shelbinator.com

Since everyone’s whining about gas prices on the MSM, I figured showing fit and attractive young cyclists out enjoying the fresh air would be a better way to report on the “crisis” than just a bunch of predictable stock footage at the gas station. You want biofuels? We gotcher biofuels: PBR in a can, man!

Personally, I think it’s about time we started paying what gas is worth — or more accurately, what gas costs us in the long run. We’ve got a pollution problem, an energy problem, a war-in-sucky-deserts-for-crap-reasons problem, and a national obesity problem. How hard is it to put two and two together to make get-on-a-bike-ya-softy?

Click for video.

For the record, filming while biking is not a simple task. Thanks to Rachael of SoPo Bike Collective for giving me a sound bite, so it looks like I actually did my job.

Digg the video.

Tessa just made me aware of an outstanding bike-themed website for any angry two-wheeled commuter like myself — at least for entertainment and venting purposes. I’m not sure there is anything actually useful that will come of it, but Atlanta has joined a host of other cities on MyBikeLane.com, a site that seems to have originated in New York.

What’s its purpose? If you’re tooling along on your fixie, urban hybrid, or nasty yellowbike and come upon a gas-guzzling roadblock in the bike lane — and you happen to have really quick reflexes, good balance, and a shoulderstrap-mounted camera case — snap a picture of the yobbo. You can then upload the photo, report the tag number if you catch it, and bitch about it. The site keeps a tally of repeat offenders by tag number, but again, not sure that’s actually going to do anything.

There’s a big moral gray area here that I don’t know what to make of. On the one hand, while I’m much calmer, happier, and healthier on my bike than in my car, I’m no less aggressive when provoked by bad drivers, whatever my vehicle. I’m plenty likely to scream at, cuss out, flip off, and even in really bad circumstances, chase or strike an offending automobile. (I really love putting the fear of God and criminal court in a driver who comes too close with a quick swat to their trunk; when they hear the thud and think they might’ve just killed somebody, maybe they’ll hang up the damn phone and drive.)

And bike lanes are an important feature of any city that wants to improve its urban commute. Providing 30 inches of space for people to take to work without adding another car to the road is a good investment in progressive transit (not to mention the reduction of health care costs, as long as we don’t get run over).

But for the bike community to get hoity-toity about cars parking in our lanes like it’s a special infraction above and beyond parking in any No Parking zone, we’re going to have to police some of our own members and sacrifice our own self-appointed privileges. During my evening commute when there’s more congestion, I usually sit at every red light I hit on the way home, content to enjoy my music and the end of the day. But in the morning, I join most other cyclists I know in running any desolate red light and rolling through most stop signs. I shrug off such infractions by considering these our man-powered equivalent to the exception hybrid vehicles get to drive in the HOV lanes without passengers. We’re doing our part to cut smog, so we get a wink and a nod to a quicker commute.

And then there are the crazy bike bastards, weaving in and out of bumper-to-bumper traffic, going the wrong way in the opposite lane, and alternating between sidewalk and road as conditions suit them. During the Critical Mass rides at the end of every month, we get in the ballpark of 300 bicycles together to completely dominate all 3 or 4 lanes in one direction of major downtown arteries as we cruise around the city making our little “Bicycles are here, get used to it — heck get your own” statement, and that’s all fine and good (though I’m sure you disagree if you’ve ever been stuck behind us). But out of those 300 civil disobedients, there’s always a handful of yokels who consistently swerve over double yellow lines into oncoming traffic when the pace of the mass doesn’t suit them. I would guess they’re also the commuters who freak you out by weaving through your gridlock and cutting you off by hopping off the sidewalk. They’re really not helping the movement.

Bike lanes are our safety zones, where theoretically we are not supposed to be crushed to a pulp by big boxes of speeding metal, so getting cars to respect those lanes can be a matter of life or death. But it’ll also help if we respect the same boundaries as much as possible, no? Perhaps the MyBikeLane.com people can fire up a sister site called YourDeathWish.com for drivers to upload pictures of jackass biker punks on fixies making risky traffic violations of our own. There are no tags to keep track of, but you can usually identify us by the colors and badges on our snooty Chrome bags.

For the last few months, I’ve had randomly recurring insomnia — sometimes once a week, sometimes four nights a week — that I thought was going to be the death of me. Literally. It isn’t just lying there all night staring at the ceiling, it’s waking up at 3 a.m. and getting stuck in a panic attack that you can’t shake till dawn.

Having my desk in my bedroom — no matter how I try to hide it with a crappy little curtain — probably doesn’t help the situation. So tonight it was time for a little chakra cleansing, or something, and the desk will live in the kitchen, where I’ve always worked better anyway. My fake little “pub table” wasn’t big enough for serious writing and I don’t eat at the damn thing anyway.

And what better excuse than to screw with the camera’s time-lapse setting.
UPDATE: new version, with music.

