By Andrea Menzies
Part of why I am not going to Saint Patrick’s Day events this weekend is the high gas prices. Here are some funny jokes I saw about it online. It is strangely comforting to know I am not the only person cancelling plans due to high gas prices.
By Andrea Menzies
I feel music festival envy in spring as Mardi Gras and SXSW are in Louisiana and Texas in February and March. People are desperately trying to get to New Orleans and Austin areas I used to live in, and my timeline is filled with fun photos making me desperately home sick while Virginia is completely garbage.
By Andrea Menzies
A bit of air and war irony today on the Internet. The government demands you have a clean car, but can fill the sky with pollution if they want it.
By Andrea Menzies
There is a famous documentary called “Who Killed The Electric Car?” available on IMBD here: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk plus is for sale on Amazon. I had to write many papers on this documentary in extension certificates classes at University. I made A grades on the paper, and in the classes. The famous documentary makes the point that the conflicts and wars generated by fossil fuel profits are not a natural condition. Governments and corporations are intentionally destroying alternative transportation to fossil fuel using cars and trucks. It is not natural and inevitable like the sunrise or ocean tide it is a man made problem that is causing wars, abuse of women, car wrecks, and pollution as a start to the problems. How many women who were going home from work were desperate for a car ride home in the rain, and got far more than they bargained for when they had to be alone with a violent man? When massive profit is only in fossil fuel rich areas violence will follow.
By Andrea M.
Every alien show says humans could not build large monolith buildings so aliens may have done it. They never mention many cultures had HUGE workhorse animals by the hundreds. Some even had trained elephants hauling wood and stones. Due to lack of antibiotics and food large human cities had only 50 or 60 people in most cultures 200 years ago or more. Each man could usually only lift around 200 pounds so HUMAN labor could not move things. However, huge stables of tamed horses, deer, elephants and other donkeys and llama existed all over the world humans could get animals to drag stones with large harnesses and ropes. Alien shows are fun to watch for pretty camera images, and pretty photos of interesting tourist destinations. I wish I could travel more frequently. I also think the government has been caught being less than truthful about many things, and we live in a time of caution and paranoia. I have watched a few alien shows, and I always detect the logic flaw of “only high tech can move things” which is never addressed. Without fossil fuel technology far more work animals were used in the past. With leverage, fulcrums, rope wheels, wooden rollers mixed in with the construction monolith stones could get moved, and they never mention this idea at all. Work horse transport had a second advantage, and there were few fatal wrecks. Horses have instincts that make them avoid running into other horses, and cars have none at all. With war being a modern problem with fossil fuel I almost envy times when loving furry animals for transportation was a social normalcy and not pollution making gasoline guzzling cars.
By Andrea M.
Sad, funny, and true jokes on the Internet this week. Funny in a social commentary way. I bought a “life is too short to die for oil” button as a kid, and it keeps being more true every year.
By Andrea Menzies
Happy Birthday to my mom Anne. It is her birthday this week and we are having parties tonight and Friday.
By Andrea Menzies
Many thanks to my family and friends which helped me get my car fixed this week. That is the one good part about this area is I have my mom, daughter, and a few cousins that are great at fixing cars in the area. The super cold weather has been hard on cars, and my sick car has been a challenge. I wish I did not live in a car dependent area with no buses available. I lived in France and Germany as a child when my American citizen family worked there, and public transportation was so clean, maintained, and on time transportation was never a problem. I lived in New Orleans for University and street cars and buses were easy to take, and running day and night. Car manufacturing leaders lobbied the governments in many U.S. areas to make roads non-walkable in the 1940s saying it would promote car manufacturing jobs. Now most of the jobs are gone overseas, and we are stuck with roads with few sidewalks and bike lanes. Many bike lanes are painted in this area that only run near parks, and don’t run the full street. House rental and sale websites want to list property as “near walk and bike trails” as the trails go nowhere and lead to dead-end roads constantly. The problem is people trying to go to work, school, and weekend social activities have limited transportation. Uber, other rideshare, and taxi rides are super expensive, often slow, and destroy a work-day’s profit margin for their personal profits. Cars use fossil fuel which makes pollution, are dangerous for wrecks, and cause many social problems. Forcing people in the U.S. to be dependent on cars destroys the ability to be productive many days.
The car was sick.
By Andrea Menzies
No matter what downtown you live near tiny electric scooters and gun violence are now normal. I thought I was living in the worst U.S.A. area, but then an old area I used to live in has suffered a bad shooting as well. Cold weather and a collapsing economy are making tempers flare in many areas. People want to blow off steam seeing music, but rent and parking downtown now seems to cost one million dollars. Uber and cabs are now extremely expensive. Music fans now park at a nearby hotel, and scooter a couple of miles into downtown areas. Unfortunately no area is safe anymore. The result is crime scene photos covered in tiny scooters that are a strange mix of the childlike and the morbid in one glance. I seriously do want to buy a tiny bike-scooter after seeing tiny scooters all over the last set of Austin music district murder photos. The scooter people were the ones that lived.
By Andrea Menzies
I bought one of the Actbest Mars e-bikes, and wanted to warn other customers to buy a tiny scooter instead. The battery does make it go fast up small hills for the first two months you ride it. I bought one of these in black, and it says on the description it is 70 pounds, but when I weighed it the product was over 200 pounds without the battery. With a battery it is more heavy. This is why tiny scooters have taken over downtown as E-bikes are now too huge. You think it folds so you can take it places, but it bangs up and bruises up your arms and legs so badly getting it out of storage you won’t want to move it. Two teenaged cousins had to help me put it in the back of an SUV. It will not go on bus bike racks. The heavy weight makes it fall over and bang your legs with large bruises constantly when riding. It is so heavy it doesn’t go up big hills, and you have to drag the huge heavy weight up large hills. It was pretty easy to assemble in two hours, and can drive a couple of miles to the nearby store, concert, and park easily if the weather is perfect. Tiny amounts of rain will stall it. This is NOT a car replacement at all. The battery has a tiny key that breaks every two seconds, easily snapped in half when turning, and easily falls off and will not go on key rings. They want 39 dollars for a replacement key on the website, and the heavy bike weighs so much you will need 280 dollar replacement batteries constantly. I am certain this is why they made it heavy so the bike will not run without a battery, the weight destroys batteries, and they sell many more expensive batteries. It can barely go 15 miles an hour before it starts weaving and rattling so badly it will not go faster another fact the webpage is not truthful about. If you are a huge gladiator that wants a bike made out of frying pan cast iron go for it, but a folding portable e-bike it is not. I will give it three out of five stars in my review for working a tiny bit, but many parts were lies. Next time I need short distance transportation I am buying a tiny scooter sized bike.
#MarsActBestBike
Frozen History 7 Publishing Book Review Podcast 