GLOBADOM

Had a weird experience last weekend, which I have been asked to write about. Wired Cola is reader-responsive!

The Lovely One was laid low by illness last weekend, perfectly coinciding with a fairly large social affair her mother was putting on. I was sent in as emergency assistance, and helped my mother-in-law with several hours of preparations for an all-female (it just works out that way) stamping party. If that makes no sense to you, this is a Tupperware party format, only selling rubber stamps, primarily used for scrapbooking and handmade greeting cards.

During the party, I continued to be engaged, just doing stuff like selling pottery (my mother-in-law is also an accomplished potter), helping with the food (and helping myself…my mother-in-law is also a brilliant cook), and other random errands.

This is where I’m supposed to have some interesting insight to share about female social interactions which would really help out the men in the audience. Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t have much there, except to say that I found the dynamics of this party (which was both a social engagement and an opportunity for commerce) quite interesting. The sellers are (benevolently) leveraging social contacts and structures to get motivated buyers into a buying mood. Typically, you’re selling high-end stuff at these sort of parties, because while price seems to be not too important, a product you can “believe in” is. (The Lovely One tells me that the products of this company, Stampin’ Up, are first-rate compared to other stamps she has used).

Without wishing to elaborate, and realizing this is all rather obvious in some circles, I think there’s some interesting ways this model could be moved online. That sort of stuff is occupying more and more of my thoughts these days.

So I went to bed on Thursday night feeling lousy, and woke up feeling the same. It’s cold season. As a favour to my co-workers, I didn’t go to work to infect them. Nice me.

Instead of recovering properly, I was apparently infected not only with the rhinovirus, but also with some sort of unearthly energy. I buzzed around the house completing task after task, reading stuff, I set up an entire computer, just ridiculous things that have been languishing forever. Every task I did just got done. Wow.

Of course, now I still feel sick, and a bit un-rested, and now The Lovely One has a cold, too.

When I look out from downtown New Westminster right now, the Fraser River is covered by haze. The Alex Fraser bridge, usually easily visible, has disappeared. There’s an acrid campfire smell in the air, and I fool myself that there’s a touch of peaty richness in the odor, too.

Last night you could detect the smell of the fire and the light cover of smoke even in Port Moody. In New Westminster, even inside a climate-controlled building, the smell is strong. I can taste it in my throat.

The current satellite picture at Environment Canada’s site shows a “cloud” that covers most of Greater Vancouver, but doesn’t show up on the weather radar. I’m pretty sure that’s the smoke plume from the fire in Burns Bog. Here’s the local coverage, though that link will likely expire soon.

Greatest video ever! And as you know, I don’t say things like that lightly.

Always good advice, eh? I should have heeded it yesterday, when I missed a shift while riding the BMX LX, and then fell down. Ooohh.

I don’t think I have much else useful to say. The Lovely One gave me a very early birthday present: a nice set of Yamaha speakers, including a nice substantial subwoofer. Now to upgrade the receiver.

Life with The Good Thing, our inappropriately-named 1998 VW New Beetle, has been pretty good all told. I thought I’d discuss the good and the bad of Beetledom.

The Good
The car itself is great. Perhaps I’m just out of touch with the market these days, but this not-very-large four-seater whispers near-luxury in its every feature. Super-adjustable seats, a really decent climate control system, merciless air conditioning, tilt/telescope steering wheel, remote entry, and all the mod cons, at least as of 1998. There’s no option I wish this car had. The seats are adjusted manually, but they go up, down, back, forth, and the seatback tilts, and the manual controls are just fine. This car has airbags inside the front seats, just in case you get hit from the side.

The interior finish is really nice.

Driving-wise, the car is a lot of fun. For a car this size, the 16″ wheels are big, and it goes around corners surefootedly. The 115 horsepower engine and 4-speed auto are an overachieving drivetrain: I wouldn’t mind more power, but I never find myself needing more power. I still would prefer a manual transmission, but short of the soon-to-be-widespread automatically-shifted manual transmissions, this is about as good as I expect shiftless driving to get.

Even for me, walking up to this car in a parking lot is a treat. My family motto could nearly be “no boring cars,” and a VW New Beetle is basically the least boring Jetta ever. That’s a good thing! It looks funny, and that’s wonderful. The shape has also proved more practical than I thought: it’s a near thing, but with the rear seats folded down the car will swallow a bicycle. Pretty tidy.

The Bad
Blind spots: this is the big big problem with this car. The mirrors are a bit higher than on most cars (apparently for a combination of aesthetic and convenient-mounting reasons), and the A-pillars are chunky, which gives the car a huge blind spot to the driver’s left, in a perfect location to block out pedestrian-sized objects in crosswalks as you turn left. Also, if you are taller than 5’6″ and sit in the back seat, you will hit your head.

