DumbCars not looking so good

Two articles on DumbCars recently caught my attention. First, on Nov 2, WSJ writer Jeff Sabatini told it like it is in a not-so-enthusiastic review of Lexus’s new $100,000 hybrid car:

“The biggest con running in the auto industry right now is the notion that hybrids represent some sort of quantum leap in green transportation. Not only is this patently untrue… but it shamelessly plays to the hypocrisy of our society. If we really wanted to save the planet, instead of buying hybrids we would start walking. Or riding bikes. Maybe a few more of us would try public transportation. How about starting with slowing down to the speed limit on the freeway? But let’s be honest: Most Americans aren’t willing to change to conserve energy. Even lifestyle choices like driving a small car, carpooling and living in the vicinity of where we work are largely anathema, which is why I’m not the least bit shocked by the Lexus LS 600h L.”

Sabatini calls the 17-foot, 2.5-ton sedan (which gets 21mpg) a “hybrid limousine,” and points out that it “deploys its technology as a badge of exclusivity rather than environmentalism.” He recognizes, of course, that the car is the “perfect way for a captain of industry to show the little people that he, too, will sacrifice nothing in his attempt to demonstrate to the world that he sort of cares about the environment.”

He signs off with a little note about how the Lexus-limo’s incongruity today isn’t so funny: “Would that we could save the planet while reposed in the back seat of a chauffeured limo, air-conditioned seats reclined, watching a Live Earth concert on DVD and writing a check for carbon offsets. Reality dictates otherwise.”

The second story, a review in the New Yorker of two books on the history of DumbCars, was published 3 days later. In it, Elizabeth Kolbert (the author of last year’s great 3-part series on climate change) points out that Henry Ford’s Model T, when it went on the market 99 years ago, got more miles to the gallon than the average new car today (including the new Lexus LS 600h L). She seems to agree with historian Tom McCarthy. author of  “Auto Mania,” who doesn’t blame Detroit for Detoit’s ills so much as he blames us. And her conclusion echoes that by Sabatini: “The car of the future may be no car at all.”

Recycled stuff invades!

Since I listed ZPG’s recycled tire belts on Etsy a couple of months ago, I’ve gotten sucked into an awesome world of hand-made, creatively-reused, recycled wares — and now it seems such stuff is popping up everywhere.

Meg, the awesome owner of Velo Rouge Cafe, showed me a table made out of old bike wheels by a company up in Oregon called Resource Revival. A few days later, while picking up old tires from the Sports Basement, in the Presidio, a buddy showed me his new handmade Love Life messenger bag, which incorporated a rad swath of crazy old fabric.  Shortly thereafter, I made it down to the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts, otherwise known as SCRAP SF and spent an hour giggling and inspired as I poked through thousands of parts and supplies and doodads. Two friends — Blanche and Mansur — who hand-make hats and wallets and such pointed me to the place; thank you. Then I found out that there’s a similar place over the bridge, called the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. I haven’t been yet… A few days later, I got word that a new place, called Made From Scrap, just opened up in town, and it looks like they’ll be selling ZPG belts soon.

At the same time, friends also alerted me to a couple of big, mainstream-type stories in the news about companies that make stuff out of old, recycled products, including old sewer pipes, vodka bottles, traffic-lights, and old newspapers. There’s a WSJ story from 10/6 that mentions a company in Michigan that makes all sorts of furniture out of old bike parts, and an NYT story that mentions this woman, who knitted an ipod case out of an old magnetic tape.

Here here!

New awesome stuff at ZPG

Exciting new stuff to report from ZPG headquarters!

First: I’m selling a rad new sticker, thanks to the amazing Tori Wentworth.

So… we’ve all bitten it one way or another on the tracks around town — now admit defeat with pride! Just try to keep the rubber side down from now on…

Second: I’ve upgraded to a shopping cart at ZPG, so you can buy more than one item at a time now. (Also, I dropped Google Checkout, since most people prefer Paypal anyway, and it does just as much.)

Third: I’m selling blingy necklaces, for the true bike dorks out there. They’re made out of old down-tube shifters… sawed off, filed down, smoothed out, and polished. Check ‘em out:

Last but not least: the holiday season is upon us, so I’ll be on the East coast, with the fam, until Nov 24. If you order any ZPG merch, it won’t go out until then. But I promise you will get it…

today’s funny (it’s brilliant), from mcsweeney’s

A PRESIDENTIAL-CAMPAIGN SPEECH THAT WILL HELP YOU SWEEP THE POPULAR VOTE.
by Adam Sachs
—-
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for inviting me to your wonderful state here in the great heartland of America but also pretty near the coast. It is an honor to speak from this podium, in this storied courthouse, where so many profound legal judgments were handed down that they more or less canceled each other out.

