I've been working towards my doctorate in Cynicism. Its a good thing there's no university for this, or rather every university is this, and all degrees in philosophy and climate science are cynicism degrees. I should be clear. I'm not as good at it as I'd like. The trouble with cynicism is that most people who went to public schools were brainwashed to be Optimists, and an Optimist is a multipurpose, often reusable victim for criminals everywhere. They exist to be separated from their money and happiness, to be available victims for crime. If you want to see a con man or employer's expression fall, admit to being poor and careful and always turn down opportunities. They hate that. You've just reduced their profit. They like things easy, and Optimists are easy money. They never expect to be ripped off, so it happens to them every single time. And they never learn from it, so it happens again and again till they die from it. And Optimists die. They are always loved by their parasites, because they are easy money, but Optimists are what makes widespread crime both possible and rewarding. If there were more Cynics, I think crime would have to go on a pretty hard diet, and they'd be way more bitter about things. Cynicism is the way of the real world. Most Cynics call themselves realists, but that's not very accurate. A proper Cynic knows they're turning down happiness of ignorance, and is actually unhappy about passing up the brief moment where happiness occurs before noticing their wallet is lighter again. A Cynic chooses misery over poverty. Some even choose to be poor because poor people have a ready excuse not to get involved in crimes against Optimists. Like most retail jobs, for example. A good Cynic knows a retail job doesn't pay, some are about sexual exploitation, and most retail employees are really miserable. And those are the lucky ones. The happy ones are insane, and probably going to commit suicide in some really public way. Sometimes prefaced by "Hey Bubba Watch This" or "And we're so in LOVE!". Optimists are irrational. I avoid them whenever possible, and I feel slightly sad that they persist in self destruction, but being rational, more and more rational all the time, I can only protect myself from their explosive arcs of self inflicted violence with distance and ducking behind solid objects so their meaty chucks of whining shrapnel, emotional baggage splatter, and declarations of happiness don't impact me.
Its messy out there. Learn the grunt of "I heard you but I have no opinion to share with you, Crazy". Learn to avoid the bright smiles of insanity. You know the ones. The ones that DO reach the eyes when they shouldn't. Nobody is happy to sell pastries or hot coffee or fishing lures or shoes. Al Bundy's many complaints and philosophical contemplations were right on the money. A great philosopher, Al Bundy. A modern Diogenes. Learn the modern and careful declination to advances for sharing their crazy, so you can leave the area safely, without inducing violence at your rejection. Women, single women in particular, respond poorly to being turned down. Especially the lunatic hags with the smiles that reach their eyes when they're talking obvious crazy. Healing in particular. Women know nothing about healing. People don't heal. They forget the reasons, but their brains don't. And the claws come out meaning to or not. Doesn't matter who the target is. Being in reach is enough.
Yep, you just can't be Cynical enough. You never hit bottom. Cynicism is like the Way of the Poet. The Way of the Warrior is unwanted prison sex, so stay away from that unless you're gay. Poets have it rough. You have to see things as they are to want them to be something better, and you can write about it emphatically or wryly, but only the wry get paid consistently, though the Con Men don't like it. They keep training Optimists in the public schools. Another generation of victims, of credit card debt and wage slavery and smiles that reach the eyes when they've had too much. Its just a matter of time before they're dead of despair. Only Optimists can experience despair, which is the traditional punishment for the crime of hope. A true Cynic never hopes, and never despairs. They develop full wryness and laugh at everything. Never trust someone who never laughs. They're planning to cut your throat and take your wallet. They've got legal representation. And a war chest. And lists of vengeance. That's not Cynical. That's crazy. Watch out for those.
I think its important to remember that the Gaels, who had a culture that lasted thousands of years longer than the failed experiment of Democracy, which keeps ending up with 51% criminalizing and enslaving the 49% (ask the Greeks), only had two paths: The Way of the Poet and the Way of the Warrior. Warriors die. Doing what's right. Poets just suffer but they usually live longer.
The gods doth love the Irish.
They maketh them all mad.
For all their wars are merry,
and all their songs are sad.