We’ll see how often I sleep through the night now.

I’ve already ranted about the pathetic state of American mobile telephony. Even with the even-cheaper iPhone and the ability to hack it to networks other than AT&T (hint: you shouldn’t have to hack your products), the “free market forces” in which Republicans seem to have more faith than in Jesus have made us the butt of many a European technology joke.

To solve our health care crisis, all of the Republican presidential candidates (and just about all of ‘em in Congress) put even more blind faith in the same market forces that give us sucky, crippled, service- and choice-limited cellphones to provide the services that basically decide whether we live or die.

Sorry, but I’m not at all hopeful. Republicans like to point to instances of incompetence in their effort to make government look like the worst thing since jock itch. But in the free market, the fundamental operating principle is the law of the jungle, and instead of incompetence, you just as often have instances of outright malice. It should be no surprise: the fundamental purpose of a private business is to make gobs of money for its officers and shareholders, not to give a crap about whether we survive cancer or keep our teeth in our head.

Here’s another wonderful free market example that I couldn’t fit into a debate question: Each month outside of winter (when I use my gas furnace for heating), I use about $9 worth of gas for cooking. I wish I could have an electric stove, but my old building can’t handle the 220V requirements; as a renter, I have very little choice in whether I can avoid using gas as a utility at all. In our awesome Atlanta gas market that was de-regulated several years ago, you no longer buy gas directly from Atlanta Gas Light, you buy it from middle-man marketers like Gas South. On top of my $9 worth of gas, I pay a couple bucks in taxes, which I am happy to pay in the hope that it provides some poor underpaid schmuck who prevents things from blowing up. I also pay almost $25 in fees to Gas South and AGL.

Yes, I pay about $37 a month for $9 worth of gas. Considering how much I actually cook, I’m paying about $2 per meal for gas — or more accurately, to keep my goddamn pilot lights burning in the furnace on the roof and in my hot-ass kitchen (for which I am thus paying even more in electricity for air conditioning, although the curtains I hung in the kitchen doorway help a bit). This is what deregulation brought me. God forbid AGL and the service providers amortize those $25 a month of fees into the per-cubic-foot cost of gas, so the real estate developing jackholes in their McMansions might pay for the maintenance of gas lines and administration of services commensurate with their lifestyles. Why should the utilities do that? They don’t have to. I am stuck in their market, and I have almost no choice but to pay. As long as they’re making money for their shareholders, they don’t give a rat crap about my broke ass.

But anyway, I haven’t got the energy for an extended, well-researched rant. Instead, I just asked the Republican candidates what their brilliant plan is for the next CNN-YouTube debate. Here’s hoping YouTube gives me bonus points for being one of its loyal political footage providers.

That was obviously one of my favorite take-aways from Mitt Romney’s visit to the Varsity: that Hillary Clinton was on crack for thinking we were “all in it together,” because we are an “on your own” society (take a moment to relish the structural oxymoron). This week, Daniel Gross has written one of the mostest awesomest pieces ever on the subject for Slate.com, and you all must go read it. From The Empty 401(k): If White House Press Secretary Tony Snow won’t save for retirement, why should you:

Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration’s domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush’s vaunted “ownership society”: privatizing social security, eliminating defined-benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)s; and replacing insurance with health savings accounts, high-deductible policies, and other consumer-driven health-care initiatives.

And yet Snow’s own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society—and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary.

When Snow came to the White House after several years at the Fox News Channel, it was clear that he had relied entirely on others to save for his retirement. Snow conceded: “As a matter of fact, I was even too dopey to get in on a 401(k). So there is actually no Fox pension. The only media pension I have is through AFTRA [a union].” Even though his employer provided a 401(k) and would have matched contributions, and even though he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, Snow had not shown either the interest or financial capability to manage his own retirement benefits.
…
Snow admitted to feeling pinched on his salary of $168,000, which is about 3.5 times the median U.S. income.
…
[Snow’s cancer] treatment is enormously expensive and only available to people who have good insurance — like the kind taxpayers fund for public employees such as Snow. Had Snow stashed a few thousand dollars in a health savings account, which is one of the administration’s chief proposals to reduce the rising number of the uninsured, he likely wouldn’t have enough cash to afford chemotherapy. Were any of [the 47 million uninsured Americans] to be afflicted with cancer as Snow has been, they’d be largely out of luck — unable to pay the bills for all those scans and chemo doses, and unable to find an insurer willing to cover such a pre-existing condition.

Just like the Log Cabin bois, it must feel great to be Tony Snow, spinning propaganda in favor of an administration’s policies that basically would have buggered him senseless and onto Skid Row — or into the grave, as likely as not — if he really were an “average American.”

I’m trying this new health kick thing. Sort of.