I am a simple man with a Harvard degree and a solid understanding of tractors. When I was a young boy, my father took me on his knee and told me the principle that has guided my life ever since: “Agree with some things, disagree with other things.” His was truly the Greatest Generation, along with a few that came before and a couple that have come since.

Why am I running for president of the United States of America? That’s a good question, and perhaps there’s no good way to answer it. Or perhaps there is a good way to answer it. Either way, it’s a good question and I’m glad it was raised.

I want to talk a little bit about our nation’s children. Before this speech, a young man named Stanley Exley came up to me. Stanley is a mechanic, a noble profession if there ever was one. Or perhaps he is a chemistry professor, also noble. He was holding his small daughter, Emily, an adorable 3-year-old who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. Stanley is a straight shooter, and he came up to me and asked me a question I’ll never forget: “Do you like children?” And I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yes, Stanley, I very much like children.” Maybe that’s not a popular opinion, but it’s what I believe. And to those of you who would say, “I don’t think children are our future,” I must reply in the strongest of terms: “I disagree.” Sometimes you have to take a stand for what you believe in.

Our country is sharply divided over a war that is being waged in a distant land. My views on this war are clear: it is happening, it is happening in Iraq, and it will continue to happen until it stops. Some people believe we should withdraw all the troops now. Some people believe we should stay and fight until we’ve established a stable nation. Some people believe we should gradually hand over control to the Iraqi government. I feel blessed to live in a country with so many beliefs.

On the subject of South African apartheid: I strongly, strongly, strongly oppose it. I’m glad it’s gone, and I hope it never comes back.

The state of our economy is in flux. Every single day, the stock market goes up or goes down or stays the same. If elected president, I will ask the Federal Reserve to take a good long look at the interest rate and decide whether or not to change it. If elected president, I will create jobs where there are none, and where there are jobs, I will create internships.

Let us take actions that will make people happy.

Let us take actions that will make people healthy or perhaps have the private sector do it.

Let us take actions regarding taxes.

And let us move boldly so that our children and our children’s children can look back and say, “I’m glad they moved boldly on this, this, and that.”

Thank you.

winterfest!

I stopped by the SFBC office today and dropped off a few recycled tire belts as donations for the winterfest auction.

only 3 weeks until the big rad bike party!

(note that there will be 15 kegs of New Belgium brew.)

***extremely rare campy kickstand!***

Seen at Pedal Revolution, in SF. A priceless classic.

George Saunders, I am at your service

Four years ago, back in grad school in Boston, I spent a lot of time reading and drinking coffee at Espresso Royale, over on Commonwealth Ave. I read a lot of nonfiction: stuff by Joe Mitchell, Philip Gourevitch, John McPhee, Eric Schlosser — that kind of stuff — as well as every back issue of The New Yorker I could get my hands on. Espresso Royale is a pretty big coffee shop, and it was easy to bury my head and get lost in books for hours there; dozens of other students were busy doing the same thing. One afternoon I came across a piece of fiction by George Saunders — it was “Pastoralia” — and it made me laugh so hard I couldn’t keep reading. Actually (I remember this distinctly), it made me laugh so loud that the people around me couldn’t keep reading.

That turned me on to George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read all 5 of his books. *(I’ve also adopted a word he coined, goatless, as Zero Per Gallon’s corporate theme.) They’re all hilarious; his imagination and perspective are wry and slick and out-of-control-in-a-fantastic-way and somehow dead-on. (Acclaimed writers have compared him to Vonnegut and Twain, and said amazing things about him too, far more articulately than I can.)

Here’s one such funny thing, called “Ask the optimist”

Anyway, I read Saunders’ latest book, The Braindead Megaphone, on the beach in Mexico last month, and really dug the writerly essays within. There are essay on: a book, full of sharp sentences, that he read in 3rd grade and which changed his life; how his mind boggled when he first read Vonnegut, at age 23; some techniques to sustaining narrative action in storytelling (Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse); and a great review/interpretation/essay on Huck Finn. If you are a student of English or writing or fiction, these essays make the book worth it.

There are also a few “travel pieces” that are unlike any other “travel pieces.” They’re kind of like traditional journalism on crack, and I mean that in a good way. Saunders “reports” on Mexican immigration and the Minutemen patrolling the Texas/Mexico border; the commercial absurdity of Dubai; a 15-year-old boy in Nepal who supposedly spent 7 months meditating without food or water; and a curious land called Britain. If you are an armchair tourist/traveller (or if you enjoy reading Dave Barry), and, like me, you have grown somewhat weary of formulaic travel pieces, these essays will rekindle your imagination and leave you giggling in awe.

