A sign of things to come?

The Guardian reported on Saturday how 36 people had died in riots due to fuel price hikes in Yemen.

"Looting broke out in the Yemeni city of Aden last night after two days of rioting over fuel price rises that left 36 people dead....Several police officers were among the dead. Locals are angry at a decision to remove subsidies on fuel, a move that has roughly doubled the price of diesel, petrol and kerosene and caused knock-on rises in fares for public transport."

Picture from Newswire

Are SUVs a crime against civilisation

I know we've all heard the arguments before, but there is no harm in hearing them again.
From the ecologist

What does ‘choice’ actually mean? Could I nip down the shops in a tank?
What if I drove a Harley without a silencer up and down your road all night?

Or do you actually believe, as most of us do, that sensible limits should be placed on the freedom of drivers? If so, then it comes down to where we draw the line:
and I draw it at SUVs.

Useless with tools

I'm nearly at the end of my week off looking after the kids, and as usual didnt do half the things i'd intended. I've nearly finished stripping the bannisters - on and off its taken me nearly 2 years, but it should look nice when they are waxed.
I bought a tool kit for the bike aswell, hoping to finally able to service the bearings in my rear wheel myself, but when it arrived it didnt have the right lock ring tool so I had to go out and buy one. With much enthsiasm about my new tools I had a go but just couldnt shift the lock ring, maybe i'd left it too long. So I ended up getting the bike shop to do it again, I asked them if they thought it had been stiff and they said not particularly but you really need to have it in a vice. So it looks like thats another thing i'll have to buy. I dont want to be crap at servicing the bike but for some reason I just am. I'm good at keeping the tyres pumped up and clean the chain regularly, but I just dont seem to have a good eye for the intricate tweeks a bike needs.
My mum and dad went home last weekend after looking after the kids for a week. We had great fun with the Geocaching while they were here. We found a good one on the sustrans cycle route between Lisburn and Belfast which contained a travel bug - which is a small tag or token which you move from site to site, the goal for this bug was to visit as many sites in Ireland as possible so we helped it on its way. The bug was called my dads ankh, it was a cross symbol that used to be worn by this blokes dad who died before he ever got to see Ireland, so he's doing it posthumously.
I like the cycle route between Lisburn and Belfast but its not ideal for road bikes. I'd love to get one of these for the route though, it would be a real buzz arriving at work on one of these every day. I wouldnt feel particularly safe using it on the main road but I can get virtually all the way to work by the sustrans route. But I cant decide whether I should get one of these for £600 or save up and buy a good road bike. Anyway, these are just pipe dreams at the minute because i'm skint. Oh well, maybe next year. Check them out at KMX karts.

Treasure Hunt

While I’m stuck in the office on one of the hottest days so far this year my mum and dad have taken the kids to Hillsborough Park to do a GPS treasure hunt. They told me about this the last time I saw them. Basically you register on this web-site which allows you to get details of treasure hunts that people have set up all over the world and then you follow the route with your GPS and find the hidden treasure at the end of the route (usually a rubber or something small for the kids). You then leave something in its place for the next person to find. I’m not sure whether they do one for cyclists – but it would be pretty cool to do some longer routes, you could have a puncture repair kit as the prize (always comes in handy – especially with the amount of punctures I’ve been getting)
It was lovely cycling in this morning, I came in about 7.00 so the temperature wasn’t too hot and there were hardly any cars on the road. It’s the 12th July fortnight here at the moment (when a large section of the community either parades around in orange sashes and bowler hats, or watches people parading around in orange sashes and bowler hats) Its also a time when most people go on holiday so the roads are fairly quiet. I might do a detour on the way home and see a couple of friends who have just bought a big top style tent and are experimenting putting it up in a field for the first time, sounds like hard work on a day like today.

Larne

I had a juggling job in Larne last Saturday . I always make a habit of asking any photographers taking pictures to send us a copy, they never did until today. Its not a particularly good shot (I think you need to be a juggler as well as a photographer to get good juggling shots) but it was nice to receive it anyway.
Larne is a funny place for a festival. For those of you not familiar with Northern Ireland, Larne is where most of the boats from Scotland sail to. But Larne doesn’t feel like a coastal town. The port is a big ugly blot on the landscape that just spews out all the freight traffic on to the dual carriage way to Belfast about 20 miles down the road. So you can’t blame them for trying to breathe a bit of life in to the town with a festival, but for some reason it just doesn’t feel right. The people just don’t seem to get it. The parade went well enough but the street we’d been given for our show was so depressing, it was at the back of the town and was populated by 2 charity shops, a butchers and a shoe shop.
The shoe shop was a story in itself; we didn’t pay much attention to it at first but then noticed an old man coming out of it. He tottered about like he was drunk, but I think it was more the effects of age than drink.
His shop had closing down notices in the front window, which, like the deck shoes and espadrilles, were bleached by the sun. A local told us that the notices had been in the window for about 20 years, and that the owner was 95. Later he came out with an old shoebox full of sweets for us and started telling us about his shop – how he was retiring soon and how some bloke had said he would buy his old stock. Its enough to bring a tear to your eye isn’t it .

