Fuji Suncrest, 1987 – 2008

Fuji Suncrest, 21, Beaverton, died Oct. 28 of acute frame fracture.

A remembrance will be held tonight, after dinner, over a few beers.

The Fuji was first in the possession of a bicycle shop owner in Watsonville, Calif., where he used it as a high-end mountain bike.

In 1989 the shop owner sold it to a college student, who used it as a mountain bike and as an all-purpose commuter. The student added a Blackburn rack to the bike, and rode it continually from 1989 until 1992, in place of a car. Much of this commuting was on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and some of it consisted of, arguably, one of the best 3-mile commutes in the world: down West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, Calif.

West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, Calif. Credit: ATIS547, via Flickr

The bike was a stalwart companion, despite impressive misuse including mountain bike crashes such as one at 25 mph, and a spectacular one off a bridge into a river.  On more than one occasion, the bike carried the student and his friend home on the rear rack, when his friend was too drunk to see straight.

In 1992 the Fuji moved to San Francisco and then to Palo Alto, where it served as a light-duty commuter and weekend mountain bike.

From 1996 until 2000, also known as The Dark Years, the Fuji sat mostly dormant in a garage in Oklahoma City, an inhospitable city for bicycling.

In 2000 the bike moved back to Santa Rosa, Calif., where it was fitted with slicks and served as a short-duty commuter.

In 2004 the bike moved to Beaverton, Ore., and in 2006 began a second era of bike commuting. The commuting started out as relatively short-hop: a 3-mile ride to the train station, then a 1.6 mile ride in downtown Portland. For close to two years the bike humbly and safely conveyed the same owner on commutes and trips around town, even as he added clipped pedals and fenders (a necessity in a city as rainy as Portland), and the seat post clamp wore out, the rear axle failed, and the bottom bracket broke.

By this time the bicycle was older than some of the mechanics that worked on it. Yet these mechanics never looked contemptuously at the bike. Instead, they typically nodded, impressed at the durability of the grizzled old warrior.

In the summer of 2008, when gas prices rose and Johnny-come-lately bike commuters flooded the trains, the owner began riding the Fuji the entire trip between home and work. Once again, despite being heavy and old, the Fuji performed without complaint, even as more of its components started to fail.

On October 27 in the evening, the bike conveyed the owner the entire 13 miles from work to home, carrying him along a rough path buckled by tree roots that runs down the Willamette River, across the carved-up pavement in the Corbett-Terwilliger area, up steep hills west of the river, and out through West Portland and Beaverton, a trip that includes two wooden bridges and numerous speed bumps.

The next morning, after a ride into work on a cool autumn morning, a fracture was discovered in the chain stay, near the rear derailleur.

The bike will be donated to the Community Cycling Center, for parts.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you take good care of your own bicycle.

The Soccer Ball Rorschach Test

Not long after we bought this soccer ball, I realized it was a kind of Rorschach Test. So, using the new polling feature in WordPress, I thought I’d test my hypothesis on you:

Miss Wasilla Applies for a Job

They should move up the election; I swear to God. First came the reports that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 in September alone on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe and accessories. A blogger for Slate named Dahlia Lithwick noted that “spending $150,000 on incredibly high-end designer duds not only looks bad to Joe the Plumber, but also turns Palin from Joe Sixpack into Empress Josephine.”

Lithwick makes a more interesting point that points the blame (rightly) at American culture:

It is really, really different to be a woman in the public eye. The standards for looking “good” are completely unfair, and the stakes are vastly higher for failing to do so. We obsessed about John Edwards’ haircut because a bad haircut truly wouldn’t have mattered. We obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, or her pantsuits, or her highlights because they matter so much.

Then this morning, reports started coming out that the highest paid individual in the McCain campaign is “[Not] Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staffer. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist.”

Clothes, make-up … but what about hair? It’s covered. “In addition, Angela Lew, who is apparently Ms. Palin’s traveling hair stylist, got $10,000 for “Communications Consulting” in the first half of October.”

But the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin is that Hillary Clinton’s appearance was a weird issue because she was being held to a double standard, wanting to be taken seriously as a senator and a viable presidential candidate, while also having to keep up appearances as a woman.

But Palin wants it a different way. She wants to be girly-pretty, and She’s using her looks, because there’s little substance to her actual qualifications or platform.

If we were electing a celebrity, makeup, hair, clothes, and fawning celebrity profiles would be pluses. But we’re choosing someone who’s supposed to be better than we are at governing, and her actual track record indicates she’s neither qualified nor ethical.