BUT, there is one essay above all of the rest — the very first essay, the eponymous essay — that stuck with me the most. It’s 19 pages long, and laser-friggin-sharp. it’s about us/our-brains/the-media/how-we-communicate/propaganda/commerce/writing/politics/democracy and a bunch of, uh, smaller, tangential themes. It is intensely relevant. I wish I could discuss it, in person, over a cup of coffee, with every one of my friends.

The video version sums it up decently.

The compressed written version goes like this:

So you’re at this great party, hangin’ out with smart, articulate, experienced people, and in walks a guy with a megaphone. He’s so loud that most guests can’t avoid hearing him and in some way or another responding to him, becoming “reactors-to-the-guy.” If megaphone guy starts using dumb phrases like “at the end of the day,” everyone else starts using such dumb phrases too. As Saunders puts it, “his rhetoric becomes the central rhetoric because of its unavoidability.” In other words: megaphone guy ruins the party.

The sad/scary part: “responses are predicated not on his intelligence, his unique experience in the world, his powers of contemplation, or his ability with language, but on the volume and omnipotence of his narrating voice.”

But it’s worse that just that. Megaphone guy is not only dumb, inarticulate, and inexperienced; he’s also struggling to entertain people, so he yells, and jumps from topic to topic, “favoring the conceptual-general (‘We’re eating more cheese cubes — and loving it!’), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking (‘Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?’), the gossipy (‘Quickie rumored in south bathroom!’), and the trivial (‘Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?’).”

The result: the megaphone guy puts an intelligence-ceiling on the party. Hence a more accurate nickname for him: braindead megaphone guy.

From there, Saunders backs up, and asks: What’s the best way to accurately transmit information?

“The best case scenario….information arrives in the form of prose written and revised over a long period of time, in the interest of finding truth, by a disinterested person with real-world experience in the subject area. The report can be as long, dense, nuanced, and complex as is necessary to portray the complexity of the situation.”

“The worst case scenario might be: information arrives in the form of prose written by a person with little or no firsthand experience in the subject area, who hasn’t had much time to revise what he’s written, working within narrow time constraints, in the service of an agenda that may be subtly or overtly distorting his ability to tell the truth.”

But wait, there’s more. “Could we make this worst-case scenario even worse? Sure. Let it be understood that the Informant’s main job is to entertain and that, if he fails in this, he’s gone. Also, the man being informed? Make him too busy, ill-prepared, and distracted to properly assess what the informant’s shouting at him…. Welcome to America…”

Saunders suggests that the decline accelerated sharply back in the O.J. Simpson era, and continued through the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He traces the development (or evolution) of a “new style of presentation” and a “new rhetorical strategy” that bolstered obviously-unimportant “stories.”

His take on coverage of the Lewinsky scandal: “More at five about The Stain! Have you ever caused a Stain? Which color do you think would most effectively hide a Stain? See what our experts predicted you would say!”

As he puts it, “if someone has to lecture ten hours a day on a piece of dog crap in a bowl, adjustments will need to be made. To say the ridiculous things that will need to be said to sustain the illusion that the dog-crap story is serious news (‘dog-crap expert Jesse Toville provides his assessment of the probable size of the dog and its psychological state at time-of-crappage’), distortions of voice, face, and format will be required.” Often, such “information” comes in banal language, all revved-up: (“cold WEATHer leads SOME motorISTS to drive less, CARrie!”)

So it all seems kinda harmless, until something like 9/11 comes along, and “our national discourse had been so degraded — our national language so dumbed-down,” that while deciding to invade another country, we let Megaphone Guy, with his “crude, hyperbolic tools” (“countdown to slapdown in the desert!” and “twilight for the evil one: america comes calling!”), lead the way.

As a result, instead of morality, or debate, or curiosity, or any sort of intellectual/ethical examination, we got “news” bits on tactics and strategy, because that was quick and easy to digest, and more-than-moderately entertaining.

“Why aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing discourse should prove more profitable than its opposite is a mystery… In any event, the people who used to ask, ‘Is it news?’ now seem to be asking, ‘Will it stimulate?’” Saunders allows that profit and economic incentives are fine, but adds, “if these trump every other consideration, we will be rendered perma-children, having denied ourselves use of our higher faculties. (He also explores how it is that many well-educated, bright reporters get stuck producing such content.)

And that’s the larger cost of dopey communication, Saunders says. It degrades “our ability to make bold, meaningful sentences, or laugh at stupid, ill-considered ones.” It makes “us dumber and more accepting of slop.” It’s an oversimplification, Saunders admits, but “is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn’t.”

“Next time we hear someone saying something like, ‘We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,’ we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we’ll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive.”

Or, take this example, from Saunders’ essay on Huck Finn: “In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that “Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people’s lives by helping to tell these stories,” it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.”

