The Cyclo- Jalopy (again)

This weekend, i was lucky enough to get to ride the Haulin' Colin built People Powered Parade Float again. And, if this is possible, it was even more fun this time!

We collected the wonderful machine from up on Beacon Hill at Walker's house where we left it last time. This machine has 7 pedaling stations installed upon an old Toyota Pickup chassis. The drivers' seat, transmission, clutch driveshaft, differential, brakes, wheels, tires, steering wheel, suspension and even the speedometer from the Toyota are still intact and are in use in this vehicle..

We pedaled across Beacon Hill. The ride up the slight rise at the top of the ridge of was hard work,

Juliett, Matt, me, Kye, Emily, Dylan, Tom, Davey & Adonia

Davey, me, Tom, Emily, Dylan, Danny, Matt & Adonia

Kye and his dad

Daviy Oil & me & Tom Furtulo pedaling hard uphill

but then we got to Colombian Way which would take us way down hill and all the way to Columbia City. We went very fast!

Near the bottom of the hill, the duct taped tire came apart, slapping the body and making a hell of a racket.

It wasn't serious but it did give us a bit of a scare. We limped the rest of the way to Bike Works. We parked the Octobike by the warehouse and went into the Thursday night work party at Bike Works for refreshments and circle time..

First thing on Saturday, before the parade, Ryan, the amazing lead mechanic at Bike Works went and got us a new tire. And he got it using a bike trailer; i love it!

The purpose of this trip was to move the vehicle down to Bike Works so it could be in the Rainier Heritage Parade on Saturday. We made costumes, decorated the machine and tried to name it. Megan and i tried to come up with a name based on cycle jalopy, but it didn't sound great. I think Chris hit on it a few days later it with Octobike.

Johnathon brought his banjo and Davey his Uke, so we had music on board too! It was a very hot day, and i'm not good in the heat. We tried to stay in the shade while we were waiting.

Davey asked who was going to 'drive', that is, steer and shift. The previous times i had 'ridden' the Octobike i had been pedaling. Since i can drive a standard transmission i volunteered, i figured i'd let everyone else have a turn at pedaling. I actually had fun shifting!! It was just like my old Toyota back in the 1980s.

So i drove in the parade. We had more people pedaling than needed so Juliett decided to show off her AMAZING hula hoop skills. She walked next to the Octobike part of the time, but she got up on the platform and performed while we moved along. It was great -- the crowd LOVED it.

Malia, Emily, Danny, Adonia, Juliett, Matt, Dylan, me, Davey, Johnathon, Meghan, Zack

Perhaps the highlight started off as a danger, loomed towards possible disaster and then turned out spectacular, when a little kid started to run in front of us to grab the candy we were throwing. I jammed on the brakes, forgetting that there was person standing hula-hooping on board. She was knocked off, but she managed to gracefully leap over Emily pedaling in one of the front recumbent positions and she, Juliett, landed on her feet while still hula hooping!!! The crowd went wild! They thought it was part of the act. I apologized to her after the parade.

When the parade was over the people walking were directed to the left into the parking lot next to Bike Works. That would've been ideal for us. But instead, the cops directed us down the steep hill on Alaska St and then even further, and tried go get us to go down Genesee.

So now we had to get up the hill again, and somehow avoid the Parade route. We moved past the football fields on Oregon St and waited for an 18 wheeler to turn around. Then we went up the hill on Rainier Blvd and on Alaska, with traffic. The cop at the intersection we wanted to turn left on was pretty snarky but we were polite to him. We were all pretty happy to pull up in front of Bike Works and find some shade.

We enjoyed the Summer Streets Ciclovita closure of Rainier and talked up Bike Works at the Bike Works booth. Here i am explaining the Octobike to Elizabeth and her family.

Summer streets was over at three and we were going to have to move the Octobike back UP Beacon Hill. Just before 3 good friend Joe showed up. We had been kind of expecting him earlier, he's a strong cyclist and we needed him. He showed up with his friend Chris which was good, but also with a cane and a slipped disc, which was bad. He could barely move.

Once he sat in the Octobike it was clear that he wished he could ride. I convinced him to be our driver while we all did the hard work. He came along!

In this photo you can see that the Octobike still has the brakes, transmission and everything from the truck!

Davey was quite worried that we would not have enough people to power the vehicle up the big hill, but when it came time to leave we had about 22 people volunteering. About 12 of us went. We pedaled out to MLK Blvd and then down the busy street. Davey yelled to people at bus stops that due to budget cuts, we were the bus. I thought it was funny.

We waited a while in the shade at the bottom of the hill while Davey & Danny & Adonia scored us some much needed food.

The we started to crank up the hill. It was very hot, and we were were all suffering but we decided to go up the gorgeous Olmsted parkway Cheasty Blvd which is heavily shaded.

