P!, Flying Tuktuk, and Flying Scooter Adventures?

Anime sometimes really fs up. Evangelion? Could have been a pretty good adventure instead of this long slow suicide drama. Ugh. RahXephon was Evangelion done right.There are shows with outrageously fun characters, largely discarded around the start because they're machines. FLCL thankfully didn't ignore the sheer presence of the P! yellow vespa.

Few people, prior to witnessing the spectacle of FLCL realize that a Vespa is a formidable demolition derby powerhouse, capable of bulling small trucks into the air with its 49cc 2-stroke powerplant and 10 inch wheels. FLCL is madness, of course, but its got a good grunge sound track and the characters are fun so you don't mind. Its a lighthearted show. That's why its a popular mod in the real world.

Now consider shows which have vehicles just as awesome and proceed to ignore the heck out of them. In Eureka 7 AO, we get shown a flying Tuktuk. Its a tuktuk, and it flies about 5 feet in the air, or higher, thanks to a quirk of the show mechanics that allows for flying cars using magic rocks without any visible sort of engine. Forward propulsion, nonsensically, is still the 200cc 2-stroke scooter engine you find in all Tuktuks. Part of what makes them rock so hard. That and having 3 wheels so braking hard makes them flip over onto the driver. They're famous for that. They still rock because that aspect of being tricky to drive and dangerous means an underpowered vehicle like a tuktuk is a sign of manliness and derring-do. In its way Tuktuk drivers are like a Harley rider with a job, and probably a family rather than a drug addiction and criminal record.

Unfortunately, instead of focusing on how the flying tuktuk brings families closer together and enables the local health clinic to get supplies and bring the doctor to house calls, the planet explodes with alien nanites from outer space that grow glowing coral and everybody is a prick in Okinawa and they all deserve to die and why won't Renton just step back and let them? That was a really stupid show. A "what were you thinking?" kind of show. It wasn't funny. Just made you more and more angry, and further support for US control of Japan's military since the popularity of that show is continued proof that Genocidal maniacs are the dominant mindset of Japanese youth, same as during WW2 and the rape of Nanking. If we step away, they'll go back to raping and killing everyone. And this time the world would glass Japan.

Finally, I bring you Vividred Operation, which oddly enough has nothing to do with Vandread. Weird. Vividred is sort of a more lighthearted, lesbian seagull version, of Evangelion. Only without all the angst. And a flying scooter, completely unique in the show, used as a newspaper delivery bike.

This is apparently another world without pants. Like Strike Witches. Go figure. Apparently this is some crazy arc of the multiverse where the idea of women and pants just doesn't ever occur to them. Even skirts seem to be confusing. Only in Japan. Like Kiki's delivery service had a baby with strike witches and the war ended, only to get slightly different CGI aliens attacking their tower of magical flying scooters and broadcast electricity straight out of Tesla's wet dreams. A pity more of the show isn't focused on this scooter. It would be a better show if it was. The rest of it is pretty dumb. At least its light hearted.

If Rideback, which was about huge transforming segway-motorcycles with arms for no good reason and no shown ability to control, stayed a sports anime it would have been better. The violent terrorism subplot? It was crap. The first 4 eps of the series were pretty good. I keep running into that: shows which should be about sports and competition, friendly competition, turn into bloodbaths and murder. WTF Japan? And you call yourselves pacifists. Riiiight! Yeah, not gonna let you loose of that leash anytime soon.

Post Oil Real Estate

Post Oil, lots of things change. The obvious stuff is rich people move into the cities to be near other rich people, and the cops shoot or evict the poor, because they annoy the rich people and poor people don't really matter. They are obstacles and sources of crime. Get rid of them. That's what rich people think, and money talks. The coastal cities will eventually be nothing but rich people and their approved servants, all very polite.

The countryside, on the other hand, will change a lot. Right now, most of the countryside is either farms or wild land, at least here in the West. The countryside is largely empty. It doesn't have to be. Most of the interesting farming towns that should be filled with happy families only have a few disgruntled Mexican farm workers and pensioners too poor to move somewhere else. Its true the Central Valley towns are hot in the summer and very dull all the time. However, they do have UPS/FedEx making deliveries, and real estate there is cheap, along with rents. A company that works with Brains, making Inventions, would be well served to move there instead of pay too much for facilities with no advantages and terrible traffic in the Bay Area, for example.

Back when I had a wife who liked me, we did lots of exploration of the Northern Sacramento Valley, north of the Sutter Buttes. Remember those?

