Accused ‘tried to bite officer’
28 July 2004 07:00
A man accused of murder tried to bite a police officer when he was arrested, a court heard yesterday.Thomas Cusack, 40, of Magdalen Street, Norwich, denies murdering Danny McGhee at an address in Magpie Road last November.Mr McGhee, 25, of William White Place, died soon after being stabbed in the neck.Yesterday the court heard police officers had to restrain Cusack as he was arrested.As he was taken to Dereham police station to be questioned he was spitting at the vehicle's window and trying to bite an officer.Norwich Crown Court was told Cusack had spent the day drinking before going to Magpie Road to try to persuade his girlfriend to come back to his house. She did not come with him due to other people in the house.In a police interview, Cusack said Mr McGhee said he wanted a fight and had a black stick lying on the floor.Cusack claims he tried to leave the house through the back door so to diffuse the situation. But the back door was locked and he could not get out so he took a knife from the kitchen.He said he was "angry, worried and frightened" because he had been stabbed himself a few weeks previously and was wary.Asked to describe what happened, Cusack said he did not mean to kill Mr McGhee."Some geezer tried to whack me with a stick so I stuck a knife in him."He later said: "I can't remember that much in general – I was drunk out of my head."Pathologist Dr Michael Heath said injuries received to Cusack's arm were not consistent with being hit by a stick in an attack but more in line with Cusack falling against a rough object.The case continues
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Pong in our future?
Pretty soon we will all be sitting around the flat screen tv playing pong since that was such a cool game when we were growing up!
Last update: July 26, 2004 at 3:50 PM
Backfence: Are you game?
James Lileks, Star Tribune
I asked for your early beloved video-game memories; your responses brought a tear to my eye. Really. Ah, the nostalgia. Ah, the times we had. Ah, the hours wasted in pointless pixel chases -- hours we'll be silently lamenting as we're old men in nursing homes, our gaming hands curled into useless hooks.
Hey, that would make a great game: Escape From Oaken Hills Managed Care.
Really. You have to find your way out of the place and get back your power of attorney, armed only with a bedpan. In 25 years, after all, there will be great demand from the geezer demographic for games that reflect their lives, and while some 80-year-olds may feel a deep kinship with Xtreme Beach Volleyball, most will want something more grown-up. Like shooting Nazi-Zombies from Venus who want to drag you back to the nursing home.
Today's tales are all about 'Roid Rage. Asteroids, to be specific. From Pastor Scott:
My favorite memory has to be the first time my cousin Mark flipped the score on Asteroids. Seems that the program would only register score to a certain decimal point; either 100,000 or 1 million, I can't remember which. At any rate, one day Mark hit a hot streak, and after about 45 minutes of play or so, we saw the score inching into uncharted territory. In breathless anticipation, we watched as the score passed the magic number and reverted to 0 before climbing up again.
I got the same thrill when I flipped the odometer on my '82 Monte Carlo during college, but that's another story. ...
I flipped the odometer in college, too. By which I mean I put the car in the ditch upside down. Now, from Bob:
Probably my next favorite game was Red Baron, another vector-based flight sim, kinda like Battlezone. You were flying in WWI. That was sweet! I had the high score in Mankato for months. I think they eventually removed the machine with my high score.
The high score. Every man needs to have a high score at some point in his life, and I'm not talking something lame like a "personal best," but a HIGH FREAKIN' SCORE that makes other men whimper and slink away. The saddest kind of high score is the type you get in an airport arcade, or some such place you'll never visit again. There's no one to share your glory. You walk away from the machine with deep sadness, having shared a special moment few will ever know about. Farewell, mon amour. Don't cry. We'll always have the arcade in Terminal C at Cleveland International Airport. No, the only high scores that really matter are the ones you get in your regular haunt. Your local. Your joint. And my joint was the storied Valli in Dinkytown USA.
Back at the Valli there were two kinds of high scores: pinball and video games. When you got high score on a pinball game it gave three short knocks, one for each free game. The sound made men look up from their beers, or down at their hands. The king is dead. Long live the king. There was no such auditory reward for a video-game high score, just peer approval. You entered your initials, or your three-letter nom de guerre. For most of 1981, the Asteroids machine's high scores belonged to me -- JRL -- or RIC or JET or MAY. Then one day I popped down after class to spend a half-hour of wrist-wrecking button mashing, and what I saw chilled my blood:
WAG
The next four high games: WAG. WAG. WAG. WAG. and his lowest best-score was better than ours by thousands of points.
WAG. The name was whispered, cursed, mocked. WAG? Heh. Let him show up here again! And of course he did, the very next day. He was not a regular, or at least he didn't socialize with the people who spent most of their time in the Valli's snug beery cavern. He didn't say much; he just went to work, and we saw at once how he got the high scores. Instead of tapping the fire button, he used his first and index fingers to double his fire rate. We'd never seen an innovation like this before. It felt like cheating, somehow. (Jet Varhar was particularly scornful of anyone who used "Wag bullets," as he called them.) WAG soon moved on to Centipede, and rolled the score over a few times before he disappeared completely. I think he stopped at the door and said "And now I am off to marry a supermodel." He was the best we'd seen. That, ladies and gentleman, was a gamer.
How we hated him.
Last update: July 26, 2004 at 3:50 PM
Backfence: Are you game?
James Lileks, Star Tribune
I asked for your early beloved video-game memories; your responses brought a tear to my eye. Really. Ah, the nostalgia. Ah, the times we had. Ah, the hours wasted in pointless pixel chases -- hours we'll be silently lamenting as we're old men in nursing homes, our gaming hands curled into useless hooks.
Hey, that would make a great game: Escape From Oaken Hills Managed Care.
Really. You have to find your way out of the place and get back your power of attorney, armed only with a bedpan. In 25 years, after all, there will be great demand from the geezer demographic for games that reflect their lives, and while some 80-year-olds may feel a deep kinship with Xtreme Beach Volleyball, most will want something more grown-up. Like shooting Nazi-Zombies from Venus who want to drag you back to the nursing home.
Today's tales are all about 'Roid Rage. Asteroids, to be specific. From Pastor Scott:
My favorite memory has to be the first time my cousin Mark flipped the score on Asteroids. Seems that the program would only register score to a certain decimal point; either 100,000 or 1 million, I can't remember which. At any rate, one day Mark hit a hot streak, and after about 45 minutes of play or so, we saw the score inching into uncharted territory. In breathless anticipation, we watched as the score passed the magic number and reverted to 0 before climbing up again.
I got the same thrill when I flipped the odometer on my '82 Monte Carlo during college, but that's another story. ...
I flipped the odometer in college, too. By which I mean I put the car in the ditch upside down. Now, from Bob:
Probably my next favorite game was Red Baron, another vector-based flight sim, kinda like Battlezone. You were flying in WWI. That was sweet! I had the high score in Mankato for months. I think they eventually removed the machine with my high score.