Christopher Hitchins made a great suggestion: Stop covering Palin until she gives a press conference. Not that she ever would. A press conference would be too much like a job interview, with tough, unfair, surprising questions that would test your qualifications and ability to think on your feet. And all the hair and makeup in the world can’t cover for you there.

Jon Taplin has an interesting lead in a blog post today:

As Merrill Lynch brokers arrived at their desks this morning they were greeted with an urgent memo as to how to deal with the possibility that the stock exchange might not open this morning. Europe and Asia had crashed over night and the futures were showing a possible 1000 point fall at the open, which would trigger curbs that would keep the market from opening.

Instead the market fell only 500 points, and has since recovered. A little. But the ongoing outlook is dismal, if not downright frightening.

And what has Miss Wasilla been doing? She’s been giving personality profile interviews to People Magazine, where she says she’s an intellectual (despite not naming a single newspaper or magazine she reads when talking to Couric) and mentioning how she always wanted to name a baby boy “Zamboni.”

When Hockey Gets Weird

First, I was on Twitter, and one of the election memes was “Zamboni Palin.” WTF? Turns out it’s from an upcoming interview with People Magazine, in which she also considers herself an intellectual (more here).

… well, “intellectual” might be a stretch, since last I checked, she’s on record as mentioning that “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time.”

Anyhow, it also turns out that one of her intellectual excursions is into baby naming, and she told People that she always wanted a son named Zamboni. No, I’m not kidding.

Then, in breaking news from Alabama, this past weekend’s Disney on Ice show screwed up the rink in Huntsville that the local hockey team (the Havoc) had to cancel their game. (Insert your skating rodent joke here.)

Finally, this verbatim headline: “Swedish hockey fans delay match with dildo downpour.”

I won’t bother explaining. I know you’re going to click the link anyway.

Tales from the Rainy Season

My mom lives in Costa Rica, and sent a report from the rainy season:

There are a couple of tropical disturbances just north of us, in Honduras and the Caribbean , and it has been raining here for 4 days, in a pattern of steady interspersed with hard.

A number of cows grazing near the Rio Tarcoles apparently were swept into the ocean yesterday. Turns out cows can swim as well as horses, although they aren’t known for their sense of direction. On the same day the river also took all the resident crocodiles for the same ride, including the more well known ones the tourists all photograph at the “crocodile bridge.” Cows, crocs, all gone into el mar. So here’s to our Tarcoles cows, they are somewhere in the ocean, and it’s still a jungle out there.

flickr photo: Nikki T

Pandora, My Other True Love

Sometime in the last few years, a really awful wave of music infected commercial radio. I call it “guys singing like they’re passing a kidney stone,” and I just can’t listen to it. They don’t sing so much as force constipated vocal sounds out of their orifices, and it’s unbearable. Despite this clear sign that we’re headed straight to musical hell, bands like Nickelback, Daughtry, Creed and 3 Doors Down were all over the radio.

Luckily my friend told me about Pandora. I love Pandora. Pandora is a free internet radio station that doesn’t play audio commercials — ever. Instead, it supports itself with banner ads. The music streams, uninterrupted.

Unlike FM radio stations, which group their content around various marketable themes (rock, contemporary, country, jazz, etc.), Pandora allows you to create stations by seeding it with songs you like. Using something it calls the Musical Genome Project, it then uses your selections to find songs that are musically similar in melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics and other attributes.

But you aren’t passive in this process. Once Pandora starts playing a song, you can give it thumbs up or thumbs down, skip it, or choose not to hear it for a month. You can create up to 100 stations. I created a jazz station, a pop station, an acoustic guitar singer-songwriter station, an offbeat station (Tom Waits, Devo, They Might Be Giants, etc.), soul, and so on.

My friend Hank told me about Pandora, and I had the “This is the greatest thing since sliced bread!” reaction. So I started evangelizing for it, and other people had the same reaction. Here’s one from a friend of mine:

Thanks for the heads-up about pandora.com. It’s great! I started one station and let it play for about an hour while I input grades. It was so nice … I have to get busy playing some jazz on Pandora, man. Screw the planning and the dishes!

With that kind of fanatical devotion, I expected them to be world-beaters. But last week I found out that they’re struggling. According to the Wired Music Blog, Pandora had to cut 14 percent of its staff. I know times are tough (the company I work for has been struggling like a lot of others), but I’m hoping Pandora doesn’t close up shop.

