Take Tea at 3

I wanted to see what all this tea party stuff was about.

I was too lazy and too cheap to get up, buy a bus ticket, and get to the bus to go to DC.  So I went to Morristown to their rally (billed as for those who were to cheap or lazy couldn't go).

The rally was held on the Morristown square.  The Morristown square is in the middle of town, in the middle of the business district.  The square is much like the Boston Commons but smaller.  There are four intersecting streets that form a square block.  That square is a park with benches and the like.

The rally was scheduled to run from 11:00 AM until 2:00 PM.  I got to Morristown a little after 11 and had to spend a few minutes finding somewhere to park.  I found a new parking garage a few blocks from the square.

So I missed the beginning, but caught the first speaker part way through his spiel.  The speakers / speeches were pretty much what I had expected.  The speeches mostly railed against big government and government spending.  It was kind of having come out of Mr Peabody's WABAK machine.  If it was not for the topics being government spending rather than the war in Vietnam, I would have lit one of those Winstons I smoked back then.

I thought it was a decent crowd considering most people should be at work and if you had any ambition you'd be in DC.

I would say the majority of the attendees were older, but there were a fair number of 20's & 30's as well.  There were a few mothers with strollers as well as toddlers and preschoolers.   I didn't see any of the left-wing sabateurs like Crash the Tea Party types.

I did see a kind of counter protest by a small group in the very back. 

But I'm not sure what they were saying.  Can someone tell me what MORE BLOOD WON'T CLEANSE BAD BLOOD means?  Does this have anything to do with the Tea Party?  Are they saying drink blood, not tea?  I'm so confused.  One thing I did notice was an SDS sign.

 Gee, those guys are still around?  I mean I know that several of those original SDS ( and Weather Underground) founders / members are presidential advisers, but I didn't know they were still on college campuses (I assume the kids were from some local college).

The Tea Party people had their signs of course.  For the most part the signs were anti-taxes and government spending.  The sort of thing you would expect of the Tea Party people.  But I did see this one that I guess

seeks to explain the how and why of the Tea Party movement.  I was thinking it might be a little more complicated than that.

Unlike the news accounts you hear, I didn't see any wild terrorist wanna-bees.  No hitler signs.  I did see guns though.  Strapped to the several police who were there.  The hired security were armed to the teeth with a vest and walkie-talkie.

The only sign I saw which was a bit obnoxious was this one:

 

But I also thought it was kind of funny too.  If this is the worst the Tea Party has, I think Bill Clinton needs to look elsewhere for his terrorist concerns.

Sometimes it rains

For the last couple years, my sister has hosted an Easter get together.  Given my knee problems and how the clock is getting ever closer to when I'm supposed to hop on my bike and head for Florida, I decided to ride there to get a sense on how my knee would react.

Originally I was going solo, but at the last minute, Captain Bob decided he would join me.  We decided to mostly ride our standard route.  We did decide to avoid the bastard hill by swinging over to Route 206.  From there we wound through Princeton until we got back on track.

About 3 miles from sis's, we were going through an intersection.  I was about 20 feet behind the captain.  As I watched helplessly, a gold Hyundai went about halfway past the captain and turned right.

The captain was down.

The woman did stop about 20 feet up the cross road.  I asked the captain if he was alright, etc.  He said he was OK and actually seemed to be.  Turned out that he didn't have even the smallest patch of road rash.  The most significant problem was a broken helmet.

The woman moved her car in to a parking lot.  I fiddled with my Droid camera trying to figure out how it worked.  I figured I should take pictures of what I could for record keeping.  Most importantly, I wanted to get a pic of the rear of her car in case she bolted so I'd have the license number (turns out those fears were completely unfounded).

We moved our bicyles over to where she had parked.  She was about to give out her info when the police came.  The most amazing part was that any given time, there must have been at least 3 police/EMT vehicles there.  Another would come and one would go.  By the end there must have been 8-12 different vehicles show up.

The EMTs felt up the captain, took his blood pressure, etc.  The captain refused treatment and they called off the ambulance.

