antimeria

Caroline’s recent “Five Things” posts reminded me that I haven’t done one of these in a while. And because I like her gimmick, I’m stealing it. To make up for lost time, here are five lists.

Five recent obsessions

1. Fantasy football.
2. Real football.
3. Chicken wings.
4. Polka dots.
5. Christina Hendricks (Daaaaaaaaaaamn).

Five recent stressors

1. Clara’s oil pressure (or lack thereof).
2. Neo-Nazis in Baltimore.
3. The MARC train’s unreliability and general shittiness.
4. 90°F+ and humid weather for the last week.
5. Quipu has been grumpy lately.

Five things that cause me white-hot, apoplectic road rage

1. Sitting at a green light.
2. Driving less than 10mph over the speed limit.
3. Driving slower than I am.
4. Double-parking on narrow streets with spots available.
5. Slowing to a crawl around corners or curves.

Five New Yorker articles I never thought I’d care about, much less read all of

1. “Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories.”
2. “Rich Bitch: The legal battle over trust funds for pets.”
3. “All He Surveyed: How Palladian was Palladio?“
4. “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny” (abstract only)
5. “The Olympian: How China’s greatest musician will win the Beijing Games.”

Five nervous habits/tics I have

1. Cracking my knuckles
2. Cracking my back
3. Bouncing my legs up and down, often at different speeds
4. Fiddling with my chain-bracelet
5. Picking at my cuticles

An equestrian friend passed along this 2007 American Journal of Surgery study (PDF):

[H]orseback riding has been identified as a higher-risk activity than automobile racing, motorcycle riding, football, and skiing, and at least as dangerous as rugby. Equestrian riding also is considered to have the highest mortality of all sports, with an annual death rate of 1 per 1 million population. This reality is not surprising because a horse weighs up to 500 kg, moves at a speed of 65 km/h, elevates the rider 3 meters above the ground, and kicks with a force of nearly 1 ton. A horse also is more unpredictable than either a motorcycle or a racecar.

Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, and never buy your kids that pony.

Thanks to Internet outages, I haven’t gotten around to posting photos of Clara, my new motorcycle. She’s a 1979 Triumph Bonneville T140E. Photos after the jump, all images link to high-res.

(more…)

Apologies for the severe lack of posting lately, but here’s something that’s awesome: CAFE averages! Woooo!

In short, they’re going up. Trucks, in particular, will have to reach an average of 30mpg by 2016. There are all sorts of asterisks involved (one major one is that CAFE is, by definition, an average of each class’s fuel economy), but it’s a good start. Further out, it could push more ultra-sized or long-haul vehicles, which are generally ill-suited for electric powertrains, toward diesel or hybrids (or, dare to dream, a diesel-electric hybrid, which apparently made that guy really happy). Combined with Daimler’s new stake in Tesla, it looks like I’ll have some interesting options by the time I’m ready to actually buy a car.

“I hear that the Republican Party plans next week to rename the Democratic Party the ‘Democratic Socialists’… And to rename themselves the ‘National Socialists.’” – Brad DeLong

Apologies for the lack of postage. Clara comes home this weekend!