Fall, hibernation writing invigorate

Visiting the San Diego botanical gardens during my vacation I was able to see what giant Bamboo stalks look like when they are sprouting. Oddly enough they look like asparagus (see photo above). The plant formations of the southwest look like a smorgasbord of Dr. Seuss drawings.

It was fitting that right before I left, the good sized Elm Tree in my back yard was cut down due to DED. This is ok, the tree removes now provides much more room to the backyard greenhouse, and should provide for a fruitfull growing season next yer. I have ordered a Black Tupelo tree in the meantime from the Arbor Day Foundation. It is purported to grow in Zone 4 here in Mn, but is most popular in Ohio. It will be a gamble but it's fiery red color should be worth it.

In Minneapolis the bicycling season is slowly winding down and whitteling away the faint of heart, as the nighttime temps drop down to the 50's. but I would guess there will be more winter bikers this year then last, just as there was more lsat winter then the year prior. The growth of the bicycle craze in the 1890's was concurrent with a economic recession related to the Panic of 1893, in the book "Streetcar Man" about Thomas Lowry it even references the competition the streetcar company faced from more bicycle transportation. It will be a nice day when the automobile companies look at bicycles as competition.

The fake commercial Biker Buddy made with my friend Hunter Johnson should be on the internet soon, and ideas for other collaborations are in the works.

Snow Emerging See, The Daily Plebeian

The quiet of winter has fallen from the sky, it is a hushed manner that clashes as planes from airport just south of hwy 62, that the city has succumbed too. The ladies of the night that sauntered the streets near my house in Central Neighborhood have gone on vacation for the holidays. Yet the basement steps still have their light on, truth knows the crack is not far away. Darkness falls fast before people are done with work, and caution is expected on the road.

When this snow falls in the city there is a day or two of shock where people avoid the outside, the snowplows grind through the streets, and life emerges 48 hours later.

I attended the No Coast Craft-O-Rama at the Midtown global market, where many of the booths held delightful goods. I shall mark it on my calender for next year as well.

Awhile back I noticed that the Chicago Lake infamous bar Sonny's has closed down permanently. I remember a frequent night living on Columbus Ave and Lake St when bar close brought Riff Raff to stand around near their parked cars and holler at each other till the early morning about their sexual exploits.

I am not against Riff Raff altogether but it must be maintained and spread out, when concentrated it causes great displeasure. Sonny's is now gone the way of 'The Round Up' Beerhall on Lake Street and 2nd Ave, which closed down a few years back. These are sure signs of gentrification, a slow process yet noticeable if you have been a frequent visitor to Chicago Lake Liquors. Where the selection of 40 oz. malt liquor has gone down and the selection of wine and craft beer has gone up. The evolution of cities is hard to pin point yet its slow meander is seen in the small day to day activities.

I learned the Walt Whitman once wrote for a paper called the Daily Plebeian. I like that name and may perchance revisit it again.

Darwin jumps the Shark

Recently I have had a renewed interest in the Civil war and the absurd nature it brought to the country.

Mainly the brutality of it all, the amputations, mortality, and prisons. Also the war brought death to a population that was thriving economically because of the slow brutal process of slavery, maybe it produced a small amount of karmic retribution.

There also is a push in transportation as mechanical evolution happens faster when lives are on the line. Naval vessels were produced often with metal when speed wasn't an issue, and when it was the Confederate blockade runner ships did a great job, and produced men like Rhett Butler.

Railroads were run 24 hours a day often moving supplies and men, a great advantage of the Union army who employed men of the biggest companies of the day like the Pennsylvania railroad's Thomas A. Scott.

But I would like to focus here on the Mule, a true brute of efficacy. If I had a bicycle company I would produce a tough steel commuter proletarian oriented bike called 'the mule'. When I learned in my younger years of the Mule, from the epic television series Grizzly Adams, which showed off a mule named '#7' who was often referred to as a burro (donkey in espanol). A mule is sterile, a offspring of a male horse and a female donkey. Not to be confused with a Hinny, which is the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey. Civil War Mule usage is documented here.

Now to segway, mules are beasts of burden and have been with humans for quite some time. but the are almost always infertile, excepts in rare cases. Why do they exist? Are they as cool as Street Sharks?

Will sharks one day be a species filled with asexual reproduction?

None of these matter,but if questions of Darwin were pointed to examples like the Mule, and shark reproduction, wouldn't his teaching gain a resurgence like the Fonz when he jumped the shark. Its asking to much for people to think and pay attention, unless others are. I care about Bristol Palin on dancing with the stars because others do, I heard customers at the restaurant talking about it so it must be important, just like the weather.

Daylight Savings Burning a Hole in your pocket.

The winter doldrums are fast approaching, and with the restaurant slowing I feel impelled to write in this as a seriously time consuming hobby.

I have settled into my house in the hood, the sporadic hollering and whistles outside have diminished form their frenetic pace as the Johns and Crack addled Nightwalkers go about their business. I sit back and kindly reflect on what has allowed me this fortunate situation.

I owe much of where I am to three things. The first being the love care garnished from those around me, second is food, and third is transportation.

