Bike Activist
This afternoon I’m going to attend my first meeting of critical mass (link is to a very old site, they now meet in Hindmarsh square at 6pm). This involves riding slowly through the city, taking up a car lane, in a peaceful protest against unsustainable forms of transport.
This morning I rode to uni wearing my canteen bandana and a dust mask. Prior to this I’ve never considered myself a bike activist but it hits me deep within my lungs each morning as I inhale the exhaust fumes of an executive’s Mercedes or a Pajero transporting too fewer people.
Our society needs to get it through its thick head that the world cannot afford to move 2 tonne of steel 5 kilometres down the road each morning on the way to work. Australia is the second fattest nation on earth. A great way to start to rectify this would be to stop bitching about the state of the roads, the cost of fuel and the road toll and get on your bike. Cars are the epitome of our greed.
Wasting resources is not something we have a right to. If we continue in this fashion and countries like China continue to develop we will see more dramatic consequences. Morally it’s wrong: our way of life is not a standard the world could support for the whole of humanity. If you continue to enjoy nature from the seat of your Land Rover your grandchildren will never have the privilege.
I felt like a bit of an idiot wearing a dust mask. It did nothing to prevent me overdosing on CO2, CO, SOx and the various flavours of noss (NOx) and who knows what else. Although, on occasion I have had a bus “accelerate” in front of me or I’ve been stuck behind a truck and hit by a dose of macro-cabon, nearly all of the toxins my lungs sample are very small and gaseous.
I’m thinking of following Wayne Witt’s example and getting a respirator mask. I assume he’s correct and there are masks that can weed out O3 and NOx and other HC as well as particle pollution. Even if there is just some benefit i think it would be worth while.
but, before you point and laugh or stare at the bloke wearing the gas mask consider this from the aforementioned site:
“For 17 days [when Atlanta hosted the 96 Olympics], traffic was restricted in the city, and reduced by 21 per cent.
That in turn lead to a 27-per-cent reduction in ground-level ozone. What they found was that hospital admissions for respiratory-related illness decreased by 42 per cent.”
For those more scientifically inclined there is this paper which takes a closer looks at what we’re breathing.
This article makes me glad I wasn’t cycling a decade ago: “Lead in fuel has been proven to cause brain damage in children living in areas with high levels of pollution from gasoline-fueled vehicles.” Despite the recent changes, I don’t have high expectations of benefits of long term exposure to the shit motorists expect us to breath.
Anyway, I will let you know how the cycle tonight pans out.
Telepathetic
Reading Nimitons post from the other day made me reminisce about my own primary school days. I can’t remember how it started, but in year three a group of half a dozen boys including myself began sitting in a small circle on the oval practising guided meditation. Our guru was a lad from our year who claimed that he knew how to harness the complete power of the human mind. In hindsight, his social behaviour was probably just the result of long term exposure to Star Trek.
We’d sit around the shot-put circle on the far side of the oval and he’d demonstrate his telepathic and abilities. He would claim that he was influencing other kids as they played or that he was able to lift his tie off of his shirt using the power of his mind. I’m not really sure if he believed in his own abilities but I was fairly sceptical. It was doubtful that he had any control over the other children and I was fairly sure his tie was moving due to him leaning forward and it being blown about by the wind. However, he was very convincing and not the type of person who was open to argument.
After a few days of this I was starting to get a little bored so just before the lunch bell I slipped my ruler inside the lining of my tie. We went up to the circle and I ate my lunch and listened to him preach about how he was able to move stuff across his desk at night when he was relaxed. I pinched the top of my tie and made it look like I was struggling to pass energy down to the tip and make the whole thing battle against gravity. Slowly my tie stood horizontally as our guru became lost for words.
Instantly my eight year old brain confirmed that he was a giant hoax. He was shocked and mystified that someone was sitting in front of him clearly demonstrating these powers. For dramatic effect I appeared to concentrate deeply and strained to “defy Newton”. After the short battle with gravity I admitted defeat and my tie fell back against my stomach.
He couldn’t understand but he was an instant believer in his own methods. He told everyone that this is what he’d be training us for. I did a few more demonstrations over the next few days before letting some kids know it was all a charade and that we should go back to playing marbles or soccer. Suddenly there were quite a few kids practising telekinesis and I decided I should let him in on the ‘secret’.
He was suddenly very unimpressed but I didn’t feel bad because I’d only deceived him in the same way he’d deceived us.
To this day I still struggle to watch Star Trek or Star Gate or even Star Wars to a degree. Looks like hanging around with this kid did have some positive spin-offs.
ignore the sun
The keyboard/pianist/base player in my band tells the tale of a friend of his who had few life commitments and decided to trail 36 hour days. He experienced two long 36 hour days for every three 24 hour days that most people experience.
For example; He would wake up at 8am on Monday and have a normal day. He’d stay up all night and go to sleep at 8am Tuesday morning. He would force himself out of bed at 8pm and stay up all night and all day and go to bed at 8pm Wednesday. Wake at 8am on Thursday and continue the cycle.
