Weapon of Mass Construction.
On November 30th, 2003 Eugene McGee was driving on the Kapunda to Gawler road when he hit cyclist Ian Humphrey in his Pajero 4WD. He immediately fled the scene of the accident leaving Ian to die.
McGee’s blood alcohol was never tested and two witnesses who saw him driving erratically (at ~160kmh-1) were told by the court that they weren’t needed to give evidence. In the trial McGee’s Psychiatrist explained that he was unable to stop because he “disassociated” himself as a result of the trauma caused by accident. There was no expert witness provided by the defence to rebut this. On Thursday (28/4) the Adelaide district court handed the high profile criminal lawyer a $3100 fine and 12 months suspended drivers licence.
Like many people, I was deeply angered at this outcome. I hope the inquiry into the trial proceedings goes ahead. I find it outrageous that they are only going to make Eugene McGee forfeit a few weeks wages and catch taxis for a year [edit: probably a lot less than a few weeks wages for a criminal lawyer].
This anger throughout the community inspired some of the cycling-activists to take to the streets on friday night. Critical Mass is world wide event run on the last friday of each month, but for at least six months it’s Adelaide contingency has critically been lacking mass.
Critical mass is a protest against cars. It means different things to different people but the centre of it’s ideology it is about reclaiming public space. Cars don’t own the streets, they just dominate them, congesting, polluting and making them dangerous for other road users. Some car drivers are elitist, they think that they can treat cyclist however they want because they are invincible wrapped in over a tonne of steel. Some cyclists in San Francisco were tired of the lack of respect so in a protest against the overuse of the private motor car they reclaimed the streets, taking up a lane and riding slowly on the last friday of each month with their friends. In response to the angry motorists they voiced their opinions about smelly, inefficient, environment killing, greedy, war supporting cars.
So, last night I rocked up in the southwest corner of the intersection in Hindmarch Square. I waited. I waited. I really hoped it would happen tonight, not only was I angry about the recent chain of events but I’ve moved back home so riding into town just to get stood up costs me about forty more minutes and I perceive the ride home is a lot more dangerous.
Things weren’t looking good, but then I saw a group of four cyclists waiting on the lawn behind me. I went over and we waited around for a while, a few more people came. There was talk that about six police on bikes had pre-emptively been waiting for us in Victoria square but unfortunately we were unable to join them. Just as we were preparing to leave another group of cyclist came by, they’d departed from Victoria square minutes before.
A group of a dozen or so cyclist rode down Pulteney street and then Rundle street. When we reached east terrace someone up the front of the pack decided to do a u-turn at the lights. I don’t know of the legalities, it isn’t something I would do but it was safe enough, it was between the light cycles when no traffic was going through the intersection. The cop car behind us also did a quick u-turn and the testosterone filled policeman jumped out and informed us that we couldn’t act like that. It looked really nasty, this cop looked really angry but nothing eventuated and we continued on our way.
As we rode there was a fair bit of bell ringing and one group member in particular yelled various slogans at the public. -“Bikes not cars! Bike logic! Bikes for life, Cars Kill! Your car smells so bad, bikes smell so good! Bikes mean ecologically sustainable transport! You fumes are killing me, I’m in need of some oxygen, turn your car off!”- Some people looked guilty, others moved to rebuke these allegations, a lot of people cheered us.
We circled back on ourselves, down to Hindmarsh again where we turned west onto Grenfell St. We rode down to light square, on the way being educated by one motorist that it was illegal to ride two abreast on the road and that cars have right of way. We went south down Morphett Street till about 100m before Gouger street when we ducked down a back street that runs near the back of MARS. It was nice to get away from the noise pollution for a little bit. Turning east onto Gouger street we waited for the traffic to clear but we would have been there all night. We started weaving through the traffic, riding at about 10kmh-1 which was about 10kmh-1 faster than anyone else on that road. After passing the central market car park we were finally able to accelerate to our preferred speed of about 15kmh-1 and ironically we pissed many motorist off who we’d just overtaken because they couldn’t pass us. We told them to beep if they supported unsustainable transport.