So. My humble request of the day is to try Pandora. If you like it, recommend it. And yeah, I know I sound like a marketing shill. But hey, this is Web 2.0. Support what you believe in, eh?

Memo to Joe the Plumber: Work on Pipes, Not Policy

After being mentioned 23 times in last night’s debate, Joe the Plumber had his 15 minutes of fame extended when Dianne Sawyer interviewed him. His beef with Barack Obama’s proposed tax policy was that if he were lucky enough to make $250,000 a year, he didn’t want to have the government tax it more. (The difference would be from a 36% tax rate to a 39% tax rate.)

Joe said, “Just because you work a little bit harder to have a little bit more money taken from you, that’s scary. I work hard for it, why should I be taxed more than other people?”

Sawyer: “What about people who make a million dollars, or five million dollars?”

Joe: “Why should they be penalized for being successful? … It’s a basic right. And Obama wants to take that basic right and penalize it. It’s a very socialist view and it’s incredibly wrong.”

Actually, it’s not socialist. Obama’s not advocating state ownership, merely an adjustment in what we already have: a progressive tax, which has a rate that increases as the amount subject to taxation increases. And it’s common in most advanced economies.

Joe’s opposition seems to come from working a little bit harder to having a little bit more money taken from him. In strictly personal terms, that makes sense. But even in the situation he’s describing, it doesn’t. Here’s why.

First, according to the US census, only 1.5% of all US households (not individuals, households) earn more than $250,000 a year. (As an aside, if you’re making even half of that, you’re doing pretty damned well, since 80% of people on earth live on less than $10 a day — that’s $3,650 a year.)

Second, if Joe is concerned that he’s going to get penalized on “working a little harder,” we have to question what his motivation is. If he’s lucky enough to make $100 an hour as a plumber, and he works 2,000 hours in a year, he’d make $200,000. Why isn’t that enough? What is the compelling reason to work another hour a week (or another week a year) to go from $200,000 to $250,000? It can’t be meeting basic needs. It has to be something else — like greed. Greed isn’t a basic right, it’s one of the seven deadly sins.

Third, if he’s complaining that he shouldn’t be taxed “more than other people,” what he’s actually advocating for is a proportional tax (i.e., a fixed tax rate for everyone), but it’s not very common, because the ability to pay that tax is disproportionately harder for people with lower incomes, so much so that such tax proposals usually exempt household income below a certain minimum threshold — in which case Joe’s same selfish argument would apply slightly differently: “Why should I work just to get taxed?”

Fourth, one of the way a progressive tax operates is to exempt some basic necessities from taxation (such as food), and taxing luxury items (such as yachts) instead. Many people, people like Joe, actually favor that.

As personal income grows, people tend to spend less and less of it (as a percentage) to meet their basic needs (food, clothing, shelter). In economics, there’s also a concept called the marginal utility of money, which is the “change in the total satisfaction derived from money that results from one unit of change in the quantity of money.” Put another way, one dollar is worth a whole lot more to someone living on a dollar a day than it is to Warren Buffett. So for high-income earners, they pay more taxes, but parting with it causes proportionately less pain (because they can still easily meet their needs).

Also, as income grows, some people derive income from their investments (property, stock, etc.),  so they’re not actually working harder for more income at all.

No one likes taxes, but if you’re lucky enough to be making more than 98.5 percent of everyone in the US (and 99.9% of everyone on earth), and you spend proportionally more income on things like luxury goods, you’d have to be awfully selfish indeed to believe you’re somehow entitled to keep every last penny when other people can’t afford to eat. Or build a school.

That’s why thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith supported such progressive taxation, and 81 percent of economists support it now. Here’s Smith’s rationale: “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Smith is talking about something Joe is omitting to mention. In a society, you ought to have rights, including the right to be successful. But you also have obligations. And one of your obligations ought to be to contribute to everyone else’s benefit. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had a really good quote about this. “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

Last point: if a 3% increase for the highest incomes seems unfair, it’s worth noting that Bush tax cuts were hugely regressive: According to one set of data, “the top one percent of households (whose incomes average nearly $1.2 million) will receive an average tax cut of approximately $40,990 in 2004. This is more than 40 times the average tax break for those in the middle fifth of the income distribution.”

So why not turn Joe’s question on its head: why does someone in the middle income get a tax break that’s 40 times less?

The Poor, Poor Rich

Today is Blog Action Day, and the theme is poverty. Considering the meltdown of the US financial system, it’s a really timely topic.