I believe the above was by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A fine definition, if ever there was one. George Bernard Shaw has longer plays and novels along similar lines. The English love to pretend they're the culture of the British Isles, but the Scottish and Irish tend to be more educated and more clever. They just have crappier soil and poorer growing conditions. So the English have it easy.
As a proper Cynic, I struggle to crush any optimistic impulses, to avoid temptations by the insane with smiles that reach their eyes, and plead poverty to avoid con men everywhere I go. I don't expect any of my readers to understand what I'm saying here, since most of you went to public schools and were brainwashed to believe in Optimism rather than see it as a madness it really is. Still, I post this here so years from now, when you've long forgotten this, someone will find it and read it and say: "See, he told you so." That's a Poet's revenge.
There's something the self-defense crowd does that really irritates me. I'll be clear. I like firearms well enough. I own several, but my focus is marksmanship as a skill, so I consider photography and hiking and bicycling to be cheaper and more convenient skills with more value. I like my Xbox more than my firearms.
I'm of the opinion a good knife is for slicing veggies and bread. I like cooking. I do own a handgun, but I bought it for the express purpose of learning how to shoot a handgun and determined that I'm not good at it. I also noticed that few other people are either. Many like the BANG noise. Some are clearly insane in various ways. I think my enjoying target shooting was more a love of math and concentration, which is why I love my driving simulator so much. Same part of the brain.
The rest of the time we see firearms carried or used? It's by paranoid people who are HOPING to have a lethal confrontation with someone they'll feel justified shooting "in self defense". The saddest part is, the person they shoot might be someone just like them, reacting in the same paranoid way to someone carrying a concealed weapon. A friend of mine once told me something really important, something that changed my whole view: "The hulking huge guy knocking on your door in the middle of the night might have broken down in his car, and just wants to use the phone to call for a towtruck." And you know what? He was right. That's most cases.
If you're not a criminal, you're going to have very little reason for a gun for self defense. Nearly all cases of home invasion robbery are criminals breaking into a place where other criminals have huge amounts of cash because they are drug dealers, and most of the time, the ones breaking in know the people socially or in business together. They never ever admit that in the news stories. Ever. You have to dig to find out the reason they delayed calling for the police after their home invasion robbery was they were packing up the drugs and money and hauling it off to hide it somewhere off premises so the search warrant wouldn't cover it, then cleaning up the residue, and evidence, so only the dogs would know there was hashish tar traces left behind, etc. Its never innocent people having their doors broken down by thugs. NEVER. Just to be clear.
Nearly every case of someone being mugged or raped and murdered was someone who should have known better than to be there at that time and physical condition. We know what the bad parts of town are. We know not to go there "to party" or "hang out" because that's how those people end up in the news, and later get arrested for murder and felonies related to that.
If you find yourself reaching for a firearm going out the door "because you need to go somewhere unsafe" ask yourself this question: "Why am I going there?" Are you suicidal? I wonder about that. Aren't there other places to go which are safer? And is a few cents off on groceries really worth the life you may lose going there? That's stupid.
If you find yourself thinking daily carry of a firearm is really important, you are living in the wrong place. Pack your stuff, move somewhere safer. If you find yourself surrounded by people doing daily carry, you have the wrong friends. Get new ones. And seriously consider moving somewhere daily carry isn't a common hobby.
The only people who can justify daily carry are cops, park rangers, and ranchers protecting their herds from coyotes. That's it. Everybody else should move somewhere smarter and saner. Or find a legal occupation.
