Phew!

There I was thinking of voting green, you know to try and promote the idea of sustainable development, get the government to take some reponsibility for our greenhouse emissions and perhaps get some sense of social welfare back into government .. or at least I thought that’s what I was doing.

Thanks to Pastor Peter Curtis of Werribee South, I’ve been saved from making a terrible mistake!

The Green Peril

ALL Victorians should be aware of the extreme danger posed to our state with the grim possibility of the Greens holding the balance of power. This party fraudulently claims to be about the environment, yet wants to import heroin, decriminalise other dangerous drugs, and encourage young teenagers into a homosexual lifestyle.

The Greens are the radical descendants of the Communist Party cloaked in the falsehood that they are harmless lovers of the environment while their real agenda is strongly anti-Christian and anti-family.

Pastor Peter Curtis, Werribee South

— From The Age
My emphasis.

And I thought Alan Jones and John Laws were crackpots .. well they are, but there’s worse out there!

From the hippies over at Stop the Hale Street Bridge:

I don’t know the politics around the TransApex project, although from a cursory read it sounds like a pie-in-the-sky load of B.S, dreamed up by some advisor and unfortunately swallowed by some percentage of the Brisbane populace.

Still this Hale Street mob might be just a bunch of nimbys, although I think they probably have a good point. Either way it’s still a great image.

And for the Canberrans in the audience, just imagine those 60 cars all lined up single file .. it’s the GDE!

© wendyfairy (flickr)

While reading the latest pseudo-scientific bunk about climate change, from some arts-degree toting, petrol-company funded hack, I stumbled across a comment from someone saying they wished they could just “download the models and do the science themselves”.

Even though that’s probably a bit rich, I think there’s maybe more to it than an afternoon of modelling involved, it turns out you actually can download a model and play with it.

It’s called EdGCM, Education Global Climate Modelling, from Columbia University.

Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows or Mac. Neither of which I have. But, Linux nerds take note, they have a poll on their home page asking what platform users run EdGCM on, or would like to, including Linux.

So go and vote and get those climate monkeys coding on the Linux version!

A few weeks back I headed down to Melbourne for 10 days or so. My primary reason for being there was of course to see Jess’ final dance performance, cough. But while I was there we also did the 100km Bay in a day ride, just in passing.

I drove down to Albury on a Friday night, where I eventually found Catherine and Zain’s place, and after a few too many ales at the Bended Elbow, they kindly put me up for the night. Catherine and I drove down to Jess’ place on the Saturday.

Saturday night we saw Jess’ dance performance, which was spectacular, there’s no other word for it. And Jess drove us home in her car-share car, which was kinda exciting – although I’m sure in twenty years it’ll seem quaint to be mentioning it.

Sunday we did the Melbourne cafe breakfast thing, and pottered around the city shopping. In the evening I went for a short ride down the Yarra and took a few sunset shots looking over the city.

I worked from the Melbourne office during the week, and as it happened we had a bit of a crunch on so I put in quite a few hours. Melbourne public transport is totally awesome, and even at 9pm it’s a snack getting home.

Wednesday night I drove out to the airport, with beautiful colour directions from Jess, to pick up Meg. She spent Thursday gadding around the city while I worked, and then we limped home together in the 37° heat.

Friday her and I checked out the Queen Vic markets, which were pretty awesome for food – pity we weren’t hosting a BBQ, we could have seriously gourmed it up. We met Jeremy, Jess and her work mate James and their pals for lunch at a nice cosy pub, and ended up just having beer cause the waitress forgot our order!

We spent the afternoon strolling around the suprisingly excellent Melbourne Zoo. And then met up with Scott for a top notch hot chocolate and pancakes at some little place in North Melbourne.

Saturday we prepared for the ride, and snuck in some more hot chocolate. We popped out for a lovely dinner with my cuzzzes, the youngest Lepperts, before turning in rather early. Sunday we rode 100 freakin kilometres, check out the full story.

Finally we drove back to Canberra via Albury, where Catherine and Zain once again put on an excellent evening, including a BBQ and several too many beers, but lots of good chatter and fun had.

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So the whole reason we even went to Melbourne, was to drive 100km away from it, and then ride back. Make sense?

Hmm yeah. Well it was awesome, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Known as the “Bay in a day”, it’s a big ride – 15,000 riders – organised by the excellent [Bicycle Victoria] – the folks who brought you ride to work day.

