother’s Day early with the wife.
This has become way too common in the last 6 months. Man riding bike shot, killed in Gary I have lost count of how many people have been shot just since the start of the new year. I distinctly remember 2 in CA and one in FL, one that I think was in SC, one maybe in Seattle (not sure if it was this year or last). It used to be a cyclist getting shot was as common as a cyclist killing a pedestrian or driver, now we have all these dead cyclists with bullet holes in them…
This is a combination of bad infrastructure with bad manners. UPDATE: Cyclist Seriously Injured In Williamsburg Bridge Crash Seriously, look at the crash scene: see those fences? The street furniture left in the travel lane? Imagine that as you would a street for cars with big immovable objects left in the lanes of travel. Not gonna happen for cars, is it?
Our Daily Ted. How Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Since when does “direction of traffic” apply to a sidewalk?
I didn’t know the Keystone Kops had emigrated… Suspected thief walks free from court after bungling police officers admit selling the stolen bike that was supposed to be used as evidence against him
And things aren’t any better in Enn Zed. Driving sentence upsets family A NZ$3000 fine and a 9 month suspension of his driving license? For driving off the road and killing a man?
Why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling in one easy graph. The Only Chart You Need to Explain America’s Broken Gas Tax
No, really, tell me about how well Vision Zero is working. NYPD: Drivers Injured 945 Pedestrians and Cyclists in March, and Killed Six Another month without a dead cyclist, but still too many people getting killed on the outside of motor vehicles.
Off-road in Portland. Off-Road Cycling Plan gets Council nod, Bureau of Planning will take the lead This takes the person responsible for getting bikes banned from a site that had been built and maintained by MTB’ers for nearly 2 decades out of the off-road bicycle planning process.
What makes a great city? Among other things the length of the block. The Importance of Block Sizing Portland for example has a 200 foot block size and is very walkable.
The other big local transportation issue, for more than 15 years now. Is there a partisan divide on Trinity Parkway? This was what we got instead of the little lakes and parks we were promised when the vote was taken on the bond issue. Those parks and lakes were not mentioned on the ballot, but they were everywhere in the promotional material about the bond. Turns out it is perfectly legal for the city to lie like a rug in promotional materials.
Good news about a heart-breaking situation. FLEET OF BIKES DONATED TO WOUNDED WARRIORS The stolen bikes had been individually modified to work with the particular rider’s injuries and disabilities. Now the new bikes will have to be likewise modified.
I wear a helmet because it insulates my heirs slightly from blame if I get killed, particularly the kind of helmet I wear. Helmet or No Helmet? It Depends Which Side of the Atlantic You’re On As I have written in this blog many times, a bicycle helmet is basically useless in a wreck with a motor vehicle because it was just not built for that kind of impact. Bicycle helmets are designed and built to prevent skull fracture when falling down when you can’t unclip. The maximum impact they’re built for is 12.5 MPH, as speed increases the energy that needs to be absorbed increases as the square of velocity, which is why the motorcycle helmets made for a 20 MPH impact are so much larger than a bicycle helmet. Reducing impact forces requires reducing the acceleration of the head, which in turn requires distance, this becomes intuitive if you think of your head like a car that is moving at a steady speed when a red light changes. The faster you are going the more time and space it will take you to come to a stop. That space is the thickness of the liner in the helmet. Bicycle helmets have 12.5 MPH worth of space.
And I seem to have run out of links again.
Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet
Witch on a Bicycle 