If we did get into a serious multi-decade drought I'd move out of this place. Pack up and head for the coast, probably. Somewhere it either rained more or desalination was possible. As much as I'd consider a place like Boise or Spokane, those places are hit by drought too, and in the best of times the only jobs they have are lumber mill, motorcycle parts, franchise retail, and agriculture which is impacted by the drought. I suppose I'd look harder at Oregon and Washington state, however the legalization of marijuana worries me about its economic impact causing a surge of manufacturing businesses to flee, and I already know what happens to a place when that happens. You get an economy like here: minimal service jobs, drug abuse on the job, high turnover rates, supervisory abuses, gender bias and sex discrimination, con men and embezzlers everywhere, and falling wages as competition for the remaining jobs drives down wages. Finding places with enough water and geography and laws to support business is very difficult when drought is ruining so much. Any stresses make it all worse and drive up the crime rate, making living there under stressful times a seething cauldron of anger and violence, enough that you become hardened to its frequent appearance. You get Detroit, basically. And all violent cities have two important factors in common. One of those is poverty. And we know what the second one is.
If there were infrastructure investment, what we have for civilization would last a bit longer, but 200 year droughts are hard to plan for. Hard to fix. For some reason, congress is utterly fixated on some silly idea that people won't leave places that are bad and go places that are better. If California is in the early stages of a 200 year drought, something pretty common based on the data they're uncovering from tree rings, and that the last 100 years were the wettest in a millennium.... wow. Can you imagine? California could look a lot more like Baja, and that also means the interior West would be a lot drier too, though they saw lots of lightning and summer rains, what's called Monsoonal Pattern in Arizona, Nevada and the rest of the West. California is mostly skipped by that rain, staying East of the Sierras. Here there are more fires, more reservoirs filled in with silt, more lakes and rivers and aqueducts gone dry. No water for growing crops because cities use far less. With no agriculture, we lose most of the state's revenue, which unlike the article claims is the majority of the money made in the state. Sorry, farming is a $5B/year business that can't be exported by modem to India or China. We do export the food, though, and drought cutting that off, when California farms feed America and Japan and China? Yikes. Not a good thing. Drought could lead to unrest due to famine elsewhere, and that could lead to civil war, and even collapse and a new dark age as the factories supplying the world in China are shut down or burnt down. Not nice for everybody dependent on those parts to keep things running. We might get enough warning to create our own, but we might not. Black Swans exist, after all.
With drought, settling in one place isn't wise. You can move in, rent, see if the rains are more stable despite the drought parching California and the Southwest, and leave if things go bad, legally or water allowances. Despite the asinine and ignorant whining of Victor Davis Hanson in his article on NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370425/californias-two-droughts-victor-davis-hanson he have built dams everywhere it was safe to do so, and then built dams where it wasn't safe, and nearly built dams that would have killed 50,000 people when they burst, and other dams were stopped before they started because they would have silted up with dirt before they were finished. Unlike him, I've done my research, and I live here. I even know people. The most important things to know about California's climate are:
The summer cooling comes from the North wind down the coast pushing the Longshore Drift, aka Alaska Current, which supplies cold water and nutrients to the fish on our coast. This cold water is why we have fog, which keeps coastal temps lower in the hot summers and allows many plants to survive the months without rain.
The state's Sierra Nevada Range causes severe rain shadow and catches most of the moisture which heads across them, funneling it back into California's western slope, thus caught in reservoirs and carefully distributed to farms and people.
The Sierras have high rates of erosion, meaning that silt and mud end up downstream. When water slows down in reservoirs, the amount of silt that can be carried by that water decreases, dropping the silt into the reservoir and filling it in. In time, all reservoirs become meadows.
Wildfires increase the silt washing into rivers and then fill reservoirs faster.
A reservoir full of silt holds much less water and can't be easily dredged since turbulence turns the silt back into liquid. It can't be shoveled out when its wet. There's math for this kind of hydrology, but the outcome is the best time to empty a reservoir of silt is when it is dry, and you need trucks and bulldozers etc. This is quite expensive so nobody does it.
The infrastructure the above yahoo quoted were built by the survivors of the Great Depression and WW2 veterans, not his generation of Baby Boomers who most just maintained it at 3x the current wages for those same jobs, so small wonder mine isn't leaping to correct this deficit. Low Bidder contracts make such things done by the least skilled and slowest working so it can be done again.
