Masculin products

Taking a cue from my sister, there is going to be a theme this week: Masculin products. This doesn't mean they're masculin in themselves, like an older Bentley, it means that they are products for a man. They stand-out with subtlety and boast frillless performance. They are products marketers hope you forget, in hope that you might buy the latest.

Tonight, we’re going to take a look at Gillette Foamy Regular. Later on we’ll touch pickup trucks, raincoats, bikes, and magazines. Sports cars as well. Maybe sports car drivers.

Gillette Foamy Regular. Gillette’s most generic shaving cream—it doesn’t have Vitamin E, or Advanced Gel, and it isn’t for Sensitive Skin. It’s just fluffy and white—pure shaving cream. And we don’t have Barbasol in the US, so men have to use Foamy Regular.

Contrast that to Gillette’s Edge Advanced Shaving Gel, Extra Skin Protection. Just read:

From drugstore.com:

Sometimes you're cool and contained. But other times it feels good to get into a real lather. Edge Pro Gel is dispensed as a gel, but oh, baby, look what happens when you rub it onto your face. It lathers right up for a sinfully luxurious shave. Extra lubricants allow your razor to simply glide across your face, making it especially nice for guys with sensitive skin.

But if you aren’t quite ready to leap to Regular from Jack Black’s Face Buff, or your girlfriend isn’t ready to switch from her Satin Care, Gillette’s Foamy Lemon / Lime can ease the transition.

New York City is the "greenest" place in the US

I used to think that cities were filthy, dirty places that consumed vast quantities of resources. The thing is though, they house vaster quantities of people--and consume less resources per capita than rural areas (apologies for the goofy font choices).

The Herald Tribune agrees:

"The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape and the leafy-green suburbs as the ideal is outdated and does not lead us to a future of energy independence, clean air and a stable climate. Cities are the best hope to realize our need for a bright, sustainable, and promising future.

New York City, for example, is the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per capita basis, than any state in America."

There's some pretty heavy red-taping going on when you compare a 20-some square mile island to spread-out states, but the article is still worth a read..

Ferrari and Shell

Okay, I must admit that I am absolutely speechless at how cool this Shell ad is. I'll let it speak for itself.



Edit: The above link is down. see it on youtube (albeit in lower quality).

Passenger-miles per gallon

This is what's been on my mind lately: Passenger miles per gallon.

A cyclist gets 600mpg, and a person driving a car gets 40mpg. Well, what about with 2 people? Lets say a car gets 40mpg. With one person in the car, that's 40 passenger-miles per gallon. With two people in the car, it would achieve 80 passenger-miles per gallon (move two people 40 miles with one gallon). Four-up, it would get 160 passenger-miles per gallon (4*40mpg). More on the bike later.

This concept is especially important when calculating the environmental impact per person of mass transit. A bus, which gets an abysimmal 4mpg, gets 160 passenger miles per gallon with 40 passengers on board (40*4mpg). The trouble is, if a bus holds 40 people, and you want to move 41 people, you need two buses. you double the amount of fuel consumed to move that extra more person, and the passenger-miles per gallon of the convoy comes down to 81. (from: 41 passengers*(4mpg)2 vehicles)

A 75% full 747 might get 30 passenger-miles per gallon, and a cruise ship gets about 10-passenger miles per gallon.

So what about a bike. I got 633 miles per gallon, but what if two people go on a bike ride. It takes twice as much energy for two people to ride bikes, but they get twice as many "passenger-miles." So the efficiency stays the same. So whether one person rides to work, or everyone rides to work, each person is getting 600 passenger-miles per gallon [ 2*(600 mpg / 2 vehicles) ]. And you don't have to go in the same direction as anyone else!

I saw a guy with a kid in a child seat on the back of his bike on my way to work this morning and thought, holy crap, (approx.) 1200 passenger miles per gallon!

633 mpg ride on Scientific American podcast

PODCAST!
my bit starts halfway through

Admittedly, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this bike ride, but none has made me quite so proud as the recent podcast I did for Scientific American. I used to read SciAm growing up and always had real difficulty wrapping my head around the topics they covered with ease. What an honor to be on their website.

