Hoarse Speak

Looks like the city of Lyon has implemented a free (to the city) very cheap (to the user) scheme of bicycle shareing. Basically they've put about 2000 bikes in around the city and by using your credit card, you can "check out" a bike. It's free for the first 1/2 hour then less than 1 euro per hour after that. Pretty cool for an urban area and maybe the fact that you have to check the bike out on a credit card will cut down on the plagues of theft from other "free" bike schemes such as the orange bike disaster in Amsterdam.

Anyways, this comes via Velorution (2000 free bicycles for Lyon citizens) and the full story appeared in Le Monde but of course they have annoying subscriber access and bugmenot doesn't seem to work. Someone has reproduced the original article with some more of the background politics behind it here at Tous à vélo!. I can't read French very well, so it will probably take me a week to understand 30% of it.

Transport for London (London's dept. of tranportation/streets) is promoting cycling through a series of adverts. http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cycles/press-releases/2005/apr/18th.shtml

They've got a series of 3 targeting "young professionals", "youths" (with BMXers and women looking to pick up men, and "families" . Cheezy, but cool that they are actually trying to promote cycling as a way of improving quality of life and decreasing congestion in the city.

via Velorution: http://www.velorution.biz/?p=886

"[The IRS is] like a police department that was giving out lots of parking tickets while organized crime was running rampant".
Charles Rossotti
Former Internal Revenue Service commissioner

From the BBC's website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4440125.stm

DeLay Says Federal Judiciary Has 'Run Amok,' Adding Congress Is Partly to Blame

I can only hope that this serves to show that DeLay is truly a lunatic, albeit a lunatic who has followers, but Jim Jones had followers too.

For those of you who know Ana, she's been posting some over on her blog that she calls artesanato antropológico. She's been volunteering at a daycare in Sobradinho, the town where she's living, and has some pretty funny stories about the day care as well as some photos. See:

adventures in babysitting for a story about one of the impish little girls and Tricotando present for more about the place as well as some of her photos of the kids.

She's also been having laptop woes and ran all over Salvador ( a city of 3 million people) looking for canned air to clean the dust out of her laptop. Instead she only found a product called Mastersux (more here) which is some kind of cannister vaccum that they sell - but of course there were none in stock.

I've also posted some of the pics from our trip here: http://www.rakaposhi.net/photos and will put up some more over the next weeks. And actually write about the trip - imagine that.

This commentary and analysis: http://www.juancole.com/2005/04/tragic-death-and-other-tragic-deaths-i.html by Juan Cole of Bush's speech yesterday where he mashes Terri Schivo's death into a culture of life cover for the pre Iraq war intelligence failures is really interesting. Most interesting about it is how neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post seem to have commented on how wishy washy Bush is in his response - especially in a war that has left 1000's dead and will leave more 1000's dead over the next 10 years. How does this fit a "culture of life" by any measure? I think Cole nails it when he says that the so called "culture of life" is another way of saying power and hierarchy.