Mar 25, 2019

Got Soul?

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

On the shake-down cruise for our new miniature motorhome back in the summer of 2013, I managed to do something dumb and my bicycle slipped off of the trailer and dragged along for a couple of blocks before a Good Samratian (Look it up, that is supposed to be an oxymoron.) took sympathy on me and flagged me down. This is a 25+-year old, no-name (SuperGo) mountain bike that has suffered all sorts of depredations, but was my only bicycle and I'd intended to ride it when we got to the campground. No such luck, though. The rear derailleur was trashed and there is no hope for an 18-gear bicycle without a rear shifter. The rest of the bike was in pretty decent shape, road-rashed but ride-able. If I had $20 worth of parts, I could have resurrected the bike and the bicycling portion of the week.

While we were hiking the area, we ran into a shop that specialized in tasteless Velvet Elvis tourist crap made by "local artisans," sodas and packaged ice cream, and a bicycle rental/repair shop. I half-hoped the bike shop might have a used replacement shifter for cheap, since they rented a butt-load of cheap bicycles to untalented and uncoordinated tourists. It didn't take long to realize that was a non-starter. The bike shop guy claimed that he could sell me the parts I needed for less money than in the Cities and that their repair job would be the best available. "We're a bike shop with a soul," he claimed.

Ever since Mathew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work hit the bookstands, every breed of repair guy has been claiming to be specially soulful in his work. Since, for most of my life, I've been around musicians who are the original source of people with soul, I have a few bases for comparison. Like lots of trendy qualities, the rule for musicians is if a player claims to be a "Soul-man," he isn't and wouldn't be allowed to park any where near someone who is one. Mechanics and technicians, almost by definition, are the polar opposite of soulful. They might be spiritual, in one of the thousands of ways humans make claim to that status, but "being one with nature or machine" is usually not the attitude of the usual mechanic. It's true that a lot of small, independent bicycle shops are staffed by die-hard bikers who believe they are saving the world on human-powered machines and that is a damn soulful approach to life, but making claim to being specially soulful in that crowd is either clueless or arrogant or both. For a baseline, I looked up the word "soul" in Webster's little book, but the definitions are nearly useless: 1) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life or 2) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe or 3) a bunch of mindless crap that doesn't define an identifiable or useful characteristic. Ok, maybe the lake resort bike shop was a soulful place. It appears that anything that exists is. I had no idea the word "soul" was so useless in defining anything.

Apparently, being the "King of Soul" wasn't much of an accomplishment, no matter how much I thought it was? No, I'm not buying that. JB wrote the best national anthem in American history and that has to count for something. "Having soul" still accounts for something with me.

Not wanting to be suckered into dumping a bunch of money into a worn-out bicycle, even with all of the emotional attachments, I looked around a bit for signs of soulfulness. Almost immediately after I talked to the bike shop owner, he took off for the day and left the place in the hands of some teenage kids who looked about as soulful as Donny Osmond or that Bieber twerp. Not a good sign. I watched one of the kids "work" for about ten minutes and decided I could survive on foot for a few days. If there had been a case bolt on the bicycle the kid was working on, he would have used an eight pound sledge and a steel chisel to break it loose: a scene right out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if I ever saw one. I saw no evidence the kid knew a pipe wrench from a bottom bracket tool. My bike was busted, but fixable. I decided to take it home and administer resuscitation myself. The If I really needed to go somewhere, I brought the dirt bike with me and managed to keep it on the trailer without incident. We put in a lot more walking miles than I'd planned and that was probably good for me, too.

Once we were settled back home, I pulled the shredded pieces off of the bicycle and found replacements. A local seriously soulful local bike shop sold me a decent replacement derailleur for about $30 and a couple of hours later, I took the repair bike for a post-destruction road trip. It is worse for the wear, but still rolling. Best of all, a bike repair man "with soul" did the work; me. This isn't a new lesson, but a reminder of an old fact. The only person who really cares about my stuff is me. I can't fix everything, but the things I can fix I need to do myself. It's a soulful thing.

Mar 19, 2019

Levels of Stupid


This snazzy advertisement from J&P Cycles appeared in my inbox this morning. One one level, I wanted to write something about how incredibly inappropriate it is to be loading up your hippobike with alcohol advertisements. On another level, I sort of hit the limits on my patience for human, especially American, stupidity. If you follow the link, you'll find all sorts of cheap chrome crap with which you can decorate your cheap chrome crap Harley or yourself.

Why decorating yourself with stuff like this wouldn't be justification for pulling over a rider for a blood alcohol test, any time of the day, beats me. I would even be good with "putting a couple of warning shots into the head, as a warning," as my father used to say.

