Grom: Conan's Tiny God? Or The Dream of the 90's?

Why does this look so wrong? 

Honda has gone and made a weird Monkey Bike, which is a small motorcycle with small scooter wheels. Its called Grom. Grom is urban slang for a surfer who is under 15 years old. The bike is a 125cc, fuel injected engine, dry weight of 225 pounds. It costs $3K new, coming out in August. The interesting bit is the 12 inch wheels have fat tires and long suspension so it can take bumps. The seat height is under 30 inches, so it will work for short people, even girls. It has scooter fuel economy, but doesn't look like a scooter. It is less nerdy and less gay than a scooter. I have seen several people cruising through town on monkey bikes, not like this, probably older versions that are restored to running condition.

Honda Rebel

What do I think of it? I'd rather ride a cruiser than the Grom, like an old Honda Rebel 250 (234cc) with its crappy drum brakes, and butt-hurting seat. A used Ninja 250 is better than that in most ways. I saw a used Ninja 650 missing its plastics in the parking lot Wednesday, near the UPS store. Somebody must have laid it down and the cowlings cost as much as the bike does. Total ripoff. Replacements cowlings to cover the critical ugly bits in metal that look good would sell.

I once had a dream of  riding a Cafe Racer version of the Triumph Bonneville through Eastern Washington's apple orchards. They're pretty, grown up bikes capable of speed and proper style, which is something worth the money. Or I could pay $4500 for a bike such as a TU250. I am not ready for real power. I could easily see myself twitching the power at the wrong time and ending up in a bad place.

Still, the Grom is interesting. I can see there would be lots of people who would buy it as a fun machine to get around town with. It's certainly better than scooters. I don't think I would want one, however. The roads are too rough. I liked the MadAss for its 16 inch wheels, which are a far better protection from potholes and such, which a Monkey Bike would stumble over its own tires and dump you. I would not enjoy that. On flat roads and good pavement? The Grom would be great. Down in the Valley there will likely be many buyers.

I still see lots of people on Scooters with smaller wheels than that (10" is standard for Vespa and many others), commuting across town. And I totally get that people can ride them safely. I just would rather have something with bigger wheels that rides more like a bicycle, like I'm used to. I'm really used to the 26" wheels of my commuter/mountain bike. Standard wheels are 17" for street bikes and 19" to 23" for Enduro/dual-sport bikes. Big wheels go through messy roads a lot better. The physics support it. The angles are gentler.

Considering a dual sport is probably the right machine for me in the long run, even though they're ugly as sin, I will probably eventually get one of those, with both sets of wheels and tires and progressive shock suspension. Perhaps a model with an engine balancer so it is smooth but retains the torque advantage of a single. I may have to do without. I have learned, by observation, that 600 cc engines are much quieter than expected. I know I would HATE a loud engine. That has got to be really annoying after a while. The Suzuki DRZ-400 is a popular dirt bike, and comes available with a Supermoto version. Downside is its $7K.

If I were to choose a sport bike, the Honda CB500F is 471cc, liquid cooled, $5500 and will climb the mountains at freeway speed. Important if you want to go to Tahoe for a good long ride around the lake. As Lake Tahoe is only 70 minutes away, that's a legitimate consideration. However a bike that takes more than 5 minutes to warm up is one I'd only ride on the weekends. While I saw a bunch of people on Hogs, I also spotted a guy on a Suzuki Bandit 600 at the old Donner Pass overlook. Nice looking bike. Good size and shape, really looked well balanced and agile. If I lived further out of town that would be a nice commuter.

Kawasaki Super Sherpa

Most of my motorcycling interests are local commuting to work and back, however. The $1000 beat up air-cooled bike that works reasonably well is probably more my speed. Maybe a used Honda 230CRL, lowered enough I can plant my feet. Or perhaps a Kawasaki Super Sherpa. Those are famously good bikes. I don't see them for sale used much, actually. Even stronger recommendation isn't it? I wonder if I could get an old Suzuki DR350? Mondo Enduro rode those around the world and found parts everywhere. They were a good choice.

There is one of these in town, as someone's daily rider.

Really, I can see a real market for light 110-250cc bikes that are designed for city streets with crappy pavement. Bikes with an upright riding position comfortable for beginners. There are a few of those in town, actually. Even a 110cc would be better than pedalling up that mountain. Bikes are great when you have hours to recover. Not when you have to work when you arrive, or after having worked a full shift. Then they're just not much fun. Maybe the Hipsters are right? Get a Honda 360, dress down, don't waste money, be a sort of lower-key Libertine and extend the pleasures of life rather than race for prison like the idiots in Oakland. Hipsters ride the old bikes. They buy used airstream trailers and restore them. Cheaper than rent or buying a house in a flood zone. Taxes rise too much? Move somewhere else. Voting with your feet, and taking your home with you. This is what Socialism has driven us to. We're all getting poorer. So yeah, maybe the Hipsters are right. 

This is probably the right bike for me. Kawasaki GTO 110.

Take your Materialism and crippling debt and shove it. The dream of the 90's is alive in Portland (and Nevada City if they ever get enough part time jobs to support the existing trust baby population).

Something like that. This is the horror awaiting the Baby Boomers retirement funds, and the Socialists with their Totalitarian dreams. They wanted us to be good slaves, working away to make a more terrifying future of Big Brother, but nobody cares enough to make it happen. Are we working too hard? Are the hipsters right to just do as little as possible so they can hang out in coffee shops and complain about not being taken seriously? I wonder.

Fracking the Monterey Shale in California

So it seems there's a push to start fracking (hydraulic fracturing) the Monterey Shale here in California. On one hand, that would mean a huge oil boom, and extend the duration of California's wealth. On the other hand, Frakking is known to cause all sorts of unintended consequences, including natural gas leaks into the groundwater, getting into private wells, causing tap water to burn.

I doubt we can afford to ignore it. We need the oil to keep the water flowing, the lights on, and pay for installing cheap solar everywhere. Cheap solar isn't FREE after all. Were I the governor, I would be insisting on first repairing levies, so we don't have a flood disaster of Biblical proportions, intentional flooding of certain areas as a stopgap measure, then start deliberate clearing of sediment from reservoirs so they will work as flood control, during late summer when water levels are lower. I would insist on restoring the campgrounds and plant sport fish (trout) into rivers and lakes so California would be a good fishing spot again (there's a LOT of tourism associated with that and resorts are a better occupation than Welfare).

I would also get projects to inject clean water into salt infiltrated coastal ground water and using cheap solar and cheap desalination so the coasts recover from a century of abuse by all the rich jacka55e5. And I'd make sure the idiots living there paid for it. Coastal living is very expensive. Nobody who enjoys the benefits should get a free ride on my tax dollar. But they'll find a way not to. The work still needs to be done. I'm sick to death of people in govt who can't think beyond their next election. Protecting the state for future generations is going to be hard, not easy. Most of this recovery could be paid for with oil money from the Monterey Shale.

We have to boost tourism for the long run, and that means you have to keep the state clean and pretty. Nobody wants to stay in a dirty Motel room with noise and no view. People who want that go to Vegas. Here in California, pretty motels in scenic towns means jobs cleaning them in rural scenic towns. Pretty motels also means cute restaurants next door and down the street, and jobs at those restaurants. But you have to have a reason to stay there.

Before the Pike, Hwy 70 through the Northern Sierra was Trout fishing heaven. It's still listed that way in older books. My family used to go up there in the summertime, for a good long week of rest and recuperation. I still have a fishing pole, somewhere, that we bought at the local sporting goods and grocery store in Portola. You were sure to catch trout in Lake Davis, and any section of the Feather river, right up until around 1990. It was a great place to go for vacation. Very safe, very clean, anywhere you stopped would treat you well and the food was good. Most restaurants would cook your trout for you for a modest fee, and provide the first class restaurant experience as well. Trout Almondine is delicious. So is cornmeal crusted. Good times, good memories. So why am I talking about it like its past tense?

