Colliding impressions

Instead of spending this morning at the office, I got out of the house earlier than I have in five years or so to drive to the middle of the state for a clinical meeting. Some, but not all, regular readers here have clinical backgrounds, and I hope they'll forgive me for skipping the details. I found it absorbing. A description would put non-clinical folk into a coma.

Just the other day I was thinking about how our arrangement of the calendar in these latitudes wastes about a quarter of the year's gift of sunlight. We obstinately start our summer seasons at Memorial Day and end them at Labour Day. This cuts a month off the long days of May, and ignores the last final fortnight of mild temperatures in September. We have few enough of either and should get the most from them.

After 40-odd years living on the New England coast, I haven't got used to the baleful influence of spring sea breezes. Fact is, it doesn't get reliably warm around here until  the middle of June. Those of us subject to what we spent the morning calling thermal allodynia can resent this a bit. Growing up inland,  I came to expect consistent warm temperatures to show up near the end of April. Today's midstate meeting was a reminder that they still do. I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time outdoors, but what I had was sweet.

Add to all this was the Facebook comment of a former colleague and fellow New Hampshire native about the smell of a New Hampshire spring. That brought back a range of recollected sensations. Smell leads the list, for those warm spring days bring out the life in scores of plants just waiting for the prompt. Spring brings out birdsong, and tempts  boys to try the first swim of the year: once I remember trying that from a boat in the middle of a trout pond that still had ice at one end.

It's also the season when a real dirt road is at its peak of favourable sensations. As Newt Tolman wrote, we're not talking about gravel roads here. A true dirt road is a pair of bare ruts surrounded by grass and wildflowers. The dirt is alive; its smell is full of the promise of life. Walking barefoot on a dirt road in spring is a purely sensuous experience. The soil is midway between the yard-deep mud of early spring and the foot-deep dust of summer. Tolman described the texture as glassy. Looking back,  I recall it as that of newly-thrown pottery: cool and yielding to pressure.

It's worth something to spend a few hours listening to lectures in clinical science to get this flood of recall. I hope there are still children in the country uplands who get to taste these things.

Road Rage: his or mine?

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OK, I was a little unfair last time to Greater Boston and the Marblehead Reporter. Their bicycle coverage turned out to be reasonable. However, the Reporter also ran an Op-Ed signed by Joe McLaughlin that neatly captured all the venom and hypocrisy of those who don't just dislike bicyclists behaving badly, but hate all bicyclists all the time. It follows the time-honoured pattern of much expression of this hostility. It begins with an attempt at reasonable dialogue, drawing comparisons between Massachusetts road behaviour and West Coast behaviour. (He saw all this on one trip to Seattle.) 

Reason usually is too much for these people to sustain, and they collapse into naked hostility after one or two paragraphs. It would appear that Joe brought nothing back from the West Coast but a skinful of pent-up hostility toward all bicyclists everywhere.

In 30-plus years as a cyclist, what I've observed is that motorists carrying a chip that size on their shoulder remember every bicycle infraction they have ever seen. They don't seem to have quite as sharp a memory for the tens of thousands of thoughtless acts that bicyclists are subjected to daily when they exercise their right to use the road.

Joe informs us that there are two types of "bikers....Turned-down handlebars, skinny tires, Spandex and Day-Glow [sic]: Seldom do the rules apply. [The other group:] Turned-up handlebars, fat tires, polo shirt and Bermudas: Not so much of a threat."

Threat, Joe? Threat? In your stereotyped universe, you seem unable to remember that car and driver outweigh the bicycle and rider by 3500 pounds or more.  Bad behaviour is endemic on the roads of Massachusetts, and isn't confined to people on wheels. But good heavens! A bicyclist's carelessness poses an inconvenience to the Kings of the Road, not a threat. On the other hand, a driver's carelessness or animosity may seriously injure or kill a bicyclist. You seem to forget that, Joe. Your stereotype also illustrates the habit bicycle haters of arguing from the extremes. Cyclists between the extremes seem to be invisible to you.

Despite Joe's failed struggle to be open-minded, he would have us believe that West Coast law enforcement means cracking down on cyclists and giving motorists a pass. Sorry, that's what happens here, now. Experienced cyclists will testify that they feel no one is on their side: not police, not prosecutors, not judges, and certainly no motorist who failed to master the bicycle at age eight, and has it in for everyone who did. When I see cyclists disobeying traffic laws, I blame the individual, not everyone on two wheels. I do the same with careless motorists: I just have many thousands more chances to exercise my forbearance.