Yeah, those. Volcanoes in the middle of the Sacramento Valley. The only real landmark. The Sacramento river swings around the West side. The Feather river around the East side. Both rivers have flood control from really big capacity dams. The Feather from Lake Oroville dam. The Sacramento from Shasta Dam on Lake Shasta up near Redding. Those two dams allow for the productive orchards downstream, and the rice fields responsible for feeding 1.00 Billion People give or take two hundred million people any given year, most of whom are in Asia, Japan and China in particular. Japan would starve without that rice. That would be sad.

The towns near there are either rice farmers or the farm workers, or from the orchards growing various fruits or almonds or walnuts. The almonds grown here are mostly sold to the Europeans, who are crazy about almond butter. I dunno why. Its nothing special. Not peanut butter good, for example. Or cashew butter, which is much tastier but really expensive. I really should find a local source for that. But the towns are half empty. They USED TO be full of families, businesses, people doing more than farming. But then the 1980s destroyed the world and the towns largely died. By the 1990s they were pretty well dead, with just a few old timers still there, the rest of the homes empty shells, the businesses boarded up. All that potential and cheap water and cheap real estate wasted, waiting for vision and someone smart enough to realize that good sushi isn't enough of a reason to pay 3x as much for your office space in the Bay Area. Much less the terrible murderer commutes. I am NOT FOND of Bay Area traffic. I tried to avoid it as much as possible. Its one of the things my wife and I agreed on: drivers in the Bay Area took stupid-moron pills, daily. Peak oil is the best thing to ever happen to Bay Area traffic. It will force those dumba$$es off the road. They can wallow in their stupidity alone, as they well deserve. Bay Area traffic is one of the strongest arguments for involuntary euthanasia... Yeah, I really hated driving there. Its not a positive place.

If I lived in say... Colusa or Gridley, I'd have all sorts of business opportunities. Imagine if Facebook were headquartered there. Cheap housing, local fresh vegetables, 65 minutes to Sacramento if you really must go there to party, see a movie, shop. 63 minutes to Davis, which was honestly a nicer town, just more expensive. Still, it's got real potential despite how far it is from cities. And being far from cities is why it's affordable.

Work the last two days has been furiously busy. We're dealing with sales backlog, plus other backlog. I want to be caught up. It feels bad going home after 9 hours with no real breaks but you just make mistakes when you're exhausted.

Work

Work was hard this last week. I started on Sunday, unloading a truck and finding spaces for all the stuff that came out of that truck. We had help, so it wasn't an exhausting disaster, but it was real work. The rest of the week was spent picking, packing, and shipping the perfume oils, which is what my real job is. Up to this point I'd been prepping for this week of shipping the actual product to customers. And the prep work was all about streamlining the flow so the shipping would work well enough we wouldn't fall behind. By the end of the week we'd been shipping 40 packages per day, possibly more, spent close to a thousand on shipping charges, and only made one mistake that I know of. My fault, too. Otherwise its gone well. Its just hard work, so to speak. Its not digging holes or mixing concrete but there was construction involved and there's boxes to assemble and a tape gun and packing peanuts (ghost poo), invoices, packing slips, and I've now shipped several packages overseas. Never done that before. The product still smells good, being perfume oils (organic essential oils). The hardest part is I got a cold Friday a week ago and was sick with it the entire duration of this very hard week. Boxes of kleenex. It didn't really back off much until the rains came, and only a bit then. Its mostly gone today.

Good news of the week: new season of Top Gear out. And Trigun movie finally came to netflix. I was a fan of that series over 12 years ago, one of the few you could watch on cable TV. Back in the day where you had to pay for anime on DVD because there WAS NO streaming.

Bad news of the week? I'm losing my health insurance coverage because my wife lost her job, part of the Supression? Segregation? Crippling Anti-military presidential budget blunder? Whatever. I'll be paying for insulin out of pocket, and that's going to be expensive. I dearly hope my employer comes up with something. My soon to be ex-wife no longer offers me ANYTHING but bad memories now so filing for divorce is a priority. Whee!

Not A World Power, More Of A Joke

I have been saying for some time that America is a lot like Spain after its Armada sank trying to invade Britain. This is not just a convenient metaphor. Our president's limo broke down in Israel, widely regarded as a Free Fire Zone, like South Central LA, New Orleans, South Miami, Detroit, the entire US-Mexico border, Stockton, and Oakland. Wow that's a long list. More and more of the USA is turning into a cesspit of bigotry, violence, ignorance, and contempt. Much like Spain, we continue to pretend we matter on the world stage when every time our chosen (fool) representative speaks up, he gets a laugh of derision from the rest of the world. That's the consequence of being All Talk. The current president has done a great job promoting the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, previously known as the least effective president ever. That's no longer the case. Jimmy Carter is gaining a reputation, ex post facto, of being moderately successful. Someone else took his place as "Most Useless". Someone still proving daily just how little you can do despite having the job. Perhaps, in the future, we'll look back on these times and laugh about how stupid this whole era was. Then swing a leg over our bike of choice and pedal or ride away into the rain.