California doesn't have normal weather. It gets hit by storms off the coast and those are in the Sierras in merely 4 hours, potentially causing blizzards any time of year. History shows this to be the case. All weather in California is sudden, usually weird, and only rain shadow is decent protection from its extremes. Rain shadow also makes for surprise heat waves and desert, so its not often very nice either. In the dry season, California is a desert with many oases. In the wet season, it can be a swamp with snowy peaks. Many of the reservoirs were built to stop really terrible floods in the springtime thaw, which can happen in a few days all at once. Marysville was famous for flooding, and the main reason hydraulic mining was banned. All that silt and sand washing downstream made the Yuba River flood even worse than usual.
There is significant and extensive evidence for the North Wind to stop blowing, the sea to warm up, and hurricanes striking the California Coast all the way to Fort Bragg, well North of San Francisco. Ponder that. Hurricanes. Big strong ones. You think you know what Normal Weather Is?
I've personally witnessed two extended 40+ day rains caused by Atmospheric River events from near Hawaii pounding and flooding northern California during my childhood. It was bad enough that owning a rain-suit was considered sensible for all school children, and not catching illness from frequent wetting in the weather was a sign of good fortune. Again, this is common and will happen again.
All the whining about Eastern snowstorms amuses me since I remember my entire childhood seeing those same images on the national news: snow in winter. What a concept!
Yesterday's high temp here in the lower Sierra was 44'F. There was snow yesterday morning, and probably last night. I am expecting more snow in the next hour and again later today. I doubt it will stick, but if it does? Meh. We'll get groceries before then.
And a Message for LA: stop whining about your brownouts. Let your lawn die. That whining will lead to the division of California and your troubles would be just beginning since that opens the doors on water distribution rights contracts, the most cutthroat business since claim jumping in 1849.
Here's a nice looking, properly made bicycle. It's from Munin Cycle Works in London. Nothing weird, just a bike you'd want to ride. It even has fenders and inch wide tires so it can deal with wet pavement. The lines are sensible, the frame is brazed with nice brackets, and the result is very clean. A bicycle should be pretty simple. It doesn't have to brag about how awesome only one gear is, and then never be ridden anywhere with a slight hill. Fixies are poseur bikes, unless they're BMX and its a certain Scotsman doing stunts.
That's Danny MacAskill. He's awesome. He deserves the word. Everybody else on a fixie? Nope.
So in the real world, you need gears to climb a hill, but overall a nice clean bike, what you'd see racing in 1976 is pretty much like what you see racing today, just more carbon fiber. And don't skimp on the spokes. Taco-ing your wheels from a slight bump is lame. Don't be lame. Ride a proper bike.
It is sunny out, but the polar wind is blowing down from the Gulf of Alaska. So in the sun you feel warmth but the shade feels icy cold, and you can feel both at the same time depending where you stand.
The rain we had over the weekend did not amount to much at this elevation. There IS snow up at 6000+ feet elevation and down at Lake Tahoe. Just not here. There's been clouds muffling the sun every now and then, and the sky is sharp blue, the clouds just as sharply white, and the breeze quietly sizzling through the pine needles and bare branches. There was ice on my car until midmorning.
I notice that Laser-Like Focus still hasn't fixed the mostly ignored economy. Funny how that is. I've largely given up on looking for a serious job and am focused on long-term volunteering in hopes that folks I meet there will know of jobs I can do that don't get advertised, yet aren't illegal. Ones where possessing boobs isn't a major job requirement. I'd like to say that women aren't hired around here for exactly that reason, but I just can't.
I raced the car simulator a bit today. It remains entertaining, whether driving slow cars fast, or fast cars fast. I still store very highly at Sears Point, having watched many races there and having great instincts for twisty roads, since that's what I grew up with. The computer sends the other cars through several wrong lines that nobody actually uses on that track, which is somewhat baffling, and I find the slow cars in front of me to be infuriating, to the point you use the low-damage cheat in the program to side-swipe them on a corner to pass and road away. Considering certain tracks are an absolute MCF at the first hairpin turn after the start, with cars ramming each other and you, and you NOT being able to rewind so close to the finish line, it can be inevitable. The upside is with sufficient affinity in driving a car, the sponsors pay for that and more, so drive to your viscously sadistic heart's content. Just try not to destroy then engine or drivetrain. Or turn off the damage sensitivity. It becomes more like bumper cars if you do that, however, so be aware the worse it is, the more the computer AI cheats.
