Posts by JackElder
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Super Vision for cock
The power Superman only discusses in front of select groups of friends.
-
I habitually wear a cycle helmet BUT if I'm grinding up to a saddle at about 5km/h in Central Otago in summer, there is bugger all airflow for ventilation, and I'll happily swing my helmet from the handlebars. Always put it on before starting and descent of course.
In this, you take the same position as the management of the Tour de France, who require riders to wear helmets at all times - except in the final climb of the day, where the stage finishes at the top of a climb of at least 5k. If you want a souvenir, standing around at the bottom of the final climb is a good way to pick up helmets as the riders hurl them off before hitting the climb.
A ten minute ride is one thing, but half an hour would start to look too much like hard work, if you had a car to jump into instead.
This is an interesting one. I used to work a 30-minute bike ride from home. People were amazed that I rode it five days a week. What they didn't realise was that in rush hour traffic, it was also a 30-minute drive (or a 40-minute bus ride). Yes, the car's faster on an empty road, but at 8am going into the CBD, the bike is often faster in real terms.
-
Just a quick note that there are other reasons for not liking helmets, besides hair-related vanity.
Heat's one. Some people I know swear blind that they overheat when they wear helmets, particularly in summer. I personally think that's because they haven't tried any reasonably modern helmets, where the venting is designed to help direct the airflow to keep you cool - but it's a potential reason.
The actual physical reality of the helmet is another. To put it simply, helmets are a pain to carry around. They're impractical to attach to your bike (if you lock it to the frame, they're just at dog-urination level), and they're a bit annoyingly shaped for carrying around in a bag. When you're not wearing one, a helmet is another bloody thing to have to lug around/look after.
I should point out that in over a decade of fairly committed cycling, I have never had a crash that included me hitting my head. However, I did once have a bee fly into the vents in my helmet and freak out on top of my head while I was doing 30kph. On that occasion, wearing the helmet markedly increased my chance of an accident, as it was very hard to concentrate until I'd done an emergency stop and removed the bee.
-
Cul-de-sacs increase the distance to walk or bike between any two points and general favour the use of cars as transport.
But, as I believe James has pointed out, they don't have to. You can have lots of pedestrian/cyclepath cut-throughs that make it faster to travel by foot/bike than by car. Upshot is that by car you have to take the looping way, on a bike you can take lots of shortcuts.
Of course, you need a good set of tyres, because the shortcuts are usually traps for broken glass. I personally recommend Specalized's "Armadillo" range of kevlar-reinforced tyres: I have, quite literally, never punctured on them in four years of use.
<flat>
I believe someone's already pointed out that cycle use is quite high in Wellington - despite the hurking great hills. To be honest, I think the rain is more of a disincentive than the hills.
-
The Bechdel test is really just a rule of thumb, so of course you can come up with more nuanced analyses. But it's a nice rule of thumb to have.
-
Haven't listened to the piece yet, but cycle helmets really do arouse emotions, don't they?
Our kids haven't discovered YouTube yet, although I discovered that attendance at primary school these days seems to come with a familiarisation with Abba's greatest hits. Though this is still my children's favourite song:
Video is a) a static image and b) of the wrong band (the picture's actually of Gogol Bordello, not Leningrad). But the kids love the song; I have it on good authority from a Russian-speaking friend of mine that the song is actually about sniffing glue and contracting gonorrhoea, but it's a top tune.
-
George: Is this deliberate? Or are you suggesting we are pron to porn?
Probably deliberate - that's a standard misspelling (to get around keyword filters for the string 'porn', funnily enough). Alternate variant is the l33t variant, 'pr0n'.
-
Until I googled that just now, I assumed it came from 'Aliens'.
That... is awesome.
As is the fact that if you google for that exact phrase, this thread is the third result (at time of writing).
For the curious/childless, it's a quote from Madagascar (or, specifically, the Penguins of Magascar christmas special - it's on the DVD, it counts).
-
It's interesting seeing how the people with kids pick up the lines from the movies their kids love. The other day in a meeting, one of my coworkers came out with:
"Smile and wave, boys. Just smile and wave."
Half the meeting - the half with kids - got it, and laughed; the other half looked baffled.
For reference, "Kowalski! Give me options!" has become a catchphrase in our house.
-
But I think you're confusing cool quotability with "saw it when I was a kid and my brain swallowed it whole". I think if you took a 15-year old kid and asked them for some quotable lines from their favourite films, you'd get a landslide.
As someone said to me, Avatar is for eight-year olds now what Return of the Jedi was for me as a kid.