Month: April 2017

Optimistic or Marketing Hype?

When my fair city of Aiken was first laid out back in the late 1800’s they started by naming the few streets after South Carolina Counties. As the city grew north and west they eventually ran out of county names, so they started adding US state names. Before the Bomb Plant development just blew-up the size of town to the south it went east a bit and they used some SC city names.

A dozen or so years ago the Aiken Corporation1 built a 30,0000 sq.ft. spec building on the northeast side of town on Beaufort Street across from where Hampton Avenue ended. The city provided the services, water, sewer and paved in a little road extending Hampton. The building was on one of the two 6 acres lots and they zoned it light industrial and they created a small industrial park. Unfortunately, light industry never came. Over the years there have been inquires about the building and every once in a while there will be a little blurb in the paper about something thinking of moving there, but the monolithic appearing structure still sits empty.

This morning on the way to work, my usual route takes me right by the building, I noticed a new street sign leading into the “industrial park” where our underutilized sits. Instead of keeping it Hampton Ave or naming it Hampton Ave Ext, they gave it a different name. In keeping with the city name naming structure it has a sign that says Prosperity even though Google thinks it is still Hampton Ave NE.

Requiem For Bob

When Donna retired she said that the only thing she was going to miss was riding the bike to work on Friday. We decided that seeing as we couldn’t ride the tandem, I would ride a my single bike and she would ride her single bike with me half way and turn around. She would then come back in the afternoon and meet me near the Valve Store, that way she’d get in 1-1/2 bike trips to my one.

Trouble is my regular single bike is a lightweight club racer, not a commuter, so there is no way to mount any of the racks on it that would allow me to transport my clothes and lunch to work. One way to go about it would be to take all the stuff I need at work on Friday by car on Thursday night, then retrieve it by car later Friday evening or Saturday morning. But we used to be so proud about riding to work on Friday because often times we wouldn’t even use the car at all that day, now with this option we would be making two car trips to ASCO to support one bike trip there.

Several years ago when I got the Bianchi road bike we stripped a few of the parts off of the Bob Jackson framed touring bike to upgrade Donna’s touring bike and hung ol’ Bob upside down from hooks in the garage. My idea was to get my old touring bike down and take it and the various other parts, that may have come off it originally or may have come off Donna’s touring bike or may have came off some other random old bike, down to Cyclesport and let Shareen work her magic. If it needed something, and we figured it would, she could source it and fix up my old friend.

Turns out it needed new tires and tubes, a 42 tooth front chain ring, a set of brake calipers, new cables and some handlebar tape. We got it back a few weeks ago and I mounted the front and rear racks, strapped on the front panniers off the tandem and my new trunk bag for my lunch. I took it out for a shakedown cruise around the neighborhood it felt good. The weekend before the first planned ride to work, Donna and I went for a usual Sunday morning Ridgecrest breakfast ride. The clip-less pedals were tighter than on my club racer and there was a slight creaking coming from up front somewhere, but other than that the bike felt like a pair of sturdy well broken-in shoes – comfortable, familiar and ready to go anywhere. When we got home I loosened the screws on the pedals and tightened down one of the front racks mounting screws.

That Friday on the way to work the creaking was still there. On the way home it was little louder. The sound was most evident when standing on the pedals climbing one of the small hills on the route and seemed to coming from the handle bars. When I got home I loosened the stem and pulled it out of the frame, cleaned it off and coated with a little grease, because this could be the source of the sound. I then took the front rack off entirely and went for a ride around the block. The creak was still there when I rocked the bike by pressing down on the left side of the handlebar and lifting the right. So now I’m a little worried about the creaking because the handle bars are original to the bike (which was bought new in 1981!) and after 36 years of life/use they might be suffering from metal fatigue.

Figured I should take it to a professional for a second opinion, so back to Shareen at Cyclesport. Dropped it off late on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday when I called her after work, she said she pulled the handlebars out of the stem and lubed that too, another known creak creator, and neither part looked like there were cracks in them, but the sound was still there. I told her I’d be down to get the bike. When I got there she said, “I found where the noise is coming from.” I said, “Great.” She said, “Noooo, not really.” “See that scratch on the head tube?” “Yeah,” I say, “I noticed that, along with all the other paint imperfections on a 30+ year-old bike.” “Well, that’s no scratch,” she takes a box cutter blade, lines it up with the scratch and proceeds to push it in about a 1/16″ of an inch, “that’s a crack.” It starts at the front, angles up and follows the outline of the lug, ending about 2/3rds of the way around the head tube. Crap.

Happy 4/20 Day

Holy crap, there is a chapter of NORML right here in my fair city.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is famously anti-marijuna, must have been partook in some himself today because he thinks Hawaii is just some island in the Pacific.

Also celebrating Four-Twenty by having cannabis infused almond milk on their cereal this morning, TV execs at FOX, who green lit 10 more episode of The X-Files.

Do it yourself THC enhanced “gummi bears” from The Helpful Woman at Jezebel.

From the New Yorker – The Martha Stewart of Marijuana Edibles who brings new meaning to the word “baked.”

Get one of the best vape pens around, the G Pen Elite Vaporizer, for a big discount today only, so hurry.

See you next year…

Miata Ipsum

Twice a year the MMC has a Planning Meeting to fill up the Club Calendar. There are 2 standard events held each month, a dinner meeting on the first Thursday and a breakfast on the third Saturday. Most of the time the Club President spends the better part of the meeting trying to elicit volunteers to host the standard events and to pick the destination spot. Occasionally there are other random planned events by members, but the number of events that are brought to the meeting already partially formed are rare and the ones that are fully planned out rarer still.

