Occupy Los Angeles

Sign placed over Pasadena Freeway by the Tribunes of the People,
Remained for just under four hours.

Occupy Los Angeles

Los Angeles

The Tribunes of the People, being strong believers in the people's right to know, applaud recent document releases by Wikileaks. While Julian Assange is ensconced in a baronial hall somewhere in the English countryside, though, PFC Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have leaked the documents to him, is being held in the brig at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia under conditions of solitary confinement that are tantamount to torture. The Tribunes strongly support Bradley Manning.

Here is his entry on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

And here is a nifty way to access the documents contained in the Wikileaks release:

http://www.elpais.com/documentossecretos/mapa-cables-wikileaks/

Sailing Across America

Lately I’ve been messing around with bicycles and sails, trying to combine the two technologies into a more perfect machine. Although it’s been done before, previous bike/sail designs were built around the sailboat model, with a large mast and triangular sail: excellent for harnessing the wind, but practically useless on roads. I’ve been working with smaller, more discreet sails that can be folded out when there’s a tailwind and back when there isn’t. Bike sails are cheap and easy to make, requiring little more than a beach chair, yard sign and duct tape.

In the spring I took this bike out to the Great Plains to test it in big wind. Starting in Chadron, Nebraska, up by the Wyoming border, I set out to go literally whichever way the wind was blowing. Eight days later I was in Waterloo, Iowa: just shy of the Mississippi River. 850 miles on a fully loaded bike, and I was hardly even tired. It was incredible.

This was back in April, with winds averaging between 25 and 30 mph - with gusts up to 50 - coming straight out of the west. The wind on the plains is awesome: it comes whipping across the prairie, shrieking through the power lines and ripping at everything that isn’t nailed or bolted down. When I was stopped, or at low speeds, the wind almost tore the bike apart, so it was important to either quickly find shelter or get back up to speed.

When I was moving though… wow. All around me everything was chaos: an entire landscape of crops, grasses and trees bucking and heaving in the wind, while on the bike everything was still - sometimes almost perfectly still - enough to light a match and let it burn. It was a bizarre, otherworldly feeling, and one I’ll never forget.

With a cruising speed between 18 and 23 mph, I was able to do over 100 miles a day easily - almost lazily - crossing practically a third of the country sitting on my ass. Yes, I had to pedal, but I didn’t have to pedal much.

In September I decided to really put things to the test and see how long it’d take to go coast-to-coast. Starting at the mouth of the Columbia River I headed east, reaching Virginia Beach, Virginia 3,867 miles and two months later. Here’s what I learned along the way:

1.) The United States is much bigger than it looks on the map.

2.) You can’t count on the wind.

3.) Having a large American flag on the back of your bike will give you an extra two or three feet of room from passing traffic.

In general, bicycle sailing works best in the West, in the deserts and plains. East of the Mississippi there’s just too many trees. The sails work best in high winds, 15/20 mph and above, and for hill climbing, where even a slight wind assist feels almost magical.

I may try this again in the spring, using a standard road bike and thin tires. Until then, the coast-to-coast bikesailing record stands at an easily breakable 64 days.

St. Pete for Wikileaks

The good folks at St. Pete for Peace employ the fiendishly clever Ladder Technology to speak out on Wikileaks around Tampa Bay. More Here.

"We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with..."

"Openness, transparency -- these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 -- after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin -- there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today."

-Michael Moore from "Why I'm posting bail..."

Fair Game

This sign was placed over the Pasadena Freeway near downtown LA on October 29th, timed to coincide with the opening of the film "Fair Game" about Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. (My apologies for the photo quality, it was taken off a computer screen.) The sign itself stayed up for 22 hours, including that Friday's rush hour.

How To Make A Bicycle Sail

What You'll Need:

An aluminum beach chair
Plastic yard sign with "H" shaped wire frame
Hacksaw, Duct Tape and Scissors
Broomstick

Step 1) Dismantle beach chair with hacksaw. Take "U" shaped tubing from seat and backrest and slowly bend them to desired shape.

Step 2) Cut yard sign in half, place inside the tubing and attach/fill in the gaps with duct tape.

For standard bikes simply tape the sails to the sides of the wire frame, using duct tape as the hinge. Bungee or tape the wire frame to the rack and seatback. Broomstick/crossbar should be bungeed/taped on the front of the rack just in front of the sail. Attach sail edges to crossbar with bungee cords or duct tape.

For Recumbents the proceedure is the same except the wire frame ends should be bent at right angles and then extended with ballpoint pen tubes or aluminum tent pole pieces to accomodate sail height. The end result should look something like this:

(recumbent style shown - standard bike sails should have a thinner gap)

Attach wire frame to seatback crossbars and backstays with duct tape. Sail crossbar should fit in between sail and seatback.

Obviously there will be differences in beach chairs, racks and bicycles, but the beauty of bikesail technology is that it can be designed, built, modified and repaired using little more than duct tape, tubing and wire. So long as you have panels that you can fold out when there's wind and fold back when there isn't, you're sailing.

Phoenix