Both the New York Times the Wall St. Journal have been hard at work covering how the souring economy is having an effect on the rich.

On Oct. 3, the Times ran “They’re Pinching Hundred-Dollar Bills,” noting that the number of private jets for sale is up 31 percent, that champagne sales have softened (“but sparkling wine has gone up”), and that some of the super-rich are downsizing from three multimillion dollar homes to two.

“The superwealthy in America are in a state of shock,” said Ronald Winston, honorary chairman of Harry Winston, the jeweler. “They are not rushing out to buy expensive diamonds. The psychological mind-set of the nation is keyed to the stock market, and in a downturn everybody is psychologically affected.”

The next day, the Times ran this:

This was further navel-gazing: a yacht broker noted, “The yacht is probably the first thing to go,” the bar and bat mitzvah market is soft, more luxury homes are on the market, etc. etc.

Then, this:

DESPITE these gains in the middle class, though, the truly wealthy have pulled away from the pack. Not since the late 1920s, just before the 1929 market crash, has there been such a concentration of income among individuals and families in very upper reaches of the income spectrum, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Paris School of Economics.

Some say that anger over the yawning wealth divide found traction in the highly charged and polarizing debate in Congress over the bailout bill.

Which is somewhat shocking, since it’s true, but off-topic. Isn’t the point of these articles to let us know about how the rich behave so we can emulate them?

Today in the Wall St. Journal, “The Billion-Dollar Question: Is Bling Over? How Luxury Executives Are Handing the Financial Crisis; Selling the Yacht.”

It’s about as nauseating as you’d expect. Sure, there’s a tinge of schadenfreude in reading that the pampered rich have to cut back, but selling one house is infinitely less painful than being foreclosed out of your only one.

Bad as that is, it’s nothing compared to real poverty. It just so happens that I was researching refugee camps recently, and read an article in the Guardian about the Dadaab settlement, which is the world’s largest refugee camp:

An increasingly violent insurgency in Somalia is fuelling a fresh refugee crisis with nearly 40,000 people arriving at a desert camp in north-eastern Kenya this year despite the border being closed.

The Dadaab settlement now hosts more than 210,000 people, making it the world’s biggest refugee camp. With at least 200 new arrivals every day, aid workers are struggling to cope.

“We are already at bursting point,” said Maeve Murphy, field officer with the UN Refugee Agency in Dadaab, 60 miles south of the border with Somalia. “And more refugees are on their way.”

The temperatures reach 104F (40C). “The newcomers’ shelters are desert igloos; bent branches covered with plastic sheeting and blankets.” Rapes and violence are common. Another story notes that “Life in the refugee camps is harsh. The refugees have no legal status and cannot move beyond the camps without permission.”

Joseph Stalin was reputed to have said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

It’s not worth thinking about the rich and their millions. It’s a statistic. And it’s too hard to think of 210,000 displaced, suffering people, since that’s a statistic too. But it’s worth thinking of that child in that photo. I was looking at a clothing catalog last night, and realized that boy needs my money more than I need that sweater.

It doesn’t matter that Ralph Lauren upped the ante on its notoriously expensive Ricky bag, that it’s now available in 20 shades of alligator skin, including platinum, “vibrant cherry” or cobalt, that it’s priced from $12,995 to $28,995, or that the company is confident that it’s well-positioned with its customers. No matter what the Wall St. Journal writes, that’s all bullshit.

What matters is stepping away from the American consumer trap (and the American media that perpetuates it), and realizing that you have all you need — in fact, you have more than you need. You were incredibly lucky not to have been born in Somalia, or in about half the world, where people live on less than $2.50 a day. You were lucky not to be one of the 26,500-30,000 children who die each day due to poverty.

Christmas is coming. If you’re going to spend money, here are five places guaranteed to put your money to better use than Ralph Lauren or a yacht broker.

• Mercy Corps -works with countries recovering from disaster, conflict, or economic collapse
• UNICEF -The UN Children’s Fund provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries
• ninemillion.org -created by the UN refugee agency to give children better access to education, sport and technology
• Right to Play -uses sport and play to improve children’s health, life skills, and foster peace in disadvantaged countries
• Kiva – the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website

Quiz: Name that Product!

Let’s play a little game. I’ll give you three product names, and you try and guess what the products are. Okay? Here are the first three:

• Rialto
• San Martine
• Rosario

It’s something exotic, right? Rialto is a movie theater name, and Rosario sounds like a Brazilian soccer players. So maybe they’re European sports cars?