Around 1990, Nothern Pike got planted by some eco-terrorist, and not the defending but the destructive kind, they ate the trout, bred like crazy, and the last 25 years of attempts to kill them off, with poison, shocks, explosions, gas poisoning, draining the lake: none of it worked. Their eggs are lodged in the mud and nothing kills them off. The Feather River was a success story that went very wrong thanks to one evil bastard who wanted to catch Northern Pike instead of trout. Around 70,000 people lost their jobs and homes. Its not like a Fire, where you can rebuild. There's no insurance coverage for eco terrorism. All the resorts closed, with the exception of the ones focused on Golf. Most of the hotels, the restaurants followed. Lots of people moved up to there to retire in the late 1980's. Before the pike, it was a lovely place with happy families, the train moving through along the river, and thousands of fishing resorts and campground. Its very safe with clean water, clean air, and peace.

With no trout, the resorts closed. With no fishermen, the campgrounds fell apart. With no trout, there were no tourists. This is something which must be fixed. And not just there, but elsewhere. Killing off the pike eggs in the sediments at the bottom of Lake Davis will require a lot more brute force. Maybe even permanently drain the lake, just to be sure. Its going to cost a lot of money. There are other places in California where things went really wrong and cleanup is needed. The North Coast, dependent on Salmon Fishing, destroyed when the Peripheral Canal was built, killing the newly hatched salmon, but supplying water to San Jose and Los Angeles, freeing them up from using Colorado River water whose demand was violating a treaty with Mexico. They built a nuclear powerplant just to desalinate water so it would reach the legal requirement when the river hit the border. Even so, it was mostly underground by that point and illegals could cross the river without getting their feet wet. And whom did that water help? American farmers who owned the Mexican land. All that money spent to make them richer. Getting LA out of the Colorado river, required NorCal's water supply, and killing off the salmon didn't matter to the movie stars who benefitted from it. They've never been short of hypocrisy. Woody Harrelson stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge 20 years ago to protest for Earth First, an anti-logging hate group that killed loggers and destroyed families in order to "save" trees which ended up cut down anyway. The logging was increasingly mechanized and eventually the jobs were lost, at which point the hate group of eco-terrorists found someone else to harm. The families on the North Coast? Terribly wronged. LA took their fish, so they lost their boats and went bankrupt. Some suicided. Are lives only important when those dying aren't poor white people? They turned to logging, and terrorists from Berkeley killed them with impugnity, ignoring the harm they caused and pretended they were "warriors". I felt glad when that b17ch0 died in her own bombed out car in SF. Would have been better to get shredded by a saw blade like most of her victims, but her cultists liked to pretend she never gave that speech on local TV about how it was justified to kill loggers to save the trees. Which grow back.

Do those eco terrorists plant trees and stop erosion? Do they help the salmon return so the coastal population can have legal jobs? Do they really care about anything but their own narrow violence? NOPE. They found other people to attack and murder.

I do not like Earth First. I went to college with the surviving children of the murdered. They like Earth First even less. Will Earth First blow up frakking rigs once this starts? Yep. There's no shortage of arrogant haters at Berkeley. They don't see the big picture. They see a chance to piss off Mommy and Daddy and get negative attention. That's how they were in the 90's. They'll be the same pricks today.

I've done basic lab research on the Monterey Shale back in college. Its an oil shale. You can smell it. Runs up and down the California coast, but turns underground, gets cut through by volcanoes and faults, and runs across the Central Valley well underground. There's a lot of oil in there. Trapped. A pretty ideal example of where Frakking would do some good, assuming it can be done safely with just water, no contaminants left underground.

California needs this money, and this energy will let us tell Saudi Arabia where it can get off. It's enough money we can stop paying any attention to DC. They do NOTHING for us anyway. Drilling the wells for frakking is jobs. Maintaining the jack-pumps is jobs. Harvesting and routing and storing the natural gas is more work, more jobs, and more savings. California could use some good news. What's more? The areas in yellow above are mostly empty, so real estate is cheap, and fixing up the houses will be yet more jobs. Restarting the schools for the worker's kids is jobs for teachers, hopefully capitalists instead of commies, since Capitalism will be paying the taxes, not Kumbayah and hand holding. Find a balance between the energy money and restoring our tourism for the future, long term. Do what the arabs utterly failed to do: give their people a future without bombs in the market place. We need a future.

Reliving the 1900s

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

We tried the centrallized Modernist approach last century. That gave us National Socialism, World War, Stalin, pogroms and purges and ethnic cleansing. The Military Industrial Complex. Too many madmen with too many loyal killers. We tend to ignore our own evils in that, but we shouldn't. America's biggest export is weapons.

Our next biggest export is food. Rice, wheat, corn, soy beans are the big ones. We feed the world, and some of our shady agribusiness men buy up entire country's crops and burn them, then sell hybrid seeds at twice the price just to insure that the local farmers have to buy them every year. It drives them out of business, and makes those nations dependent on US grain exports. We have a bad crop? Those countries starve, and starvation drives war or revolution. Maybe the new govt of those countries will have better credit and more naive fools to be manipulated with underhanded corrupt practices. Nasty.

The oil is going away. Not instantly, obviously, but it is going away. I just finished watching the Formula One Grand Prix of Monaco, live. Woke up at 5 AM to see the parade lap and the race. Back in the early 1900's, car racing was a big deal. People with horse and buggy, or even those newfangled bicycles, would ride out to the race track, usually dirt on really bad soil left fallow, and watch the race. The fuel for the cars was hauled in by wagon, much like the cars themselves. Racing has always been both sport and entertaining show. It remains such. The one F1 race to see, if you see only one, is Monaco, running today. The one Indycar race to see is the Indianapolis 500, also running today in an hour from now. Sadly, Indy is not really as polished or exciting as F1 so I pretty much stopped watching it after they removed the Turbochargers. When they sounded like Nascar I was outta there. Its like watching High School Football. F1 is professional and very competitive.

Even when the oil goes away, I still expect to see F1 continue, and be broadcast in HD, even if the fans get there by bicycle and streetcar and scooter. The winner of today's race in Monaco actually lives in town, so he slept in his own bed last night and rode a scooter to the paddock, put on his race suit, and eventually won the race. He'll probably get a lift home, thanks to all the parties, but it would amuse me to learn he'll just scooter to those as well. In Monaco, the streets are very narrow, very twisty, and very steep in many cases. Perfect place for a scooter.

Make tens of millions a year as a race car driver? Rides a scooter because they're fun. We can tell ourselves we don't need scooters or bubble cars in America, because we have the wide open road. And we're delusional, trapped in the past, and unable to cope with reality. We have entire generations raised with Entitlement complexes, and many of those people have already killed, and be jailed or killed in return, to keep that just a little longer.

Our overseas invasions aren't about stopping terrorism, since every bomb we drop and bullet that hits a bystander makes more enemies. We're overseas killing people because its our delusion that we're World Police. At some point, we'll run out of the fuel to even do that, and then those terrorists will come HERE. Like the Chechens in Boston, blowing up marathons. Perhaps they'll go after shopping malls, farmers markets, sniping movie stars on Rodeo Drive or bomb some Broadway play full of New York intelligentsia. Its the sort of Nightmare scenario that Homeland Security is failing to prevent. Every dollar we spend on Middle Eastern oil is a dollar that funds terrorism. And we can't get by without it. Not without huge changes in how we live, how we appreciate time, what jobs we do, and what risks we take.

Tahoe and Truckee are really beautiful this time of year. Hell, they're beautiful most of the year. Living there is miserable in the winter unless you ski, and even then the black ice is expensive in car repairs. Still, imagine post oil. Tourist trains disgorging skiers, trams running back and forth to the resorts. That only works if there's enough skiers to pay for it all, and the more it costs, the fewer can afford to come, or less often.

