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Sunday, Jun 11, 2006
Re-Elect Gore!
Spoiler alert
I think Gore's new movie, which D and I saw last night, may do much to rehabilitate Gore's image -- along with raising awareness about the carbon issue.
One of my favorite parts was when he was picking apart a slide presentation by skeptics (the White House?). One slide showed a balance with stack of gold bar on one side, and the planet Earth on the other. I'm paraphrasing, and exageratin' now, but Gore said something like this ... "Lookee thar. Gold bars. Mmmm-MMM. Gold. I loves me some gold. Mmmm. Gold is nice. But what's that on the other side? The entire planet. Hmmm."
Very nice use of Southern attitude. I was about dying during that scene.
And, on a tangent, I'm getting into some more bicycling. I've got a mountain range to cross to get to work. Okay, small mountains. One thousand foot climb from here to the ridge line, and about a two thousand foot climb from the valley side. Still, that's considerable. But with a combination of car-pooling over the ridge, roof-top racks, and some flat land riding across the valley, I should be able to eliminate a couple of days of driving.
Besides the health benefit and saving gas, I went through a set of tires on my daily driver in 10 months. That's pretty quick even for me.
I've decided I need to expand my bicycle collection to include something less than 40 lbs. I'm fixing to get me one of these in extree large.
My target was a cyclo-cross style bike with gearing and geometry close to a touring bike, and flat handlebars like a mountain or commuter bike. Disk brakes would have been nice. This one seems to be as close as I can get without going custom.
It's got cantalever brakes, which is good. They'll give me clearance to upgrade to semi-nobby tires. The cable routing is road-bike style, meaning I've got to keep an eye on the gunk if I play in the dirt. I was leaning towards chromoly (how retro), but aluminum frame with carbon fiber forks should be fine. The slanted top tube is good for step over height. The gearing range isn't as extreme as I was hoping for, but it does have a granny. I think I may have to resort to walking on extreme uphills on the fireroads.
In general, I continue to be amazed at how good bicycles are these days.