I called my sister and related just a bit of information to get their imagination going.  I basically said that we were delayed and I was trying to keep the captain out of jail.

Captain Bob declined filing a report so the last police officier left and we got on our way.  His front fender was rubbing the tire so we performed a quick adjustment and then really got on our way.

About a mile down the road as we were discussing the accident, the captain ran in to a curb and went down again.  This time, the blood was flowing all over the place.  It was like the Monty Python Black Knight skit.

Somehow we dealt with accident 2.  We had to adjust his fender again, but then we were on our way.

The rest of the trip was uneventful and we got to sis's without further incident.

But after a while, the captain was on the cell phone talking to Mrs. Captain.  She isn't at sis's because Mrs. Captain is visiting her daughter for Easter.  She has gotten back to Pennsylvania.  Just to the I78 tollbooth.  Her car has died.

Fortunately, AAA was on the way and that seemed to end well as the last I heard Mrs. Captain was back and home with her dead car.  Captain called when he got home later that night.  We'll have to see how he is after his doctor visit.

Click Me Off

So with new pedals, I went out for a ride and fortunately my head was strapped in to my helmet. If it wasn't, it surely would have exploded. The click was worse than ever!

[Rant On]

I asked for advice in a couple forums. I got a few useful ideas, but also a lot of the usual forum responses. Why do people respond when they don't actually read the entire post? I started off with that I had first posted last fall. I included that I had my bottom bracket replaced at the local bike shop, put on new pedals etc. So in addition to some useful suggestions, I get responses that included suggestions to check my pedals and bottom bracket. One got a little further reading my post because they knew about the new bottom bracket. But they asked whether I had done (assuming my incompetancy I guess) it myself or had my bike shop do it.

[Rant Off]

Anyway, I went back and tightened cranks. I tightened my chainring bolts although I was nervous about that as I think those threads are aluminum. Given that new pedals didn't do the trick, I put the old ones back on. Finally, I put new cleats on my shoes and went out for a ride.

Voila! No click.

Please pray for me that I've finally solved the problem. I don't care which thing did it. If it is finally gone, that's good enough for me.

Fix a Flat

One of the subscribers to a bicycle touring list that I also subscribe to recently got a flat (he lives in Florida so it's not too cold to ride) and he decided to let his LBS fix it while he made a video of the process.

I thought the video was worth posting. Probably because it almost exactly matches my method.



My notes:

I wrote to Ken (the bicycle owner) and noted that the mechanic talked about positioning the tire label by the valve in order to know where to look next time a flat occurred.¹ However, the mechanic never performed that search with the flat being fixed. Ken said that because of YouTube limits, he had to edit the video and that the mechanic had spent about five minutes examining the old tube / tire.

I actually position the label opposite the valve. Presumably you can position the label anywhere as long as it is consistent so that you can use the label and valve to locate where the cause of the flat came through the tire.

Another member of the list noted that if the offending bit of metal or glass or whatever is not lodged in the tire but is loose inside, it will continually roll to the bottom as you examine the tire so you ought pay particular attention to that. I've added that to my procedure.

I pump up the tire maybe a 1/3 to 1/2 way and examine the bead seating as in the video. I also knead the tire as you can see. I also might bounce the tire on the ground in a couple places. After that, I deflate the tire again in order to relax the inner tube. My theory is that if there were kinks or creases, the now relaxed inner tube allows them to straighten out.



¹ When the next flat occurs, you pull off the tire and find the flat in the inner tube. Once you find the puncture, you know to look at the tire the same number of degrees away from the label as the puncture was from the valve.

Guns for Lead Based Toys

"China's military stepped up pressure on the United States on Monday by calling for a government sell-off of U.S. debt securities in retaliation for recent arms sales to Taiwan."

 - Washington Times 2010-02-10

When will we wise up?  Will it take a real economic strike by China crippling our economy before we tighten our belts and stop the insane spending.  Federal, state, and our own consumer addictive self destructive behavior has to stop.