A sport can die out if its too pricey. Its not like F1, which can be held on any bits of reasonably smooth paved roads, even city streets. Monaco is streets. So is Montreal in 2 weeks. If the race is in your town or on the air, great, watch it. If its something you have to do personally to enjoy, like skiing? Well, that's a bigger expense and one maybe not justifiable with a modest post-oil minimum wage job and no career prospects thanks to the collapse of manufacturing.

When the Levies Break (so does your head), we'll have prime bass fishing territory in Lake Sacramento. I suspect that people will fish and do water sports and hunt geese and ducks rather than climb up those mountains for a literal fortune in fuel, at least until cheap solar powers the trains again. Even then, tough argument. Will people give up skiing and go bass fishing instead? Maybe sailing through the various sloughs in small dingies? Rowing? I could see it.

Bicycle tourism? Absolutely. I just got back from some of that up to Lake Tahoe. Lots of families out doing it. Fun times. Rode on Mom's restored 1970's Peugeot bicycle, which is, despite being named for a low quality car, a high end racing bicycle. We keep it under the house with the garden tools. On the relatively flat and gentle inclines of the trail, I made good time upriver the 4-5 miles to Tahoe City on Lake Tahoe. Dad and I got lunch at the Bridge Tender Bar and Grill. They were doing outdoor services today, but it was chilly so we ate near the bar inside where it was warm instead. It was breezy and almost cold during the ride. There were hundreds of bicyclists out today. Had a burger, fries, diet Pepsi, biked back after a brief stop at the lake to just stare at the huge majesty of the thing.

Lake Tahoe, May 26th 2013

Lake Tahoe is huge, but you can clearly see across it. It's a lake. Not a sea. And it has more water in it than the Great Lakes combined. The Great Lakes are quite shallow. Tahoe is deep. The river flowing out of it is over half of Reno's water supply, btw. The remainder are other tributaries of the Truckee River, such as the Little Truckee River north of Truckee (the town).

Also: I have a wine recommendation. It's Barefoot Cellars Impressions Red blend. It's similar to Menage a Trois, but half the price. Not quite as sharp a blend so not ideal but close, and a better table wine than many at the $7 price. I think I will drink this again.

Bicycles were very popular sporting tourism in 1900-1920's. They were new technology then, and were part of the exercise craze that comes and goes. Before cars, they would let you see the countryside without the trouble and stink of staring past a horse's behind. With modern bicycles and smooth pavement, they remain such. After pavement, they'll be slower going, but still better than horses. They're a lot less trouble. And don't cost you money when you aren't using them, or require a veterinarian or dentist. Anyway, I'm tired now. Cheers.

Combining Disasters

Climate is always changing. Pretending humans are responsible for the ongoing drying and storm events is highly arrogant and ignorant to an extreme. That said, climate is naturally unstable. It doesn't have to be human caused to be a serious challenge.

California (PRK) used to get hurricanes, in pre-history. We still get heavy rains from Pineapple Express out of Hawaii, capable of dumping dozens of inches of rain in a few days. Or even sustaining heavy rains for months. I lived through one of those already. Very interesting. Made owning proper raingear useful instead of signs of Geekery. Where was Al Gore in the 1986 Pineapple Express storms? The predicted heavy pineapple express last winter gave 10-15 inches, then stopped.

Every time there's a hurricane in Baja up the Sea of Cortez, we get spinoff thunderstorms into the Mohave desert, Nevada, Arizona, and sometimes up into the rest of California too. These happen in the summertime, and can lead to lightning sparked wildfires, flash floods, roads and bridges being washed out, even deaths. The sudden intensity in places that rarely get water means erosion is really bad there. The alluvial fans and debris flows, a sort of foam mixture of sand, pebbles, boulders, water, and air, can flow enormous distances and their results are visible in every fan below every canyon in the LA basin. This is an ongoing problem. Building houses on those fans is just asking for it. Yet people do, just like other people build on crumbling cliffs obviously eroding away from the waves and then complain when their house falls into the sea. Duh.

So hurricanes can create thunderstorms two thousand miles away that burn down the woods and cause flash floods and drown people and destroy property. Huh. And that's just from hurricanes.

Erosion carried by rivers into reservoirs fills them up, removing their value for flood control, for power generation, and for irrigation of crops. Eventually the filled in dams become meadows of silt with a waterfall where the dam is overtopped by the floods and all the sediment continues downstream, accelerating the rise of river levels behind levies, which raises the chances of flood to inevitable.

Those floods will end up depositing fresh silt all over fertile farmland, ruining it for the short term, since it takes some time to turn silt into soil. Subsequent floods will remove most of that soil fertility so until the floods stop, the soil is going to have problems. Few farmers can afford to deal with that and will bankrupt and either suicide or leave. Losses of crops to the world means millions or even billions will starve to death. But those billions won't pay for levy repairs, nor will they fund the necessary land work to scrape off the topsoil, bring in fill dirt, and replace topsoil well above the eventual flood levels, which will always rise due to ongoing erosion caused by the fact there are mountains around the valley. Too bad. Nature is harsh.

Loss of tax revenue from the largest industry in California, farming, means no funds for social programs or basic maintenance, fire fighting, levy repairs, flood control mosquito abatement. Pretty soon California isn't a fun place to live. Once the delta levies fail, salt from the Bay will reach a carefully isolated pumping station responsible for irrigation water for San Joaquin Valley agriculture and drinking water for San Jose and Los Angeles. The loss of water for both those cities will simultaneously end both High Technology and the Movie Industry in this state. That's the remainder of big business in the state. Gone.

The state could legitimately declare Force Majeur and legally avoid meeting contracts for its employees, suppliers, and people on the many social programs. This would be a disaster for every person who relies on benefits like Welfare etc. The checks would stop, or being meaningless since there's no longer drinking water where those people concentrate (Oakland, South Central Los Angeles). For them, rioting will lead to gunfire, and fleeing the state with what fits in your car the only option for survival. They will curse California as they drive away, assuming there's fuel and they don't find themselves grateful to get into a train boxcar across the desert, pure refugees hoping relatives will take them in. This series of events would happen in about 4 months from the failure of the delta levies and the first high tide to lines of cars leaving the state. Those who wait it out will learn about Malaria and bankruptcy.

Those remaining in California will find their taxes going WAY up to pay for repairs, water supply, govt employees, all the stuff that's broken. It becomes a bad place to be rich, too. I suspect many will leave. California has always been about boom and bust. When the levies fail, it will be all bust.

And that's leaving out volcanic eruptions adding to sedimentation rates. The levies will fail. Nothing we can do will prevent that.

Earthquakes and Volcanoes

Last night, at 851 PM, there was a 5.7 quake up by Lake Almanor, north of Quincy close to a town called Greenville. As the rocks between there are here are a mix of metamorphics and granite, the energy transferred down to Grass Valley really well and the house shook hard. I was on the phone at the time. The lights did not flicker or go out and there's no broken glass or pipes. Thank goodness. I haven't been through a quake since I moved up here.

At 6.0, you get minor damage to buildings, just to give you some idea. At 6.5 structural damage and broken windows and some buildings become uninhabitable. If this hit 7.0, we've have homes destroyed, buildings flattened, bridges and dams affected (possibly breaking), and potentially regional devastation.

After about 50 seconds the shaking stopped. And then I found that the new GIS interface for USGS earthquakes is kinda sucky. You have to turn on the map layer to see the maps. That should be default on. People want maps. Duh! Do your jobs.

This wasn't the end of it either. In the Sea of Ohthotsk, in Eastern Coastal Siberia, there was an 8.3 quake, the size of the San Francisco quake in 1906, triggering tsunami warnings for the Pacific. It was strong enough it rang the planet like a bell, much like the 9.0 in Malaysia/Thailand which caused the massive tsunami the day after xmas several years ago, killing a quarter million people. This quake was extremely deep, at 600 km down, meaning it was in the Pacific Plate subsumed under the Asian plate. They've had 5.0 aftershocks. The quake was felt as far away as Moscow, several thousand miles away. Presumably this also means it was felt in Japan, Korea, China, and Alaska too. I feel bad for the folks in the Pacific islands running for high ground in the middle of the night. Tsunami warnings have got to be terrifying. I make a point of always living about the 400 foot mark about sea level. The kind of tsunami that can hit that high requires an asteroid strike, at which point you have bigger problems than drowning. Thank Larry Niven for that housing requirement. I read Lucifer's Hammer as a teenager.