The high score. Every man needs to have a high score at some point in his life, and I'm not talking something lame like a "personal best," but a HIGH FREAKIN' SCORE that makes other men whimper and slink away. The saddest kind of high score is the type you get in an airport arcade, or some such place you'll never visit again. There's no one to share your glory. You walk away from the machine with deep sadness, having shared a special moment few will ever know about. Farewell, mon amour. Don't cry. We'll always have the arcade in Terminal C at Cleveland International Airport. No, the only high scores that really matter are the ones you get in your regular haunt. Your local. Your joint. And my joint was the storied Valli in Dinkytown USA.
Back at the Valli there were two kinds of high scores: pinball and video games. When you got high score on a pinball game it gave three short knocks, one for each free game. The sound made men look up from their beers, or down at their hands. The king is dead. Long live the king. There was no such auditory reward for a video-game high score, just peer approval. You entered your initials, or your three-letter nom de guerre. For most of 1981, the Asteroids machine's high scores belonged to me -- JRL -- or RIC or JET or MAY. Then one day I popped down after class to spend a half-hour of wrist-wrecking button mashing, and what I saw chilled my blood:
WAG
The next four high games: WAG. WAG. WAG. WAG. and his lowest best-score was better than ours by thousands of points.
WAG. The name was whispered, cursed, mocked. WAG? Heh. Let him show up here again! And of course he did, the very next day. He was not a regular, or at least he didn't socialize with the people who spent most of their time in the Valli's snug beery cavern. He didn't say much; he just went to work, and we saw at once how he got the high scores. Instead of tapping the fire button, he used his first and index fingers to double his fire rate. We'd never seen an innovation like this before. It felt like cheating, somehow. (Jet Varhar was particularly scornful of anyone who used "Wag bullets," as he called them.) WAG soon moved on to Centipede, and rolled the score over a few times before he disappeared completely. I think he stopped at the door and said "And now I am off to marry a supermodel." He was the best we'd seen. That, ladies and gentleman, was a gamer.
How we hated him.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Deaf at the Shite house?
Hey, maybe Rumsfeld is deaf from standing too close to the artillery. When W asked him which country to invade, he had heard Tenet wrong, and said Iraq....
Right axis, wrong evil
LIBERTIES
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Bush administration had no good intelligence, so it decided to invade the Ira- that was weaker. The war was based on phony WMD analyses and fallacious welcome scenarios.
WASHINGTON - The capital has plunged into satire. There’s the bizarre investigation of Sandy Burglar, as the respected former national security adviser has now been dubbed, pulling a Fawn Hall and smuggling stuff out of the National Archives in his fine washables.
And, just when you thought the Bush foreign policy couldn’t sound more chuckleheaded, revelations in the 9/11 commission report being released Thursday elevated the Bush doctrine to an Ali G skit.
The most astute prophet of the administration’s Middle East muddle is Sacha Baron Cohen, the hilarious British comedian whose Ali G character is an uninformed gangsta rapper interviewing unwitting VIPs.
This Sunday, HBO will run Ali G’s interview with Pat Buchanan, in which he presses the broadcaster about why no “BLTs” were found in Iraq. Buchanan plays along, but it’s not clear if he actually thinks there were BLTs in Saddam’s arsenal. (Cohen speculated in The Times later that Buchanan might have thought it was argot for “ballistic long-range-trajectory missiles.”)
Last year Ali G asked James Baker, the Bush I secretary of state, if it was wise for Iraq and Iran to have such similar names. “Isn’t there a real danger,” the faux rapper wondered, “that someone give a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying ‘Bomb Ira-’ and the geezer doesn’t heard it properly” and bombs the wrong one?
“No danger,” Baker replied.
Well, as it turns out, the United States did bomb the wrong Ira-. President Bush says he’s now investigating al-Qaeda-Iran ties, and whether Iran helped the 9/11 hijackers.
Whoops. Right axis. Wrong evil. It’s like Emily Litella -- “What’s all this fuss I hear about making Puerto Rico a steak?” -- except the US can’t simply shrug “Never mind” because 900 American troops are dead.
The Bush administration had no good intelligence, so it decided to invade the Ira- that was weaker.
The war was based on phony WMD analyses and fallacious welcome scenarios drummed up by the neocon Chihuahua Ahmad Chalabi.
Bush should have worried about the Axis of Evil in the order of the threat posed: North Korea, which has nukes; Iran, which almost has nukes; Iraq, which wanted nukes.
Now American forces are so depleted that the Pentagon is pulling forces out of South Korea to go to Iraq. And, given the huge National Guard deployment in Iraq, states say they don’t have enough manpower to guard prisoners, fight wildfires or police the streets.
Besides excoriating the CIA and FBI and chronicling as many as 10 missed opportunities to pick up on the 9/11 plot -- in the Bush years and in the Clinton era -- the 9/11 commission report has new evidence that Iran may have helped up to 10 of the hijackers with safe passage from Osama’s Afghan training camps.
“Grimly, what the new 9/11 report makes clear is that nearly three years into the war on terror, America is still not close to understanding the enemy,” Michael Isikoff and Michael Hersh report in Newsweek<. “And Washington seems less able to force Tehran to change its ways, especially since Bush has removed one of the chief threats to the mullah regime, Saddam Hussein, and is now bogged down in Iraq. As one intel official said before the Iraq war: ‘The Iranians are tickled by our focus on Iraq.’”
Just as the invasion of Iraq was “a Christmas gift” to Osama, as the CIA official who wrote a book as “Anonymous” put it, in terms of recruiting in the Muslim world and diverting the US, so it may be a gift to Iran. US military officials say Iranian agents have been helping Iraqi insurgents as a way to shape Iraq into a Shiite fundamentalist satellite.
Though the 9/11 panel found no “collaborative” relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it found one between Iran and al-Qaeda -- though no evidence that Iranian officials knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks.
The report concludes that “al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran and its client, the Hezbollah militant group, was far deeper and more long standing than its links with Iraq,” according to The Washington Post.
Bush vowed to deal harshly with any country that harbors terrorists or assisted the 9/11 plot. But our military is so overextended from invading Ira-, we’d be hard-pressed to go after Ira-.
Right axis, wrong evil
LIBERTIES
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Bush administration had no good intelligence, so it decided to invade the Ira- that was weaker. The war was based on phony WMD analyses and fallacious welcome scenarios.
WASHINGTON - The capital has plunged into satire. There’s the bizarre investigation of Sandy Burglar, as the respected former national security adviser has now been dubbed, pulling a Fawn Hall and smuggling stuff out of the National Archives in his fine washables.
And, just when you thought the Bush foreign policy couldn’t sound more chuckleheaded, revelations in the 9/11 commission report being released Thursday elevated the Bush doctrine to an Ali G skit.