Is there an antidote? There is, Saunders says.

“Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote.” The battle will be won “with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once.”

“Turn that megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.”

Ridding the world of goats, one at a time

Here’s to Tracey Arnold, a 26-year-old Australian who got drunk at a Friday the 13th party last year, stole a goat, broke into a church, slaughtered it in a satanic ritual, took some photos of her friends and the detached goat head, and then put the head in her freezer.

Unfortunately, she was caught, and fined, and forced to apologize, and forced to undergo psychiatric treatment, but, hey: she was fighting a good fight.

My favorite sentences from the news story:

She “was ordered by a court on Monday to apologize to the church and the dead goat’s owners”

and

“Arnold’s lawyer told the … Court that …when she drank alcohol she made poor decisions.”

*update, 11/7/07: Apparently I’m the recipient of goat-hate mail. Just got this, from “Ken” in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

-Dear J -
Goat I hate this place. La Crosse WI sucks ass because of all the goats on the road, and all the goats in the city council. Old school car driving red neck having goats that would rather pay the price at the voting booth and the gas pump. How J, how? What would notgoat bomb now? Would you tie a singlespeed ribbon around the old oak tree to remember all the old notgoats? Watch your left, goats are there.

Update 11/8/07: More news from the (robotic) goat world:

Owners of a Japanese gambling facility have created an animatronic Rocky Mountain goat that “eats” about 500 losing tickets every day. Kids love it, apparently. Hey, as long as it’s not the real thing, it’s cool.

brakeless and helmetless in SF, the really really ridiculous way

Ted Shred rides the old-fashioned, Fred Flintstone way; as he puts it, “I trust my feet more than anything else.” Um, yeah. At least he’s sponsored by Vans. He’s not lying when he says the way he rides is like “doing trapeze with no safety net.” Enjoy…

wake up, race bike. repeat daily.

My buddy Page, in DC, sent me this little gem a month ago:

I have a bike race every morning I ride to work. I write down my times and distances and compute the speeds using an equation I learned in 7th grade. Life is such a thrill that way. Coming in to work today I had raced 126 times in the past 13 months and my bestest of the best time was 19.5 mph on the 26th of June. I have no memory of that day in particular, but I’d imagine I was down-wind and made some stoplights because it’s pretty far ahead — 0.45mph — of the next fastest. Most days are around 17-18mph.

The idea of reaching 20 mph has been sort of like the fake bunny at a dog race: trying to catch it takes care of any would-be existential angst. Lots of things work that way: the prospect of striving leaves our identity in its wake, so it doesn’t matter that it’s a fake plastic bunny and we wouldn’t want it even if we caught it. The challenge then becomes perpetually finding something to be the fake plastic bunny even when we know what it is.

I caught it today. 20.3 mph. And here is how I caught it: my front wheel was on backwards, so the little magnet that plugs into the speedometer was on the wrong side, so for the whole ride it said 0.0mph, and I never knew my speed. So it was mental! And now I search for another decoy.

track bike SOLD!

It’s a rare Casmano, and it’s spicy sweet — handmade by Steve Casmano in Portland, OR. 58cm, custom track frame. Lugged steel. Suzue Pro-max hubs laced to non-machined silver Velocity rims. Shiny steel drop bars. Cinelli stem. Drivetrain = eh. Fork is drilled for a brake. Pedals not included.

I’m looking for ~$800. Shout out to me!

free blinkies!

I spent a couple of hours last night at 17th and Valencia handing out — and installing — front (white) and rear (red) blinky lights to bikers who didn’t already have blinkies of their own. All over the city, the SFBC distributed 1500 lights, courtesy of the MTA (which provided the lights). They went fast!

trickster treat 07

last night i raced around town with 50 other riders, and along the way trampled through a dark pet cemetery, pulled a dead (plastic) baby from a lake, ogled at a haunted house, ran through a spooky cave, and ended up at the top of mt. davidson, in a cold, eerie fog.

the result: I came in second place (right behind devin), and won a KHS track frame. I also fell on my ass while descending the hill at 2mph. go figure.
*results*

1 – devin
2 – jonny5 (me)
3 – christina
## paul, charles, chris, and craig (missed some checkpoints)
4 – judah
5 – tommy
6 – jenny
7 – Antwon
8 – Ben Joaquin
9 – Daniel
10 – Daryll
11 – Igor
12 – Caleb
13 – Jonathan B
14 – Tony
15 – Steve
16 – Seth
17 – Dennis
18 – Miles
19 – Emil
20 – Jeremy
21 – Jonathan
22 – Ted
23 – Mike B
24 – Sarah V
25 – Levi
26 – Winford
27 – Chris P
28 – Phil