During the night there was a short 15 second 4.9 aftershock, and a bunch of 2.5 aftershocks from the Greenville quake which woke me from a sound sleep. I suspect there will be more of those. Examination of the map shows there are dozens. Most too small to feel.

Mount Lassen, eruption side

The fault line in question leads to Mount Lassen, which is an Active Volcano. It isn't erupting at the moment, but it went off over just over a century ago and will go off again. Its last eruption destroyed a large area, mostly uninhabited. Mount Lassen was once about 11,000 feet tall. It is merely a nub left behind now. The rest was blown away. California used to have many volcanoes that looked like Mount Shasta or Mount Fuji. Mount Saint Helena is a nub, but was once quite huge and dominated the northern views out of the SF Bay. Its since eroded away rather than exploded.

Mount Lassen, stratovolcano.

Sometimes volcanic eruptions can be triggered by earthquakes (and landslides like on Mt. St. Helens), and sometimes magma movement triggers earthquakes. I don't have any data on that and I'm hoping to get some reports as to whether there is activity under Lassen responsible for these quakes. Almanor itself does get quakes. Most of the time, those are quarry explosions, but those are 1.2 quakes at most.

It would be interesting if Mount Lassen opted to start erupting again. It certainly could. It's in the Cascades volcanic complex, and it retains its active magma source, unlike volcanoes further south like Konocti and Mammoth Mountain. Those won't go off again. Lassen will. In a few hundred thousand years the triple junction for the Pacific and Juan de Fuca and North American plates will shift north, cutting off their magma supply just as its already cut off the supplies for the more southern volcanoes, including Castle Crags at Donner Pass, and the mountain just south of Big Pine on 395, and the across the Mojave Desert volcanoes down to Los Angeles. Non-geologists rarely notice these things, but I was trained for years to spot them and observe.

It would also be really interesting if Hat Creek Volcano erupted again, as those flood basalts would do a good job covering southern Oregon and Idaho as its already done several times. There's a bunch of volcanoes capable of that.

To be able to see that, with the convenience of local travel rather than having to deal with Hawaii, Alaska, or Kamchatka? Oh yeah. The lava flows of Table Mountain near Oroville are very interesting. Seeing those added to at the same time as poor maintenance and quakes destroy the bad levies? Indeed, California would become INTERESTING again. Kinda hard to argue about car exhaust emissions when volcanoes and spewing a planet worth of CO2 and steam and SO2 gases into the air in every day of eruptions. Which Mount Pinatubo did, btw. Al Gore conveniently ignored that in his nice movie.

Table Mountain, CA

The black flat layer on top? That's basalt from a lava flow, just like you see in Hawaii. We had those here, not that long ago. We could have them again, too. Active volcanoes would get rid of the tourists and entitlement jackasses from my state and free me up to do actual science again. If I didn't have diabetes to worry about, being a Field Geologist would be a wonderful and fulfilling career, even now. I'd get mobile, properly equipped, a field partner so I wouldn't die and could bounce ideas off her, do extensive photo proof, GPS readings, chase the mess, use remote sensing drones to get views of stuff rather than hike to a place I don't need to hike, and take advantage of technology instead of doing everything the brute force way. Modern equipment, modern signals and permissions through those other outlier communities I'm involved in, I'd get into places most people would be turned away from. It would be really interesting. I'd also see about charter flights and aerial photo data coordinated with other scientists doing the same thing.

I wouldn't see this as a disaster, even if the lava flows are erasing a lot of human construction and probably some farmlands as well as burning down the trees and grasslands. Most of those areas are empty. That stuff will grow back. The magma is pretty slow so only really stupid people would die. As a Geologist, I'm a fan of evolution so Darwin Awards go where they belong. Just don't be one myself. Understanding the situation is a big help. I remember Mount Saint Helens eruption, and how it went from silent to erupting in about a week. There was little warning, really. You have to take the warnings you've got seriously. And keep a safe distance.

With this in the highlands and flooding in the lowlands, people might get the idea that California is unsafe. I never said it was safe. It has nice weather, but not enough water. It has mosquito borne illness, bubonic plague, vicious fires and snowstorms, and the surprise weather that hits our coasts is in the mountains 5-6 hours later, short enough you can get caught there and die of exposure. Being paranoid is a survival trait. Also, due to its remote canyons there's all sorts of odd people with cults and insanity living here. Caution is important. Idiots still ski into trees, which didn't used to be a problem until recently. Psychotic break? Probably. Driving too fast into corners, getting drunk in icy rivers on a hot day and freezing to death, surfing in shark infested waters: this is common. And people die. Are we better off without them? I suppose so. California is beautiful and dangerous and must be respected.

Hairdresser Complaints

The shop where I work is next door to a salon, and the hairdressers smoke and sometimes read but often chat outside the window when I'm bottling stuff. Yesterday I overheard the following conversation between the fake redhead downstairs who's kinda hot, and a tall blonde that's too heavy to be attractive, to me anyway. I couldn't actually see them talking since the window was the wrong place, so I just listened while I worked instead.

"Oh my god, I can't believe them." 

"What?"

"My friends call me a man-eater."

"You do go through a different one every week," admitted the other. 

"It's not my fault!" squealed the woman. "On Friday night I get drunk and pick up a guy, and in the morning he's all "OH SHIT!" and pulls on his clothes and stumbles away."

"Stumbles? He doesn't run?"

"Too tired," she admitted, sounding both embarrassed and proud. 

"Yep, you're a man eater."

"I've been with... like... fifty guys. And they always run."

Another couple girls have come out of their shop after finishing with clients, including the gay brother of one of them. He's new, never seen him before. They join the conversation. 

"Oh my God! Men totally lie," exclaims the gay guy. 

"Yeah, they're totally married. You totally picked up married guys," admitted one of the girls. 

"Oh my god! I'm such a slut. A man-eating house wrecking slut." There may have been tears at this point. 

"Well, its really their fault," suggested one of the girls philosophically. 

"Nope. It's yours. If you weren't such a horn dog none of that would happen." 

They couldn't really object to that truth so the conversation broke up. There were various supportive mumblings and they all wandered back into their shop or went home.

I originally wrote a bunch of commentary about this but eventually gave up and decided that less is more. The conversation itself says all sorts of things and individual bias will twist its meaning into something else.

Improving Fuel Economy

Most of the scabs from my road rash last week are falling off, finally. Pink skin and a reminder that 2-wheeled vehicles are meant to lie on their sides, possibly with you there too. Sad panda.

Buying a new car to get better fuel economy is often a bad move. A new car is new debt, in a time of uncertain fuel supplies and probably a future with rationing which might not be enough to cover your commute, leading to bankruptcy, eviction, and losing your car to repossession. So taking on debt just to save a little? Tough argument.

I already know that ugly little cars like the Geo Metro are the better deal for cost and fuel economy, if you can find one. They're around $1200 and get 45 mpg, no batteries, no weird electronics. They make the Prius look stupid and they're just as slow, and you'll have $24K more money to spend than owning a Prius. If the fuel runs out, the Metro isn't that big a loss. So yeah, go Metro before you waste on a Hybrid. They also have the advantage of a roof and seatbelts compared to the inevitable bicycle or scooter we'll all own eventually.

What can you do to keep your current car going? Well, oil changes help a lot. Reduces engine wear, reduces friction so the engine gets more from its gasoline, and its a small price to pay for not buying another car. Next is the air filter. The engine breathes. Dust clogs its lungs, making it less efficient. So change the air filter. Its hella easy. Lift the hood, find the latch, swap the filter, close the latch. Done. Its a 5 minute job. Takes longer to buy the filter than it does to change it. A car shop will charge you $100 in labor for that. Mechanics are often crooks. They like their steak. You can either pay for that or learn a little, get your hands a bit dirty.