• Cabernet
• San Raphael
• Rochelle

Okay, not sports cars. You might give a car an incomprehensible genome name (E46 E series, or the CLK320), or if you’re Volkswagen, you might use bizarre-sounding names like Tiguan and Touareg 2, but you’d never name a sports car after a type of wine. The color, certainly — champagne, burgundy — but not the car itself. (Otherwise I’d be driving a Mickey’s Malt Liquor 40 Series.)

But I digress. Still, got to be exotic, right? Do you have a guess? No? Then let’s continue.

• Palarre
• Pillow Talk
• Fables and Flowers

Hmm. With Palarre, I’m really thinking exotic, since it doesn’t even mean anything. But then … pillow talk? What do the sweet nothings whispered by lovers when they’re nekkid and amorous have to do with places like San Martine, or nonsense like Palarre? Maybe it’s lingerie?

Then: Fables and Flowers? That sounds like something from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Signature line of bedding and towels. Color me baffled.

Here are the last two:

• Prairie Flowers
• Laureate

Prairie Flowers has to be a scent, or a fabric pattern, right? But if that’s the case, what is Laureate? It means something worthy of honor or distinction, but if it were a product, I can only imagine a leather-bound notebook, perhaps, I dunno, burgundy-colored.

So … give up? Yeah, I would have been stumped too, only I happened to see the product list. But just to help a little more, I went to the company’s website, and pulled a few more names.

• Portrait
• Kathryn
• Devonshire
• Memoirs
• Iron Works

… that help? No? Then how about …

• Gabrielle
• Cimarron
• Pinoir

Give up? Okay, here’s the answer. They’re Kohler toilet models.

I bought a replacement flapper for my toilet. This is the package. Who woulda thunk?

Want a Sustainability Tip? Ask Anyone

I’ve been writing a sustainability tip for my company’s internal newsletter for about two years. When I started, I had to go searching for sustainability tips, and found some good ones from places like the Georgia Conservancy.

But things changed quickly, especially as people started to figure out that climate change might actually be a problem. Not long after I started writing my tips, magazines started running “green” features and “green” issues, with helpful tips like change to CFL light bulbs, and buy a designer reusable shopping bag. (The Onion nailed this with their “Obligatory Green Issue” — which I’d link to, only their archives suck.)

Nowadays green advice comes from everywhere, including the American Psychological Association’s annual meetings. Here are two tidbits of their advice I covered in my newsletter:

1) Walking outside rather than inside — even for just 15 minutes — makes you feel happier, more energetic and more protective of the environment, two studies found.

2) “One of the first things you think of is turning off lights when you leave a room or changing the thermostat settings in the house. They don’t think first of caulking windows or upgrading your furnace,” says Paul Stern, a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

“More insulation in the attic and tight windows make more difference than changing the thermostat setting. Having a more fuel-efficient car makes more difference than any amount you’re likely to decrease driving.” (Source: USA Today)

Two weeks later, I found three more. This is also from my newsletter:

1) The United Nations is hitting us where we eat. Last week Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that people should reduce their meat consumption. Though his comments are controversial, the UN estimates meat production accounts for nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions (more).

2) Instead of “Drill, baby, drill!” the American Physical Society urged the US last week to insulate, baby, insulate. The 46,000-member group suggested that with current or almost-on-the-market technologies, buildings could be made dramatically more efficient — enough to cut projected energy use in U.S. buildings 30 percent by 2030.

3) Tinkerbell is teaming up with the US Dept. of Energy to help teach kids how to save energy — too bad Consumer Reports is arguing that one Tink/DOE recommendation, Energy Star, “saves energy but hasn’t kept up with the times.”

Now, when you Google “sustainability tip,” the advice comes from schools, magazines, newspapers, the American Association of Pediatrics, conservation nonprofits, the city of Canterbury in New Zealand, and even the San Diego International Airport.

This last one a delightful bit of dark irony. Why? Though the airport lists 30 sustainability baby-step tips (“Save old tattered towels and t-shirts for cleaning. Cut them into squares to replace store-bought rags and paper towels.”), they omit the elephant in the room that applies directly to them: flying.

How bad is flying? One transatlantic flight for a family of four creates more CO2 than that family generates in an entire year.

So it’s all well and good that the airport is telling me to save my t-shirts. But it’s also good to get your sustainability tips from places a little more credible than Tinkerbell and the airport.