The most astute prophet of the administration’s Middle East muddle is Sacha Baron Cohen, the hilarious British comedian whose Ali G character is an uninformed gangsta rapper interviewing unwitting VIPs.
This Sunday, HBO will run Ali G’s interview with Pat Buchanan, in which he presses the broadcaster about why no “BLTs” were found in Iraq. Buchanan plays along, but it’s not clear if he actually thinks there were BLTs in Saddam’s arsenal. (Cohen speculated in The Times later that Buchanan might have thought it was argot for “ballistic long-range-trajectory missiles.”)
Last year Ali G asked James Baker, the Bush I secretary of state, if it was wise for Iraq and Iran to have such similar names. “Isn’t there a real danger,” the faux rapper wondered, “that someone give a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying ‘Bomb Ira-’ and the geezer doesn’t heard it properly” and bombs the wrong one?
“No danger,” Baker replied.
Well, as it turns out, the United States did bomb the wrong Ira-. President Bush says he’s now investigating al-Qaeda-Iran ties, and whether Iran helped the 9/11 hijackers.
Whoops. Right axis. Wrong evil. It’s like Emily Litella -- “What’s all this fuss I hear about making Puerto Rico a steak?” -- except the US can’t simply shrug “Never mind” because 900 American troops are dead.
The Bush administration had no good intelligence, so it decided to invade the Ira- that was weaker.
The war was based on phony WMD analyses and fallacious welcome scenarios drummed up by the neocon Chihuahua Ahmad Chalabi.
Bush should have worried about the Axis of Evil in the order of the threat posed: North Korea, which has nukes; Iran, which almost has nukes; Iraq, which wanted nukes.
Now American forces are so depleted that the Pentagon is pulling forces out of South Korea to go to Iraq. And, given the huge National Guard deployment in Iraq, states say they don’t have enough manpower to guard prisoners, fight wildfires or police the streets.
Besides excoriating the CIA and FBI and chronicling as many as 10 missed opportunities to pick up on the 9/11 plot -- in the Bush years and in the Clinton era -- the 9/11 commission report has new evidence that Iran may have helped up to 10 of the hijackers with safe passage from Osama’s Afghan training camps.
“Grimly, what the new 9/11 report makes clear is that nearly three years into the war on terror, America is still not close to understanding the enemy,” Michael Isikoff and Michael Hersh report in Newsweek<. “And Washington seems less able to force Tehran to change its ways, especially since Bush has removed one of the chief threats to the mullah regime, Saddam Hussein, and is now bogged down in Iraq. As one intel official said before the Iraq war: ‘The Iranians are tickled by our focus on Iraq.’”
Just as the invasion of Iraq was “a Christmas gift” to Osama, as the CIA official who wrote a book as “Anonymous” put it, in terms of recruiting in the Muslim world and diverting the US, so it may be a gift to Iran. US military officials say Iranian agents have been helping Iraqi insurgents as a way to shape Iraq into a Shiite fundamentalist satellite.
Though the 9/11 panel found no “collaborative” relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it found one between Iran and al-Qaeda -- though no evidence that Iranian officials knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks.
The report concludes that “al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran and its client, the Hezbollah militant group, was far deeper and more long standing than its links with Iraq,” according to The Washington Post.
Bush vowed to deal harshly with any country that harbors terrorists or assisted the 9/11 plot. But our military is so overextended from invading Ira-, we’d be hard-pressed to go after Ira-.
We are # 1
It is nice to see a guy going to all lengths to make himself heard!
Man gesturing at trains gets too close
APPLETON, Wis. A man in a wheelchair who makes obscene gestures to the crews of passing trains was injured when he got a little too close to one of them, police said.
A gas tank on a train engine clipped the wheelchair of Leland Laird, 54, Tuesday evening, causing him to fall out of the damaged chair and injure his arm, police said.
Laird told officers he has used a wheelchair since 1989 when a car he was driving was struck by a train near Fremont.
But that's not the reason he periodically "flips off" the trains, Lt. Pat Matuszewski said.
He told police he puts himself where train crews can see him — engineers and conductors consider him a regular — and makes obscene gestures because he is frustrated by their loud horns.
"He lives right near the intersection. That's his way of addressing the loud horns blowing," Matuszewski said.
Laird was treated at Appleton Medical Center for an abrasion to his left arm, ticketed as a pedestrian for violating traffic signals, and told to find less dangerous ways to express himself.
Man gesturing at trains gets too close
APPLETON, Wis. A man in a wheelchair who makes obscene gestures to the crews of passing trains was injured when he got a little too close to one of them, police said.
A gas tank on a train engine clipped the wheelchair of Leland Laird, 54, Tuesday evening, causing him to fall out of the damaged chair and injure his arm, police said.
Laird told officers he has used a wheelchair since 1989 when a car he was driving was struck by a train near Fremont.
But that's not the reason he periodically "flips off" the trains, Lt. Pat Matuszewski said.
He told police he puts himself where train crews can see him — engineers and conductors consider him a regular — and makes obscene gestures because he is frustrated by their loud horns.
"He lives right near the intersection. That's his way of addressing the loud horns blowing," Matuszewski said.
Laird was treated at Appleton Medical Center for an abrasion to his left arm, ticketed as a pedestrian for violating traffic signals, and told to find less dangerous ways to express himself.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Ohhh, a nasty surveying problem....
It would be hard to give up half your house....
geezer defies house-halving order
July 21 2004 at 04:13AM
London - A British pensioner has vowed to sit tight after being ordered by a court to quit half his house under the terms of an unusual 19th century lease.Derrick Bensted on Tuesday vowed to stick it out after complaining that the order - which would see him lose his kitchen, bedroom and half his sitting room - was unfair.The dispute is centred around the lease under which 77-year-old Bensted's home in Whitstable, on England's south-east coast, was first built.Half the former pub was constructed in around 1860 on land rented from the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, and the firm has been fighting to reclaim what it considers its share of the property.A deadline for Bensted to leave following a court ruling expired on Tuesday.
geezer defies house-halving order
July 21 2004 at 04:13AM
London - A British pensioner has vowed to sit tight after being ordered by a court to quit half his house under the terms of an unusual 19th century lease.Derrick Bensted on Tuesday vowed to stick it out after complaining that the order - which would see him lose his kitchen, bedroom and half his sitting room - was unfair.The dispute is centred around the lease under which 77-year-old Bensted's home in Whitstable, on England's south-east coast, was first built.Half the former pub was constructed in around 1860 on land rented from the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, and the firm has been fighting to reclaim what it considers its share of the property.A deadline for Bensted to leave following a court ruling expired on Tuesday.
Santan pushing 60?
Listening to KALX last night, a station from Berkley, and the punk dj said they were going to play some Santana since it was his birthday and he was pushing 60.