The name alludes to the original ride, around Port Philip Bay in a day, or if you’re good, in a morning. We weren’t quit up for that, which is either 200km or 250km, depending on your sanity. Instead we rolled up for the entry-level 100km ride, from Sorrento in the south back to Melbourne city.

After an insane, pre-4am start, and a chilly ride down to the Docklands, we pulled our bikes apart and stuck them in trucks, and we jumped on buses.

During the hour or so drive down, we were treated to a sudden, heavy, and very disconcerting rain shower – which elicted thoughts of “holy shit are we going to be riding in that for 8 hours”. Just as we were sharing our thoughts of doom the rain stopped and the sky cleared, more or less anyway. But a nice little joke from the man upstairs.

We were a bit late getting down on the bus, so we missed the 8am start, hitting the road about 8:30am. That wasn’t so bad, we missed the crowds, and so we had pretty unobstructed riding until the 50km mark or so when we caught the bulk of the riders.

Perhaps it was enthusiasm, or we’re just daft, but we rode through the 25km rest-point without stopping – we thought it wasn’t far enough and must have been for people going in the other direction. At 40km we realised our mistake, but that wasn’t so bad, we were making good time and felt good on the bikes.

The only serious hill was around the 40km mark, but only 100m or so vertical, so just 5-10 minutes of puffing and we were at the top. The rest of the ride was pretty easy going, nice to cruise for ages and really get the legs working. At one point we got a view south over the bay, which seemed to go for miles, and I coudln’t believe we’d ridden all that way – as it turns out that was only about a quarter of the journey – you sure can ride a long way if you try!

There was a bit of weather around, mainly just a bit of wind and a few minor showers, but nothing that got us seriously wet. Somewhere around 75km Meg got a puncture, thanks to some ####wit who’d spread thumbtacks all over the road. We had all the gear to fix it, and my legs felt better after the 10 minute rest anyway.

The last 10-15km into Melbourne were a bit stop-start, with traffic lights holding us up a bit here and there. The final hurdle, at something like the 95km mark, was the bridge over the freeway, not high, but steep and nasty at that point in the day. I raced over it just cause I still could.

In the end we rolled over the finish line about 5 hours after we started, not exactly fresh but certainly not spent, a nice little days outing.

If all goes well we’ll be back next year, maybe for the 200km, but probably not – that’s getting silly. Although we will be doing something to avoid another 4am start!

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While in Melbourne I took Friday off, just to hang out with Meg around the place and have a relax before the big ride.

Little did I know it’d be a fun-filled, action-packed tour of insanity, all organised by your lovely tour guide Touristmeg!

Actually it wasn’t that bad, but we did pack a lot into a little day. We started out with breakfast on the porch at Jess’, then headed into town to visit the Queen Vic markets. We should have skipped breakfast, as the markets were chockers with nice looking food, I’ll have to organise a BBQ in Melbourne one day just so I can buy all that nice stuff!

After a leisurely lunch with Jess, Jeremy, James and other people who’s names starts with J .. at a nice pub in the city, we took a tram off the Zoo!

We’d planned to visit Taronga Zoo when we were in Sydney a while back, but it didn’t quite happen, we never quite had the time. So we couldn’t miss out again.

It’s probably ten years, or more, since I went to Taronga, and I remember it being pretty nice. But to be honest Melbourne beats it, or at least my recollection.

It’s a great layout, not too huge, so you don’t get super tired, but also nice little loops that are quite good at making you feel like you’re really in a jungle (the monkey section) or Thailand (the Elephant section) etc. I hadn’t really realised, but after nearly a week in the bustle of Melbourne, I really appreciated some open space, green grass and a bit of quiet.

We wandered around for ages, and saw most of the good bits I think. At about 5pm just before closing, the Lions went beserk which was awesome. I’m not sure what set them off, but they just started roaring and carrying on. It was pretty speccy, you would so soil yourself if you heard that noise out on the planes of Africa.

If you’re down that way I highly recommend it!

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Although I was originally heading to Melbourne for the Bay in a day, it happened to coincide nicely with Jess’ final dance performance.

If you’ve never seen this Indian dancing caper then you should keep an eye out, it’s pretty incredible. Insanely over-done costumes, incredibly ornate and stunning, in conjunction with ridiculously precise dance moves, it’s something to see.

The only sour note was that the organisers had plans to make a DVD, and so as not to erode their profits, had declared all photography and videography illegal inside the theatre. Pffft.

As it turned out I only had my camera phone, so these shots are pretty crappy, but they’re here anyway just to stick it up to the man.

There’s a much better shot of Jess, from a previous performance, over here.

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