Ryan, Johnathon, me & Joe in the shade
photo by Chris Zömbory

We had enough people that a couple could push and one or two could rest while the rest pedaled. We switched out frequently.

Davey, Danny, Chris, Johnathon, Joe, Emily, Matt & Adonia crank it up Cheasty Blvd in the heat

Johnathon, Joe & me

I took a turn in one of the front, recumbent spots. It's HARD work. I used muscles i don't normally use. I didn't last long.

Chris sweats it out pedaling up Cheasty;
She didn't know her visit to Seattle would be this much fun!

We celebrated once we got to the top and coasted down to Walker's house again. We were all happy to get some food and cold drinks -- it was hard work and took a couple of hours, but it was great fun. I'd do it again.

Here's our route.

Seattle Attacked from The Air

Central Seattle was the victim today of a series of sorties by the most expensive and deadly military hardware in the world.

The extremely low combat maneuvers are designed to frighten and pacify enemy nations. They are performed over residential areas only one time per year, with Seattle being the lucky exception to the strict aviation regulations. No bombs were dropped by the deadly warplanes this time.

While many people interpreted the fear generated by the terror machines as life threatening, it turns out this was just a Soviet style propaganda exercise reminiscent of columns of tanks passing the Kremlin in parade.

The ostentatious display of expensive military hardware was specifically designed to give Americans, especially liberals in Seattle, a warm and fuzzy feeling about war and imperialism and to make them feel happy about spending 70% of their tax dollars killing and subjugating people around the world.

July ride map

In July i rode 450 miles, only 9 miles off of a record for July.

I rode 19 days, 61%, down considerably from previous months,
partially because i was out of town several times for work, or
HAM radio volunteering but also because i lost a little interest
early in the month.

It's not a recession!

I accidentally listened to a right wing talk show the other day.

I didn't mean to, i just wasn't in a position to turn it off. I realize the terrible problems that selective media creates, but like everyone else, I still engage in it. We can learn a lot from people we disagree with. We can even learn a lot from people who are wrong. It's important to hear those things. But it's not easy and it's not comfortable. I usually change the station.

The guest on this show was David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director. He is the person most responsible for Reagennomics. The world we live in today is his doing. He INVENTED this economy. Believe me, I didn't want to hear what he had to say. I'm very angry at him and the Reagen clan. I've heard the right winger arguments and they don't make any sense. The host and panel on this radio show however clearly felt they were in the presence of royalty. They were in awe and each and every one of them, especially the host, took time during introductions to express their deep respect and admiration for him.

After a few minutes of worshiping him, they started asking questions about the budget crisis. Almost immediately he said:

"It's very simple, we must cut the defense budget by 26%, preferably more. We must raise taxes on the rich and even the middle class. We must exclude the wealthy from social security. We have no choice. We've gone way too far."

The right wing host, Dianne Rheam, actually cut his mike and said that he "had to leave". The guests were irate. But I thought it was interesting that the guy who invented this hyper capitalist world says we've gone to far. That percolated in my head for a while.

A couple of days ago I read a quote from Warren Buffet, another annoying republican who I normally ignore. He said, "The debt ceiling debate is a red herring. Our current debt is high, but after WWII it was 152% of GDP. This is not that bad."

I've been trying to ignore the media's mindless babbling about the debt ceiling debate. They are flogging a non issue just to further the Republicans selfish agenda. There will almost certainly be a deal, right at the deadline, the only question is how much blood the Republicans can steal from the American people in that deal. If there is NOT a deal, the Republican Party will never recover. They will never win another election if they shut down the government or if they cause a default. Because despite the constant screaming from the far right about how bad government is, most Americans actually like the government. Just ask Newt Gingrich who's career was ended when he shut down the government.

Yesterday I was stuck in a car for three hours and my mind was wandering when it hit me. This is not a recession. This is a POST WAR economy. It's the classic situation, exactly like every other post war period in US history, in European and Chinese history and in the Roman Empire.

Wars cost money. Lots of it. They are the most expensive thing we can buy. And it's awfully hard to time them so that you have money saved up. So you borrow money for your war, and then you pay it back.

Several years ago as part of my job I was trying to track down inflation rates. I found data from Professor Robert C. Sahr at Oregon State University who had calculated the value of the US dollar annually all the way back to 1665. So I grabbed that data and created a graph.

It's very hard to get any usable information, visually, from this graph, because there are two major phenomena that dominate the graph: the relative stability over a long period of time and the massive inflation since WWII.

So to learn anything useful, we have to zoom in.

Now what becomes obvious is that there are periodic spikes, big jumps in inflation, where the dollar's value declined, but fairly quickly returned to a norm. It's fascinating that, ignoring those spikes, the dollar remained at the essentially the same value for 300 years.

