Recovering from my Turkey Coma on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well yesterday we went to my daughter’s house for round 2 of Thanksgiving dinner. This time the turkey was smoked instead of oven-baked. [old joke]Smoking a turkey is really difficult, do you know how hard it is to keep one lit?[/old joke]. We also had Loaded Baked Potato mashed potatoes, country-style green beans, stuffing, and they threw in a quart of gravy from the turkey vendor. So we had a pretty decent dinner.

I have been really enjoying my HD TV since I found the Velocity channel. Near as I can tell from the last three days this is an all-car-build channel. There have been several marathons for different build series like the one currently playing of Overhauling which is a program where they find some pretense to haul away a person’s car and completely restore it or complete an unfinished project. I also watched a Bitchin’ Rides marathon where they make show-quality cars…

Watching these car-build programs gets me fired up to work on the Sprint T. I have been considering possible donor vehicles for the drivetrain. Someone brought up Toyota full-size pickup trucks with the 5.0 and 5.7 DOHC V8 engines and automatic transmissions. The engines are a bit on the wide side and will probably hang out from underneath the sides of the hood, but the focus of a T-bucket is the engine. Most of the other potential donor vehicles are also V8 pickup trucks, or V8 luxury cars. One that also sounds interesting is the Hyundai Genesis sedan with the 5.0 liter V8 and 8-speed automatic and possible 4WD from the factory… And don’t forget Corvette, Camaro, Challenger, Charger, and Mustang late-model performance cars. And in addition to those are the plethora of crate engines and transmissions available. Decisions, decisions. I’m looking for something on the order of 600RWHP/ton with a weight around 1600 pounds wet. Obviously I’ll take lighter if I can get it, and more horsepower, but I don’t want to give up low-end torque for racing. Basically this is going to be a huge go-kart that will never get out of low gear on most autocross/Solo racing courses with instant throttle response, brakes that never give up, and tons of grip into, through and out of the corners.

I haven’t given up on building a computer model to run in GT4, but I have hit a brick wall on the formatting for the car file. Nobody that is willing to tell me knows, and nobody that knows is willing to tell me how. All I need is the file format and the variables, I can do the car performance programming myself, and I have someone who can build the graphic model. I really want to drive the Sprint T at the Nürburgring, but there ain’t no way I will be able to ship the car there to do it IRL, so it will have to be simulated on the PlayStation. And I have several variations of the car I want to program in, the full street version with the soft springs and shocks and the skinny hard compound tires, the Goodguys version with the high performance street tires and tuned springs and shocks, and the SCCA Solo version with the 14″ wide wheels and the soft, wide slicks and the tuned springs and shocks. The SCCA version also runs tires that drop the car by 2″ in ride height without changing the suspension settings, so the CG also drops by 2″ and has to be entered into the performance programming.

Getting back to that new TV, you would not believe the difference in enjoyment going from the dinky SD TV to the 32″ HD TV I bought Wednesday… which I think I might have mentioned a time or two already. I mean it ain’t as cool as a good bike ride, but watching TV without bands of purple and orange going up the screen is pretty cool. I don’t know what was dying in the old TV, but it was worse running through the tuner than it was going through the composite in with the audio jacks. We had a couple of days without AC a few years back that took the stuffings out of the old TV.

We are having our annual post-Thanksgiving potluck at church this evening and I have to shower and get ready, so this looks like a great place to stop, proofread, and edit the post before hitting “publish”.

PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet

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Happy Thanksgiving, and the Feed

There was no post yesterday because I was out buying a TV to replace the worn-out SD TV I have been watching the last few years. There was a huge sale going on at a local retailer prior to Black Friday, so I went down to peruse the products. The 20″ TV I was looking at in the ad was sold out (not surprising in that the sale started on Sunday and I went shopping on Wednesday) but there was a 32″ also on sale for the same price (without the rebate) that was a name brand that still had a couple of boxed units in stock. So I got the 32″ HD TV to replace the much smaller SD TV I had been watching for last few years after the other room mate decided to get rid of it and rather than chunk it in the trash. And as the SD TV still works (except for the color bands that go up the screen), I passed the old TV to the room mate that doesn’t have a TV any more. One thing I’m looking forward to is plugging the laptop into the TV so that I can type with the keyboard lower for better ergonomics while holding my head higher that reduces neck strain. All that will take is a few feet of HDMI cable (and maybe an audio adapter).

The inhabitants of Casa de El Poeta sat down to a traditional Thanksgiving feast this afternoon complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Pie will be later after dinner has time to settle. We said a traditional Pagan grace over the meal, “We thank the creatures of the forest and field for the sacrifice of their lives to sustain ours.” We also had a dry white wine to accompany our meal which I didn’t like much. I prefer sweeter wines or dark beers to dry whites or red wines.

One thing we didn’t have was football. Instead we watched Mythbusters minimarathon on the Science Channel. I have always like Adam, Jamie, and company and this extended batch is like being a kid in a huge candy store, so yeah, fun.

Up first has NYPD totally lost their minds? NYPD Will Crack Down On Cyclists Because Of Dubious Math While this crackdown was going one three pedestrians were killed, none by people riding bicycles, and one cyclist was killed by someone running a red light as the cyclist had the green…

And more data on the NYPD’s total disregard of what causes death and dismemberment in NYC. NYC Motorists Have Killed Five Pedestrians and One Cyclist in 10 Days That’s actually even worse than it sounds, because two pedestrians and the cyclist were killed within 24 hours. By cars… And the only driver getting charged was the one that left the scene.

Yesterday’s Daily Ted. Pre-Thanksgiving Morning Links: SaMo begins enhanced enforcement; stop bike thieves with a handlebar bomb

It was a good thing this wasn’t published early in Spring, or someone might mistake it for an April Fools’ Joke. Stealing your bike will hurt. This is either a prank, or someone is terribly mis-informed about bicycle handlebars. Check the size specs, these things will never fit into a normal bicycle’s handlebars at 1.25″ in diameter. Also how are you supposed to recharge the battery via USB when the units are sealed behind a plug cemented in the handlebars? Also it would most assuredly be fatal to the thief and probably anyone within 30 feet as “The M67 grenade has a spherical steel body that contains 6.5 oz (180 g) of composition B explosive.” or roughly the same amount of explosives as the Vengecycle.

Infrastructure! news from NC. More bike lanes planned for Raleigh, which had 98 car-bike crashes in a year I got news for you guys: Paint stripes on a few roads will not prevent cars from running over people on bicycles.

More NC infrastructure news from the same media outlet. After three deaths in two months, cycling advocates call for new bike plan, education, enforcement You want another toothless bike plan, or do you want proven infrastructure that gets a 30% bicycle mode share with fewer wrecks?

Why did it take over an hour to recover a cyclist from a wreck after getting hit by a car? Call for inquiry as ambulance responds after 72 minutes to injured cyclist in East Oxford The chances for a bad outcome go up exponentially after an hour from a wreck, the ambulance in this case was 12 minutes past that.

E-assist news. Electric Bicycle Innovations Helping Propel Global Bike Market

This looks like fun… Friday’s Tour de Tryptophan benefits injured SoCal rider If you have a few bucks that you don’t feel like fighting Black Friday crowds to spend, this would be a good one.

I think I did this story once already, but not this outlet. Big hearted Scots cyclist wins legions of fans after halting world tour to save badly injured stray dog The poor doggy has to live with only 3 paws on the 4 legs…

And those were all the links that didn’t have bicycle wrecks in them (except that ambulance one).

Billed @€0.02, Opus the unkillable badass Poet