Tire pressure controls your car's rolling resistance, how much energy it takes to keep going forward. Proper tire pressure is found with a $10 dial guage. Use a bicycle pump to add air, use your thumbnail to let some out. Easy, and very effective. A good driver should check this weekly. Few do. Every month is certainly possible and if you find the tires are lower than you expected, it will motivate you to check more often. Always check them in the morning, when they are cold and you haven't driven on them. This is the true tire pressure.

Weight. Your car works harder the more weight it is moving around. If your trunk is full of stuff, its wasting gasoline. You should have emergency first aid and tire change kit back there, not much else. Hypermilers pull out the back seat, since most people are solo drivers. If that's too much, clean out the trunk and under the seats. It will look nicer too. Books and rocks and trash are heavy and why are you carrying that? My ex used to have 60 pounds of books under the seats and in the trunk. After I cleaned that out, she got 3 mpg better mileage. Boy, was that embarassing.

Anger makes you accellerate harder and brake harder. The harder you accellerate, the more fuel you waste. Drive calm. Sometimes the solution to that is the right music, and clean your windows on the outside AND the inside, so you can see better. Clean glass makes the car feel cleaner, even if it isn't. Its a Jedi Mind Tricku. A happy driver won't be such a leadfoot and that's 5-10 mpg right there. Clean the mirrors too, even the rearview mirror. You'd be surprised how much greasy dirt sticks to that. Eventually get around to detailling the inside of the car, so the instruments are spotless, the dashboard and everything you see is clean. It makes the car feel nicer, which affects your happiness and self esteem, far better than lots of other things do. I have a dustbuster vaccuum which lets me get up the grit and dirt off the seats and carpets in the car. Little things add up.

You may as well enjoy your car fully before the fuel is gone. Yes, that's probably years away but its $4.10/gal at the cheapest station in town here, so paying more just hurts more. When you no longer have the option of a car for your commute, and have to do things the hard way, or even carpool, or worse public transit. The above labor is a few hours a month and yields a maximum benefit for cost. With any luck you won't have to buy a Prius or other Hybrid and your car can retire gracefully when the oil stops flowing. Cheers.

Computer Aided Drafting

I'm too old to go back to college, particularly since I know their entire purpose is to keep you there so they get more money out of you, not to make you employable or able to think. College is a ripoff. I want to actually learn stuff which can solve problems or lead to a satisfying career. For me, that's got to involve amateur engineering, mechanical and structural. I'd like to learn CNC machining and build engine and suspension parts, then get them heat treated so they're strong. Considering most of the people I run into in business just care about themselves and have no scruples about cheating customers to maintain their lifestyles and comforts, I will probably need to do most of that myself. CNC equipment is coming down in price. I have a very high IQ for geometry. It is time I used that for my own benefit. I've said many times that the future of our collapsing world is in spare parts manufacturing, and in lightness. I see documentaries like Yank Tanks in Cuba and I see America in 10 years and wonder just how many people will be cobbling together cars running whatever fuel we can cook up. And what are the engineering requirements to accomplish that.

And the place to start all of this is a CAD program. Not AutoCAD. It was clearly designed by people who hate end users. It consistently remains awful software. I have never found a CAD teacher who could teach it. I suppose this means that either they don't exist, or they're in so much demand because its such a PITA software program that they're busy working for money, not teaching. Its probably the latter. AutoCAD is just one of many. I need to work with 3D, so I can design structures like vehicle frames, and then digitally stress test their joints to see where they're strong and weak and improve them in cost effective ways, well before I go and buy the equipment to do the job. This means I'm going to need some education in structural engineering too. I'm counting on the software to do the calculus for me, or find the formulas in the book. Most engineering problems have already been described in mechanical and structural engineering books. Civil too. There's no point mastering calculus if you're doing earth moving and drain pipe laying for a subdivision. I need to know the stressors on individual components in engines and suspensions and support structures of a frame. Not that interested in crash absorption. Sorry, just not. Dune buggies don't have that luxury.

Now that I know I'm just too clumsy for routine bicycle riding, this largely means motorcycles are even worse an idea for me. I'm really disappointed. Really disappointed. Been dreaming of them for ages, but my diabetes screws with lots of parts of my health, and obstinately insisting I should ride, with no health insurance, is likely to get me killed. They aren't completely useless, though. The engines, and the concept of lightness as a driving force, gives me reason to think seriously about buggies, street legal, for my commute. It is probably cheaper to start with a light car and make it lighter, such as a bubble car. Make it lighter and less comfortable, but lighter will use less fuel and be a good test of my craftsmanship and eventually wind up with a small roadster or convertible out of an ugly little car like a Geo Metro, which uses a water cooled 3 cylinder Triumph motorcycle engine, pattern built by Suzuki. I need to know a lot before I spend any money, including finding an overlay of the frame and its hardpoints (where the critical drivetrain and suspension mounts are and what holds them steady). Find where things can fail. Reinforce the danger points as I replace the monocoque frame with tubes welded into place. See about variable ride height at some point, and the trick magnetic suspension, maybe. Might be too heavy to bother with. Mechanical progressive suspension is probably lightest and more reliable, not having a computer.

A Subaru would almost certainly be cheaper. And heavier. And more comfortable and safer as well. Its not exactly the point. The point is I need a project I can get into.

Predictive Suspension

Most of us have seen Roman Holiday. It has Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn on a scooter in Rome. Its one of the more popular nostalgia scooters.

Doesn't she look like she's having fun?

This is not the only bit of media with a scooter in it. They turn up from time to time. I'd love to see more villains on them. They're surprisingly discreet vehicles. And the transportation of the future, sort of. Picture any TV villain. Get him out of the suit, into basic riding clothes which doubles as the anonymous disguise, a pair of black shades, a mean expression, possibly a cigarette, and tall boots to decisively plant on the pavement, while stalking the oblivious hero. Isn't the modern boogeyman a banker/terrorist stalker lurking in an alleyway with a gun and bomb? Ready to blow up the MILF heroine and kill her babies, just to motivate her for revenge? I have to say, modern times are irredeemably dark. A little too Kill Bill or Batman's Joker. Lazy comic book writers. They never kill off the Joker. They'd have to make a new villain. That's like... work or something. Sheesh. Modern movie villains are like the muslim terrorists, only with better monologues than "Allah Akhbar!".

My favorite manga of all time is Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, translates to Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip. Its also known as Cafe Alpha or Quiet Country Cafe (anime version). Its special because it has no plot yet was hugely popular and ran for years. You can read YKK online, translated into English. Its about daily life in a scifi future where Japan is sinking into the ocean. There's also been disaster with nanotechnology affecting the human population too. Birth rates are way down and it can't be stopped or reversed. The species is dying out. The heroine of the story is an android, a human appearing robot, with both biological and synthetic parts who is immortal and runs a coffee shop in the countryside, near what used to be a road but has no passerby anymore. There's some of the anime version online, btw. A lovely program which does a good job of catching the original mood, that of post-violence post-apocalypse setting. The violent people are already dead so early on she puts away her gun for good and takes up a camera. There are few people left and they want to die with dignity of old age. Most do.

Here's the first episode. My mom got to watch some of it before she passed on. Alpha owns a scooter as her primary transportation.

Note the larger wheels. This is an underbone, suitable for the roads. Its also a 2-stroke, which you can hear in the anime. The roads are like this:

As the years pass in the story and the kids grow up, the roads get more broken, more overgrown, more lost into single-track. When the gasoline deliveries stop and the old man at the gas station down the road vanishes (dead of old age), Alpha simply hikes instead.

Its a very basic machine, probably 50 cc, very slow, but she's dealing with no traffic, no people most of the time. The population is a tiny fraction of what it was. Naturally, this is not the only anime with a scooter in it. There's FLCL, see below.