For one, I’m eating a lot more vegetables. Most of the time, I think vegetables are to be thrown at people or used sparingly to enhance dishes based primarily on meat and cheese. Chicken quesadilla? Yeah, put a little salsa in that. Salsa = vegetable serving, only four more to go. This might be why I should really go see my doctor about the way my heart does the cha-cha when I try to exercise.

But more importantly for graduation purposes, I’m trying to break out of the cycle of stay up late, have a couple beers to get sleepy, wake up too early by fighting with alarm clock, drink a pot of coffee at work, sludge through unproductive zombified day, go home late and repeat. My friend K just managed to defend her dissertation without any assistance from an alarm clock, so why not me?

I’m four days into the less-beer, more-greens, more-sleep diet, and I’m as yet unconvinced. You would think that letting the body wake up gradually and naturally wouldn’t come with this totally doped-up feeling like your system hasn’t flushed the serotonin yet, but even after a few nights of 8+ hours, I have to furrow my brow and concentrate on the kitchen cart before I can remember what I need from it.

Coffee filters. Oh. Right. Now I put this
No you idiot, throw out the old one first. I knew that. I was just testing…me. Now I put the water in here, and, voila!
Is there any coffee in the filter? Oh. Right.

And while I was so proud of myself for getting up unassisted after 8 hours of sleep yesterday, that’s just not always going to work for me. I am a very vivid dreamer, and my brain has learned to use this to thwart me. Instead of getting up and hitting the snooze button, I now just dream about it. I know I was awake at a decent hour this morning, having grown too disturbed with being stuck in the wrong hotel room taking a shower with no clean towels before a wedding in the desert. I opened my eyes and the sun was up, but something in my head told me it was still too early for work.

It’s only 7 yet. Go back to sleep. How do I know? I can’t see the clock. Sure we can. It’s over there, see? 7:05 it says. But…but…isn’t it behind the desk partition? How can I see it from here? I need to get up and look. No, that’s right — but see, all we have to do is move the curtains aside — and see? Now we see the clock! Oh, yes, that’s a neat trick. Yep, 7:05. I guess I can go back to sleep.

So, having telekinetically moved things around to see a clock that existed only in my head while quite awake mind you, I mistakenly believed I would not be late for work and got back to the business of hiding from monkeys. In the Great Smoky Mountains. Where they abound.

Monkeys that turn into Akitas.

Really, it’s always crunch time in grad school, it seems. But crunch time has moved full force into my mouth.

My whole head hurts.

This happened a few weeks ago, when a dull, throbbing pain grew worse and more widespread, emanating from my lower jaw up through my face and into my skull, and I thought it was just a sign of having neglected a cavity my dentist was worried about for far too long. But then the pain subsided for a while and, hating dentists, I never called to make a follow-up appointment.

The pain, she is back. But the fact that its return coincides with a new nocturnal phenomenon confirms my suspicion that the real culprit is the fact that I’m clenching my jaw during the few fitful hours of what passes for sleep each night. This time around, I take a break each night from grinding my teeth to wake up sometime before dawn and enjoy the fact that I am absolutely drenched in sweat.

Grody, I know. Like I have time to do extra loads of laundry on top of salvaging bollocksed research, writing hopeless chapters of literature review, and keeping my fingers in too many political pies that I consider “investments in the future.”

It ain’t insufficient air conditioning. It ain’t too many blankets. Four nights in a week and the feeling that I’ve been whacked in the face with a cricket bat really point to the fact that I’m steadily losing my mind.

I can’t wait for the night terrors to come.

It’s fun how your mind starts making up random tasks and logical connections when you’re running on empty. Among the more brilliant things I’ve found myself almost doing lately:

• Making breakfast, put bowl on counter, put milk on counter, pour cereal in bowl; see dog walk into kitchen, pick up dog bowl, pour dog food in bowl; grab milk, almost pour milk onto dog food instead of cereal.
• Turn on stereo to listen to NPR, then pick up TV remote control in an attempt to change the volume. No, this wasn’t just a case of mistaken remote — I was pointing it at the television.
• Lift toilet seat and then try to sit down on the rim.
• Packing for work, think “Need to dock iPod to get latest podcasts,” and go to freezer. Stand in front of open freezer trying to remember what I’m looking for.
• Get to work, put coffee in filter, take coffeepot to water fountain for water, walk back into office and take coffeepot to printer because it happens to be making noise.

I was listening to some news program on the ol’ podcast format the other day, and they were talking about sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique. The commentators were discussing the public opinions of some public official — I think in Israel — who was deploring sleep deprivation from personal experience, saying that the fatigue-induced dementia will eventually lead any person to sign any confession you want them to, so desperate will they be for a few minutes of unconsciousness.

Considering the way my short term memory is falling off the chart, and the fact that I will go through an hour of hitting the snooze button (on an alarm clock that is 15 feet and one sleeping dog obstacle away) without ever really comprehending what I’m doing, I don’t doubt it.

It was me. I leaked the NIE to the NYT. Do whatever you want with me, just let me sleep for 2 days.