I walked in this weather, with the warm sun and icy wind listening to music on my MP3 player, which is not an Apple product, takes AAA batteries and runs for 12 hours because of it. I adore replaceable batteries in electronics. They never die, thanks to that. You're not stuck with a fancy and expensive brand charger that transfers power surges and brownout current loads into your sensitive electronics and murders them. I don't have to worry about it. And that's wonderful. Much like my GPS which is still on the first set of AA batteries. My video game controllers, which are wireless, run for a week each of intense use, so last over 12 hours a pair. That's really amazing, particularly considering they also do force-feedback so you get a better and more immersive game experience.
I still wish that my driving simulator had weather, and wet or icy pavement so you actually had to work harder to drive instead of just do more laps in faster cars. Fog banks? Hell yes. Rain storms at one end of a track that gradually move across to the other side? Great. How about darkness so you have to drive with headlights? That would be a realistic challenge. I suspect after this I'll want to track down a rally car game and see about driving in the dirt. I haven't read any reviews that were especially positive there, and the games I did read about were ridiculously expensive and reviewed not particularly well. A pity. A dirt version that includes the sections of the Dakar (African AND South America) rally? That would be awesome. Throw in Wales, Scotland, Yorkshire, Baja, Argentina and Brazil, Alaska, Road of Bones in Siberia, Borneo, Malaysia, the Himalayas, Oman, Switzerland, Finland... you see all the possibilities?
Imagine if people can submit roads and if reviewed high enough, become content in the game through the marketplace. It would be great if the Wine Country Roads that I know are really fund to drive were in Forza. A race from the Square in Sonoma up Hwy 12 to Kenwood, twisty roads, trees, vineyards, creeks, would be a really fun drive at very high speed and routinely killed people when I was a lad. There are some very unforgiving turns. Great for a driving game that has a "rewind" button that backs up a few seconds before the crash. Later sections of that same highway out to sea is very fun and fast too, particularly if you started it in the streets of Sebastopol, then roared over the hill to the West, through the Apple orchards and then the dairy country, past the Schoolhouse from The Birds in Bodega, winding over the canyon on Hwy 1, and down to Bodega Bay.
That road, too, is a fantastic drive which rewards skill and kills stupidity. These would benefit being added to a driving simulator. Most people won't ever get to drive these roads, ever. Let them experience the simulator. Maybe M$ can talk Bing Maps into driving it with a GPS-camera mapping vehicle and adding it to the game content? It's all M$, after all. I'm not quite sure what it takes to get a high resolution read of the area and the road surface, but it must be possible. And that would certainly save lives of fools without skill trying to duplicate my childhood mania. My generation could DRIVE. And we tended to live more than the 70's Musclecar crowd, who died in their flaming straight-axel tardmobiles any time there was a slight turn or some surface roughness. Sigh. Its called a Double Wishbone Suspension, with coil-over springs and gas shock absorbers. Disc brakes, not drums. These save lives. Power to weight ratio. Braking distance. Horizontal gee-force limit of grip. Learn it.
I wish everyone well. Stay warm, eat hearty, and don't catch a cold if you can help it. Cheers.
Went for a hike today. Its going to snow later so it is reasonably chilly and overcast right now. The lady we hiked with described several encounters with mountain lions while hiking with her son at Foothill Park in Los Altos Hills, a place I've solo hiked in and never seen one. Of course, I'm male, a meat eater, and sweat visin through my pores like an alpha predator so mountain lions flee me, just like deer.
Most people killed by mountain lions have certain things in common.
They are alone.
They are wearing headphones.
They are physically small, usually a woman.
The lion pounces from behind.
They weren't paying attention .
They're vegetarians. Militant vegetarians.