The Great Streetcar Con Game

In a perfect world, the oil would never run out. It would be limitless and our infrastructure would allow us to continue living the Disneyfied(tm) world of tomorrow forever. We'd still have beehive hairdos for the women, and if you wait long enough your thin tie will come back into style. In a perfect world nothing changes. We don't live there.

In the best of all possible worlds, we'd have the foresight to build renewable electric transportation, like streetcars that go everywhere we want to go with cars, often enough that we're never waiting more than 15 minutes, and all our shopping and housing needs are met with this convenient and reliable answer to city living. Wouldn't that be great?

This is particularly important as we ease out of the Oil Age and into the age of 2-Wheeled transit. While its nice and charming to think about streetcars and light rail and electric vehicles the facts are these:

1. There is ONE (1) Streetcar maker in the USA, at Oregon Ironworks in Oregon. Their staff of 13 is not capable of producing all the needed streetcars for every American city and town a few weeks before some OPEC tragedy causes a panic shortage. This is a growth business, obviously, but that only happens if all those cities and towns start buying them NOW and they won't fund anything until its too late, like after the Panic. 
2. Almost every American has a bicycle, and the rest can get one. 
3. The trouble with bicycling is the difference in speed between a bicycle and a car is sufficiently great that most drivers consider bicycles pedestrians. This remains true until cars get into 25 mph zones, where the bicycle is almost the same speed and suddenly the cyclist becomes visible to the driver as part of the traffic flow. Its like magic. What it is, is perception. This is one of the better arguments for upgrading to a scooter, since a scooter is fast enough to be perceived as traffic by drivers rather than a pedestrian with wheels.
4. The average work commute is 30 miles. This is too far to bicycle. I'm sorry, but the average American just can't do that and still be fit to work all day, much less bicycle home afterwards. It's not going to happen. 
5. A scooter can do that distance easily, even with only 49ccs of bweeting noise, blue smoke, and pollution. If it means you keep your job, you don't care about the environment. The Environment doesn't put a roof over your head and food on your plate. Your job does that. You can't have a job if you can't get there. Everyone else is doing the same thing so there's smoke and noise whether you're causing some of it or not.
6. Giving up the job you LIKE (the one you probably have now) for the job you can physically reach post-oil will be a terrible personal tragedy and likely increase the Misery Index for the nation. 
7. The gap between the end of plentiful oil (now) and post oil (post Panic event) will be a great opportunity for scooter sales and bicycle parts and repairs. This panic will likely last for weeks or months, since hoarding and rationing are just going to keep forcing people to scooters and bicycles as their basic personal transportation. 
8. This will be especially tough on mothers of young children since they're used to the convenience of passenger vehicles and switching to sidecars or bike trailers will be very tough for them to adjust to. Picture the school run with bicycle trailers instead of SUVs and station wagons. Say goodbye to inefficient yellow school buses. We don't have the diesel for that.
9. The modern concept of Safety is useless in the face of a post-energy survival situation. We all become like Vietnam, a mix of rich people in cars (evil grinning grammas with tinted windows) running over poor people on bicycles and scooters. That's reality in the real world outside the rich First World nations. They call it the "road tax" and its paid in blood. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can adapt and overcome. 

Eventually these sorts of light vehicles will become common because they solve the major issues of transportation while using minimal fuel. Its all about power to weight ratio, which is often the opposite of safety. Too bad. Suck it up. The Nerf(tm) world cost too much and it doesn't work. The real world has splinters and boo-boos. 

Rolling

Despite my many posts on motorcycles and scooters, I remain a huge fan of bicycles. The trouble with bicycles is they tire you out, which is a bad thing if you're on the way to work. To cars, a bicycle is a pedestrian only existing to be passed contemptuously, and probably not very safely, on the side of the street.

I live in a hilly place. Technically, this is the Mountains. Bicycles are great fun on the flatlands where moving forward is a matter of pedaling and coasting. In the mountains? Not so much. Also, there tends to be an absence of bike lanes, the roads are often potholed and spills of gravel spread 100 feet down or across every rural driveway. Its a serious danger to motorcyclists but annoying enough to bicycles too. Those long hills are often in narrow treelined streets sometimes with lots of parked cars. Climbing that, slowly, on a bicycle after working all day? Not safe. If there were no cars, it would be a different deal, but there ARE cars and there will be until the fuel stops being delivered here.

For pure exercise, bicycles are great. You shift your body weight as you pedal, which is why a real bicycle is far better exercise than a stationary one in front of a TV. The pauses, the hard breathing, the motivation of it is a big part of why bicycling is good exercise.