Hey, Carlos has great talent and will probably be around for many more years. Age is a bit irrelevant to talent and ability.....
I feel better now....
Hey, Carlos has great talent and will probably be around for many more years. Age is a bit irrelevant to talent and ability.....
I feel better now....
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Fuck the workers...
"Joe Six-Pack is under a lot of pressure. He got a lousy raise; he's paying more for gasoline and milk. He's not doing that great. But proprietors' income is up. Profits are up. Home values are up. Middle income and upper income people are looking pretty good."- ETHAN S. HARRIS, chief economist at Lehman Brothers.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Goodbye Loretta
I went to the funeral service for Loretta Wahl today. She was 8 years older than me and died of cancer. She was always a friendly and good person. She certainly could be a geezer from time to time. I always wanted her to put some rock music on the hold music of her business. She told me when I owned her business, I could select the music. Fair enough. I hope you are setting the stations on the next life. Travel well, Loretta.
Something a geezer would do
Even though this guy is clearly too young to be a geezer, he is already acting like one! I am sure he will be drooling in his prison cell when he gets to meet bubba. Do you think he will be the man or woman?
Man jailed after shooting self in groin
SHEFFIELD, England (AP) — A man who shot himself in the groin after drinking 15 pints of beer and stuffing a sawed-off shotgun down his trousers was jailed for five years Tuesday for illegal possession of a firearm.
David Walker, 28, underwent emergency surgery after the March 6 incident in Dinnington, northern England. Tests were continuing to learn if Walker would be left infertile, his lawyer Gulzar Syed said.
"He still feels quite severe pain," Syed told Sheffield Crown Court, adding that some pellets still were lodged in Walker's groin area.
Walker had admitted one charge of possession of a prohibited firearm at a previous hearing.
Prosecuting lawyer Andrew Hatton told the court Walker had gone home to get the shotgun after arguing in the pub with lifelong friend Stuart Simpson about whose turn it was to buy a beer.
As he was returning to the pub, which had closed by then, he accidentally fired the weapon.
"He had it shoved down his trousers," Hatton said. "After the shotgun had discharged he placed it in a rubbish bin and crawled back to his home."
Walker told officers he was so drunk he had no idea how he managed to shoot himself and why he had gone home for the gun.
Judge Robert Moore said recent legislation regarding banned weapons meant he had to impose the statutory five-year minimum sentence.
"The shooting of yourself is plainly an exceptional circumstance which is capable of reducing the sentence," Moore said. "But in this case, I am quite certain, it does not justify reducing it below the statutory minimum."
Man jailed after shooting self in groin
SHEFFIELD, England (AP) — A man who shot himself in the groin after drinking 15 pints of beer and stuffing a sawed-off shotgun down his trousers was jailed for five years Tuesday for illegal possession of a firearm.
David Walker, 28, underwent emergency surgery after the March 6 incident in Dinnington, northern England. Tests were continuing to learn if Walker would be left infertile, his lawyer Gulzar Syed said.
"He still feels quite severe pain," Syed told Sheffield Crown Court, adding that some pellets still were lodged in Walker's groin area.
Walker had admitted one charge of possession of a prohibited firearm at a previous hearing.
Prosecuting lawyer Andrew Hatton told the court Walker had gone home to get the shotgun after arguing in the pub with lifelong friend Stuart Simpson about whose turn it was to buy a beer.
As he was returning to the pub, which had closed by then, he accidentally fired the weapon.
"He had it shoved down his trousers," Hatton said. "After the shotgun had discharged he placed it in a rubbish bin and crawled back to his home."
Walker told officers he was so drunk he had no idea how he managed to shoot himself and why he had gone home for the gun.
Judge Robert Moore said recent legislation regarding banned weapons meant he had to impose the statutory five-year minimum sentence.
"The shooting of yourself is plainly an exceptional circumstance which is capable of reducing the sentence," Moore said. "But in this case, I am quite certain, it does not justify reducing it below the statutory minimum."
Sunday, July 11, 2004
kisser quiz
Here is why type of kisser I am according to a quiz....
You have a surprise kiss! Your partner is always
pleasantly pleased to have you jump outta no
where to dote them with a fun peck on the cheek
or more passionate embrace. super markets and
work places are your favorite places to attack
your loved one with all your love =p
What kind of kiss are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
You have a surprise kiss! Your partner is always
pleasantly pleased to have you jump outta no
where to dote them with a fun peck on the cheek
or more passionate embrace. super markets and
work places are your favorite places to attack
your loved one with all your love =p
What kind of kiss are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
geezer slowing down?
When you are 100, a week will make a big difference.
Second crack at run gets geezer record
By AP
CAPE TOWN -- The first time Philip Rabinowitz broke the record for the fastest 100-year-old to run 100 metres, a power outage stopped the official clock, so the time was not recognized. The South African man had better luck the second time around, finally making it into the Guinness Book of Records yesterday.
Rabinowitz made his run at the Green Point stadium in 30.86 seconds, beating the previous record of 36.1 seconds.
Last week, he broke the record by clocking 28.7 seconds, when the official clock failed him.
He participated in the South African leg of the global Olympic torch relay earlier this year.
Second crack at run gets geezer record
By AP
CAPE TOWN -- The first time Philip Rabinowitz broke the record for the fastest 100-year-old to run 100 metres, a power outage stopped the official clock, so the time was not recognized. The South African man had better luck the second time around, finally making it into the Guinness Book of Records yesterday.
Rabinowitz made his run at the Green Point stadium in 30.86 seconds, beating the previous record of 36.1 seconds.
Last week, he broke the record by clocking 28.7 seconds, when the official clock failed him.
He participated in the South African leg of the global Olympic torch relay earlier this year.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
President and vietnam
How convenient that the records for Bush were destroyed in the 90's. Probably the only draft evader that they cannot find records for. Hogwash....
Friday, July 09, 2004
Sun Sounds
Since I am an old geezer and have no worthwhile life, according to the grumpy kids anyhow, I volunteer some time to Sun Sounds of Arizona, http://www.sunsounds.org to read things by a radio frequency to people with print disabilities. They may be blind, infirm or have things such as dylexia. So, tonight we were reading the USA Today. There was an article about Lenny Bruce and a collection of his acts that was being put together by his daughter. At the end of the article, she said the skits were so funny, they would make you pee. I found that hilarious and it was hard to keep this geezer from laughing. Oh, if only things were so funny that you had to pee your pants. Just that little spot of pee. Hey, I think that is why they make DEPENDS!
Geezerdom will bring that to the forefront soon enough....drat.....
Geezerdom will bring that to the forefront soon enough....drat.....
Thursday, July 08, 2004
Go SOMEWHERE else!