Those critical factors will kill you. Vegetarians do not emit the scent compound visin, which is generated during the digestion of red meat in carnivores. All carnivores emit this smell, this chemical. If you insist on being a vegetarian you don't emit this smell so are marked as a herbivore, as prey. Get a different hobby that keeps you away from mountain lions. They're common in green spaces, even close to cities. I've only seen one twice, and both times they were exiting the area quickly and from a good distance off. I like eating meat. I stink of visin, just like other normal people.
The rule of thumb for dealing with predators is: if you see one and it's watching you and NOT running away, it is hunting and will try to eat you or someone else. Call Fish and Game and report the animal sighting. The life you save might be your own. Don't be so selfish as to think it is cute.
If you see one of these near your home, or on a public trail while hiking, call Fish and Game. If they tranq the animal and take it away, and it comes back, call them again. Keep calling till they kill it to stop the calls. Anything less than that requires you buy a firearm, learn to shoot it, and carry the thing around your home whenever you step out the door. That's a PITA, and a legal mess if you actually defend yourself.
Of course, eating a steak a couple days before a hike makes those hunting cougars run away, and makes the need for a firearm while hiking unnecessary. So always have a steak before the hike. Don't shower. Let them fear your stink. Let them run away. You won't be arrested for smelling like a meat eating predator. Vegetarianism is a selfish act, and denies your innate humanity. If you hate yourself so much you can't eat meat, perhaps you need therapy.
In a poor country like Japan, many people cannot afford a car. In the city of Tokyo, it is so overcrowded that you have to prove you have a place to park it before you can be sold a car. This leaves people using the reliable public transit or riding bicycles and scooters, which avoid those issues. Keep in mind that Tokyo gets snow in the winter, briefly, and it usually doesn't stick, but snow is no place for a 2-wheeled vehicle and is the primary reason they aren't popular in the USA. Detroit built so many cars, and the roads are salted in the winters in the East that cars rust and more are build to replace them, and this has been going on for decades now. Most of a century. As New York City announced back in 1910, automobiles would clean up the streets and get rid of the mess from horses pooping everywhere. And it did. But people always find something to complain about and Jazz was the next big thing to corrupt the youth, and banning alcohol just made people drink more because Americans do NOT like being moralized at.
In Japan, a bicycle is a sign you're too poor to own a parking space, and in the countryside, too poor to own a car. Since 90% of Japan is rural and half of it is mountains and undeveloped land, despite what you've been told, there's a lot of places to park outside the cities. I think people are really weird about clustering together in cities, but whatever. Japan's anime include several which feature the poverty of its characters, and most of them have bicycles to prove this point. Many are riding them to school, or even travelling the country that way, seeking answers to the questions in their souls, assuming that they have souls rather than just identity crisis and misery which an economy of 70% unemployment causes. America is heading that way. We're at 56% unemployment now. Just a bit worse, to go.
The hero, such as he is, of Golden Boy rides a bicycle from temp job to temp job, having dropped out of college rather than graduate in something he no longer believes in. His mantra, while pedaling around, is "Study study study!".
He's like Pretender without the overt gayness. He's got a creepy toilet fetish though. Ugh.
The Love Hime references Love Hina which is the Japanese adaptation of French peasant farce which goes back over 1600 years and kept them going through the Dark Ages and the Pope slaughtering non-Xtians en-masse. Love Hina doesn't have much bicycling in it so that's enough mention of it.
In Honey and Clover, art school college students struggle with their art and their poverty and stare at the bleak future of no job prospects, of life getting worse after school when even being understood by fellow artists is lost in a Japan with a crushed economy. In this sad and bleak story of temporary joys and minor triumphs, the two heroes try to gain the love of a tiny genius sculptor girl, who suffers her own tragedies. One of the heroes ends up taking a break from school and cycles around Japan, trying to find answers to the failures of his life, most of which is a matter of perspective. He chose to be an artist, or can't resist its needs at least, and thus suffers poverty, ending up on a bicycle. If an artist ever tells you they are rich and happy, that person is a con artist or a hooker, not an artist.
Poverty. Between the rich older men on race bikes showing off their money and fitness against the young on bikes because they can't afford better is a huge gap.
