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Day: September 25, 2008

Daily Dose of Bigotry

Published September 25, 2008

This nice piece of bigotry, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West showed up in the mail today.

Today I received two nifty things in the mail. The first was these Olympus knock-off batteries from Eforcity for my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW.

The second is the winner, though; that DVD up above there, of Obsession The Movie. In order to form a proper, informed opinion of it I’ll be giving it a viewing, but I suspect that it’ll live up to its reputation of being a neocon-backed piece of anti-Islam propaganda. We’ll see, though. My understanding is that its production has a bunch of neocon backers and copies of it are being mailed out en masse in swing states. Yes, that’s how it came to me… Completely unsolicited, via the US Mail.

I guess it’s time to cue Göring:

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

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Night-Time Trail Riding

Published September 25, 2008

I wanted to post a few of my thoughts about riding single-track mountain bike trails in the dark, with a head lamp:

· While a decent head lamp (like the Nite Rider Digital Evolution I was loaned) works well, having the light helmet-mounted and thus in line with one’s eyes means that shadows aren’t visible in many situations. This is the same as using camera-mounted flash on detailed textured surface and losing the texture in the final image. The result was that I couldn’t tell the depth of many rocks, gravely areas, and roots and almost fell a couple times.

· It’s basically accepted that riding one-way trails opposite the posted direction is okay after dark when done with headlights. Part of tonight’s ride involved going through The Pines backwards. (Videos of this trail forwards are here: 1 & 2.) This wasn’t hard, seemed to flow nice, but felt like a bad dream. It was dark, my field of vision was relatively narrow, there were bright lights dancing around in the distance, and while recognizable the backwards riding made whole trail feel somehow wrong. A couple of times while riding I had the sort of deja vu which comes about when one flashes back to a nightmare where Things Just Aren’t Right.

· Riding in the dark is a lot of fun. It’s a completely different feeling than the normal everything-can-be-seen daylight riding, and I like it a lot.

· A heavy head lamp (like the one I was borrowing) mounted near the front of my helmet made it tip forward slightly on bumpier sections. This was a bit awkward. It might be nicer to use a lighter lamp with a light Li-ion battery mounted on the helmet for balance, although the battery-in-pack setup I used tonight worked great and wasn’t noticeable while riding.

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