So, I was standing in Starbucks this morning behind a lady. She was ordering three drinks. She ordered one fooh fooh drink that took more than 5 words, not coffee anymore according to me. Then, she looked at the menu and said she wanted two drinks that did not have coffee in them. The jaw of the clerk dropped as he looked at me. They talked about the hardly any drinks that starbucks offers that don't have coffee or caffeine. For Gods sake, that is why you go to Starbucks. If they injected the coffee directly into our veins, we would happily pay extra!
Well, the clerk did come up with some fooh fooh drink that looked like lemonade....don't know and don't care what they were...
Go next door to Einsteins for non coffee drinks....
Well, the clerk did come up with some fooh fooh drink that looked like lemonade....don't know and don't care what they were...
Go next door to Einsteins for non coffee drinks....
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Hungry yet?
It is always good to figure out how you die....
Crash Course
The science of reconstructing car accidents.
By Jascha Hoffman
ANDREW RICH IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL POLICE OFFICER, and not because his thick, Jersey baritone and slick double-breasted suits give him the appearance of a capo in a crime family. What really makes Rich stand out from his colleagues in law enforcement is his erudition.
"Good morning, my name is Andy, and I'm a geek," he announced recently at a lecture at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. As if to prove the point, he opened his suit jacket to reveal an extra-large pocket protector.
After 11 years as a highway patrolman, Rich became a detective with the Fatal Accident Investigation Unit of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office in 1999. As an accident reconstructionist, Rich spends his days determining how car accidents happened, gathering all the hard evidence available, and using the laws of physics to run the crash in reverse. On this morning, however, Rich was giving a talk at a seminar organized by the New York Statewide Traffic Accident Reconstruction Society, or NYSTARS to its members.
Like the recon profession itself, those who attend the quarterly NYSTARS seminars comprise two types of professionals: police detectives like Rich, who do reconstruction for their departments, and mechanical engineers, who typically work for private reconstruction firms that contract their services out to insurance companies and lawyers.
The detectives, most of them men and many of them mustachioed, tend to have developed something like a sixth sense for how an accident occurred, having seen hundreds of them while on duty. The engineers prefer calculus. The two groups tend not to mix much outside events like this one. For cops, the work is a distinction, albeit a nerdy one. Most engineering majors, on the other hand, don't dream of spending their careers reconstructing gory car wrecks. Rich is one of the few in the business who belongs to both camps. Back when he was on the highway patrol, he worked nights and took engineering courses at Bergen Community College during the day. Now he works days, and is in the process of earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Rich wears his erudition lightly—he refers to himself as Professor Protractor. He treats his work with a clinical detachment, referring to pedestrians as "it." Rich's first topic of the day was three-point airborne trajectory analysis, which is used when an accident causes a car to make a brief (and invariably unsuccessful) attempt at flight. Rich flashed a slide of a severely wrecked sedan spattered with blood and battery acid. According to the police who were chasing the driver of this car, Rich explained, "our young hero" jumped a guardrail and hurtled off an overpass, taking down two trees in his path. Miraculously, he survived. His girlfriend in the passenger seat did not.
In a case like this, the recon expert's task is to confirm that the driver was speeding. It's possible to estimate how fast the car was going when it hit the ground by looking at the damage to the car. But to accurately estimate the driver's speed when he left the ground—a crucial question in court—you have to know the takeoff angle.
Where a car has taken off and landed isn't hard to determine—the former is where the skid marks end; the latter is where the crumpled wreck was found—but a third point, necessary for three-point analysis, can be elusive. If, however, a reconstructionist is lucky enough to find a snapped tree branch or, as in this case, some scrapes on the side of an adjacent overpass, he can apply three-point analysis. From there, it's just elementary calculus, Rich explained, but decided not to test the audience's patience with a complete derivation of the formulas involved. "Not if I don't want to get shot," he reasoned. The cops in the room did not object.
Reconstructionists usually rely for their data on police investigators who take photos, measurements, and samples of all the evidence at a crash scene: spattered blood, automotive debris, clothing fibers. With these raw materials, reconstructionists get to work, running lab tests, calculating approach angles, and—a somewhat recent development—running computer simulations to check their work.
With the right physical evidence, reconstructionists can determine how fast a car was going and whether the driver was braking or swerving in the moments before impact. Sometimes, they are called on to make grimmer determinations—in a truly bad wreck, it can be difficult to tell who was driving the car. In some crashes, the force of impact does all the work: The person with the brake pedal's pattern etched into the sole of his shoe was probably the driver.
Other incidents are trickier to decipher. In a case this spring, a reconstructionist testified that a woman was driving when she and a Hartford businessman careered out of control on Connecticut's Route 9. The attorney for the woman, on trial for manslaughter, claimed that it was the man who was driving. The lawyer suggested that the woman's injuries, including a ruptured left breast implant, were consistent not with driving but with performing oral sex on the late businessman when he lost control of the car.
AFTER A SHORT BREAK, Rich picked up a new topic, explaining why hit-and-run cases involving pedestrians are so terrible: They take forever to reconstruct. Arriving on the scene, Rich said he can often identify where the accident happened, how far the pedestrian was thrown, and how far he slid. He can then use formulas honed from thousands of crash tests to estimate the driver's speed within a close range. To use these formulas, however, he must first determine what kind of accident occurred, and that means looking at the injuries to the victim.
Typically there are two kinds of injuries, those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as "road rash." To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video clips on his laptop. The first one showed a well-dressed man with a briefcase in each hand caught crossing a busy Manhattan street. Suddenly, a white minivan blindsided him, causing a "fender vault" that tossed the man three feet into the air, still holding one briefcase. A taxi approaching from the opposite direction then launched him into a textbook "roof vault," sending his remaining briefcase flying and hurling him headfirst onto the pavement. This was not a walk-away accident.
The lecture hall stirred with uneasiness. Rich ignored his audience's squeamishness and moved on to a clip of a man carrying a pizza box who, propelled into a full forward flip by a speeding coupe, landed twitching on the pavement 20 feet ahead. At this point, the crowd could not control its discomfort. "Is this real?" someone asked anxiously from the back. "It's an Australian public safety video," Rich barked in response. A cop asked whether the first one was a simulation as well. Rich ignored the question.
Having forced his audience to witness these gruesome happenings, Rich continued by explaining that it is a central tenet of the accident reconstruction business that eyewitnesses are more or less useless. Drivers lie to protect themselves, and given the speed of most accidents, even the memories of honest souls can't be trusted. Witnesses will swear that a pedestrian was launched 200 yards by a collision—a feat that could only be accomplished if the offending vehicle were doing something like Mach 3. They will claim a black car was white, or a white car was red. Once, three cops commenting on the same accident told Rich respectively that the conditions were wet, dry, and icy.