Now with what I know about history, i instantly found the timing of these spikes very interesting. So let's label the years.

Yes. Each spike is a war.

We inflated the currency as a way to borrow money, to pay for the terribly expensive wars, and then we paid it back. It's a normal pattern. The Roman Emperors did the same thing. Since Rome was a military dictatorship, each time a general would lead a coup and become emperor, it would cost a lot of money. So they would collect all of the silver coins, melt them down, and add some tin, and make MORE coins than they started with. They inflated the number of coins but sold them for the same amount. They raised more money.

We just bought a four trillion dollar war, we have to pay for it. It's one of the most expensive things we will ever buy. It's like buying a house, you take out a mortgage because it's one of the most expensive things you will ever buy, then you have to change your budgeting for a period of time because you are paying off the house.

We are paying off our decade long $4,000,000,000,000 war. We may not want to, some of us didn't want the war in the first place, i'm not sure it accomplished anything, but we bought it, we took out loans to pay for it and now we have to pay it back.

Some political opportunists on the right are pretending that the reason we are in debt is because of taking care of the American people, but that is just a lie to try to enrich themselves. If government gets smaller, the wealthy can fill the gaps for themselves, but the other 85% of Americans suffer for the luxury of the wealthy.

We are in a post war economy, we've got a big mortgage, but we still have to buy food. To suggest that the problem is social programs is like buying a house, taking out a half a million dollar loan and then looking at your bottom line, seeing that you are in debt and blaming the cat food.

June riding

In June i rode 498 miles, riding 22 days (73%).

An Earthquake Is Coming

Seattle is in a very earthquake prone region. It took some getting used to. I don't like the ground to move!

For the first 10 years i lived in Seattle we had an earthquake every 13.5 months (by my calculations). For the second ten years i've been here we've had exactly ZERO earthquakes. Or so it seems. Right now we know an earthquake is coming. It's expected on October 29th. No, i know it's impossible to predict earthquakes, but something interesting has been happening. Let me explain.

The first two years i was in Washington there were no earthquakes. Since then there have been eight.  I graphed them here:

(bubbles are magnitude, height is time since previous quake in days)

• Thu 25 Mar 1993 13:34, magnitude 5.6 in Scott Mills OR (far away)
  A small earthquake (here). I didn't feel it although many people did. I was at a fast food restaurant in Factoria.
  
  
• Sat 28 Jan 1995 19:11 5.0 at Robinson Point in Puget Sound (very close!)
  It was cold and rainy and i was just out of the shower and making mac & cheese. It scared the heck out of me!! It was my first earthquake, so maybe my memory is exaggerated, but it seemed huge.
  
  
• Thu 02 May 1996 21:04 5.3 near Duvall (close by)
  A little less scary but still disturbing. I was at home listening to baseball on the radio - the announcer left the booth and there was dead air.
  
  
• Sun 09 Feb 1997 20:26 3.5 under Seattle (very close)
  I felt it, but it was quite small.
  
  
• Mon 23 Jun 1997 12:13 4.9 near Bremerton (near by)
  I was at work at PSC. I was in the bathroom. When i got back to my desk everyone was freaked out about the quake, but i hadn't felt it.
  
  
• Tue 03 Nov 1998 02:40 3.1 near Bremerton (close by)
  It was in the middle of the night and i didn't wake up.
  
  
• Fri 02 Jul 1999 18:43 5.8 Satsop (not close)
  I don't remember this, maybe i didn't feel it.
  
  
• Wed 28 Feb 2001 10:54 6.8 near Olympia (not close)
  This was very big in Olympia, but only 4.2 in Seattle. Still, it was the biggest i've felt. My computer monitor fell in my lap, i ran out of the apartment, thought better of crossing the skybridge and got out of the 100 year old brick building.
  
  
• Incidentally, i was in another earthquake, although not in Seattle
  Mon 10 Jan 2000 22:27 magnitude 2.8 Trapani, Italy
  Very surreal. I was in a hostel in Sicily in even though it wasn't strong, it was long, and we were right on top of it. I took it in stride, but the other people in the hostel, especially the Moroccan students Josef & Rashid in the next room were very scared!
  

Here is a list of Pacific Northwest earthquakes since 1993, [fixed dead link 2013] with the most recent on top. I watch this list weekly.

Nine earthquakes in less than 8 years and then nothing for over 11 years? Well, it's possible, and THE BIG ONE could still happen any day. (I'm involved with HAM radio neighborhood emergency training for just that possibility.)

But it turns out that in fact, we HAVE had earthquakes since 2001, seven or eight of them, all around 7.0 on the Richter scale.  But instead of lasting for 17 seconds or 52 or 31 or even 138 seconds, they've lasted for 28 days!  The plates still slip, the same amount of energy is released, but over a much longer period of time.