Rideback has them too, though Rideback would have been a better anime if they'd kept up the sports theme and dropped the terrorism one. Most of those are a cross between a segway and a street bike, but the veteran soldier has a scooter with a 2-stroke engine, tiny little thing. With him, its just more bad455 because he doesn't need the full kit.

While some parts of that tech are bs, mainly the arms, articulated wheels and autobalancing? Yeah, that's already happening.

Picture this with wheels and computer speed agility and eventual lane picking so it can navigate, bounce, use physics to its advantage to move faster than the eye can track. We won't be able to keep up. They plan to put guns on this. And grenade launchers. Now picture the same UN that forced people into concentration camps in Bosnia, then stepped aside when the machine guns came so the genocide was neater. I don't like that.

The upside of such technologies is we could end up with articulated self balancing walkers which can cross rough terrain at reasonable speed and maybe offer real mobility to crippled people, rescue workers, and new sports in wild places. Lots of the terrain I hiked as a geologist I'd have been able to see faster riding a larger version of the Big Dog. The 4-wheeled Yamaha leaning quad bike prototype would be far more interesting with active controls and all wheel steering.

All the fun of a bike but double the safety on corners. Especially corners with loose gravel like I see everywhere here. I really hope they actually build, market, and export this to places like the USA. It would be interesting.

Citroen used to have a car with active suspension that leaned into corners, like an amusement park ride. It was famously uncomfortable. And unreliable. Audi and Porsche use iron filings in their shock absorbers and electromagnets to change the viscosity of the liquid inside, affecting how much they move and how strong they are, by the millisecond. This is on lots of cars, and will probably become standard like ABS has because its fantastic for handling and not actually that expensive.

A trophy truck does this mechanically with a very loose suspension and strong antisway bars for races like the Baja 1000.

This is how a suspension should work. Its hard to get it to work perfectly because we don't have predictive variable suspension yet, which would stiffen or relax based on coming terrain, like a person or animal does when we run or ride. It would require proper shape recognition software which actually works, and on a moving vehicle going faster than the robot can think, could kill the driver, leading to a lawsuit. Not to say rich car companies don't advertise for HUDs with infrared they claim will spot the jogger or deer on the road ahead of you. We've all seen that advertisement. This is handling, and that's easier to sue for. If they get it right that would be the next big thing.

Fully active suspension would offer all sorts of advantages but when those reach their limit and you get stuck in the boonies you still have to get out and push, or even grab a shovel. Picture active legs that sprout from the sides to lift a vehicle out of a hole their wheels have dug, then retract out of the way again to drive on. That would beat the heck out of traditional jacks or getting out to push. All wheel drive with predictive active suspension? Really amazing potential.

I wonder how hard it is to get a serial number for a kit car vehicle without all the nonsense of crash testing etc. I'm not doing that for an experimental vehicle. Can I build a jeep/buggy frame and put in the active suspension and radar, computers etc, active antisway so it doesn't lean the wrong way around corners? Or just do it mechanically? Can I figure out the vertical wheel travel optimum, the wheel size, the fenders etc, and get the thing good cooling, and a all wheel drive that really works? And should I keep bicycling between now and when its finished enough for legal road testing? And is this a really dumb idea? Should I sell my Honda and just buy a Subaru instead? I really should know my costs. Most of the Subarus which would suit me are $22-25K, list price. Tax and DMV stuff gets me to $25-27ish. On my current wage? Uh uh. Is that cheaper than both a scooter and a welder setup, and DMV experimental vehicle fees and all the work hours required? Hmm.

I have to wonder if maybe buying a 3-cylinder Geo Metro that's wrecked out and putting that and its critical drivetrain welded to a proper tube race frame might not be the answer. Its cheaper than a jeep. The tricky bit is all wheel drive. Might be easier to start with a subaru AWD system, and their typical opposed 4 engine, and then put the frame on that. That would keep the weight down. If I can either find a supplier for carbon fiber race seats or learn how to make them myself, with a 4 point harness because I dislike anything not-female pressing against my sensitive parts. More research must be done.

Electrics would need the scavenged computer, the signal relays going to LED lights and use a lighter battery, assuming it can trip the engine to start consistently, with solar panels on the roof to trickle charge the battery while its parked. And HID headlamps, with secondary ones on the roof for crappier conditions? Dunno. I wonder if there's a model that does most of this already, just needs weight reduction to get it there. I suspect that I might get happier results if I can pull that off. Meanwhile I can drive to and from work with the windows open and pretend.

Road Rash

I rode my bike to work yesterday. When I reached the end of the ride, I unbalanced and fell off, tearing off some skin from my arm and leg. A layer of skin that opened up lots of blood and ouchiness. How embarrassing. I spent the day wincing, and even bandaged, every time I bumped them in the night, it woke me up. It will heal, but its very annoying.

The rides went fine, otherwise. The way there I wasn't huffing and puffing so I wasn't wheezing or out of breath like the first time. The ride home I pedaled up the first hill, Laurel Street, without stopping. The second hill, Alta Street I pushed the bike till I reached the top, then pedaled home. I was sweaty, but not half dead. My fitness is improving. That is something worth doing once a week, but not every day.

For ages now, I've wanted a scooter, but the wheel sizes are wrong, and the gear you're supposed to wear is sweaty. If I'd been wearing that gear on my bicycle, there would be my bruised shoulder but no road rash. In the summer heat? All that gear will stink and it won't be much fun. Now that I know I can fall over, and keeping in context I'm injured every 10 times I get on a two-wheeled vehicle, I have to worry about the dangers of something faster. There's compromise vehicles, of course, like sidecars or leaning trikes like this:

But I have to wonder, in this context, if I might be happier with a jeep than a motorcycle. One with the roof down, doors off so I can enjoy the pavement whizzing by, yet has four wheels to deal with gravel, is obvious about being there, and 4WD for all those roads I want to drive on in the boonies, and I can wear light clothes rather than a helmet etc.

And if a jeep, how I can go about making it more fuel efficient and lighter weight so its fun to drive. With a latchable locking cover over my radio, for example. I think I need to look into this. Maybe swap the engine for Diesel someday. I don't know what it would cost, and I don't like the new ones. They're too obsessed with comforts and safety features and are hugely overweight. A proper jeep needs welding to stay together, an upgraded suspension, anti-sway bars, progressive shocks, and reinforced mounts, and big knobby tires. Those things are available aftermarket but probably expensive.

I suspect if I go that route, I will have to buy a proper TIG welder, argon bottle, cooling system, vacuum vent, and fan to keep the fumes off me. Upside is it would be MINE. And a good reason to learn how to work with carbon fiber, building replacement fenders and doors and body panels, replacing the frame with tubes of cromoly steel. Gradually, of course. As I understand it, Subarus aren't really serious offroad vehicles, and I know that jeeps are. They are light enough, which is really important. I need to do a lot of research. There might be a better open-door open top option than a jeep.  I wish I was a structural engineer so I could design a reasonable frame and avoid the inherent flaws an amateur makes. And I need to learn 3D CAD of some kind. One that takes a stress test plug-in so I can figure out where the stressors are and design the frame to deal with them properly. Screw up and you get cracks and failure.

Maybe I'm overreacting to the fall, but both places are stinging right now, and its going to be another hot and sweaty day, followed by a warm and muggy night. I am already using my fan to allow me to sleep. When its muggy and the air is still, its too miserable to fall asleep. An open top and light clothes are a lot more comfortable than stinky sweaty leathers in 100'F heat. Or road rash from my bicycle. With no health insurance a bad crash would prove quite expensive.

Yep, lots to figure out. Around the time these scabs finish healing and fall off, I should have something to report.

A Glimpse of the Future

Diary, May 14, 2019

Dust. Everything, every road, was dusty. The wind blew it around till the rains hit, then you had mud. Everywhere the mud went, green. It was like nature was taking revenge on them for the hundred years of oil. For their greedy impatient excesses. A revenge of sprouting leaves and purple flowers, covering the crumbling pavement, crowding out the roads, erasing them. The ditches filled with debris and flooded the roads, washing them out, covering them with inches of sediment, which sprouted flowers, bushes and trees. Roads became impassible, broken, lost. Where the leaves fell, more sprouts rose the following spring. More trees grew year by year. 