In the absence of reliable witnesses or conclusive injuries, Rich explained that it can take a trained eye to identify what's not an accident. He recalled arriving at the scene of what looked like a typical hit and run. Since the force of an accident can scatter personal effects, they are not always a good way to determine the point of impact, but some rules tend to hold. While eyeglasses drop straight down, shoes and hats "go into orbit like the space shuttle." In this case, Rich found a body in a pool of blood with a yarmulke suspiciously close by. ("Maybe he used a lot of bobby pins?" volunteered one officer. "Just one," Rich shot back.) Further examination showed no denim fibers spread on the asphalt from the inevitable slide, which led Rich to conclude that this was no car accident. When fresh tar from the deceased's boots matched tar from the roof of the building across the street, Rich's suspicions were confirmed. Quoting an old axiom of police work, he said, "Things are not always as they appear."
Around 1 p.m., Rich wrapped up the morning's events by discussing how to decipher various medical clues, which he described with the help of a horrific series of slides depicting protruding femurs and sheared skin. "Everyone hungry now?" he asked when he had finished. Everyone was. The crowd filed out impatiently for lunch, refueling for the afternoon session, a three-hour lecture on collisions with poles.
Crash Course
The science of reconstructing car accidents.
By Jascha Hoffman
ANDREW RICH IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL POLICE OFFICER, and not because his thick, Jersey baritone and slick double-breasted suits give him the appearance of a capo in a crime family. What really makes Rich stand out from his colleagues in law enforcement is his erudition.
"Good morning, my name is Andy, and I'm a geek," he announced recently at a lecture at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. As if to prove the point, he opened his suit jacket to reveal an extra-large pocket protector.
After 11 years as a highway patrolman, Rich became a detective with the Fatal Accident Investigation Unit of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office in 1999. As an accident reconstructionist, Rich spends his days determining how car accidents happened, gathering all the hard evidence available, and using the laws of physics to run the crash in reverse. On this morning, however, Rich was giving a talk at a seminar organized by the New York Statewide Traffic Accident Reconstruction Society, or NYSTARS to its members.
Like the recon profession itself, those who attend the quarterly NYSTARS seminars comprise two types of professionals: police detectives like Rich, who do reconstruction for their departments, and mechanical engineers, who typically work for private reconstruction firms that contract their services out to insurance companies and lawyers.
The detectives, most of them men and many of them mustachioed, tend to have developed something like a sixth sense for how an accident occurred, having seen hundreds of them while on duty. The engineers prefer calculus. The two groups tend not to mix much outside events like this one. For cops, the work is a distinction, albeit a nerdy one. Most engineering majors, on the other hand, don't dream of spending their careers reconstructing gory car wrecks. Rich is one of the few in the business who belongs to both camps. Back when he was on the highway patrol, he worked nights and took engineering courses at Bergen Community College during the day. Now he works days, and is in the process of earning a degree in mechanical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Rich wears his erudition lightly—he refers to himself as Professor Protractor. He treats his work with a clinical detachment, referring to pedestrians as "it." Rich's first topic of the day was three-point airborne trajectory analysis, which is used when an accident causes a car to make a brief (and invariably unsuccessful) attempt at flight. Rich flashed a slide of a severely wrecked sedan spattered with blood and battery acid. According to the police who were chasing the driver of this car, Rich explained, "our young hero" jumped a guardrail and hurtled off an overpass, taking down two trees in his path. Miraculously, he survived. His girlfriend in the passenger seat did not.
In a case like this, the recon expert's task is to confirm that the driver was speeding. It's possible to estimate how fast the car was going when it hit the ground by looking at the damage to the car. But to accurately estimate the driver's speed when he left the ground—a crucial question in court—you have to know the takeoff angle.
Where a car has taken off and landed isn't hard to determine—the former is where the skid marks end; the latter is where the crumpled wreck was found—but a third point, necessary for three-point analysis, can be elusive. If, however, a reconstructionist is lucky enough to find a snapped tree branch or, as in this case, some scrapes on the side of an adjacent overpass, he can apply three-point analysis. From there, it's just elementary calculus, Rich explained, but decided not to test the audience's patience with a complete derivation of the formulas involved. "Not if I don't want to get shot," he reasoned. The cops in the room did not object.
Reconstructionists usually rely for their data on police investigators who take photos, measurements, and samples of all the evidence at a crash scene: spattered blood, automotive debris, clothing fibers. With these raw materials, reconstructionists get to work, running lab tests, calculating approach angles, and—a somewhat recent development—running computer simulations to check their work.
With the right physical evidence, reconstructionists can determine how fast a car was going and whether the driver was braking or swerving in the moments before impact. Sometimes, they are called on to make grimmer determinations—in a truly bad wreck, it can be difficult to tell who was driving the car. In some crashes, the force of impact does all the work: The person with the brake pedal's pattern etched into the sole of his shoe was probably the driver.
Other incidents are trickier to decipher. In a case this spring, a reconstructionist testified that a woman was driving when she and a Hartford businessman careered out of control on Connecticut's Route 9. The attorney for the woman, on trial for manslaughter, claimed that it was the man who was driving. The lawyer suggested that the woman's injuries, including a ruptured left breast implant, were consistent not with driving but with performing oral sex on the late businessman when he lost control of the car.
AFTER A SHORT BREAK, Rich picked up a new topic, explaining why hit-and-run cases involving pedestrians are so terrible: They take forever to reconstruct. Arriving on the scene, Rich said he can often identify where the accident happened, how far the pedestrian was thrown, and how far he slid. He can then use formulas honed from thousands of crash tests to estimate the driver's speed within a close range. To use these formulas, however, he must first determine what kind of accident occurred, and that means looking at the injuries to the victim.
Typically there are two kinds of injuries, those from the initial impact, and the ones from hitting and sliding on the asphalt, known as "road rash." To illustrate the different types of impact a pedestrian can suffer, Rich cued up a series of video clips on his laptop. The first one showed a well-dressed man with a briefcase in each hand caught crossing a busy Manhattan street. Suddenly, a white minivan blindsided him, causing a "fender vault" that tossed the man three feet into the air, still holding one briefcase. A taxi approaching from the opposite direction then launched him into a textbook "roof vault," sending his remaining briefcase flying and hurling him headfirst onto the pavement. This was not a walk-away accident.
The lecture hall stirred with uneasiness. Rich ignored his audience's squeamishness and moved on to a clip of a man carrying a pizza box who, propelled into a full forward flip by a speeding coupe, landed twitching on the pavement 20 feet ahead. At this point, the crowd could not control its discomfort. "Is this real?" someone asked anxiously from the back. "It's an Australian public safety video," Rich barked in response. A cop asked whether the first one was a simulation as well. Rich ignored the question.
Having forced his audience to witness these gruesome happenings, Rich continued by explaining that it is a central tenet of the accident reconstruction business that eyewitnesses are more or less useless. Drivers lie to protect themselves, and given the speed of most accidents, even the memories of honest souls can't be trusted. Witnesses will swear that a pedestrian was launched 200 yards by a collision—a feat that could only be accomplished if the offending vehicle were doing something like Mach 3. They will claim a black car was white, or a white car was red. Once, three cops commenting on the same accident told Rich respectively that the conditions were wet, dry, and icy.