In my duties as Web Guy for the MMC I am called to post the events on the Club Calendar for most everyone. The people who know how to post are rare and of those that do know how, and do, are rarer still. So what usually happens I get a copy of the meeting minutes a date and a name and that is it. In the past I have inserted a stock sentence along the lines of, “Come out and join your fellow Club members for breakfast/dinner and a meeting/drive.”

The other day when entering a breakfast event I wanted a little something different, so I thought, “Why not use some Lorem Ipsum instead. So I Googled it and the resulting page had the link to the Wikipedia page defining it, a few links to Lorem Ipsum generators and further down the page something called Bacon Ipsum, so you know where I went. The event description was a short paragraph of Latin words mixed with words for meat.

Bacon ipsum dolor amet venison sausage est short loin beef. Ipsum turducken quis tail turkey deserunt. Tempor in deserunt fugiat in irure veniam in cillum laborum dolor incididunt ullamco kielbasa. Consequat pork belly turkey porchetta, pig prosciutto kevin non pariatur lorem ground round rump pork loin.

Well, it turns out the fine folks behind Bacon Ipsom have a WordPress plug-in entitled Any Ipsom which allows you to create your own themed Ipsom Generator, so you know what I did. Behold, Miata Ipsum!

Miata ipsum dolor amet et adipisicing consequat dolore speeding in. Slow car fast minim zoom, dragon shocks excepteur nostrud sunt. Exercitation irure dipstick aliquip duis. Adipisicing cas speeding torsen barndoor shifter shocks eyeball vents swaybar rspeed mollit titanium na top down. Cupidatat touring duis nc lorem club ex proident, miata titanium gopro aliquip esse sint.

WWJD


From the song “Trial Before Pilate” on the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar:
-Pontius Pilate-
Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr.
I wash my hands of your demolition.
Die if you want to you innocent puppet!

Friday I watched Jesus Christ Superstar on the TV in the living room. Donna poked in a couple of times as she like the music, but doesn’t really care for the movie. Last year I watched the movie on the laptop and the video quality was not that great, but my rip of the 720p resolution DVD which in of itself was made from the 1973 movie film really looks fuzzy only 9 feet away from a 52″ TV. I’ve read there is a blu ray version of the flick available, but I have also read it wasn’t remastered in any way so I’m not to keen on buying it. There is probably a torrent out there of it. What Would Jesus Do? Would he download the torrent to see if it worth maybe buying it?

Today we watched the totally forgettable movie The Intern. From the title I thought it was that stupid Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson thing, but the trailer had Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway and it seemed kind of fun. And it was, but at 2 hours it was about 15-20 minutes too long. We didn’t need the interns Ocean’s Eleven side trip, Ben at the kid’s birthday party and we didn’t really need the whole infidelity sub plot.

In between we had breakfast out with a small contingent of the MMC, lunch out with a friend, a three mile walk in Hitchcock Woods and plenty of screened porch time. The 3-day holiday weekend is winding down and tomorrow it will be back to work for me and back to the grind of retirement for Donna.

The Tweet is on the Other Foot Now


Every Monday since the end of January I have looked at what was tweeted by @realDonaldTrump and @SenSanders over the weekend, printed out a choice one from each for my political action figures to hold up. It has been great fun choosing something off the map of normal Presidential behavior from The Donald and some well thought out, on-point rebuttal, from the Bernie.

But recently, I think that the IT wizards in the White House have figured out how to intercept Mr. Trump’s tweets and replace them with, well, something an adult high ranking public figure might tweet, then somehow make sure that he sees what ever nonsense he blurted out on his devices only. Bernie’s tweets on the other hand have gone full tilt boogie to the left-wingnut realm: Free College! Free Health Care! Big Paychecks for Everyone!

Because we had visitors from corporate tour the Valve Store last Friday (a Masters Tournament by-product) I stashed my pint-sized plastic political pontificators in a desk draw. Monday morning when I went looking for fresh tweets, I was so frustrated by the reversal in tone from the two that I put them back on my window sill without a tweet card held high. Then as the day wore on and I explained why no tweets to the 3 or 4 people who asked, it dawned on me that I aiding and abetting the social divide that has got this country all out of whack by presenting just my point of view. So in an effort to help heal and to perhaps Really Make America Great Again by showing bi-partisanism, I found a couple worthy entries for my dynamic duo diorama.

Another Week, Another Shirt

I just got my Miata Toys shirts in the mail last Saturday from Blipshift and here I am ordering another one. This uses up all my gift card money except for 65¢.

This one is part of another batch of 25 restomoded shirts and is the only first-time design. It is the winning entry in a design-a-shirt contest put on by the fine folks at Flying Miata. I submitted an entry, it was a rear 3/4 view of the new RF version with the stuff from the Back to the Future DeLoren on it. I labeled it Miata McFly or Back to the Futrue Part MX-5. It is a quick and ugly photochop (click here if you dare) which I thought was clever enough to win, but alas no.

That is OK because I have another design idea that I hope will win me another gift card and consequently another free shirt. This one is inspired by my Fairy2 Godfather David. I’ve got two versions and I’m not sure I like one better than the other. Actually, I’m not sure I like either one of them, but there just has to be a joke in there somewhere using the name of the famous Porsche wheel style. Forgeting the joke, here’s a third attempt, maybe just a 914 outline with “Porsche?” over it.