Posts by JackElder
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I think there's another side to the "motorists shouting stuff" coin that we should acknowledge: when cars full of teenage girls yell "nice arse!" at you as they pass.
Yes, this has happened to me. Twice.
It's a lovely day out there, by the way. Get on yer bike and get some fresh air.
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the past few days I have sensed a bit of a sea change in motorists’ attitudes while I’ve been out pedalling around Wellington.
I think this is something that we should probably highlight: most people - drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, that idiot on the kick scooter - are actually pretty considerate and nice. The number of actually malicious people is very, very low; the number of inattentive, distracted, or just dozy people is somewhat higher, but still the vast majority of people do watch out for you and aren't tools. Worth bearing in mind the next time someone does something dumb and annoying; it's standing out because most people aren't like that.
My very anecdotal impression is that people in Auckland open their driver doors without looking more often than people in Christchurch do. Since the streets are narrow in Auckland and there are more cyclists in Christchurch,
I think the problem is that a lot of our actions are based on unconscious assumptions, hammered home over multiple repititions. Which is a wanky way of saying that if you're used to there being a lot of cyclists around, you look out for them more. When you're moving fast, you're scanning the environment around you for things you need to pay attention to - and for many car drivers, this is basically "large, approximately rectangular lump of metal". Hence the whole "looking right at you but not mentally registering your presence" thing. In places where there are a lot of cyclists, drivers' minds are used to looking for them, so the subconscious scan includes you. So the more cyclists there are, the safer it is to cycle - see the points made in David Haywood's post passim on the systemic effects of cycle helmet legislation. Certainly, I've felt much, much safer riding in places where there were lots of cyclists. In this sense, I think that shouted abuse from a car is in some sense a win: it shows they've seen you. I'm much more concerned about the inattentive than the malicious, because the world contains a lot more Distracted than Evil.
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Best thing I've had shouted at me from a car: "DYKE!"
I mean, I've got a beard, FFS.
Best thing I've had thrown at me from a car: a fork. I've still got it.
Then again, I've had quite a few things shouted at me from passing cars over the years, mostly when I've been on foot. I must have one of those faces.
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Since this has turned into Gardener's Question Time, two questions for the field:
I'm getting a lot of fruitflies in our worm farm. This is a pain, as it's only about ten feet from our kitchen door, so we always have fruit flies in the kitchen. Any suggestions for keeping the fruit flies down without affecting the worms?
Related: can anyone suggest any worm best practice tips? I've had a worm farm for the last few years, but I can't help feel that I'm probably missing out on Advanced Worm Technique. Anyone got any tips or links?
And finally, someone mentioned coffee grounds. I have access to rather a lot of coffee grounds; but won't they make the soil too acidic for a lot of plants? How do bulk coffee grounds do in a worm farm?
I should point out that I've been growing various plants since I was 19 or so, but I've always been more interested in the ornamental/interesting section of the spectrum rather than food. Trust me, you haven't seen a double-take like the day that I (aged 25, obv a bit pierced/punk) asked my manager for a day off so I could go help man a stall at the Chelsea Flower Show...
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Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Are you sure you weren’t a Milanese urban designer in a previous life?
With this dress sense?
Which proves that there are arseholes on bikes, just as there are arseholes in a cars and, for that matter, arseholes on foot
Indeed. The sad fact of it is, there are a lot of assholes out there, no matter what form of transport they use.
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Anecdata: the part of my bike commute that I feel least safe, and the part where I've seen the most accidents, is on a shared footpath. Specifically, the section between the bottom of the Ngauranga Gorge and Thorndon Quay (in Wellington). The path goes along in front of a lot of businesses, including one childcare centre; so in sections you have to slow down to 15kph in case a 3-year old suddenly darts out from behind a car. There's also a lot of potholes, because fixing potholes on a footpath isn't as important as fixing them in a proper road. There's also a lot of cars turning into or pulling out of the aforementioned businesses; going in to town, it's not so bad, because you're coming in the same direction as the motorised traffic and drivers reflexively look right to see oncoming obstacles. On the way out of town, it's pretty normal for people to pull out right in front of you while looking to the right to see any oncoming cars. About once a month I have to do a panic stop to prevent myself being creamed by someone pulling out of the Spotlight carpark and not looking for cyclists coming to their left. Then again, that's not helped by the fact that the sight lines for that carpark aren't great, because it was poorly designed, because someone presumably wasn't thinking about two-way cycle traffic when they designed the merge.
I use shared footpaths because some parts of my commute are badly designed otherwise. But if, say, someone at the council offered to knock 1.5m off the footpath, extend the roadbed and mark it as a dedicated cyclepath, I'd love it. In general, roads are better designed for reasonably fast-moving (20kph +) traffic than footpaths are. Which is why I'm a bit worried about any push towards more cyclepaths; I think that we'd just end up with the same footpaths we currently have, with the same design issues, but with a small bicyle painted on them at 100m intervals.
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Up Front: That's Inappropriate!, in reply to andin,
Is that your voice in my head?
Are you my conscience?
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I don't recall seeing anyone else posting this in this thread, so why not.
Avenue D, "Do I look like a slut?"
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Disclaimer: I really wanted to name our 2nd born Prudence. I was overruled.
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I'm finding the cloaked use of the name as a class signifier really annoying, myself. Partially because it's a sniffy way of labelling someone as working class and dismissing them (while not in any way acknowledging that's what is happening, as we definitely don't have a class system here in NZ, oh no). And also partially because a lot of the people I know who've given their kids pretentious names are actually extremely wealthy. It's like: name your children after certain kinds of mineral, alcohol, or abstract concept ("Amethyst", "Chardonnay", "Harmony", etc) and you're a fucking prole and we shouldn't expect any more from you or, indeed, your children, you fucking slag, she's no better than she should be, etc. Give your kids French names when you have absolutely no connection with France, and you're a solid upper-middle class taxpayer.
This is a bit of a personal niggle, mind. Then again, I've never quite gotten over my experience when I registered my first child's birth, back at the Cambridge Registry Office in 2004. While the registrar was writing the birth notice into a giant ledger (yes, really), I noticed that on the wall there was a list of "Strangest names registered at this office". Quite apart from the staggering unprofessionalism of having this on public display (OK, you snigger about the names over the tea urn, but typing it up and putting it on public display), I was very disturbed to note that they thought that alongside names like "Justice", "Chardonnay" and "Crystal", names such as "Chiara" and "Kwame" were similarly sniggersome ... not so much if you're Italian or Kenyan, of course, but We Are Still So Very White Around Here. Ahem.
Anyway. For me, this has highlighted one of the reasons why I'm in favour of school uniforms: because they give kids something completely meaningless and safe to rebel against. They're gonna rebel, might as well give them a punching back to kick against.