My brain hurts, and the Feed

I tried to watch the GOP debate from yesterday before filtering the Feed, and then I filtered the Feed. Now my brain hurts from all the Stoopid and H8 to quote Gigi’s commentary from Facebook. Seriously, how can anyone believe the lies and half-truths that get spread around? How can people just run over cyclists like they aren’t even there? Like I said, it causes me pain to think about it.

Up first, can concepts and technology win the Nobel Peace Prize? Bicycle ‘should win Nobel Peace Prize’ I certainly hope so.

On the same idea, bicycles as vehicles for change (no pun intended). Designing a Bike Path to Global Health So, healthy for the driver of the vehicle, healthy for people not using the vehicle immediately outside, or people halfway around the world…

Our Daily Ted. Morning Links: Turning Vision Zero into an unfunny joke, adventures in traffic blocking, and CicLAvia the Musical

Still in CA. Two Bay Area Cyclists Cut Down By Drivers in One Day Why do allow this level of CARnage to continue?

Now that the relatives have been told we can finally know the name of the OR cyclist killed by the deadly combination of bad infrastructure and an impaired driver. Portland police identify 38-year-old bicyclist struck and killed in NE Portland The sentence that chills me was “There was a transfer of blue paint from his car on the guardrail near where the bicyclist was discovered.” after I posted this “And then there was this,”We may never know, but it’s entirely possible the victim knew he was about to be hit and was trapped against the guardrail.” So now we know that is what probably did happen. Basically the infrastructure would work only as long as the drivers paid full attention to not running into the cyclists at the pinch points, which means that every driver has to be awake and free of chemical or physical impairment. Fail even one of those criteria and add in a cyclist, you end up with a high risk of dead cyclist. A risk that failed this time.

And in the ABQ a cyclist killer gets caught driving drunk shortly after getting released from prison and still on parole from the killing. Drunken driver who killed cyclist in ’05 suspected of 7th DWI You think that after 10 years in prison/jail he would have stayed away from alcohol but that was not the case. Somehow he still managed to get hold of a vehicle and excessive amounts of alcohol. “He was arrested after failing several field sobriety tests, and breath tests later showed he a BAC of 0.21 or 0.22 percent.” So, how do we as a society keep confirmed deadly drunks from gaining access to the most deadly devices we have common access?

Another link to the wreck of the FloriDUH drunk motorcyclist running a red light into a cyclist. Two injured when motorcycle runs red light, hits bicyclist near Clearwater Mall Nothing changed, the motorcyclist is still a drunk idiot riding on a suspended license.

Oz infrastructure news. Brisbane City Council to announce cyclist clearways for Sylvan Road

And this was a friend of my son who got hit by a car in his apartment. Gamer Hit By Car While Playing Fallout 4 In His Home Survives I keep telling people that motor vehicles are artillery shells, and until something like this happens where a vehicle goes through 3 walls and still almost kills someone nobody believes me.

And I’m all out of links.

Billed @$0.02, Opus

State of the Bike 2012, Wreck-Free Sunday

A while back Jay from my bike club “loaned” me a 2008 Fusion with 192 miles on the clock, a handlebar mounted mirror and a RANS rack. The mirror got knocked off in the first 2 months of using the bike as transportation as other people would barge up against it when it was locked up to racks outside places that actually had bike racks, but the rest of the bike has held up well.

The bike now has 3300 miles and is still using the OE chain that was delivered with the bike from RANS. It is on the third set of brake pads since I got it as I do a lot of stop and go routes with way too many stop signs. Fortunately the KoolStop Black pads I use are very gentle on rims so they are in decent shape. The OE tires started allowing large numbers of flats (especially rear flats) this summer so they had to be relegated to “backup” status and were replaced by Performance “City” tires in the same size that had very similar rolling resistance and much higher wet grip.

Added since I got the bike are some custom fabricated fenders that started as Wald 26″ Middleweight stainless fenders. I pretty much used the rear fender as it came on the rear, but the front fender is a second rear fender cut short and drilled for 2 sets of fender stays plus the bolt that goes through the fork crown. Also added was a mud flap that was cut for a gallon milk jug. I now have fenders that keep water off my feet and road trash off my legs for all-weather riding without having to shave my legs to let me tend to the numerous tiny cuts I used to get from the little bits of glass kicked up off my front tire while I rode during the summer in shorts. Making all this fit on the disk-brake front fork so that it wouldn’t interfere with the disk caliper when I upgrade the brakes was a struggle as I went through various mount configurations. Ultimately the solution was a simple extended bolt on the single fender mount on the fork that spaced the fender stays away from the caliper mount far enough to prevent interference, with jam nuts to make the bolt stay in the correct position, and to hold the fender stays away from the fork.

The most noticeable addition to Blue since I got him was the kitty-litter bucket panniers. This also was a major undertaking to mount. I have used 3 different ways to mount then to the rack. The first 2 were variations on a theme using pipe hanger strap attached to the parts of the bucket where the handles were fitted as a bucket. While this worked for carrying light loads the buckets would bang and bump against the rack and the bike frame. This was so annoying that I removed the buckets to re-think the way to mount them. The new mounting system uses fewer bolts than the older system, and uses heavy aluminum angle rather than pipe hanging strap which reduces the installed weight of the system, plus the angle is much neater in appearance than the pipe hanger straps which to be totally honest would make Rube Goldberg toss his cookies. I wanted a system that would require power tools and several minutes to remove to reduce the possibility of theft while the bike was parked.

A minor change was the addition of headlights, first a 9 LED flashlight held on by interlocking hose clamps. That one is still installed but has been re-aimed to pick out street signs and stop signs up close as the new headlight, a Cateye EL-503, throwns most of its light output in a narrow cone that leaves such things as street signs and stop signs invisible once you get within about 50 feet of them if the light is aimed to light up the road.

The final change made in 2011 was the tail light, which also went through several iterations. First attempt was to drill a hole for a regular blinky bike tail light. That didn’t work as the switch for the light was not accessible when the light was mounted. Second attempt was to use a flexible glue to shock-mount the blinky light so the switch was where the light could be turned on and off. that worked for about a month before the people running into the bike in the bike racks caused it to come loose and eventually come off on a night ride. The final solution was to build a successor to the Honkin’ Huge Taillight^tm that would mount to the bracketing that holds the kitty-litter buckets to the bike. Honkin’ Huge Taillight II The Doubling^tm uses 2 LED marker lights from Harbor Freight and a 12V battery assembled from 10 2.1 Ah NiMH cells that take up less than half the space and weigh about 1/3 the previous HHT’s 12V 1.3 Ah SLA battery. The end result is a light that has more light (about the same light output as the HHT had on the high setting) for more time than the HHT. The theoretic burn time for this light is 17 1/2 hours, the HHT had a 16 hour burn time on low, or 1 3/4 hours on high.

So, I have a bike that will do 90% of the things I need to do with a bike, while I build bikes that cover that other 10% plus a little overlap.