This gives you a wake to sleep ratio of 2:1 which is equivalent to a person sleeping for 8 hours a night in a traditional 24 hour cycle.
Admittedly this idea seems totally crazy but that didn’t stop the Wright Brothers and it isn’t going to stop me and my brother. We’re going to do it when we both have a few months holidays with no commitments.
I admit this scheme has huge gimmick value but, in addition it will help us to appreciate the dead hours. We’ll do this over the summer holidays when the days are too hot for activity and the nights are too warm for sleeping. A favourite past time of mine when I can’t sleep during hot January nights is to go for a walk in the cool of the morning or go cycling. For those of you who haven’t tried it, I highly recommend cycling at 4am. It feels almost surreal because it’s very quite and the roads are empty. You only have the hum of your tires and the gentle summer breeze.
I’ve also always wanted to see more sunrises. My proposition allows us to see 2 our of every 3. I think these activities are best facilitated through a formal sleeping pattern like this rather than our usual holiday pattern which involves progressively latter nights. In the past we have gone to bed later and later by playing games, reading books, surfing the net and watching too much RAGE and too many movies into the waking hours of the next day.
This leads to us sleeping through every day meaning we don’t do any daytime activities and our nights are unproductive. With this new schedule we will be able to balance our daytime/night time activities and waste less time getting to sleep which is a major problem in summer. Using this system we’ll also receive more sleep than we usually do.
Anyway, we’re going to Germany for January next year so it will probably be 2006 before we get a chance to play this little game. By then we might be over it and I’ll find something else to do.
This summer, during December, we are thinking of trying to replicate this experiment, where someone writes a log of his experiences of depriving himself of sleep over 127 hours. Without question I would attempt this without any drugs.
A recomendation
I love this sketching:
http://nairohe.com/sketchbook/
” The Sketchbook
the story of a frustrated artist. I’m sure you won’t understand. Nobody does. ”
jump to the start. it isn’t a bad place to begin.
Wisdom from the loo
As seen on the back of the level 1 male toilet door, in the medical school south building of Adelaide uni:
organised crime =
1. Government
2. Medical (something scribled out)
-money for nothing
-paid for guessing
-no responsibility
-no accountability
there’s some truth here. think critically about those who govern you and those whom give you medical advice
driving me mad:
this is a fleshier version of a comment I posted to an article at Dock Of The Bay (http://mblog.com/dock_of_the_bay/093574.html)
The other day I managed to create a great new word while being “drived” around in the back of Kent’s car. Alas, Kent reports only half the story. It is true, that I made the comment about the driver but he replied, saying that it was evident i’d been hanging around too many bogans. I embraced terrible grammar while he embraced terrible manners.
Shortly after this on our drive home from Semaphore he commented to my flatmate about how good it was to be back on the eastern side of town. He may have simply meant it was good to be home but considering his recent comment about bogans I hold the impression that his thinking was shallower than that.
Buying into the idea of judging people on their land value or average income or crime rate or life expectancy or education level (or however you classify a bogan) is buying into the glass floor mentality of a society stuck in the 18th century.
Last year when I began working in Elizabeth I was told that I was getting paid a starting wage that was the average for the state. It surprised me that the people I worked with that lived in Elizabeth or Craig More would claim that they were ‘doing well’ and imagined their financial life as being much better than most. They were as optimistic as Kent that they were well off.
For your information, generally speaking, these were one of the friendliest groups of people I’ve met. We’d go down to the Elizabeth Tavern after work to have a quite OJ. When I told friends from my private eastern suburb high school about the pub they’d snigger and ask questions or make assumptions about the place being seedy. Sure the carpet may have been cheaper and the aircon was being serviced (for several months) but the place was pretty nice and the pool table was in mint condition. Oh, and the blokes drank the same poision as the easterners drink in their smokier, more crowded, sluttier eastern pubs.
I digress though. The glass floor mentality continues. There are also other people who live in nicer houses than Kent, who probably think Kents place is below average and they would probably be at pains to associate with anyone who lives like him, in that level of ‘poverty’.
I find it blindingly clear that this mentality is plain stupid. It is also rude and wrong and so 18th century to judge someone on something so insignificant as their social status.
I was just watching Billy Joel on Andrew Denton. He was introduced as one of Australia’s most successful musicians. Growing up in Elizabeth he may not have had the fancy education that some people were given. This is evident in the way that he talks.
Would I judge the man on his habitual oral inefficiencies in English? Absolutely not! He has so much more to offer the world. I would easily trade in my education and social status for what he has.
You must take into consideration that not everyone wants to speak like an high society pommy snob. Some people find identity in using the language of their culture. Billy Joel may speak in the fashion that he does because that’s the way he wants to, not because he knows no ‘better’.
More so, with his heavy Australian accent and casual dialogue he has been able to communicate with people on a level that formally spoken Australian wouldn’t have a hope in competing with.
Maybe i’m wrong, hopefully kent wasn’t thinking like this.
The guts of the matter is that like all discrimination, this is mentality is plain stupid.
The Soothing Call of the Jack Russell 