The West Coast seems to be ahead of us, to be sure. I can only speak for Berkeley, not Seattle. There, enforcement is level, making no distinction between users of the road. Sorry, no entitlement for anyone. And sorry, Joe, that doesn't mean everyone always obeys the laws. There are still jaywalkers, still sidewalk cruising cycling stoners with headphones, and many thoughtless fools on four wheels. Could Massachusetts laws have more uniform penalties? Absolutely, but whose fault is that? The cyclists and pedestrians, or is it an unmotivated police, judiciary and legislature? None of these can be bothered to take cyclists and road safety for all seriously until there is a fatality, such as the high-profile cyclist death in Wellesley last year? Even after a fatality, the motivation won't stand much strain. Officialdom's attention span is very short where bicycles are concerned.

Next time you go to the other coast, Mr McLaughlin, try opening your eyes. Next time you drive here, try to generate a little empathy for users of the road other than yourself.

Gather ye bicycles while ye may

I got the mountain bike back on the road. Shakedown cruise revealed the usual  inventory of required tweaks. Headset is a trifle too loose, rear brake cable needs to be tighter. However the main event--the new rear wheel and gear cluster--are working well. I bought the wheel with a bolt-on axle, intending to replace it with a quick-release. That comes later: the quick release I had available has seen better days.

Non-cyclists can wake up now. The question will be whether the media will have run all bicycles off the road by the end of this week's "objective" coverage of sharing the road . The week seems to be shaping up as "trash cyclists" week under the guise of balanced reporting. My opinion of  Greater Boston has been vile since April 15. They're turning the whole week onto this topic and I expect little or nothing in the way of objective coverage. The local media up heah are doing this too.

By the time they're all done, I fully expect to have SWAT teams breaking down my door and bomb squads taking my bikes off for "examination." I've seen some balanced reporting on this subject before. By the time they're done, you'll need to hail a cab to cross the street,  because the balanced reporters will make one thing clear: The road is for no less than four wheels. As I said, I admit my current bias against Greater Boston. I wonder if the host will admit hers?

If we could be objective, I have a contribution to make. I was driving through downtown Salem at lunchtime last week. As a woman stepped out of a restaurant, she was nearly (by nearly I mean inches) run down by a cyclist: on the busy sidewalk, cruising at maybe 12 mph, wearing noise-deadening headphones. He didn't appear to apologise; in fact, he hardly acknowledged the woman's existence.

It's hard to know where to begin critiquing an asshole like this. I just know where I wouldn't begin, and that is to damn all cyclists and keep all of them off the road, but that's exactly what I expect to hear during a week of supposedly objective bike reporting.

Wake me when it's over, and let me know if I should bury the bikes.

No lack of non-news

I  have little doubt that my skeptical view of the three amigos arrest down in Dartmouth is unpopular. My skepticism is fueled in part by a series of media reports referring to the trio as "terrorists." Did the reporters dream this up themselves or were they led by lapsis linguae on the part of law enforcement? Why do their attorneys find it necessary to insist that they had no part in the bombing when the charges say nothing like that?

I think you have to be an historian, a Southerner, or both to remember Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted of conspiracy in Abraham Lincoln's assassination for the crime of setting Booth's broken leg, and perhaps panicking like the Amigos afterward. Despite the reasonable doubt that has caught the attention of many, in the mania that followed the assassination he was tried by military tribunal and convicted. Pardoned in 1869, Mudd's conviction has never been overturned. To  this day, majority opinion is confident of Mudd's complicity in the assassination plot. Links such as this are hard to find.

In the present atmosphere,  Tsarnaev's Three Amigos don't seem to stand much of a chance. Now or for all time. The evidence suggests no more than the crime of aggravated adolescent male stupidity, but that won't signify. There's a lynch mob mentality; there's an obsession with proving the Tsarnaevs didn't act alone. The latter is especially disturbing: the acts of self-radicalised individuals appear to be more dangerous and less predictable than any acts of organised terror. A thoughtful government would focus on that.

I'm also rather ashamed that Boston has to carry on so obsessively about an attack that killed three and injured 280 (including the superficial injuries), whilst Bangladesh mourns over 600 dead in the collapse of a sweatshop. Are we checking labels in our clothing purchases, changing our buying habits, in protest? I don't think so.

Likewise, unpopular as it is, I'm leaning toward support of Ron Paul's criticism of the Boston police lockdown the Friday after the bombing. The problem with giving the police all these toys is how fond they become of using them. We've already had a number of incidents in which police went to arrest someone, without even the quaint notion of probable cause, using 20 cops in BDUs, body armour and helmets, and carrying automatic weapons, smashing down the doors of what turned out quickly to have been an innocent person's house. There's also the disturbing report that in Newtown, CT, police stopped to don their federally funded BDUs, body armour etc. before heading for the school. If true, this would take the riffs of Alice's Restaurant to a tragic extreme.  I fear that the police mentality is too easily distracted by toys of this sort. One cop with a sidearm, on the scene in under a minute, would have helped much more than a dozen with all the militaristic regalia.

