Long-time readers may have deduced that people riding their bikes on public sidewalks pisses me all the fuck off.  For all I rant about the public’s right to self-defence, I’ve been injured far more by cyclists than I have by muggers.  I have fucking had it with sanctimonious cocksockets riding their magnesium-framed hippie status symbols on pedestrian thoroughfares with the oblivious self-satisfaction of the monomaniacally anointed.  “Get out of my way, you dirty bipedalists!” they scream, “You’re impeding the Future of Transportation!”

When Sonny Bono hit that level of asshole, he killed himself on a fucking tree.  Apparently BC doesn’t have enough trees.  We surely have enough hills.

San Francisco also has enough hills.  Rather than trees, however, they’re substituting cars… and an environmental movement which condemns — are you sitting down? — bike lanes:

• San Francisco Ponders: Could Bike Lanes Cause Pollution? (Wall Street Journal)

At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly [Rob Anderson] has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That’s put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report.

Cyclists say the irony is killing them — literally. At least four bikers have died and hundreds more have been injured in San Francisco since mid-2006, when Mr. Anderson helped convince a judge to halt implementation of a massive pro-bike plan.(It’s unclear whether the plan’s execution could have prevented the accidents.) In the past year, bike advocates have demonstrated outside City Hall, pushed the city to challenge the plan’s freeze in court and proposed putting the whole mess to local voters. Nothing worked.

[...]

Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, [Anderson] reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has been blinded by political correctness. It’s an “attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy,” he wrote in his blog this month.

The rest of the article describes a tempest in a teapot, including some lawyer bitching about some other lawyer’s choice of acronyms.  It’s a delightful and amusing paean to people’s fixation upon the trivial at the expense of the useful.

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Poor Nancy Pelosi.  She’s been in trouble lately, and it’s all so very unfair.  She’s done all sorts of wonderful things since achieving the position of Speaker of the House, and all people want to talk about is her failure to end the War in Iraq.  It’s not as though she ever said she would — well, I suppose the Democrats ran on that particular platform to win their Congressional majority in 2006, but come on, they would have had to use the power of the purse to get that done, and that might have made them look bad.  That’s just far too much to expect.

Nevertheless, she’s done, uh, stuff.  You know, she organized that thing where the Dems voted for that bill where they organized funding for that shit the Republicans didn’t really want.  And stuff.  And sure, they tacked it onto yet another Iraq war budget authorization, but you need to make hard compromises like that in the dog-eat-dog world of politics.

And speaking of hard compromises, Pelosi’s committed to promoting energy independence and preventing global warming and, like, stuff.

• Meet the Press transcript for August 24, 2008

REP. PELOSI:  I’m, I’m, I’m investing in something I believe in.  I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

What?

• Natural gas (Wikipedia)

Natural gas is a gaseous fossil fuel consisting primarily of methane but including significant quantities of ethane, propane, butane, and pentane—heavier hydrocarbons removed prior to use as a consumer fuel —as well as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, helium and hydrogen sulfide.^[1] It is found in oil fields (associated) either dissolved or isolated in natural gas fields (non-associated), and in coal beds (as coalbed methane).

Key Riced All My Tea.

I blame the schools.  The mechanism by which anyone can graduate from high school — let alone get elected Speaker of the fucking House — without knowing that natural gas is a fossil fuel entirely escapes me.  It’s clear that a bunch of so-called teachers in Califuckingfornia are not doing their goddamn jobs.

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While Pelosi and her Democrats are conspicuously failing to demonstrate any sort of intestinal fortitude in Washington, Zimbabwe’s MDC is demonstrating the sort of sisu that must have made Simo Hayha sit up in his grave and applaud with enough force to shake the leaves (or needles) from every tree in the northern hemisphere:

• MDC heckle Mugabe in parliament (The Beeb)

“You killed people, we won’t forget that,” they shouted, while Mr Mugabe listed government achievements.

Nice to know that someone on this fucking dirtball has some nuts.

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And speaking of lack of sisu:

• Spider forces family out of home (The Beeb)

Lorraine Griffiths and her three children have moved out of their house in Colchester, the RSPCA said.

They are refusing to return until the large sandy-coloured creature, thought to be a camel spider, is captured.

This is not the England about which Kipling wrote.  It’s a fucking spider! Give your kids a pair of pliers each and set them loose.  Three kids on seek-and-destroy missions ought to rid your house of a goddamn camel spider in a couple of hours, tops.