Rants

DCNR Doublethink

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Our forests already are suffering the affects[sic] of both our national over-reliance on fossil fuels, and the urgent threat of global warming. Only by taking our head out of the sand and looking for creative solutions will we fully understand if our assets can be used wisely to address the nation’s energy crisis and the astonishing perils of global warming

— A message from [DCNR Secretary] Michael DiBerardinis

Bone’s Summary: Let’s build windmills in the State Forests to combat global warming!

Michael DiBerardinis today announced that the department is issuing a position on natural gas
development on state forestlands that favors deep and medium drilling for future lease sales.

— DCNR Press Release (PDF) 4-1-2008

Bone’s Summary: Fuck global warming, there’s oil in them thar hills!

Oil Well

Community For Sale

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Community for sale
Community for sale

Act Now!
The first 100 callers will also receive:

  • Civility
  • Liberty
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But Wait! Pay by credit card in the next 15 minutes, and we’ll throw in — free of charge:

  • conformity
  • inanity
  • obesity
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  • and…bestiality!

A $100.00 value, all yours for only 3 easy payments of just $39.99!

Call now, operators are standing by!

Spice

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Spices are awesome. You can take a totally bland, boring bowl of runny snot, and make it into something tasty with a prudent selection of spices.

Evidently, some real estate developers are now taking this approach to their spruce up their fecal smörgåsbord.

Behold Ginger Fields, a shiny new housing development, just outside of Mechanicsburg.

Ginger Fields
Ginger Fields

Amazingly, those are the actual street names. Turmeric, Cardamom, Ginger, and Thyme.

I wonder what sort of blandness these people are trying to liven up with those spicy name… Let’s go see, shall we?

After a short ride, we arrive at the grand entrance. Note the lovely beige house.

Welcome to Hell
Welcome to Hell – Click for big

Surely, not every house in the development would sport so unimaginative a color pallet?

Just another bullshit development
Oh dear…

Well, let’s just see what’s around the corner…

Freak show
A sea of sameness

Wow! It’s a horror show! If it weren’t bad enough that every house is the same color, every house is the same BEIGE color.

Whatever. Slapping exotic-sounding labels on the streets of your brand-name, all-beige suburb does not make it exotic, unique or interesting. It’s just a sad, pathetic, attempt to polish this turd of a neighborhood.

Anyhow, after I had my fill of these banana-republic mass-produced bullshit people, I rode out into the remaining farmland, where I regained my composure.

I’m going to the woods tomorrow. I’m afraid I’ll loose my Buddha-nature if I stay in the suburbs for Earth Day.

Today: 20.5 miles
April: 49.5 miles
2007: 230.5 miles

Variance

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Apparently, there are still a couple of real estate developers who didn’t get the memo that sprawl is no longer profitable. Now, these miserable douche bags want to clear-cut the area up right up against the Appalachian Trail and the White Rocks Trail (a blue blaze).

White Rocks Development Proposal
Map of the proposed development

The Cumberland Valley Appalachian Trail Club is on the case. Hopefully, they will be able to convince the township elders that clear-cutting the woods is not really consistent with conservation. (Yeah, the land in question is zoned conservation.)

The Susquehanna Appalachian Trail Club has a page with some more info, too.
The CVATC has put together a real nice PDF file with all the pertinent info.

When the revolution comes, these real estate assholes will be first against the wall…

Land – O – Lakes

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I was a little bored today, and so I got to thinking about how to optimize my commute.This is a composite map of the area surrounding my route to work.


Mechanicsburg

My commute takes me roughly from the lower left to the upper right side of the map. The map is somewhat deceptive, however, because many of the roads depicted on the map are utterly worthless to me as a bicycler. Dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and restricted highways are all useless to me.

To make the map more useful to bicyclists, I have gone ahead and retouched it to make it seem like any worthless piece of asphalt is actually a body of water.

Highways are rivers, and unnavigable cul-de-sac neighborhoods are ponds.

This is what the same area looks like from the perspective of a bicyclist.


A practical view of the neighborhood

Seeing the map this way also makes it plain that there simply isn’t ANY east-west route through the area that doesn’t involve one of the busy arterial roads. I have to take either the Carlisle Pike, Trindle Road, Simpson Street, or Gettysburg road.

I usually take Simpson in the morning, because there isn’t much traffic, and Gettysburg in the afternoon, because it gets less than the others (but it still gets a lot).

We could really use a bike path along that railroad line right through the center of the picture.

Suburbia For Sale?

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I just came back from a ride through suburbia. I was just kind of cruising along through some of the housing developments near my neighborhood. (I’m the “bad element” in this neck of the woods).Anyhow, I was surprised to see how many McMansions had for-sale signs in their front yards. These are houses that were built less than five years ago. One neighborhood only one block away had 3 houses in a row up for sale.

I wonder why the whole neighborhood decided to move away…..

Maybe the owners are those foolish people you hear about who got the biggest adjustable-rate mortgage they could afford and now the rate ‘adjusted’ and they can’t afford the payment.

Maybe it’s because of the price of gas? Doubtful. I mean, we are a whole nine miles from downtown Harrisburg, and it’s less than one mile to a bus stop.

My hypothesis is that these are people who commute to Baltimore from here. It’s 80 miles to Baltimore.

Let’s see… an 80 mile commute each way is 160 miles. Assume they have a half-decent car that gets 30mpg. That’s 5.33 gallons of gasoline per day. There are about 20 working days per month, so these people are burning thought 106 gallons of gasoline per month, just in commuting.

At $3/gallon that’s a gasoline budget of over $300 per month.

Of course many of these people drive faux military vehicles which get about 15 miles to a gallon.

I guess maybe it’s both the interest rates and the price of gas. If they are already squeezed on mortgage payments, an extra $300-$600/month on gasoline could really mess up the finances.

That seems a little bit insane to me.

I hear people bitching at work about this stuff. Apparently they “worked real hard to get where they are” and it’s “not right.” I feel sad for them. Thier entire notion of ’success’ hinges on a totally ridiculous concept of a ‘dream house’ in the suburbs.

There are better things to dream about than vinyl siding and sheetrock.

More Artsy-Fartsiness

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I know that my readers come to blasphemous.bike for the superlative professionalism and maturity with which I conduct this blog.

With that in mind, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum:


Rick Santorum loves the cock

Lay in Hell

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This just in:Bonius.com “embedded reporters” in the lake of fire report that Enron founder Ken Lay has arrived on the eighth plane of hell*. He is awaiting paperwork to determine whether he was “merely fradulent” or a fully blown traitor. In the case of the former, he is likely to remain on the eighth plane, in the case of the latter, he will be transported to the ninth plane for his eternal torment.

The Devil
The Devil is stoked!

Lucifer’s press secretary issued a statement that Lay is expected to end up “somewhere in the second zone [of the ninth plane]”.

Satan could not be reached for comment.

*For a complete discussion of the geography of hell, consult “The Divine Comedy”