Good idiots, bad idiots

The other day, I was observing how simple it is to obtain gunpowder cheaply. Evidently, I overestimated the intelligence of our alleged perps. We are informed that they spent nearly $200 (or $400...whatever) to buy two mortar-type fireworks in order to obtain an inadequate (or barely adequate...whatever) supply of gunpowder at a premium price. Supposing this to be in fact their only source of the stuff (a point being contested as I write) I suppose we are lucky that they weren't smart enough to buy bulk black powder online or in person at under $20 a pound, considering the damage they were able to achieve with whatever they had.

Fortunately the backbone of terrorism seems to be disaffected young men who are also dumb as rocks, at least when it comes to practical explosives. All of this probably makes them good idiots.

The backbone of their diametrical opposites is also comprised of the disaffected, mostly but not exclusively male and not necessarily young, Americans. The chief points they have in common, besides the default level of stupidity, are  a sense of victimhood that makes self-pity look courageous and a level of gullibility that would gladden the heart of a carnival barker. Most of the Americans of this stamp fortunately carry out their jihads in the empty space between their ears.

I was also reflecting on how inappropriate the words "theory" and "theorist" are when paired with "conspiracy." At last, I have a better combination. Let's call them "conspiracy toddlers." Their behaviour is right out of the terrible twos. Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the evidence, their response is an emphatic "NO!" Like toddlers, they feel no obligation to support their position with reason. What's more, they have the same motivation: attention-getting. Right now, anyone so inclined can have their pick of Marathon bombing conspiracy baby-talk. It's all plausible if Oz's Scarecrow has more brains than the audience, especially because it floats free of the need to provide evidence.

My freshman political science professor taught us to eschew the notion of a political spectrum. He said the term conjures up a false notion of a linear progression, with Hitler on one end and Mao Zedong on the other. He favoured the idea of a circular progression. He showed us how, in this model, the extremes of either camp overlapped and mingled, giving us Adolph Zedong and Mao Hitler, as it were. Now we have Jihadis and right-wing conspiracy toddlers, and after a short time, they all sound the same.

What I'm doing today

By a fortunate coincidence, this is my platelet donation day. It's as important to donate  a few days after a disaster as it is at the time, because things like the Marathon bombing draw down blood supplies dramatically. That's especially true of platelets, which have a shelf life of just five days. One unit of platelets can do the work of six units of whole blood, which makes them useful little buggers.

About 11 percent of the American population is eligible to donate blood, but only three percent do so, and many of them don't do so regularly. That's why blood supply runs short of demand even in good times.

If you are eligible to give blood, and don't, you'll find most regular donors tolerant of the reasons you don't. I'm not one of them. That's due half to my native impatience, and half to experience. If you'd ever seen a Navy Corpsman lying down to give two units of whole blood at once, a desperate measure in desperate need, you'd get the experience part.

Fear of needles is a learnt response that one can unlearn.  So is getting creeped out by the sight of blood. As nurses say, it's just a liquid.  I wouldn't suggest that most people start by doing platelets. A whole blood donation takes very little time; the red tape takes longer than giving the red stuff. Platelet donations take (red tape included) a couple of hours and usually involve both arms. But where else does one get to lie on a heated couch in the middle of the day, under heated blankets, and do nothing but squeeze a rubber ball and watch a DVD?

The Internet has been afloat with people offering prayers for Boston this past week, and West, TX as well. Prayers be damned. If you can give blood, you should.

long shadows and such

The FBI wouldn't tail *this* guy on a Russian tip.

Now that the alleged perp has been captured we can start our favourite sport, the blame game. It seems that the FBI will be the primary finger-ee for having had a tip on Tamerlan and dropped it. Yeah well, where did that tip come from? The long shadow of the Cold War guarantees that the FBI, of all agencies, wouldn't take a tip from the Russian government seriously enough to keep an eye on Boris Badenov, let alone a Chechen nobody.  Nor would any Republican in Congress now lining up to lynch the agency and its director.

Whatever the facts,  we seem to have given Russia two things. First, Putin can now say "We told you so" very loudly. Second, he now has a licence to go in and take the Caucasus apart whether there is an active rebellion or not. When he's done, he can smile and say how he'd done it to show friendship with the US. Blech.