Mar 12, 2019

Crashes and Deaths by State

How crazy are the drivers in your home state? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety does a nice job of providing data for you to decide. Unfortunately, my HTML/Google Blogger capabilities makes this harder than it should be to read. I apologize for that. Excel spreadsheets don't transfer smoothly to webpage tables and correcting the spacing and alignment is beyond my patience and interest. This is 2017 data, but I doubt ANYTHING has improved since then, since nothing else in this country is getting better.

State
Population
Vehicle miles traveled (millions)
Fatal crashes
Deaths
Deaths per 100,000 population
Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
South Carolina
5,024,369
54,859
924
988
19.7
1.8
Mississippi
2,984,100
41,387
614
690
23.1
1.67
Louisiana
4,684,333
48,094
696
760
16.2
1.58
Alaska
739,795
5,028
75
79
10.7
1.57
Kentucky
4,454,189
50,284
721
782
17.6
1.56
West Virginia
1,815,857
20,106
280
303
16.7
1.51
Arizona
7,016,270
67,821
919
1,000
14.3
1.47
Montana
1,050,493
12,738
169
186
17.7
1.46
Florida
20,984,400
215,810
2,922
3,112
14.8
1.44
Kansas
2,913,123
32,504
407
461
15.8
1.42
Texas
28,304,596
270,621
3,343
3,722
13.1
1.38
Arkansas
3,004,279
35,746
457
493
16.4
1.38
Idaho
1,716,943
17,676
223
244
14.2
1.38
South Dakota
869,666
9,341
111
129
14.8
1.38
Alabama
4,874,747
69,277
864
948
19.4
1.37
New Mexico
2,088,070
28,171
340
379
18.2
1.35
Oklahoma
3,930,864
49,228
611
655
16.7
1.33
Tennessee
6,715,984
80,128
959
1,040
15.5
1.3
Wyoming
579,315
9,492
105
123
21.2
1.3
Georgia
10,429,379
122,398
1,440
1,540
14.8
1.26
Missouri
6,113,532
74,005
863
930
15.2
1.26
Colorado
5,607,154
53,750
600
648
11.6
1.21
North Carolina
10,273,419
117,754
1,306
1,412
13.7
1.2
North Dakota
755,393
9,760
105
115
15.2
1.18
Oregon
4,142,776
37,528
400
437
10.5
1.16
Delaware
961,939
10,242
112
119
12.4
1.16
Indiana
6,666,818
80,282
836
914
13.7
1.14
Maine
1,335,907
15,063
163
172
12.9
1.14
Nevada
2,998,039
27,803
290
309
10.3
1.11
Pennsylvania
12,805,537
104,022
1,083
1,137
8.9
1.09
Nebraska
1,920,076
20,828
210
228
11.9
1.09
Rhode Island
1,059,639
7,997
76
83
7.8
1.04
California
39,536,653
353,868
3,304
3,602
9.1
1.02
Illinois
12,802,023
107,369
1,005
1,097
8.6
1.02
Hawaii
1,427,538
10,513
96
107
7.5
1.02
Ohio
11,658,609
117,194
1,094
1,179
10.1
1.01
Michigan
9,962,311
103,080
939
1,030
10.3
1
Virginia
8,470,020
85,335
783
839
9.9
0.98
Wisconsin
5,795,483
64,160
557
613
10.6
0.96
Iowa
3,145,711
34,241
301
330
10.5
0.96
Maryland
6,052,177
59,417
511
550
9.1
0.93
Vermont
623,657
7,436
63
69
11.1
0.93
Washington
7,405,743
61,569
536
565
7.6
0.92
Connecticut
3,588,184
32,126
260
278
7.7
0.87
District of Columbia
693,972
3,550
29
31
4.5
0.87
Utah
3,101,833
31,874
247
273
8.8
0.86
New Jersey
9,005,644
76,550
591
624
6.9
0.82
New York
19,849,399
129,146
933
999
5
0.77
New Hampshire
1,342,795
13,467
98
102
7.6
0.76
Minnesota
5,576,606
57,922
340
357
6.4
0.62
Massachusetts
6,859,819
60,560
336
350
5.1
0.58

For me, there were few surprises. I absolutely admit that I would assume that Red States have a higher percentage of pissed off assholes and the resulting sorts of highway deaths and mayhem.Texas is, as you'd expect if you've ever driven or (suicidal-ly ridden a motorcycle) in that nutbin of a state, Deathrace 2017 and Beyond: 10 million fewer people than California but 100 more people dead on the highways. The Southeast is consistently the most dangerous place to be on the road with only Virginia in the safest states at #14. Minnesota Nice appears to be reflected in our highway safety record. Traffic congestion seems to be less of a contributor to highway fatalities than you might think, since Massachusetts, New York, California, and many of the  states with significant urban traffic are under-represented in fatality numbers.