In the absence of reliable witnesses or conclusive injuries, Rich explained that it can take a trained eye to identify what's not an accident. He recalled arriving at the scene of what looked like a typical hit and run. Since the force of an accident can scatter personal effects, they are not always a good way to determine the point of impact, but some rules tend to hold. While eyeglasses drop straight down, shoes and hats "go into orbit like the space shuttle." In this case, Rich found a body in a pool of blood with a yarmulke suspiciously close by. ("Maybe he used a lot of bobby pins?" volunteered one officer. "Just one," Rich shot back.) Further examination showed no denim fibers spread on the asphalt from the inevitable slide, which led Rich to conclude that this was no car accident. When fresh tar from the deceased's boots matched tar from the roof of the building across the street, Rich's suspicions were confirmed. Quoting an old axiom of police work, he said, "Things are not always as they appear."
Around 1 p.m., Rich wrapped up the morning's events by discussing how to decipher various medical clues, which he described with the help of a horrific series of slides depicting protruding femurs and sheared skin. "Everyone hungry now?" he asked when he had finished. Everyone was. The crowd filed out impatiently for lunch, refueling for the afternoon session, a three-hour lecture on collisions with poles.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
new fangled bikes
Now it seems to me that the real problem is that kids can drive cars on video games and they have stopped ridin their bikes!
Nation’s love of bike riding is going flat
Safety concerns, video games, car pools keep children away
By Niki Kelly
The Journal Gazette
COLUMBIA CITY – In years past, a hot day called for children to perch atop bicycles of all colors and shapes – the wind whipping ponytails back and forth as riders careened down the street, destination unknown.
Maybe a stop at the local mom-and-pop grocery for a favorite candy. Or, to the park for ball practice. Sometimes a trip across town to visit a friend.
Nowadays, the once-familiar sight of a gaggle of kids riding their bikes around the neighborhood is fading into American folklore.
Kids instead walk to the local pool or hop on a motorized scooter. Better yet, they don’t leave the house at all, lounging instead in the air conditioning – fingers numb from hours of playing video games.
“It seems to me that if you think about the psychology of the bicycle, youngsters used to see learning to ride as a way of expressing themselves as people. It was freedom,” said Richard Hess, a 58-year-old Fort Wayne resident. “You got on the bike with a couple of other kids and you had a sense of being in control.
“It gives them an opportunity to get away and be themselves. If they aren’t doing that, it’s unfortunate because they are really missing a step in their development.”
Hess belongs to a generation of adults who spent their adolescent years scurrying around their hometowns on a bicycle.
So did 48-year-old David Coar, who carried his love to pedal into his job as manager at Summit City Bicycles & Fitness. And Chuck Bash, a 55-year-old Fort Wayne man who still does a century every year on his bike (that’s 100 miles in one day).
“When I was a kid we spent the day on the bike,” Coar said. “I could go all over town between 10 and 14 years old with all of my friends. We did everything on bicycles.”
But those days are gone.
What once was a child’s only mode of transportation has been replaced by Mom and Dad carpooling kids to school and other activities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2003 that 71 percent of parents with school-age children rode their bikes to school when they were younger, compared to only 18 percent of their children.
“It’s not gone, but it’s certainly not prevalent. Kids in general don’t ride the way they used to,” said Stephen Madden, editor-in-chief at Bicycling Magazine. “I absolutely remember those days. We used to pretend our bikes were fire engines or police cars and ride all over the place putting out fires. We would be gone for hours, riding out of the city and into the suburbs to see big houses and fields. I want my kids to have that same experience.”
Statistics show that likely won’t happen.
Lou Mazzante, senior editor at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, said bicycle sales have been flat for several years, bouncing between $15 million and $20 million annually.
But there has been a precipitous drop in youth or juvenile bikes, he said, pointing to a 25 percent decline in 2003.
The National Sporting Goods Association conducts an annual participation study, which showed bike riders dropping from 53 million people in 1996 to about 36 million people in 2003 – almost 32 percent.
Additional statistics show that only 15,128 children ages 7 to 17 rode bicycles six times or more last year, a decline of about 24 percent in the past decade.
There are a host of reasons – among them safety concerns, increased traffic and lazier children – why young people aren’t out and about on their bikes anymore.
“Parents are just worried,” Mazzante said. “It’s just fear. Of falling down, getting hit, getting kidnapped. They want to protect their kids.”
Even those who cherish childhood memories atop their favorite bike say today’s society is a different place than when they were growing up.
“There are a bunch of reasons,” Madden said. “Kids are much more scheduled than they used to be, so there isn’t time to ride between school and piano lessons and baseball. Another part of it is the number of miles of roadway has not increased a whole lot but the number of cars has doubled, so there aren’t as many safe places for kids to ride.”
That’s why bicycle purists advocate more bike trails and special bike lanes on highways and busy streets.
Still, with more cars on the road than ever, bicycle fatalities resulting from vehicle crashes were down 9 percent in 2002, to 660 deaths nationwide. And 85 percent of those deaths involved bicyclists who weren’t wearing a helmet. More than three-quarters of the deaths were riders 16 or older.
In Indiana, there were nine bicycle fatalities in 2002, including two from ages 5 to 15. Indiana has no helmet law.
“I used to ride my bike a few miles at a time, but now I would never consider letting (my daughter) ride that far,” said Nancy Rinehart, of Columbia City. “Things are a lot faster than they used to be. There are more cars and less patience.”
Huntington mother Belinda Ritenour is also concerned. She let her now-grown daughter ride all over Roanoke when growing up. But she doesn’t support the same freedom for her three grandchildren living in Huntington.
“It’s a mom’s paranoia,” she said. “There are more threats to children and too many things go on.”
Others say less bike riding is just another symptom of a bigger problem – lazier, more overweight kids.
“Our competition is video games,” Coar said of bike sales. “It’s too easy for kids to just sit on their can and not do anything.”
Bash said the phenomenon doesn’t end with bikes.
“Kids aren’t doing a whole lot of other things like they used to, either. They’re not outside playing tag or basketball,” he said. “They are sitting inside watching TV.”
Or they have turned to motorized scooters, all-terrain vehicles and miniature motorbikes instead.
“It’s much more fun to just sit on a four-wheeler and gas it up,” Ritenour said.
Skateboards are also popular. Thirteen-year-old Chase Langeloh spent one day last week skateboarding at the park in Columbia City. He says he rides his skateboard every day and his bike only once or twice a month. In fact, he recently gave it to his 7-year-old brother.
“I got all my friends into skateboarding. It’s a lot more forgiving – if you wreck, you’re not going to kill yourself,” he said.