On other matters, I'm glad Dave Henneberry, who whose boat was literally in the line of fire in the capture of DzhokharTsarnaev, is getting more than a little online help. Had he not been so dedicated to his boat that his first act, aside from lighting up, on being allowed to step out of the house, was to check up on it, this drama would probably still be going on, and there might have been more innocent casualties. I'm sure many of the half-wit internet comment mob are condemning this generosity, but it wouldn't be necessary if he could expect institutional help. First, if his boat or homeowner's insurance company had immediately manned up to cover the damage or loss, there would be no need for support. As for government? I still remember the comment of one of my junior high history teachers, over 50 years ago, that there were then, still,  government Civil War claims that had not been paid. So, good luck with that source.

Having dumped on the legitimate media over the last few days, let's not spare the wannabe media of the social networks. These would be the ones whose Reddit crowdsourced "news" identified two or more innocent people as Marathon bombing suspects, people whose lives are likely to carry this stain forever. Not, you say? Imagine these people being Googled by some HR person as stupid as the Redditors in five or ten years. What do you suppose the results might be?

Some of the crowdsourcers have defended their actions with equal parts of vigour and stupidity. If you don't yet believe in the widespread idiocy of this news source, remember that this lot can't tell the Czech Republic from Chechnya: more proof that the education of Americans in geography is the worst in the world. Even though this sort of thing can be fact-checked with a couple of keystrokes, these journalistic wannabes are too lazy to do so.

If you rely on social media for information, these are the people giving it to you, about the only ones who can manage to make the American mainstream media look good.

And finally, one thing that most red-blooded Americans don't understand is why a Tamerlan Tsarnaev could turn against a country that "had taken him in," rescued him from the perpetual conflict of the Caucasus.

I do. My studies taught me that the older an immigrant is, the less likely he or she is to fully assimilate. It's most evident in language. Children under ten still have very fluid speech patterns, and adapt readily. After that, adaptation becomes progressively more difficult on every front.

In my young adulthood, I learnt a dirty little secret. My grandparents, especially my grandmother, never fully assimilated to the United States. During the Depression, with my grandfather unemployed and my grandmother only working part-time, they were angry, resentful, and not careful to keep their opinions away from their children. My father and aunt, by then in their teens, were just as angry with their parents. They were assimilated and more American than my grandparents. Sorry, red-bloods: failure to assimilate is more common than you may think.

What curiosity got the cat

One of the surgeons working on the wounded of the Marathon bombing told the media that they were removing "ball bearings...2mm to 3mm diameter" from many of the wounded. Since curiosity isn't the strong suit of contemporary media, especially of the broadcast variety, "ball bearing" became the trope of choice to describe one of the ingredients in these two nasty bombs.

However, I'm afflicted with both curiosity and skepticism. I'm also a recreational cyclist trying to keep machines over 20 years old on the road. As a result I know something about the bearing market. In which it is damn hard to find loose ball bearings of any size; caged and roller bearings have been the norm for most of the 20-odd years since my bikes were built. It's especially hard to find small ones of steel. The few that are out there are ceramic, not steel. Bulk steel ball bearings fall more in the line of antique dealers than mechanics.

A reasonable person should not expect ER surgeons to be up to speed on such mechanical detail. They have enough to do to keep up with their own mechanics. Therefore a reasonable person paid to ask questions might ask if these pellets were truly ball bearings. That reasonable person would notice that while loose steel ball bearings have become scarce over the past 20 years, steel birdshot has become common, relatively cheap, and easily purchased in bulk. (This happened when the use of lead shot on waterfowl was proscribed for environmental reasons.) Because many hunters reload their own ammunition, the component parts of a shotgun shell are widely available. 

The projectiles described by this ER surgeon fit the description of #4, #5 or #6 birdshot, available in steel for $15-$20 for a 10 pound bag. That's not much more expensive per pound than the nails also used in the bombs. Depending on the variety, the gunpowder used in these devices is around $15-$20 per pound and available from the same sources in lots ranging (in my search) up to eight pounds: to anybody. Eight pounds is a lot of gunpowder.

My curiosity stops short of trying to search for the purported bomb-making sites: instinct says this is not the time to go prowling around them, so I don't know exactly how much of each ingredient they are supposed to hold. The component figures raise a point. A large part of the "evidence" advanced by talking heads is that these two putzes could not possibly afford the components; therefore they must have had external support. The same sources point to "no visible means of support."

Pardon me, but they had family and one had a wife. They may have been supported by family and one hopes the police will investigate that, even if it doesn't occur to pundits with an ax to grind. Two young men, supported by families, spreading out their purchases, could certainly afford a bomb's raw materials at these prices.

Washington Republicans and the gun lobby are trying to use the bombing as a way to reinforce their argument that stiffer gun laws won't prevent tragedies. Well, if two of the principal components of the bombs are available in bulk to recreational firearms users, then this event most certainly crosses into territory in which reasonable regulation would make a wicked big difference.  Sensible gun control also means bomb control.