Because the energy is spread out over such a long time, they were called Silent Earthquakes when the were first discovered (here in Washington) in 2003, which soon after changed to Slow Earthquakes when the reasons were discovered. Now they are officially called ETS events, Episodic Tremor and Slip, but i like the term Slow Earthquake better. They have since found them in Hawaii, Indonesia and a number of other places around the world. Central Washington University has a nice detailed explanation.

So yes, i know this all sounds like i made it up, it's just so strange.  And wait... it gets weirder! Most amazing of all, they come at regular intervals, every 14 months reasonably dependably.  They are predictable! With some data from The University of Washington and The Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network i made some charts and calculated averages.

You can see the regularity of the events (the 2008 ETS had a long tail, it seemed to end on time, but then there were continuing effects for a couple of months). So using that average, 13.7 months, i came up with a date of October 29th for the start of the next Slow Earthquake. Just this week the PNSN added a prediction of late October to their ETS page [fixed dead link 2013]-- so i guess i came close. I made a calender graph of when the seven well documented ETS events have happened, and used some mathematical modeling to estimate previous, and future events.

The PNSN ETS page, http://www.pnsn.org/NEWS/PRESS_RELEASES/TREMOR_05.html, [fixed dead link 2013]- has all the data on previous Tremors and usually has day to day updates on events when they happen. So keep an eye on it, and be ready for a silent earthquake on Halloween!

Stairway

How can Stairway to Heaven be the best song ever when it isn't even the THIRD best song on it's own album?


Seriously, The Runes Album has at least 3 songs that are clearly better:

Rock & Roll
Bron-Y-R Stomp
and especially
Misty Mountain Hop

roads ridden in May

In April i posted a map of all of my rides for the whole month.
Here's May. In May i rode 503 miles. I rode 26 of the 31 days (81%).

Kitsap weekend

Needing to sleep outdoors, wanting some miles, looking for a holiday weekend activity, i accepted Nadine's invitation (after several years) to camp at Manchester State Park.

I put the tent and sleeping bag on my back, filled my trunk bag with food and pedaled down to West Seattle. Johnathon rode with me. We went over the hill instead of around Alki because i was running short of time.

At the ferry terminal i met four folks on really pretty bikes. I only remember two names, Stuart & Annie. They were heading for a ride on Vashon Island. I recommended Burma Road.

The ride up to Manchester was fast. I set up the tent, ate well, walked in the woods (never saw the water!) and slept very well. Late morning i packed up and as everyone got in their cars i hopped on the bike hoping that the Port Orchard ferry was running on this Sunday in the era of budget cuts. It was. That prevented an 8 mile detour on the freeway. I was happy. From the other end of the ferry it was an easy, hilly ride to my friend Gene's house for a Memorial Day picnic and Gene's beer can chicken.

I crashed on Gene's couch and in the morning decided, instead of riding the 5 miles to the Bremerton Ferry, i'd ride in the rain to Bainbridge Island. I got lost a little in Keyport (it's a peninsula and i couldn't get off). 29 miles later i caught my 4th ferry and was just 2 miles from home!

Medowdale Park

Jeanette and i wanted to get some miles in and after batting around some ideas we decided that a ride to Edmonds might do the job. I had a route in mind but Jeanette was interested in another route, so we agreed that she would lead. It's always nice to follow along.

The Leader instructs.

We wandered around a bit by Shoreline Community College and found our way along the big hills to the forest north of Edmonds.

We're on route.

We stopped at a nice farmers market, grabbed a bit to eat and decided we were not quite ready to turn around so we went north along the shoreline from Edmonds. 'Along the shoreline' in a fjord basin like Puget Sound inevitably means lots of up and down!

Finally we found our selves in a nice park called Meadowdale. We spent a few minutes enjoying the view on the beach and found the gravel trail east out of park. We checked the sign, it said bikes were OK on the trail so we started riding. It was a very pleasant trail through the woods, and reasonably flat.

We were quite enjoying it and finding it pretty easy so we thought it was odd that all the walkers that we passed were congratulating us and treating us as if we were super heros. We commented on how odd it was, it hadn't been a hard ride at all.

Then we encountered the hill. It was about a 35% grade. Walking the bike up it was difficult. Very difficult. We had to rest a while at the top. Then we we worked our way across Lynnwood, mostly on residential streets but also on a few of the big scary multi-lane boulevards that Lynnwood is famous for, until we found the intermittent Interurban trail. That was almost a straight shot back down to Jeanette's house where her husband Richard brought us Indian food and we watched a movie before i took my routine lovely trip back home via Ravenna and Interlaken Parks. It was a good day. I rode 49.8 miles.