We turned into victoria square, riding past the District courts. Our town crier cyclist yelled loudly that “this is where Eugene McGee was fined $3100 for killing cyclist Ian Humphrey while driving drunk in his SUV.” We continued through the square as commodores and a BMW Z3 beeped and screamed abuse. A young lady also offered her opinion screaming, “Go you hippie cyclists!”
We continued north down King William Street. A few departed and we noticed our numbers had dwindled to six as we embarked on our journey west down Hindley Street. On the footpath a male pedestrian, about 17 years old told us that bikes suck. Another member told him that we were striving for sustainable transport. He told us we were blocking traffic. I told him, “we are traffic!” to which he relied “no you’re not!”
He continued to baffle us with such logic telling us that cars cause less pollution, that they are faster and cheaper than bikes. By the time we lost him the most vocal member of our group admitted that he was only returning comments to egg him on.
At this point we were entering light square again and the group decided it was time to depart. It has been a successful night. I went to the apple store and played with tiger for at least half an hour and then rode home, getting home just after 20:30.
Critical Mass should meet again on the 27th of May at 17:45 near the fountain in Victoria Square or at a city centre near you! Bring your lights and a bell. From experience, I’d recommend something warmer than Lycra.
More importantly though it the protest on next saturday.
Wheels of Justice – the Alliance of SA cyclists
….Just letting you all know that a group of fellow cyclists had a meeting on Thursday night and formed a group to be know as “Wheels of Justice – the Alliance of SA cyclists”. Present were members from most cycling groups in SA and Mr Graham Humphries, brother of Ian Humphries and representatives of the media. It was overwhelming decided to hold a “protest” rally for cyclists rights on Saturday May 7th at 9.30am leaving from Victoria Square to the steps of Parliament House. We need all the cyclists/bike riders we can get to this rally, to show our strength of numbers to the government and to let the courts know the events of the recent weeks have not gone unnoticed.
What exactally are we protesting? I point to Peter’s comment on this forum:
It may well be something to do with the level of action (inaction?) taken by SA Police in their investigation of traffic infringements against cyclists re. the failure to pursue evidence in the recent McGee case.
Nothing new in this – report an offence in most states, even with witnesses, and if you’re on a bike it gets filed in the circular file. Just that this case is so blatant that it demands a response. Most cyclists are sick of the ‘blind side’ of our police.
I agree. I collided with a car when a motorist cut me off late last year. She walked me across to the hospital and then ran off. The cops got her licence number and my blood test and then sat on their hands. Every few weeks I went to them to ask what was being done and I was told they were “following it up”. Six months later they gave me the details of the case and told me there was nothing more they were going to do. It’s total bullshit.
perturbation
At the moment I hate many things. I hate society. I hate art. I hate computers. I hate the internet. I hate education and schools. I hate the advantages of modern medicine. I hate heath care and insurance. I hate families. I hate suburbia and cities. I hate bikes -they are right but I feel too weak.
I want to die
but I am fond of the country. Of open spaces. Of barren land. Of small towns. I like the idea of smooth roads and fast cars. I am fond of nature and being surrounded by nature -specifically being surrounded by and isolated in the middle of untouched, untapped, natural beauty.
I want to live
Geocaching
Looks like fun, recommended by on of the creators of commander keen:
Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.
Pie floater.
I was less than a 1km down the road on the way to the bank this afternoon when I saw a magpie sitting in the opposite lane, facing the curb furthest from me.. I was probably nearing 40 clicks an hour and as I approached, the maggie took flight. He immediately did a sharp 180 and collided with the top of my front wheel. I suppose his belly bounced off my tire and he ricocheted up into my handle bars. His beak hit my index finger with force, it really hurt my finger and must of given him quite a headache later.