Here in America, bicycles are an exercise fad for most people. Many middle class people own bicycles. Especially people with kids. A bicycle outing on a slow paved trail in a park or along a river or lake is a good place to have a ride and a picnic, cheaper and healthier than Chuck E Cheese. Not to say that poor people don't have bikes too, but for very different reasons. Bicycle messenger services in San Francisco and New York can beat the traffic, or did before Email made it irrelevant.
The messengers have monthly protests called Critical Mass, where they take over the streets and gum up the traffic to remind people bicycles have rights by breaking the traffic laws. Oddly, this makes them rather unpopular. A movie about bike messengers back in the early 80's called Quicksilver is one of those Kevin Bacon flicks that kickstarted Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, one of the first Internet Memes.
We also had the classic coming of age movie Breaking Away which while quite dated is a classic film.
And there's lots of the hero bicycling, and the grand finale is a bike race relay between the poor kids and the rich kids. Ironically, my final geology class was through that university, though held in Montana rather than Bloomington Indiana where the story takes place.
America is getting poorer. Detroit, above, is a great example of the communist future awaiting us all. Stockton is headed that way, and Oakland too. Many of us are going to end up on bicycles as our primary transportation someday. Rain or shine. You'll think hard about how much you need it, and what you buy at a store weighs, before you go to the checkout line and then load it onto the bicycle, slowly rolling home past the desperate and poor and hungry.
The only ways around being stuck on a bicycle pedaling in bad weather are homemade fuels or electric vehicles like golf carts. I happen to know that you can make an ATV road legal in California, strange as that sounds, with fenders, lights, and a rearview mirror, the DMV will sell you a registration plate. Not comfortable in the weather, but legal on secondary roads and streets. I've also seen couples and singles puttering around on underbone scooters, some coming back from college. If the college gave them free parking, more would do it. And the more people on scooters, the more drivers notice them on the road and the fewer accidents.
Yesterday I saw a man with a Honda Rebel (234cc air cooled cruiser motorcycle) with a bicycle trailer welded on as a sidecar to carry his stuff, slowly motor in and park at the Library where I volunteer. It was interesting because being homebuilt, the trailer had mountain bike wheels, two of them rather than one wheel which likely limits the speeds it can go, and the steel tubes connecting it seemed a bit much for the sidecar.
Most sidecars, such as on a Ural, have ONE wheel, and just a couple or three braces to connect them. The Ural has a straight axel, which is sometimes powered to both wheels, allowing it better offroad capability since real rural Russian roads aren't necessarily paved. Having a motorcycle or sidecar will someday be a sign you are a lingering part of the Middle Class, or a crime lord, maybe a Blue-Ray disc pirate or biodiesel processor. He's the guy other guys know. He can hook you up with fuel or pirate movies because you can't stand all those trailers on a movie you already paid for. He'll have one of these.
Urals are slow and kinda dorky but fun on the secondary roads. People stare. They can carry groceries. They are actually fun, based on captured German army scout sidecars built by BMW in WW2. The Russians kept them simple so can be fixed easily with minimal tools. Modern motorcyclists kind of mock them, but they're a great way to take a squeaky granddaughter out for a ride and dogs love these things too. The real downside is they cost around $13K, which is Yaris/Aygo money. If you like being a spectacle, a Ural sidecar is a good way to go. Much cooler than a Vespa and last longer too.
So when it comes time to buy a bicycle, or you find one at a garage sale with flat tires and surface rust, are you going to find your future daily driver? Use the hand tools and rescue an old steel frame. They are still around because they last. And a top end race bike from 1976 is just as sweet as a top end race bike today. It's a mature technology. Only the advertising changes. Just keep in mind, and in your garage, some wider knobby tires for the eventual day that your roads get left to decay into gravel and washouts. At that point, owning a mountain bike might be a good idea. Bicycles don't take up much space, and owning a second bike, which you ride sometimes for exercise, keeps up the skills. That's what I do. Ride when you can, when its fun and pleasant weather. You won't always have the choice.