Wildfires in summer and fall till the rains put them out. There was no fuel for fire fighting planes. And on the ground, if you have to hike to the fire? You arrived too late. Folk living in the boonies either cleared the trees well back and kept a pond and a pump or they ran away when it came. Sometimes they didn't make it. Sometimes the fire crews would find the bodies, often choked to death in the smoke, faces twisted in horror and disbelief. 

The prior generation's obsession with comfort and safety killed them in the reality of the modern post-oil era. Old ideas that don't work now, like living in the boonies for no good reason, that could kill you. Did in many cases. With four out of five people only partially employed and glad to have ten hours a week, and the federal government bankrupt along with the Dollar, the First World was nothing at all. It was over. It was an apocalypse, as North America had seen over and over again, through 4 prior complex civilizations. But that hardly mattered to the people clinging to life in the dust. Volunteers with scavenged tools dug their ditches by hand, dragged rusting culverts into place, hoping they'd save the road another season. Many rode bicycles bearing tools, lunch, a canteen, in hopes of making it more bearable. If the county could pay for the work, they would, but new currencies were unstable and susceptible to manipulation, crashes, so gold was king. 

Most people dreamed of owning a solar panel and had a stack of car batteries set aside. When the power was on, more likely if you lived in town or owned your own generator, you could charge them for the majority of time when the power was off. That meant you could have a radio, get some news or some hint of the old civilization through music. The old timers in particular obsessed about that. Or watched old movies on battery powered DVD players or old computers. A wealthy town would have both power and internet. Maybe even enough power for hot water, enough that folks could get clean and not stink. With a solar panel you could have radio, lights, maybe even some hot water sometimes. Once a week in the winter, twice a week in the summer. The demand and utility made them more expensive, and worth stealing. 

Alas, most of the time government stuck its nose it, it wasn't to fix what was broken. It was to take what wasn't nailed down and feed the parasites at the capitol. They were nothing. Good for nothing. Trouble brewed and simmered, and sometimes the representatives nobody liked just didn't show up, or if they did, they didn't seem to return to the capitol with their ill gotten gains. Nobody seemed to like how they disappeared, but the capitol should have remembered this is well beyond a Depression, and folks are like to get even, more than not. 

About the only folk doing well are machinists. Everybody needed replacement parts, especially the local farmers. With no hard currency, there were no imports. News was, China collapsed after they stopped buying bonds supporting currencies that allowed the nations they bought bonds from to buy Chinese goods, which allowed the Chinese to buy bonds. Shot themselves in the foot. Civil war, famine, all that happened over there. Nobody here really cared. We have our own problems. Upshot here is machinists were making the parts they used to get cheap from China, so better mean it when you order repair parts. They seriously cost, and sometimes pay in gold. Or a lot of chickens. Things people need or value. With those resources, machinists end up rich men with big houses and trophy wives and mistresses and a bevy of children. Their good fortune is known. A town with a machinist survives. A town without one withers. 

I hope, someday, we'll recover to some extent. The boonie folk are dying off. We can't help them. They either farm or they die. If they picked a place with a nice view they're a target of bandits with nothing better to do but amuse themselves, and the rumors of what happens in home invasion is grim enough to abandon such places and burn them to the ground for the wailing dead. If one believed in ghosts, they would be surely haunted, and cursed as well. There are more Manson Families today than ever before. The times create them. There is no hope for many. They find their end. We'll have to hit bottom before we can climb back up, and I worry, in all this dust, just how few of us will live to see it. 

This is the sort of thing we will probably live through because our system of government is contrary, abusive, and broken. It is only consistent about ever increasing taxation and complexity, and finding ways to be less effective at putting out the fires, guarding the borders, punishing criminals, and keeping the peace. We are left with a ruin, with apocalypse. If we continue along the same way we've been going since the 1970s... we will die out. Maybe the next civilization will be more vicious and hateful, keep it together a bit longer. Maybe it will return to a ruin with nomads living in tents, tales of metal crabs powered by magic black gold, tearing across the ground at great speed, fast as an antelope. Or maybe there will be birdcalls, mosquitoes, and silence.

Ultralight Camping

One of the true bits in the National Geographic program about the Appalachian Trail, currently streaming on Netflix, was a couple days up the trial from the South End, where most people start the hike, in Georgia, is a camping shop that also offers a package service. They got forced into this because most of the hikers filled that packs with extra crap. Neurotics chant that "two is one, one is none" and double the weight on their pack, making them extra tired, extra cranky, and quit before they see anything awesome (my dad hates the word "Awesome" because my generation started saying it in the early 1980's). This shop packs up their extra gear and sends it home by UPS. A good and needed service.

Real backpacking is about MINIMALISM, something I've been passionate about for decades. It was a primary disagreement and incompatibility I had with my soon-to-be ex-wife. A divorce is not instantaneous. I hope she's enjoying the Pacific atoll, that she got that job. She wanted to go as soon as she first heard about the place. Anyway, minimalism is key in backpacking. Carry as little as you can get away with, and you'll walk farther in greater comfort and the hike will be more what you were hoping for and less of a deathmarch, which unfortunately with my long legs, most of my friends accuse my hikes with them of being. How sad is that? Just walk faster, with purpose. There's a great view ahead, but the light will be wrong if I wait for you. Faster!

If you carry less crap, faster is possible. This leaves room for things which weren't available before. I also, in walking those long trails, recommend staying in a hotel or motel every few days, to get clean, to heal those bruises, to wash your laundry properly and get a good meal. There's no need to starve on trail food every night. A lot of backpackers show serious signs of "re-eating" starvation, where their body starts eating their muscles once it runs out of fat to keep them going. That's very unhealthy. At some point, it attacks their joints, making movement damaging too. The really determined keep going. The smarter ones rest, eat, and recover.

I wish it wasn't necessary, but a backpacker needs a gun. Considering that black bears and feral hogs can be aggressive. Bears tend to burst out of the brush without warning, and the bluff charge is largely a myth. They mostly just charge. You don't hear about bears charging and NOT stopping when the bear eats that witness, so it throws off the happy ending stories. And that's 4 pounds for a 45 or 10mm pistol or 44 Magnum revolver.

An emergency rescue radio beacon, for after shooting the bear or breaking your leg in a fall. $3000 is cheap to save your life. I plan to get one of these. This is about a pound and will call a rescue helicopter if you're too far off the roads for a truck to reach you.

Water filter is a massive yes. A light aluminum pot to boil water in too.

Emergency food? Very important. Whisperlite stoves are an awesome invention, and can be setup, used, and put away in about 15 minutes.

Remember the tiny bottle of dishwashing detergent. Grease spoils really nasty and causes some dangerously dehydrating food poisoning.

Rain poncho? Yes. Tiny tent maybe too. Depends on the hospitality options along the trail. A tent is at least 8 pounds. If you can get away with NOT carrying one, that's a lot of weight saved. If you walk the extra miles to reach the next town, you aren't sleeping in the rain.

If you plan to sleep off the trail, a sleeping pad and sleeping bag are heavy and necessary. If you can schedule your stops to coincide with motels every night? Do so. You'll be happier and healthier and while you might miss the camaraderie of camping with mosquitoes and pit toilets on the trail campsites, you'll be getting better nutrition and not be risking meningitis (West Nile Virus, Bird Flu etc).

Spare socks, and liners.

Toilet paper, in a big ziplock bag. So key. Few pit toilets are stocked or cleaned anymore. Thank Dept of Interior for that insult.

First aid kit. You might use it to help a fellow hiker. Include meds for diarhea and infection. It doesn't take much to get parasites. This is why you should visit a bar every week and get drunk. The alcohol purges most intestinal parasites. It might save your life. Learn to like quinine water and gin and tonic. Malaria was really common in the USA a hundred years ago.