I ride a bicycle and chose to forgo ownership of an automobile for the time being. The essentials of a functioning society tend to be food, shelter and transportation. The third most often needed to acquire the first and most sustaining of the three. There has been a disconnect for what is needed to what is wanted. A requirement mutated into a desire.

Food and transportation and inextricably linked, as plants that can be food for animals can be changed by many years of sedimentary compression into fuel for combustible engines that drive our cars. Both food and fuel are organic(the non branded kind) material, made of atomic bonds that when broken... release energy that can both fuel our body and our vehicles. The unique thing about humans is that using food as your fuel for means of transportation has a great multiplier effect.

Food tastes better when your body uses energy prior to consuming it. For example a person rides their bicycle to closest pizza place, in my case Jakeenos, they then ride home with said pizza to enjoy the glorious combination of crust tomato and cheese. The pizza will physically taste better to that person then someone who sat on couch and ordered the Pizza delivered to their house while not moving an inch.

The other obvious point is that using food as fuel allows people to stay more fit and healthy then they otherwise would have driving. A more fit person tends to be happier and energetic within their daily activities (broad generalization duly noted).

Now will come the end of the post where I commence to write a rhyme.

I eat my food bite after delicious bite

all them veggies keeps scurvy outta sight

blowing off the steam so the temp is just right

and like Goldilocks I know I can sleep tight

because I got my chow after riding my bike

locking up front of Cub, wiping sweat off the brow

not even caring I could smell like a sow

the feeling of my heart beat in this chest

made me appreciate the blood of life contest

day after day struggle making choices

go with the ego or the id, quieting the voices

ride a bike take the bus, live life on the cusp

from the edge the inside is bigger, more beautiful then I could ever discuss

Sage Herbaholic signing out.

My Hippie Socialism

I have moved recently, and my house came with an old Zenith stereo. This has allowed me to acquire the habit of listening to the radio. I like news radio, less talking heads, more back and forth, better moderators. Today they were talking about the new Consumer Protection Agency the U.S. Government established.

They were arguing about the nomination the head the bureau Elizabeth Warren, a supposed enemy of the banks and champion of the people.

The topic got off subject, but as I was sitting there thinking about the upcoming payments to the bank who owns my house, I realized something. Nobody wants to tell people where to spend there money, because America is free.

Freedom causes problems, then we institute taxes, like tobacco and alcohol.

I couldn't afford a mortgage if I owned a car. Nobody in the government is telling people to ditch their car. Yet according to this fun graph, Americans spend 17% of their income on transportation. Do the people getting foreclosed on all over america have a car and if so why isn't Obama telling them to rid themselves of the money pit? I think I remember, he needs the automotive industry to create jobs.

I like to think about politics in an anthropological way often, and prioritize thusly.

#1 Food

#2 Shelter

#3 Transportation

#4 Babies

These are the most needed things in society, and in the american society only one is in crisis... shelter. Housing should be helped by reforming food and shelter.

This is how I would do it.

If you look at the FUN GRAPH above, you could lower health care costs if you increased food costs, you lessen the transportation cost by making local food cheaper. Subsidize the neighboring farmers who are willing to travel to the city to sell their food cheaper then your average grocery.

Transportation- This is tricky but try to follow my naive logic, in New York and large cities on the east coast people spend more of their budget on housing, I wonder why that is?

They have better public transportation! Think if people could reasonably get to and from their daily destinations without driving. But then they would have to walk a few blocks to and from the stations, and that might make them healthier, cutting into the profits of drug companies, who like people fat and sedated.

If the money we used to bailout the car companies was put into building a transportation infrastructure we may end up ahead in the long run. But people can live in their cars, the singer Jewel did it, Mad Money's Jim Cramer did it, and Doc Paskowitz did it. So maybe the housing crisis is really an opportunity for people to experience the open road, like a mix of Little Miss Sunshine and Grapes of Wrath (a often excluded movie from the Road Trip genre).

But if we started telling people what to do that would take away the freedom of america, the freedom to be stupid, crazy, fat, lazy, and everything in between. We can't tell alcoholics not to drink because it causes health issues that cost money to the system, just like we can't tell the obese to eat vegetables. We can't tell people to sell their car, junk their TV's and the rid themselves of cable, or never use their expensive energy consuming air conditioner. We like our creature comforts and the ability not to sweat when the world gets hot. We ain't no third world country and we ain't going to live like one.

Moving

This is what I have been doing, I live currently near the super block (liquor store, Shoe Store, Nail Salon, Gun&Ammo Shop, and KFC). I am moving into an abode 4 blocks west and 1 block south, where my distance to the joys of commercial american poverty are to be replaced with the honesty of Nightwalkers/Ladies of the night. The prohibition of prostitution is just another silly way to push it into the fringes, why not contain it in a flashy red-light district rather then allow it to exist in the periphery.