He continued his flight, sailing into someone’s font yard squawking and screeching probably in pain, but it was hard to tell. Maggies always sound like they’re in agony to me. I was busy regaining my balance and composure, by the time i decided I should have gone back to see if he was okay I was a couple hundred metres down the road. So like a cold heartless motorist I just continued on my way… I’m fairly sure he would have been okay, it didn’t seem too violent to me.
An hour and a half later I was coming back up the same road and near the collision site there was a girl in her font yard sharing a bag of chips with a couple dozen maggies. As much as I don’t like magpies, I hope he was okay.
Purrr
Japanese are cool.
http://www.shot-animation.com/itop.html
Mouse over to play with the cat.
if you leave him for a minute he goes to sleep.
not that sparky would care…
but tiger (OS X 10.4) was just announced. due for release on April 29.
a lesson from the Jack Russel
look at Sparky. He doesn’t worry about the future. He doesn’t need to iron a shirt, or makes his bed. He doesn’t have strings attached. He normally doesn’t wear clothes. He has one collar, one bed, one room. When it is hot he sleeps under the stars. Just in being, he provides a service of comfort and companionship which, in turn, earns him his tucker. He earns his keep, but he doesn’t really work for it, he does what he wants and receives what ever he can get. He was attacked the other day by a much larger dog, and he currently sports a few scabs but it doesn’t worry him, he just goes on, barking at the birds, eating a bit of grass, chasing moths and sleeping on the lounge.
I really don’t understand the brain
Something I found out today that I thought was amazing:
When you are exercising your muscles need more oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange so they get an increase in blood flow to facilitate this increased exchange. However, according to my text book (Human Physiology, Sherwood, 2004), no matter what you are doing your brain receives the same amount of blood. If you are thinking, exercising, sleeping (i wonder if you are in a coma?) your brain always receives ~650ml of blood every minute. HOWEVER, the distribution of this blood within the brain alters depending on what you’re doing. That’s why, when they do a PET scan (one of those medical things that produces the brain image with typically a black background and a coloured rainbow plot showing where the activity is) different parts light up different colours. They are actually showing a scale of the blood flow to different part os the brain.
But I would think that if your frontal lobes (up the front) are needing lots of blood because you are thinking intensely, it would limit the amount that you’re cerebellum (out back) would receive so your seeing wouldn’t be as fast or refined. However, in my experience, it is all able to happen seamlessly at once. I’m sitting here looking at the text as I type, listening to Sonic Animation, worrying about the assignment I’m still not doing while composing a blog entry. So, I would assume all of these parts of my brain would be cranking along, but they can’t all be, they are still only receiving the same amount of blood they would be if I was asleep.
This affirms why asphyxiated induced fainting/orgasm is a stupid thing to do. Seems like riding a bike with a flat tire, it’s not the way we’re designed to operate.
the g isn’t for gigabyte
To celebrate gmail’s 1st birthday, google is planning to expand user storage to 2Gb and then beyond. According to the gmail homepage “starting today, we’re beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan”. It’s happening as you read this, infact, if you log into gmail, wait a few minutes and refresh the mainpage your quota will have increased.
There are reports and rumours that they are going to come out of beta but at their site they make it clear that they sill have some finishing touches to add before they will be happy to release it to the public. Despite this, SOE claims that “For the past two weeks, Google has been randomly inviting users of its search engine to sign up for Gmail accounts with a discreet link that appears for about 1 in 100 users”. If anyone out there is interested in an account, I believe the number of invites is also now bottomless so leave a comment and i’ll email you an invitation.
I was looking at the googleblog when I came across this. “When you do a search on these browsers [mozilla/firefox], we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you’ll get to that page even more quickly.” That’s all well and good for those who have fast net connections with little need to worry about downloads, but what about poor uni students who have already used over 200% of their downloads for this semester?
Update: plus they have another new product! I just have to get my hands on some google gulp.
The Soothing Call of the Jack Russell 