Yet another victim of car culture - with the pile em high sell em cheap superstores offering free parking, and everything under one roof he could never compete. What was once probably a thriving street was now full of boarded up shops with just a couple left fighting to survive.
So as Larne strives for an identity by throwing a carnival once a year, they destroy any sense of community by allowing the big boys to move in and put the small shop owners out of business. A story being repeated all over the country, if not the world.

Bike To Work Day

Well, its bike to work day and surprise surprise the rain is lashing down outside. Civil servants from other departments had an organized ride this morning but I have to drop the kids off at school so I missed it.
There was one extra bike in the bike shed at the beginning of the week - I still dont know whose it was, but at least somebody rode one day of bike week. In fact you could say the number of people cycling to my office doubled!
Oh well, theres always next year.

A Clean Set of Wheels?

A green SUV, yeah right.

From the Guardian

If you read the motoring press then you might believe that the RX400h, with
its part electric/part petrol "hybrid" engine, has been sent from above to
single-handedly slay climate change. According to much of the coverage, there is
no need to feel guilty - if you ever did, that is - about driving an SUV, given
that the RX400h achieves up to three times the fuel efficiency of its market
rivals and an equally impressive reduction of polluting exhaust fumes. The
message is clear: relax everyone, the panic's over. A breathless review in
Automobile magazine talks of a car that "accelerates with V-8 gusto and cradles
its occupants in leather-lined luxury". The hyperbolic review ends: "The Lexus
RX400h provides the well-to-do with a sacrifice-free ride to social
responsibility."

So is this car the saviour many are claiming it to be? Could the hybrid
engine be the "bridging technology" that will enable us to reach the
oft-heralded, post-carbon age? Or is it just an eco-veneer being applied to what
is still a very dirty way of getting from A to B?

Rant

After a couple of weeks cycling the trailer bike and my daughters bike back home every day I decided that I would leave the bikes locked to the fence outside the school and pick them up on my way home from work. On the second day of doing this I got back to the school to discover 3 flat tyres.
I pumped up the tyres on my daughter’s bike but the scum had pulled out the valve on the trailer bike tyre.
Of course all I got from my wife was I told you so, but it really annoys me that with all the cars near by that they never mess with them. Maybe its because they haven’t seen a trailer bike before so it got their attention. I just wish I’d caught them in the act.

Also, yesterday morning I got another puncture despite having 2 new tyres !
So I decided to e-mail the council and give them a piece of my mind. I told them that if they really wanted to encourage people to cycle in the city they should ensure that the cycle paths are well maintained and free from glass.
There has been the same patch of glass on the path now for over 2 months. With Bike to Work Week starting here next week I told them that this would be the ideal opportunity to ensure the paths are in order. There would be nothing more discouraging to a new cyclist than getting a puncture on their first day out.
I also highlighted the fact that to really encourage cycling they would need to have a cycle network that is integrated in to the main road system and actually went as far as the city centre. So far they only seem to have put cycle paths where it is convenient for them, not for us.
Lisburn is a very small city and the distance from one side of the city to the other is less than 5 miles which makes it an ideal place to get about by bike. Its just a pity that sustrans only seems to build cycle paths that attract tourists and Sunday cyclists rather than provide a real transport alternative. If I followed the sustrans route to work in the morning it would take me an extra 30 minutes.
Anyway on the plus side I saw a 4 wheeled recumbent carrying an advertisement hoarding yesterday – the only bummer was that it was on a trailer being towed by a 4x4.
Oh well every silver lining has a cloud.

Apeakolypse Now!

You can rely on Schnews to tell it like it is.

Apeakolypse Now!

Petroleum geologists reckon that the world oil peak will be sometime
between 2005 -2010. The majority of non-OPEC producers such as the United
States, Britain, Norway, and Mexico, who satisfy 60 percent of world oil demand, are already in a production plateau or decline. A leading guru, Colin Campbell (ex of Shell and Total Fina Elf) reckons 2007. Are we preparing for it? Are we readying ourselves to radically change our lifestyles and energy consumption? Of course not.