Other than that, the annoyances are minor. The vents are of a fragile design, and for no good reason: the Tercel had a vent system that was sturdy, easier to adjust, and more intuitive. The Good Thing’s vents are fussy to adjust, it’s not obvious whether a vent is open or closed, and we saw more than one car with broken vent vanes in our search, probably due to the design. The car has a “no user-serviceable parts” attitude and tight engine-bay packaging, a simple triumph of style over function. Also, I keep wondering whether all those sad-looking half-circles in the Consumer Reports reliability ratings for Volkswagens will eventually bite me back.

Conclusion
I’d buy it again. My preferred version of this car would be a Jetta wagon, or better yet a Passat wagon, or better yet maybe this car. But if I had to get my own car, cost no object, I’d probably start with something ludicrous like a Buick Roadmaster wagon and make it a bit faster, or get a Subaru WRX wagon and upgrade it to STi+ performance levels, or just go for something outrageous and slow…maybe a really swanky bookmobile.

I’m not usually one for blame and recriminations, especially when a city is as beaten down as New Orleans today. But perhaps a few well-timed kicks on the city while it’s down might illuminate some social and public policy issues. Maybe not, but I haven’t posted anything for a while, and this is what’s on my mind.

First of all, how do you help a city when, come the emergency, two thirds of the cops aren’t showing up? I’m not making that up. That’s the rough estimate of the Department of Defense. Morale is suicidally low. That was not the experience in, for example, New York City during 9/11.

Then there’s the small matter of not using available buses to get people out of the city. And the ongoing question of why in the world the response of the citizens who remained behind has, in a dreadfully decisive way, consisted of shooting at rescure helicopters, and crime ranging from looting to murder. Looting, okay, but rape and murder?

It’s easy to compare all of this to the 9/11 experience, as I did above, but in fairness to New Orleans, the effects were rather more widespread. For all the terror and tragedy of 9/11, the destruction in New York was confined to several square blocks. In the case of New Orleans, large portions of the city are underwater, and the rest is only slightly less screwed. The mess will take months, if not years to clean up, and by mess I mean most of the city.

This reminds me a lot of…Canada’s 1998 Ice Storm. Except that event killed only 28 people, and despite the fact that Montreal was basically frozen solid, and 700,000 people had no electricity for three weeks.

So, what was the difference? I think, to a first order, you can make the case that the difference was that Ontarians and Quebecois acted like people: no shooting at your rescuers, no raping your fellow refugees from natural disaster, no looting no really half-assed disaster plans that essentially abandoned tens of thousands of people; and that left the professionals free to find and rescue people in danger instead of shooting people shooting at levee repair crews.

Come on, New Orleans, rejoin the First World, eh?

I was testing out some template changes to The World’s Only Cybermorphic Weblog (new archive menu! Flickr photos!) when I found an old post that could use some follow-up.

Here’s the updates: The Park Tool levers eventually bent as well, and though I still use them, I just bought some replacement levers, this time Zefals. So far, I’m crediting cheapness over quality.

The cat still gets insulin twice a day, but surprisingly doesn’t mind much. Okay, sometimes it bites me when I inject it, but it doesn’t flee from me when it’s injection time. Quite the opposite, disturbingly enough.

I have been comped two sets of bike socks this year, and they’re very nice. If you ever want to buy me a random small gift, bike socks with an amusing graphic on them will do nicely.

I haven’t seen Strider since that chance meeting nearly a year ago, so I should write him. And the last pinball I played was Pokemon Pinball for the Game Boy, which I have been playing rather a lot.

Sorry about the lack of blogging. I think my recent pictures adequately describe my week. Note that the Date and Time stamps on those photos are accurate.

Having reassembled the Auto-Mini as a project for keith, I took it for a test ride today and was reminded of my one complaint about the machine: it managed to feel simultaneously overgeared and undergeared at various times. I assumed this was the miracle of being a heavy, clunky folding bike.

But today, I was giving it one last ride for fun, and I took a closer look at the rear hub. It’s a Sachs Torpedo Duomatic. Eh? With a name like that, it has to be a multi-speed hub, right? But I had always discounted that idea because there was no shifting mechanism. But today I took a closer look, and watched the holes in the sprocket to see if they stayed aligned with the oil fitting on the hub. No! That meant it had to have internal gearing, for nerdy bike reasons.

Google to the rescue. It’s a “kickback” hub. The shifting mechanism is a light backpedal, which pops it from one gear to the other. Remarkable, and suddenly much more functional. An exploded view.

It still doesn’t fold very well, but at least it has two speeds.