Get an electric scooter they said ,it’ll be good for the environment they said ..and it’ll be fun…. pic.twitter.com/oEiZNwfL8p
— Penfold (@elbow112) April 9, 2022
Via SortaSaint Ann | Barnhardt
Get an electric scooter they said ,it’ll be good for the environment they said ..and it’ll be fun…. pic.twitter.com/oEiZNwfL8p
— Penfold (@elbow112) April 9, 2022
Via SortaSaint Ann | Barnhardt
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Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
It blowed up real good, REAL GOOD! 😁
LOL
Despite being the archetypal hit by a bolt on the road to Damascus China shill, I’ll admit to a bucket load of hesitancy regarding Alibaba / Taobao lithium battery powered obscure branded scooter and e-bike ‘bargains’. The other big gotcha is cheap no-brand phone chargers which have been known to start battery fires.
As I wrote in an earlier comment thread: Tesla has figured out how to build battery packs that mostly don’t explode and burn. I’m not sure anyone else has. This does not bode well for manufacturers who say they’re going all-electric by 20-whatever.
There is also the problem of who is going to mine all the special minerals needed for all these batteries if all the third world children are scampering across our southern border.
Don’t forget that we need to recharge these rolling miracles, too. Especially in California, which can barely keep the lights on today, much less once you’ve tripled the load via EVs.
Don’t forget population control via snake potion injections. Or even domestic water supplies for that matter. California will be WAY smaller in “people” very soon. Therefore those still breathing will have plenty of electric power for charging everything.
The goons have it planned out. The above all in jest of course.
Here’s what else blows up from e-bikes. We founded the RatRod Riders Bicycle club nine years ago. One of the founders dropped out of the group quite a while back. He bought an e-bike. The guy showed up last Saturday for the club ride for the first time in five years. He had a big fat e-bike, one of those small electric motorcycles on which the pedals are just a legality. He had a big, two child bike trailer for the fat e-bike, and two fat dogs to ride in the trailer. He had a good fifty pounds of gut fat to lug around that he didn’t have before, too.
JWM
Did he still have the Lycra cycling suit, the one that sags in the back when you stand up straight, and has some Euro or Middle eastern company logo?
No lycra. No derailleurs, either. We are fat tire riders: Customs, stretch bikes, cruisers, classics. Here’s the thing with a cruiser. A road bike rider can do a healthy sixty miles or more on a good day’s ride. We can get that same workout accomplished in less than fifteen miles on a cruiser, and less than ten on a stretch bike. It’s a matter of efficiency. 😉
JWM
That’s an interesting way of looking at it! You’re not wrong though… Schwinning through molasses will burn calories and give you a good workout.
That being said, trigger warning just for you, Sir:
The Rules
https://www.velominati.com/comment-page-8/
Rule No. 5 is alluded to frequently in Lycra Land.
JWM-
have you seen this?
This guy built bicycles and motorcycles, with 2 wheel steering and 2 wheel drive.
The 2WS/2WD experimental recumbent electric motorcycle
https://rohorn.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-first-venture-into-recumbent-design.html
https://www.bike-urious.com/rohorn-racer/
***********
BTW, I’ve got one of these:
https://condorino.com/premio/
That roadie is a beauty. I checked the motorcycle link, too. Holy cow. I once had a beemer of similar vintage to the red one. Wish I’d never sold it. And I owned that exact model of the Honda CB750, only mine was gold. It seems impossible that that bike is a 50 year old vintage machine. Think of it. When that bike was new a fifty year old bike would have been made in 1922.
JWM
E-bikes are to bikes what Bruce Jenner is to males.
I only ride bicycles. I would never wear those form fitting tight lycra faggot pants. Men should dress like men at all times.
You try a 200km day ride at any respectable pace whilst not wearing ‘form fitting tight faggot pants’ and report back to me just how much manhood you have left when you’re done.
Form follows function. Road cycling kit is the way it is for real world reasons. For pootling around on cycle paths or heading down to the (local) coffee shop, it’s overkill and a LARP.
The three biggest problems with road cycling today are idiots on E-bikes who can now get up hills they don’t have the skills to descend safely, roided up indoor trainer Zwift strivers who go out on the road with strength and speed which doesn’t match their handling skills, and of course those #$%%ers driving coffins. Nothing new about the last one.
I used to have a Ryobi battery powered lawnmower. It was just the right size for the reduced lawn I had in Minnesota. It was light and easy to use. But the 40-volt battery packs failed regularly, or would only hold half the charge. The heat just wrecked the connections between the multiple D-sized cells all wired together. And there’s a whole lot of heat involved in charging and discharging these battery packs.
Such battery packs are about 1/500 the size of an auto battery pack.
great time to be draggin’ nutz around the house in a bathing suit…
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention….and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself….believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose.”
The Club Of Rome
-in earlier marxism it was class war, no longer cogent as class no longer prevents ownership of shiny junk and there’s plenty to go around. So CRT is advanced as replacement leverage.
So does the CDC give the dealership some of those benjamins if it is reported as a covid explosion?
Fukn Hindenburg-level epic. If we have a progeny, they will laugh at us.
…just kept gettin’ biggerer.
This made my morning y’all. Thanks!
Here’s my battery fire story:
I discharged the lithium battery below the level for recharge. It was like 8 volts on 12 volt battery. Charger would not start charge up. Simple solution. I hooked up a small 12volt battery to the lithium to put enough of a charge in it to get it back to a level the charger would take over.
But got distracted and forgot about it. It was in garage. Came home hours later. When I opened front door there was a little bit of smoke in house.
That battery pack burned up so complete there was nothing left. Completely consumed.
Only reason it didn’t burn house down was when it exploded, it fell off of wooden shelf onto a cement floor.
This one was my fault. But, now that I got a taste of how bad these batteries burn I try to only charge them on the garage floor.
I’ve blown up 2 full size lead acid batteries from overcharging and igniting the hydrogen. Made a big mess of broken plastic and acid. Never any fires.
Seeing is believing.
BTW, soyboy doesn’t have any fire extinguishers … looks like he’s carrying a gallon of water to suppress an electric blaze at 15 sec. mark
bonus points for keeping this feel-good POS indoors
Darwin Award recipient ?
Let’s put a lot of those batteries in the hold of every passenger jet. As the kids say “what could possibly go wrong?”