Being without the highpower of a motor vehicle I have been piling many of the large items into the back of the pedicab. It looks funny I am sure, but I don't pretend that I look normal myself. The utility of it is too perfect. Moving doesn't have to be a chore of fitting and arranging things into your SUV/Truck, your already putting it into the box that is your home, why put it in the box of your car. Especially when you have a convertible pedicab to cart it 5 blocks.

I have drafted a picture to go with a turtle riding a green bike that somehow looks like a battery and screams ENERGIZE.

Moving has tired me from the weekend rigors of the Pedicab, I have neglected all those thousands of people who unknowingly wanted a ride. Perhaps they should have called me. I did get to see all the rah rah of the Bicycle Film Festival, people joining the bike community to get the health benefits or just to feel like they are part of something. Minneapolis being the best bicycling city in america might just be a self fulfilling prophecy. I met a man who bikes to clients to give massages in his chair, pretty utilitarian.

If machines focused on utility more then design of bells and whistles I feel they could achieve greater evolution then what we see today. I use sometimes for this argument the sports car, which in the 50's and 60's was much different from your family owned vehicle. The sports car of today has much greater performance then those from forty years ago. If there had been as much focus on how to economically transport people in cars, we could have done the same, and ended up with something much better the the Prius. Look at the VW bus in the 60's and the best companies can do since then is the Prius and other small hybrid cars? I suppose you have to factor in the profitability push in car manufacturing, and why would someone make something less profitable.

On another note I found out that Afghanistan has a large deposit of Lithium that is used in much of today's electronics and the future electric cars like Tesla Motors.

I also went to Red Bull Flugtag this past weekend and took this snapshot of the world record breakers. Perhaps engineering is better developed in a non long term financial setting, but rather short term prize winning competition. I mean if the Flugtag can get people to build machines to fly over water after being pushed off a 40 foot cliff, then heck anything is possible.

Tour De Fat

This weekend was the 2nd Annual Tour De Fat in Minneapolis. This year it was held at Loring Park rather then a Parking Lot. There was beer and bikes galore, general merriment accompanied by music and theatrical circus entertainment.

The event was sponsored by the New Belgium Brewery, one of the more socially conscious brew companies (at least based on the festival and the website) out there. The beer is decent as well and I quite enjoy the 1554 variety. The event was MC'ed by a rather well spoken gentleman who espoused the ideas of zero waste, slow food, slow life, less consumption.

It is good that the focus is on bikes within the festival, the largest alternative to cars as of yet for local transportation. Bicycles are inspiring in the way they make you think about fuel. Your heart is your engine, and your stomach is your fuel pump. If you want your engine to last as long as possible you keep it fueled with the highest quality Petrol, as far as cars go. If our fuel as bicyclists must come from the earth we would tend to care more about it. When you go to the gas station the only info you receive about your fuels is the octane rating, when I have filled up I never thought about if the gas came from skimmed oil off the Gulf of Mexico, or the Persian Gulf, or the Nigerian deltas, or even the pristine areas of Alaska. My concern was that it burned hot enough to power my heavy box of metal to and from destinations.

Transportation is just one of the disconnects we have today about connection in the chain of productions. Energy and Food I feel are the other two predominantly neglected areas when it come to recognition of where it came from. Food I feel is the closest in todays society to changing as people feel it's direct influence in mere hours of consumption. The sink holes and environmental effect of our energy consumption can take decades to be felt. Look at the town ofCentralia, Pennsylvania. A ghost town whose coal mining and mine fire in th 1960's led to thesubsidence of the land and desertion of the town. The materials we seek for new goods that are not found from recycled and reused materials often come from underground. Wood is somewhat a renewable resource, yet wood does not grow without sapping the land around it of resources. Plants will use the land and if harvested continually and non-stop without cycles of fallow land or crop rotations of nitrogen rich plants, regrowth will zap the land and lead to things like the Dust bowl.

The industrial revolution was really a time for people to learn how to take lots of mass from beneath the earth and put it on-top. A good photographic tour of this is found in the work ofEdward Burtynsky. His documentary Manufactured Landscaped is pretty decent as well, and hisTED talk also a good time killer.

There is no connection to the oil we take from the ground to the push of a gas pedal, or the turning on a light switch to the dirty face of a coal miner.

Food we can see, we don't see the run off of the pesticides, unless we look at the dead zone of thegulf of mexico, a term called eutrophication. This word isn't well known yet, but time and crisis will show us in the future, duh duh duh duh...

This happened to Lake Como in St Paul not to long ago I seem to remember but can't find the internet source to be sure, but it probably isn't as worrysome as the evil Millfoil. My god, how dare species attach themselves to things and move around to try and keep themselves in a good position for survival. Invasive species, you should be snuffed out, while we humans should be the only species to inhabit every corner of the earth. How dare you try and play OUR GAME.

Here is a interesting site about aquatic insects in the water of Minnesota area lakes.

Bus consumption can be beautiful as I saw when giving this guy a lift to the gas station and then his car at Tour De Fat, a 62 Galaxy.

Funny that on the day of the festival, that the Isenhauer 94 Interstate was closed due to some awsome bridge rehab.

Bakfiet Wedding

Where's Narwaldo
Band ends festival with "Hold me closer Tony Danza"