Then there’s Trenton Rowe, 14, of South Whitley. He also spent part of last week doing tricks at the skate park. Only he rode a bicycle.
“I ride my bike every day it’s not raining,” he said.
Nation’s love of bike riding is going flat
Safety concerns, video games, car pools keep children away
By Niki Kelly
The Journal Gazette
COLUMBIA CITY – In years past, a hot day called for children to perch atop bicycles of all colors and shapes – the wind whipping ponytails back and forth as riders careened down the street, destination unknown.
Maybe a stop at the local mom-and-pop grocery for a favorite candy. Or, to the park for ball practice. Sometimes a trip across town to visit a friend.
Nowadays, the once-familiar sight of a gaggle of kids riding their bikes around the neighborhood is fading into American folklore.
Kids instead walk to the local pool or hop on a motorized scooter. Better yet, they don’t leave the house at all, lounging instead in the air conditioning – fingers numb from hours of playing video games.
“It seems to me that if you think about the psychology of the bicycle, youngsters used to see learning to ride as a way of expressing themselves as people. It was freedom,” said Richard Hess, a 58-year-old Fort Wayne resident. “You got on the bike with a couple of other kids and you had a sense of being in control.
“It gives them an opportunity to get away and be themselves. If they aren’t doing that, it’s unfortunate because they are really missing a step in their development.”
Hess belongs to a generation of adults who spent their adolescent years scurrying around their hometowns on a bicycle.
So did 48-year-old David Coar, who carried his love to pedal into his job as manager at Summit City Bicycles & Fitness. And Chuck Bash, a 55-year-old Fort Wayne man who still does a century every year on his bike (that’s 100 miles in one day).
“When I was a kid we spent the day on the bike,” Coar said. “I could go all over town between 10 and 14 years old with all of my friends. We did everything on bicycles.”
But those days are gone.
What once was a child’s only mode of transportation has been replaced by Mom and Dad carpooling kids to school and other activities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2003 that 71 percent of parents with school-age children rode their bikes to school when they were younger, compared to only 18 percent of their children.
“It’s not gone, but it’s certainly not prevalent. Kids in general don’t ride the way they used to,” said Stephen Madden, editor-in-chief at Bicycling Magazine. “I absolutely remember those days. We used to pretend our bikes were fire engines or police cars and ride all over the place putting out fires. We would be gone for hours, riding out of the city and into the suburbs to see big houses and fields. I want my kids to have that same experience.”
Statistics show that likely won’t happen.
Lou Mazzante, senior editor at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, said bicycle sales have been flat for several years, bouncing between $15 million and $20 million annually.
But there has been a precipitous drop in youth or juvenile bikes, he said, pointing to a 25 percent decline in 2003.
The National Sporting Goods Association conducts an annual participation study, which showed bike riders dropping from 53 million people in 1996 to about 36 million people in 2003 – almost 32 percent.
Additional statistics show that only 15,128 children ages 7 to 17 rode bicycles six times or more last year, a decline of about 24 percent in the past decade.
There are a host of reasons – among them safety concerns, increased traffic and lazier children – why young people aren’t out and about on their bikes anymore.
“Parents are just worried,” Mazzante said. “It’s just fear. Of falling down, getting hit, getting kidnapped. They want to protect their kids.”
Even those who cherish childhood memories atop their favorite bike say today’s society is a different place than when they were growing up.
“There are a bunch of reasons,” Madden said. “Kids are much more scheduled than they used to be, so there isn’t time to ride between school and piano lessons and baseball. Another part of it is the number of miles of roadway has not increased a whole lot but the number of cars has doubled, so there aren’t as many safe places for kids to ride.”
That’s why bicycle purists advocate more bike trails and special bike lanes on highways and busy streets.
Still, with more cars on the road than ever, bicycle fatalities resulting from vehicle crashes were down 9 percent in 2002, to 660 deaths nationwide. And 85 percent of those deaths involved bicyclists who weren’t wearing a helmet. More than three-quarters of the deaths were riders 16 or older.
In Indiana, there were nine bicycle fatalities in 2002, including two from ages 5 to 15. Indiana has no helmet law.
“I used to ride my bike a few miles at a time, but now I would never consider letting (my daughter) ride that far,” said Nancy Rinehart, of Columbia City. “Things are a lot faster than they used to be. There are more cars and less patience.”
Huntington mother Belinda Ritenour is also concerned. She let her now-grown daughter ride all over Roanoke when growing up. But she doesn’t support the same freedom for her three grandchildren living in Huntington.
“It’s a mom’s paranoia,” she said. “There are more threats to children and too many things go on.”
Others say less bike riding is just another symptom of a bigger problem – lazier, more overweight kids.
“Our competition is video games,” Coar said of bike sales. “It’s too easy for kids to just sit on their can and not do anything.”
Bash said the phenomenon doesn’t end with bikes.
“Kids aren’t doing a whole lot of other things like they used to, either. They’re not outside playing tag or basketball,” he said. “They are sitting inside watching TV.”
Or they have turned to motorized scooters, all-terrain vehicles and miniature motorbikes instead.
“It’s much more fun to just sit on a four-wheeler and gas it up,” Ritenour said.
Skateboards are also popular. Thirteen-year-old Chase Langeloh spent one day last week skateboarding at the park in Columbia City. He says he rides his skateboard every day and his bike only once or twice a month. In fact, he recently gave it to his 7-year-old brother.
“I got all my friends into skateboarding. It’s a lot more forgiving – if you wreck, you’re not going to kill yourself,” he said.
Then there’s Trenton Rowe, 14, of South Whitley. He also spent part of last week doing tricks at the skate park. Only he rode a bicycle.
“I ride my bike every day it’s not raining,” he said.
Thursday, July 01, 2004
dirty ol geezer
Get a car!
Sentencing for "Bicycle Groper"
PHILADELPHIA-July 1, 2004 — The man accused of groping Philadelphia women and then speeding away on a bicycle will be sentenced today .
Twenty-five-year-old Alexandro Perez, an illegal alien from Mexico, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of indecent assault, harassment and simple assault.
The 11 attacks happened in July and August 2003 in Center City, Queen Village, and South Philadelphia.
Sentencing for "Bicycle Groper"
PHILADELPHIA-July 1, 2004 — The man accused of groping Philadelphia women and then speeding away on a bicycle will be sentenced today .
Twenty-five-year-old Alexandro Perez, an illegal alien from Mexico, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of indecent assault, harassment and simple assault.
The 11 attacks happened in July and August 2003 in Center City, Queen Village, and South Philadelphia.
Blind al quida
On CNN, they were showing three blind guys who wanted to go to the amusement park. Security held them for an hour because they were concerned about their canes being what? Weapons of mass destruction, terrorist weapons, you could poke your eye out with that thing? The guys were obviously blind, so what were they going to do with the canes.
Silliness of security without a clue...
Silliness of security without a clue...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)