Humanize the Earth!

blogger nav bar gone

Just learned a new trick (those that read the site with RSS won’t notice). Remember that black Blogger navigation bar at the top of the page. It’s gone, right? I hacked it out, thanks to this page by way of Andrew.

Categories: blogging

Cool Bike Organizations

Working Bikes Cooperative collects (from donations or buying them at the scrapyard) discarded or unwanted bikes and fixes them up. They sell the ones that are most in demand here in Chicago and use the money to ship the ones most in demand in Africa or South America there. Last year they shipped some 4000 bikes. Awesome. In 2004 they opened a storefront for bike sales and repairs (was just a warehouse before that).

From the delicious co-op tag feed, I just found Plan B: the New Orleans Community Bike Project. They have a professional-quality workshop space that’s available for free and hold classes for free where people teach each other about bikes. Good stuff.

Added 4/1/05: Ride Manchester : We want to improve the lives of Mancunians using the bicycle as the tool. We hope to provide free bikes to marginalised groups in the future, if we get enough funding. For now, we provide cheap bikes to the people of Manchester, and give them the skills to maintain them.

Categories: co-op

Chicago and Illinois on different planets

Got my mailing from the League Illinois Bicylists today. It had tons of ride brochures for the summer. Here were some things that struck me:

- In Chicago we are traffic. In the rest of Illinois, riders must not impede traffic. Organizers reserve the right to remove riders from the ride.
- Route closes at 4pm (saw this at least twice) - what does that mean? These rides seem like they’re on the street so how can they close? And if they’re on trails, how can they close?
- I’ll bet some of these rides are fun, but why would I pay money for this? Sag wagon is good, I suppose. Free watermelon is good. Free water, that’s really good.

Anyway, just thought I’d share what’s on my mind.

Category: bike

print to PDF instead of paper

I wanted to make a note to myself about this free pdf printer and thought I’d share it with anyone that mistypes the blog they’re actually looking for and ends up here. pdf 995

Gay marriage ruling step in right direction

From csmonitor.com:

The intensity of the debate, combined with the relatively slow way in which it’s being resolved, is reflective of the way the nation has dealt with controversial social issues in the past. For instance, supporters of gay marriage point out that it was two decades after a California court ruled a ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional that the US Supreme Court concurred, in 1967.

For supporters of gay marriage, the parallel with the civil rights movement is heartening. After all, it’s been almost 15 years since the Hawaii Supreme Court first ruled in favor of gay marriage. Now lower courts in both New York and California have called on the civil rights battles of the past to justify their rulings in favor of gay marriage.

I see this ruling as very good news. As far as I can tell, marriage is about love and about sharing a life and about publically declaring that love and that sharing. We don’t require people to be married to have children and we don’t require people planning to get married to pledge that they will have children, nor do we ban marriages for women past child-bearing age. These arguments about what’s best for the children are not relevant, especially when you look at how many children are growing up in single-parent households. Go California!

Zoe’s Blog

My very good friend Zoe in NYC has a new blog. I’m really digging here writing. Check out Zoe’s Blog.

Such a simple act, it was radical

Is this a way out of Wealth Bondage? From The Inner-net:

“Let’s do something outrageously kind. Right now. And let’s do it without money,” I randomly yelled as five of us were walking down a busy Ahmedabad street at 10PM.

Within minutes, we notice a crew of women and men, in their 50s, sweeping the streets. Oh yeah, baby. Anjalee, Guri, Mark and I approach them spontaneously: ‘Can we give you a ten minute break?’ Despite the initial what-in-the-world response, we snagged the brooms and started sweeping!

After a few quick lessons, we were in full effect.

Such a simple act, it was radical. Soon enough, a crowd of more than 50 folks circled us. Rickshaw drivers stopped with confused looks, late night college students crowded around with curiousity, families stopped by on their scooters with congratulatory remarks, nearby slum dwellers looked on with a half smile, and one onlooker even started to sweep with us!

Jayeshbhai took the sweepers to a nearby stall and treated all of them to a ‘lime soda’. They do this everyday till 4AM, but today, they got a ten minute break from unexpected friends.

Ten minutes at 10 PM. Smiles all around.

Awesome!

Now is better than perfect

Couldn’t resist the priceless last line from Seth’s Blog: Don’t Shave That Yak!: Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later. If you agree, please go read the explanation at Seth’s site.

email I just sent

This week I received an email from someone wanting info about Ghana and the Budaburam camp. This is the email I sent back to him about Ghana and visas and such.

I’ve been to Ghana 7 times or so. I got a 3 year visa, I think, so it’ll be up this fall and I’ll have to get another one. I had to send my passport to DC to get the visa. I think I sent it directly to the embassy but you can also spent a bit more money and sent it to an agency C3visas I think is the name of one I used to get my Liberian visa. It’s about $100 or something.

There are a few airlines that fly there, KLM through AMS, British through London and maybe some others. I use a travel agent in California that does pretty well for tickets. $1300 or so this upcomign trip, I think. Other times of year I’ve gone for $900 or so.

There are a few guest houses close to the camp. I pay about $20/night at the New Timer Inn in Kasoa. I have my friends in the camp hire a taxi to come get me at the airport which costs about $15 or so. It’s much cheaper taking public transportation going back to the airport but it’s too much of a pain late at night when getting in after so many hours traveling.

There are also nicer lodgings in Accra, still not too far from the camp (less than an hour) if you’re in the mood to spend more money.

Yes, the internet isn’t bad there. In the camp there are a couple of cafes that are full all the time. Kasoa has a 24hrs place (the camp places might also be 24hrs). There are also fancier and more expensive places in Accra, Busy Internet is one. They even have wifi.

In terms of technology and how you might help, indulge me in just telling a bit about where we are now? Maybe you’ll see a way to help. I recently bought a couple of cheap (~$100) laptops and have been working on getting them working. My plan is to not have them connect to the internet, but just have whatever software we need on them and let them email attachments from floppies to us to tranfer information. We use this program to track our members: http://www.neuer-humanismus.de/FichasPlus/ Unfortuately, there is no linux version so I’m sticking with windows on these laptops.

Not sure what I can ask you to do to help. Any more thoughts?

peace,
ted

Categories: Ghana, Africa, Humanist_Movement

nothing to say

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