Bicycles are mature technology. You can buy a 40 year old bike and restore it and it rides just as well as a modern one. I scoff at poor cyclist wannabes, like a friend of mine, who insist they MUST have a $3000 carbon fiber race bike to keep up with their friends on carbon fiber race bikes on the Sunday rides they do hither and yon in their $250 jerseys and $120 riding shoes. Uh...no. Buy a used 1970's race bike, restore it, and your old race bike is both cooler and often has better components. Vintage has Gravitas. Trouble is that guy didn't actually like RIDING a bicycle, or being with his church friends. He wanted them to envy the bicycle he couldn't afford but they already had. He wanted to keep up with the Jones's. His envy left him in a permanent state of failure, a particularly UnChristian state for a churchgoer, don't you think? No alternative solution would do.We're not friends anymore.

Yesterday, while walking back and forth to the post office carrying packages, I witnessed one of the locals arrive on a very practical Suzuki DR650 with a milk crate strapped to the back. He put gas in at the local station on the corner. I have to say it was used but well maintained and the rider clearly knew what they were doing, sitting perfectly balanced in standard upright position and the long travel suspension took the bumps through the intersection as smooth as you like. I will think much harder, having seen that, about a used 400-650cc because the engine was very quiet. In the neighborhood I live in, and the hours I'll be keeping soon, that would be a positive. Especially with these hills. The supermoto makes good sense up here. Then again, depending on where you ride, so do vintage, rice rockets, and cruisers.

This is a good place for motorcycling, provided you're careful in the traffic and watch out for gravel spills from driveways near corners. Those are very dangerous. From what a friend with a long history riding said, torque is king when it comes to hill climbing and you shift a lot less with a 600cc so its more about throttle control and leaning properly, with the suspension, if properly setup, making it a safer choice for a beginner.

Rear Axel? About 4 inches behind the seat, which is a 12 degree hill.

As much as I like the MadAss, I worry it will pop a wheelie in front of traffic going up the hills here because so much of the riders weight is nearly on top of the rear wheel. Looking at that, and already wishing for a longer trailing arm suspension would fit it in the bad things category. I wasn't able to find a manufacturer that made them either, since that would require moving or replacing the rear fender. Maybe the DR is a better answer? Used they're cheaper too. Or would be if it wasn't Spring, when people go insane. Spring motorcycle prices resemble those of new bikes. You're better off not bothering.

Its been a dry Spring here too, and other than the rain coming tonight, its often a couple weeks between storms, thus tons of motorcyclists and scooters out and about.

If I had a garage I could be restoring an original series 1 Miata, though considering the person I'd likely be riding in it with has a 12 yo daughter, I suppose the money is better spent fixing up my Honda with its 5 seats. The tires and shocks, the windshield, and the ugly spots of bad paint and chips might be a good idea for repairs and replacement. Sigh. Its a nice car, at least. Once everything works right I can more confidently take it for long drives up and over the mountains and back. Maybe something will turn up that works, for a price I'm willing to pay.

Also: I've had a cold since I slept with my window open last Thursday. Sigh. 

Hiking Partner

A friend at work says she likes hiking so it looks like I've got a hiking partner now. This is good. Going hiking alone isn't much fun, and its a bit dangerous for a diabetic hiking alone. I suspect we will start with the lower elevations and work our way up, to harder hikes with more interesting terrain. I have LONG wanted to see the lakes in northern Nevada County. I've made maps from them. I've processed their data in GIS databases. But I've never been there.

Good hikes and drives, since she likes moving so drives might be a good thing too:

• Empire Mine
• Hwy 20 PGE Discovery Center
• Donner Pass Trail
• Castle Crags (north of Donner Pass)
• Hwy 89-70 Truckee-Grayeagle-Oroville loop. 
• Sardine Lake and Packer Lake, drive and picnic
• Gold lake to Silver Lake hike. 

I need some better hiking boots, and she might too. I'll ask.

She also expressed interest in mountain biking but doesn't have one of her own. I expect we'll talk about that a bit. See if we can find something for her, maybe a used bike or maybe her interests aren't so hardcore so a gentle one from Kmart will do. A road bike is good exercise around here, actually, and you can go some pretty interesting places. I have cruised around that way and found good things.

Its good to have friends to spend time with. I didn't have that in the Bay Area. The people I knew rarely called me, and only one of them down there called me on the weekend. The people who call you on the weekend are your friends. They ones who don't are acquaintances. I had to explain that to some classmates in college. They never called me on the weekend.

Tonight I will sleep with the window cracked open. Its so warm its pointless to worry about anything like heat. I want the fresh air and the sound of the night. This is spring in the mountains. In another month we'll have some proper heat waves. We're already using the fan at work in the afternoons. Its just too warm by that time of day.