Sewing kit to fix any gear damage. Backpacks can get torn. Straps can require reinforcement or adjustment or padding added to a hip belt, where most of the weight in a pack is SUPPOSED to rest.

I am also a fan of quiet packs. If you put black electrical tape on each of the pack ring pins, it stops tinkling when you walk. You may think the tinkling noise is saving you from bears, but survivors of bears running away don't tell the story of the bear going to ambush the noise because they heard it first. Alaskans carry guns for bears for very good reason. Bears have personality, and moods. Sometimes they just want to eat you.

Dress in layers so you can take stuff off or put things on. Fleece is wonderful. Serious hiking is done in shorts, but you can pull a pair of fleece sweats over it. Shirts with shoulder buttons? Bad. Think about where the straps go. The hip belt can give you awesome bruises from belt loops. Think hard about what's there. Fitting shorts don't need belt loops. Remove them and save yourself some pain.

When your clothes wear out or stink too much or are badly stained and won't launder clean, buy new clothes in towns. Nothing says you have to wear the same stuff the whole way. Use fabric softeners so the clothes won't itch or give you rashes. The people you are sharing the trail with will thank you not to stink like a dirty hippie. It's not NICE to stink. Buy soap, wash, thoroughly, throw it away. You don't have to carry it, just use it when you can.

Lights. Modern LED headlamps are cheap, waterproof, and provide adequate light for 60 hours on a set of small batteries. One of the best new things, because you can hike past dark, if you really must, and you can wash dishes, which is a massive pain  using a lantern because the light never reaches into a basin. Headlamps get around this. Buy new batteries in town. Cheaper and lighter than carrying lots of spares.

Watch out for heat rash on your back. Most backpacks fit poorly and your back gets really hot, the sweat trapped between you and all your stuff. I have NEVER found a good reliable dry pack. Lots of BS claims, all of them false. The only cure is less stuff and taking it off every half hour or hour.

Superheavy packs make for exhaustion and unwillingness to unhook because that means hooking it back up and then lifting it up again. That's a special torture. Fancy frameless ones have an internal frame, which can get bent by excess weight. They also sit extra close to the skin and make you even hotter. The less gear you have, the smaller and more comfortable the pack. My preference, after years of research and testing is a basic kids knapsack, like you'd use for college classes. Just make sure all your gear fits in there, and arrange it so nothing is jabbing you in the kidney.

A clever hiker has a friend to call that will drop off gear for you along the trailheads via rental locker companies (lots of different commercial ones) so you can get the appropriate gear or new boots or whatever. Its not as traditional as just suffering, but do you want to have lifelong crippling injuries because you were too obstinate?

It is important to note that the above gear will also fit into a modest pair of saddlebags on the back of a motorcycle or touring bag for your bicycle rack. The less gear you carry, the better. Ultralight motorcycling in the 125-250cc class is a subset of motorcycle adventure touring. Very light bikes can go amazing places. Like mountain bike amazing, just much further in a day because the operator isn't pedaling. This leaves him with more energy to watch the road, shift weight, and steer before exhaustion sets in and he has to stop. I still recommend camping at a motel with hot showers and soft beds, but that's me.

Fitness

I'm making progress in my fitness. Many people pay good money to work out at a gym by getting a high paying job which requires them to sit still all day. I have a modest paying job which is like working out at a gym for 8 hours a day. I am slimming down too. Lower fat foods, smaller portions, and my belly is getting more trim for the first time in years. It helps that I don't eat breakfast and barely eat lunch and dinners are half the size they used to be.

Now that the rains have transitioned into summer thundershowers, oddly enough, with afternoon thunderheads visible Every Day, I can really bicycle to work after all.

Dad and I went to a big-box mass quantities store in Roseville after visiting my aunt. I looked at their frozen food options and said "Nope!". I just can't see eating meat and melted cheese wrapped in dough as appetizing. I gave up Pizza ten years ago. I guess giving up quesadillas is my next quest. They don't seen appetizing. Even the potato chips I eat for snacks are healthier because I can counter the carbs with insulin and I'm actually using them immediately so I have lower sugars overall, anyway. I will probably start eating chips at 4 PM, giving myself an hour to raise my sugars before I head home up that 600 foot climb. Its better than fatty foods.

My coworker who'd made broad promises as a hiking partner is always busy and hasn't provided a phone number or home email I can reach her with so I guess that was an insincere offer, or one she quietly retracted after finding me annoying or short tempered (I am when I'm stressed). Oh well. Whatever. Dad and I can hike. I'm looking forward to the snow melting in the high country. I want to visit Sardine Lake again. Maybe hike up to Upper Sardine Lake since I've never actually been to that one. Just Lower.

Lower Sardine Lake

I can't say I'm too excited about downhill mountain bike riding anyway, having done it and finding its really unsafe. As I don't have health insurance, I plan to skip that. Not that motorcycle is safe either, but the way I drive, if I ride equally cautious I should be equally fine. 

Seats One. 

I wish I could get the Deus or even the Kawasaki W650 for a motorcycle ride up there for the day, maybe with a deli sandwich and some iced tea and cookies. Ride up, stop often, sit still by the lake and just contemplate the peace and quiet of the northern end of the Sierras, imagine the Glacier that used to sit there. 

Kinda like this: Fitz-Roy Glacier, Patagonia.

Wonder how long before the glacier reforms and starts scraping this all away again. A few decades? A century? I really enjoy picturing that. No woman is going to sit still for that unless she's a geologist herself and having dated two of those, I can say their ambitions run at different speed from mine. Incompatible ambition is one of those Irreconcilable Differences. 

If I am fortunate enough to live long enough to pass the bio-event horizon and reach human immortality, something considered to be hypothetically possible if we can decode and defeat both cancer and the cellular suicide gene(s), then I very well may get to watch the glaciers come back. Babysitting a glacier would be very interesting to me. But I'm a geologist. We like our rocks, and our rock shaping processes. Science is more interesting than religion. Science can be proven and duplicated. Religion is hearsay. And denial. LOTS of denial. 

There are many trails in the northern Sierra I haven't been to yet. Places which are good for Dad to walk in as well. I kind wish I owned a trailer, like an airstream I could restore, and turn into a really comfy place to sleep by the trailhead. 

Its more trouble than a motel, true, but I could spend a week in a place, just soaking in the atmosphere and when I've hiked enough, leave. Being a snowbird has some appeal for my retirement one day. 

Here's an example of the road quality, by someone else bicycling. Not the best roads or surfaces. Not horrible, depending on day and traffic, but definitely rough. I try to imagine what this place would be like post-oil, Post-Dollar, and post-socialism and there's no reason for it to exist. It doesn't make sense. For now, its a roof and a job and basic food. Someday I will broaden my horizons, leave town, and try not to make any friends. My solitude is valuable. Other people are far more likely to hurt me than I am myself. In solitude, I can be myself without other's expectations getting in the way. And without their broken promises or insincerity. 

Airstream Sport

This one looks big enough for my needs, even for extended time. When I leave with my things sold off and the bare minimum in a trailer behind my chosen tow vehicle, I will not look back. I will find pleasant streams and fish for dinner. I will photograph the dawn light and the wildflowers and I will listen to the peace and quiet of abandoned places and find some calm to replace this spinning hamster-wheel of inevitable disappointment my whole life has been. 

For now I will bicycle and try and find my peace in mindless work. When I have more time on the weekend I will hike. Bike and hike enough times and I'll be thinner and fitter than ever before. Almost like when I was a runner, or back when I hiked for geology in Montana. This is my fitness plan. Not a gym. Not social interaction. Certainly not dinner parties with my father's friends. I'm pretty far opposed to obligations. I prefer being alone to being polite. Does that make me a terrible person? Do I care about a socialist society which expects my gratitude when it robs me or demands my obedience? I already know I'm unfit as a husband, and unfit as a boyfriend and unfit as a lover. I don't get to have those things. But that doesn't mean I welcome paying for people who do nothing else. I've got words for that: