we discover how much fun skype is

Auckland: Hannah, Jen and Mike get skype going. Kate and David make us laugh.
Tomorrow we head for Tokyo.

Hannah and Patrick's excellent adventure

Here's the plan: NZ - Tokyo - France - Germany - Switzerland - France. We leave Wellington 10 July.

Cool bike racks in NYC

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/new-bike-racks-courtesy-of-david-byrne/

The city has installed nine new bike racks designed by David Byrne. Each has an evocative name. Top row, left to right: MoMA, Olde Times Square and Villager. Middle row, left to right: Coffee Cup, Wall Street and Ladies’ Mile. Bottom row, left to right: Hipster, Chelsea and Jersey. (Photos: New York City Department of Transportation)

New York City’s bicycle racks have suddenly become much more hip and colorful.

The city’s Department of Transportation, in partnership with the art gallery PaceWildenstein, announced today that it had installed nine temporary bike racks designed by the musician and biking enthusiast David Byrne.

The nine racks — in shiny red, black and silver — are intended to promote bicycling, which has been a main emphasis of the current transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. That emphasis includes Summer Streets, the program to close off a 6.9-mile north-south route for six hours on three consecutive Saturdays (this Saturday is the last day); the Cityracks program, which provides free sidewalk racks for short-term bike parking; and a design competition for newer, sleeker racks.

Not only was Mr. Byrne, of Talking Heads, a judge in that competition, but he also decided to submit his own designs (outside of that competition).

“It was important to me that these new racks be the same thickness and material as the existing racks—to help identify them as practical bike racks and not just modern art,” Mr. Byrne said. “The locations about as perfect as one could imagine — Wall Street for the dollar sign and Bergdorf’s for the giant high heel!”

Eight of the new racks were installed in Manhattan, with the other in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“By bringing attractive yet functional sculptures to our streets, we are elevating the profile of cycling, and we believe that more and more people will begin to think about cycling as a mode of transportation, and not just a mode of recreation,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said in a statement. “Regular bike riders have an eagle eye for our current bike racks but these nine installations will capture the attention of all New Yorkers.”

The nine racks will be removed about 11 months from now; they were made of durable materials but are intended as temporary public art, not a permanent installation. (A temporary art project cannot remain on public land indefinitely without approval by the city’s Public Design Commission.) Mr. Byrne arranged to have the racks fabricated and hopes to have the chance to sell them, eventually, as works of art.

The department explained:

These new racks will be easy to distinguish from the city’s other 5,000 bike racks, but were constructed with steel with a powder coat to resemble the square tubing from which the current racks are made. Additionally, they will bear identifying plaques. DOT is also developing marketing concepts for the racks, including a bike route map to guide cyclists to tour all nine.

The names and locations of the nine racks follow:

• The Jersey: Northwest corner of Ninth Avenue and 39th Street, near the Lincoln Tunnel
• The MoMA: South side of West 54th Street, east of the Avenue of the Americas
• The Ladies’ Mile: West side of Fifth Avenue, north of 57th Street (in front of Bergdorf’s)
• The Chelsea: In front of 530 West 25th Street, east of 11th Avenue (in front of PaceWildenstein Gallery)
• The Hipster: West side of Bedford Avenue, near North Sixth Street, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
• The Olde Times Square: South side of West 44th Street, west of Seventh Avenue
• The Villager: In front of 536 La Guardia Place, between West Third and Bleecker Streets
• The Wall Street: North side of 82 Wall Street, west of Water Street
• The Coffee Cup: West side of Amsterdam Avenue, between West 110th and 111th Streets

Watch that gin - a family story from 1872

North Otago (Oamaru) Times - 27 October 1872 page 3

Catlin wrote a book entitled “Shut your Mouth” in order to prove how dangerous it was to sleep with your mouth open. The Maories also inculcate this warning, as they say that if a person sleeps in the open air with their mouth unclosed, there is a strong probability of lizards taking advantage of the opening and going down the sleeper’s throat, causing divers and sundry distressing conditions of the body. Pakehas seldom swallowed this idea, let alone the lizards, but strange as it may seem, a woman in Wanganui named Devalion, wife of the bell-ringer, actually vomited a living lizard out of her mouth last week. The following are the particulars of this most extraordinary occurrence: on the 6th of September (Friday last), the woman in question felt an acute pain in her side, and took some gin to alleviate it. Soon after drinking the gin she felt ill and inclined to vomit, which she eventually did, and to her intense surprise and disgust saw that she had thrown up a living reptile, which on closer inspection proved to be a lizard nearly four inches in length. The reptile only lived a few seconds after its expulsion and had lost its tail in the process, so that it probably measured fully five inches before being deprived of its caudal appendage. The lizard has the appearance of having two heads, owing to the loss of its tail, and is of a light brown colour. The poor woman, whose stomach so mysteriously became the abode of so unusual a tenant, does not know how the reptile got to where it did, nor how long it remained there, but she states she still has some more of the disgusting animals in her stomach, and declares she can feel them moving about whenever she drinks anything, particularly gin, of which they seem specially in dread.

From National Library of New Zealand - Papers Past website

Mary Devalion was my great-great-great-grand-mother, born Mary Butterley, in Dublin.
Thanks for this one, Dad.

Police to tackle bike crime with new ‘Indifferent Squad’

The rise in bicycle crime in the capital is to be tackled head on with the formation of an elite new police team to be known as ‘The Indifferent Squad’. The highly trained force will be stationed at key points behind the counter at London’s last few remaining police stations, poised to do a bit of paperwork on stolen bicycles the moment they have dealt with everything else.

‘It was amazing to the see them in action’ said TV producer Pat Farrell who is shadowing the Indifferent Squad prior to making an ITV drama on their tense and exciting work. ‘At 9.03 am the call came in – front wheel stolen from a Marin mountain bike in Barnes High Street. Immediately the shouting began; Code Red! Repeat; Code Red! Dave, get form 7b/32/b from the file, don’t piss about, I want a biro, working, with the lid off NOW! Kev, Bob, where are those bloody duplicates – Sheena move, we need back up pens on the other side of the counter. I want the standard letter off to the insurance company by November at the latest!’

The theft from the bicycle turned out to be unusual in that the entire crime had been clearly recorded on CCTV and the thief had dropped his wallet in the act of removing the front wheel. Not only did it have his photo ID, address and contact details, it also contained a piece of paper entitled – ‘names and addresses of all the criminals who buy my stolen bikes off me.’

The head of Indifferent Squad said ‘Luckily the bike owner brought that wallet to attention of the Indifferent Squad. Or we’d never have been able to pass it onto Lost Property.’

Stuff White People Like

Always good stuff here!

Try this one:
Bike City
A good place to find white people on a Saturday is at a Bike Shop. Bike shops are almost entirely staffed and patronized by white people!

But not all white people love bicycles in the same way, there is much diversity. First up, we have the younger urban white folks who absolutely love their fixed gear bicycles. These are seen all over college towns, Silverlake in LA, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Queen West in Toronto, and Victoria, British Columbia. Fixed gear bicycles meet a lot of requirements for white person acceptance. They can be made from older (i.e. vintage) bicycles, thus allowing the rider to have a unique bike that is unlikely to be ridden by anyone else in town. They are also easily customizable with expensive things Aerospoke rims, Phil Wood Hubs, and Nitto Parts. The combination of rare bicycles and expensive parts makes it easy for white people to judge other white people on the quality and originality of their bicycles. This is important in determining if someone is or isn’t cooler than you.

White people also like Mountain Bikes because it lets them be in nature. It’s really not more complicated than that.

And finally, they love expensive Road Bikes and the accompanying spandex uniforms. This enables them to ride long distances and wear really tight clothes without any social stigmas. These types of riders will spend upwards of $5,000 on a bicycle and up to $400 on accessories, but will not ride to work. Perhaps because they cannot wear the spandex. It is important that you never question why someone needs a $5000 bicycle since the answer is always “performance.”

For the most part, these rules have been unisex. But there is a special category of bicycles that appeal far more to white women, the European city bike (pictured). White women have a lot of fantasies about idealized lives, and one of them is living in Europe and riding around an old city on one of these bikes. They dream about waking up and riding to a little cafe, then visiting bakeries and cheese shops and finally riding home to prepare a fancy meal for their friends who will all eat under a canopy with white Christmas lights. This information can be used to help gain the trust/admiration of a white woman, especially if you can pull off a lie about how your mother told you about how she used to do all of these things when she was younger.

And of course, it goes without saying that white people who ride bikes like to talk about how they are saving the earth. If you know a person who rides to work, you should take them aside and say “Hey, thanks. Sincerely, The Earth.” Then give a thumbs up. That white person will ride home on a cloud.

Matt Simmons and the Five Psychological Stages of Grief

by Rob Hopkins

This is a wonderful clip. Matt Simmons is the author of ‘Twighlight in the Desert’, is a leading US investment banker, and a long-term advocate of the peak oil argument. When he was asked to go on CNBC’s ‘Fast Money’ to discuss the high oil prices, he clearly stunned the presenters with his forthright analysis of society’s current perilous situation. When asked if $147 a barrel is a ‘wake up call’ he replied “yes, but we’re not having a wake up call, we’re having a witch hunt for who got us here”, a succinct analysis of the current world situation. What was especially fascinating to watch was when he was asked for his prognosis of the near future.