New Tyres and Old Wrecks

After fixing three punctures in the space of a week, I decided it was probably time to get a new front tyre. I usually buy any spares and stuff for the bike when I’m in Belfast but as I was off work I decided to use a local shop - cycle zone in Lisburn.
The guy in the shop was friendly (always a reason to go back in my opinion) and had the "2" new tyres (I decided to splash out) on in no time. I was amazed when I checked their web site to see that there has been a cycling shop on that site for over 100 years! Its hard to imagine them working on penny farthings out the back – I’d love to see some old photos of the place.
I asked him about the Raleigh 20 I have rusting away in my garage. I wanted to find out if there was anywhere in Ireland that did re-sprays, but as I suspected there isn’t. If I can get the seat post out I think I’ll take it in to him and see if he thinks it’s worth spending the money on. I’ll probably have to send it to England for a re-spray.
I suppose it’s a matter of taste with the Raleigh 20, I love them. I used to ride mine all the time when I first came over to Ireland but it got a bit neglected when I got my current bike about 7 years ago. The poor thing even rusted away outside the circus office for about a year. I’d love to fully restore it and make it in to a fixed wheel, its just having the time to do it.
Check out Sheldon Browns Raleigh 20 page to see the type of thing I’m talking about. Anyway I’m sure I’ll have more to say about 20’s in future posts.

G8 CycleCaravan

There were about 25 of us at the ride last night, which is enough to make an impact. Especially when one of the bikes is a tandem with recumbent front and mountain bike rear. And another has 2 dogs (real ones) wearing fighter pilot style hats in a front carrier ( I really am going to have to get a new camera).
We'd been out for about 15 minutes when the police finally caught up with us. A cop came up to me and said "you must be the ring leader because you've got the whistle" which I thought was funny, the only reason I have a whistle is because i'm in a stilt samba band. He tried to tell me about the highway code but couldnt quote any sections, luckily I knew section 139 says that cars should give bikes as much room as they would another car when overtaking.
He then decided to go and harass one of the others for handing out leaflets. Eventually we agreed to leave one lane clear, and as some of the cars passed it was good to see some of them smiling and waving - perhaps we arent hated as much as we think we are.
Some of the group are going on the G8 bike ride, I'd love to go to but I'll be working - anyway its good to know that some people will be there representing Belfast.
Looks like i'm getting to go on a ride today. My wife is taking the kids to her aunties for a bbq, but I have a show this morning which means i'll have to ride down later - about 7 miles each way. Her village is having a country sports fair this weekend (fox hunting, shooting etc) so you never know, there might be another chance for a bit of direct action.

Critical Mass

I got a puncture this morning, the tyre has needed replacing for a while now, but I’ve been to lazy to replace it. I’d used my spare tube last week and didn’t have a puncture repair kit, but luckily I was near a shop that sold them so I was back on the road quickly enough. I always leave bike maintenance too late, I really should make more time for it.
I saw a poster this week for critical mass tonight. There hasn’t been one for ages in Belfast. They used to have them more regularly, but Belfast is quite a small place and the numbers attending were always quite small. So now they seem to be incorporating them in to other protests – last year they had one about the war in Iraq and this one is about the G8 summit. I once did critical mass on my unicycle, which was fun, but I’ll be on 2 wheels tonight.

Cycling in Fishnets

It was great to see an article on cycling in the Guardian weekend magazine. Bikes rarely get good coverage in the press, and it’s usually in the news section. To get people on their bikes we do need to portray cycling as something to aspire to, and I can’t think of many better places to do this than in a lifestyle magazine. Plus you’ve got to have something to counter balance all the adverts for SUVs. Reading about Zoe Williams cycling in her fishnets (she reckons if more people are looking at her legs – they are less likely to crash in to her) brought a smile to my face. And if I weren’t a cyclist already the thought of seeing a woman cycling in fishnets would certainly get me on a bike.

Blog Route

You may have noticed the blog route logo down the right hand side. Its still quite new, but a great place to check out other cycling blogs. Well done to Kent Hall (velodiablo) for coming up with the idea.

Happy Cycling

The bike seat / trailer bike combination is no more. My 7 yr old now rides her own bike to school and my 5 yr old goes on the trailer bike, which make the whole journey a bit easier.
On the first day I wondered how I was going to get my daughters bike back home. But with a bit of experimentation I can now safely secure her bike to the trailerbike with bungee cords and ride the whole lot home again. Don't know what I'm going to do when she gets a bigger bike though.
The weather has been brilliant this last week, and the kids love being out on the bikes. We even went to Wallace park at the other side of Lisburn which is much nicer than our local park which is usually full of broken glass and grafitti. I can see some bigger expeditions coming on this summer!

my profile and links seem to have dissapeared down to the bottom of the page, dont know why. I've fiddled about with it and seem to have made it worse, So you might see things looking a bit different till i sort it out.

some great ideas here for making a living on your bike.
Posted by Dave

And theres more!

More from the Guardian

"One of the world's leading energy analysts yesterday called for an independent assessment of global oil reserves because he believed that Middle Eastern countries may have far less than officially stated and that oil prices could double to more than $100 a barrel within three years, triggering economic collapse."

The end of oil is closer than you think

More oil Depletion news in the Guardian
Is it me or do you think there has been an increase in this type of article in the press over the last year. Me thinks they've realised we have a problem.

The Long Emergency
Posted by Dave