Ride Lugged

who does this sound like? i hope the pictures dont give it away.
Paxton further defines fascism’s essence as:

“1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination.”^[5]from wikipedia article on fascism

Possible movement names:

Retrofile

my favorite: L’Avenir   which means something like the future you werent expecting, like the GOP wins the November elections but suddenly all become stanch environmentalists and save the world in record time.

I also think it would be a good product name.  There is a bit of a stigma, there was a cheap house brand of bike parts (avenir and cyclo pro and pyramid are all the same, more or less), but I think the meaning behind the name is interesting and signifigant, ie if lugged steel became race friendly again, it would be a perfect moniker…  And its french.  And its about time french stuff became synoymous with good design again. 

Casey, write a post here about retro woolitude etc.

How about, instead of that, I write about how hydrogen fuel cells are retarded, why, and what the solution is?

ok then:

Hydrogen takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it yields

hydrogen is an excessively low-density medium for storing chemical energy

Hydrogen needs an entirely new multi-billion-dollar fuel distribution infrastructure would have to be created to support hydrogen vehicles before any could be sold.

sounds smart right? yeah it burns clean, but so does alot of other already availible fuel alternatives, that dont need a new fuel delivery system, and are effectively recycled waste, as we will see:

Methanol is commonly known as “wood alcohol” because it can be produced from wood; it can also be made from coal, natural gas, methane hydrates, any type of biomass, or urban waste.

It can be used as fuel for internal-combustion engines, and eventually in fuel-cell vehicles. It can also be used as feedstock for producing dimethyl ether, an excellent fuel for non-polluting diesel engines. In short, it is a convenient medium for storing energy and is easily transported and dispensed as a fuel.

Methanol could also be used to produce plastics, synthetic fabrics, and many other non-fuel products currently made from petroleum.

Importantly, methanol can also be produced (in conjunction with an auxiliary electricity source, like nuclear power) by chemically recycling carbon dioxide, which can be found naturally in the air or readily captured from atmosphere-polluting industrial emissions. The methanol produced can, in turn, be used to produce synthetic hydrocarbons and other products now obtained from fossil fuels. If successfully tapped, methanol “has the ability to liberate mankind from its dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and hydrocarbon products,” while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

methanol is currently selling—without any subsidy—for about $0.80/gallon. Given that methanol’s energy content is about half that of gasoline, that price is the equivalent, in energy terms, of gasoline for $1.60/gallon. In other words, we can produce a useful and economically viable vehicle fuel, using a huge domestic and Western hemispheric resource base, at prices lower than gasoline.

methanol is soluble in water and readily biodegradable by common bacteria, so spills of methanol, whether from defective pumping stations or shipwrecked tankers, would have no long-term environmental impact.

lastly: Unlike gasoline, methanol is not a carcinogen or a mutagen, and the pollutants and other emissions from methanol-powered internal combustion engines are far more benign than emissions from their gasoline-driven counterparts. (Automobile emissions could even be reduced to zero with methanol-based fuel cells.) And if methanol is produced from carbon dioxide or from biomass, its use in place of petroleum acts to counter man-made global warming as well. “Compared to gasoline or diesel fuel,” the authors conclude, “methanol is clearly environmentally much safer and less toxic.”

ok i stole all that from the new atlantis, again.

Here’s an article by a fellow named Matthew B. Crawford who wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft for The New Atlantis, a site worth checking out, I think. Anyway,

here are some excerpts to fill your otherwise interesting morning;

nyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”

At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.

…Even so, the Wall Street Journal recently wondered whether “skilled [manual] labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living.” This possibility was brought to light for many by the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, which revealed that the typical millionaire is the guy driving a pickup, with his own business in the trades. My real concern here is not with the economics of skilled manual work, but rather with its intrinsic satisfactions. I mention these economic rumors only to raise a suspicion against the widespread prejudice that such work is somehow not viable as a livelihood.

ok the rest is at New Atlantis. i dont wanna get my butt sued too heavily, so i’ll stop there.

Bikely is a bike oriented google maps web app. Basically a bike centric gmaps pedometer. Has nice features to save routes and has a listing on the front page where the most recent public routes are posted. So who is going to join me on the hammer and sickle tour of centre Russia in 2020? It’s only 6295.64mi total.

first of all, its gotta be a black cat asshole, and you have to take it to the crossroads, not the rose garden, and you have to bind its legs.  Then you eat it, and then Laura will finally sleep with you (if she spits on the dead cat twice)

this shit isnt unfunny. i think the slow motion trails shit is the best.
Crash Part 1

Refusing the Maillot Jaune

Go check out the slide show.

So here it is. A photo of what is, according to Casey, the #1 evil in the universe. The “Pyong Jin Bicycle factory in North Korea produces 6,000 bicycles per year.”

And some of those chicks are cute, and can prolly take a beat-down ass bike and get it race-ready tuned up and running silent in 10 mintues flat.

OH GREAT GOLDEN CALF OF GLOBALIZATION! HOW I LONG TO WORSHIP YOU AND KISS YOUR FEET!