Last November, when an article about the ride appeared in Bicycling, I got an email from SciAm's own Steve Mirsky, who invited me to their offices to record a podcast. Well, it wound up happening in early March, and finally appeared on their website on the 14th.


Here is a link to the actual podcast (my bit starts about halfway through).

Here is a link to the website, the podcast in question is from March 14th.

Ode to going for it.

I've just seen two acts that make me question the typical "courageous" things I normally hear about people doing. These two gentlemen rolled the dice in the grandest style- There is nothing PC or watered-down about either of these two things. Don't sit back and relax- figure out what adventure you've been dancing around, and go take a chance.

The first is an article about the co-founder of DC-Shoes somehow working up the guts to FLOOR a souped-up scooby at a jump Evil Kneivel himself might have some reservations about. He's got a vapor-trail!



The second bit of news is slightly more somber- It is a clip of a young German gentleman who went balls-to-the-wall on the back of a German TGV. Nothing screams GAMETIME like suction-cupping yourself to the back of one of these demons. Sadly, our hero died a year later of leukemia. Happily, he lived the dream, if only until his 22nd year.




I found it on Jalopnik, where commenter Spence captured the feel quite well-

Seriously, this made me cry. No kidding. I'm sitting at my desk at the t-shirt factory wiping tears from my eyes.

What I don't think you get Kracer is that most human beings don't ever deal with the reality of their limited humanity. We trudge to work and put in our time and refuse to think about the fact that death comes in the blink of an eye. Sometimes people under a death sentence are able to face up to their fears in a way most of us don't ever. They can't pretend that the elephant is in the room any longer, so they say "fuck it" to the calculated risk that passes as wisdom in this life. They do the things that they want to do with the tiny piece of time they have. This is how we should all live our lives. Yeah, it's a tragedy when time is cut short, but it's a far greater tragedy when time is wasted on the pettiness of life. This video made me want to quit my job and walk away from my lease and do all the crazy things I want to do with my life. I may not be courageous enough to do it, but damn, don't blame this fool for doing it.

Indeed, being a fool may be the only sane reaction to the meaningless random momentary spark of existence we call life.

The smart competition

If the November 11th release of the 2007 smart fortwo didn't have you totally lusting after one of the little runabouts, perhaps seeing such a small car at least piqued your curiousity: less than nine feet long, the fortwo gets a green 50 mpg (plus or minus) without any hybrid or diesel trickery, and must be the most parkable car on the road (perfect for anybody who visits cities). Though even the brawneist fortwo spits out a decidedly lowercase 84 horsepower (although it does weight less than half as much as a VW Golf), small is definitely cool, and it doesn't have to be city-shaped.

Even sportscar manufacturers have learned from the minute smart- let's take a look at what they are testing behind closed doors:

Ferrari has cooked up a short-wheelebase enzo: ideal for their tight Fiorano test track:


Gordon Murray's long-awaited city car shares nearly everything except its wheelbase with his famed 90's F1:


The european market C6 Corvette has a smaller footprint than the stateside version, and has been received with much more enthusiasm as a result.



Quite remarkably, even classic-car enthusiasts have jumped on the microcar bandwagon. This gentleman skillfully chopped a ridiculous amount of metal out of his El Camino, and made it much more parkable (and economical) as a result. On second thought, maybe he should have saved up for a 2007 smart instead.

Microcars: Megafun!

Sure, you might look at these cars and think "that looks like an escape-pod for a Hummer," but in big cities, microcars are the most engaging and enjoyable cars around. Computer-aided engineering means they are safer than you'd think, too!

To the right is the Brabus Smart Roadster Coupe I drove for a weekend while working for Autocar in 2004. I covered 500 miles in three days, on an epic adventure from London to Sherborne and back. I had already thought the regular roadster was a gem, and the full-Brabus treatment only made it more appealing--the wastegate whooshed and banged during shifts, and I couldn't stop looking at the chunky bodykit. It wasn't just me either, girls and guys of all ages loved the thing! I can't wait until they bring cars like this to the US.

Take a look at the videos and you'll agree - good things comes in small packages.

1. Top Gear pits the original Mini Cooper against a modern competitor from Fiat to find out who is better at making a racecourse out of the city.




2. A Smartzuki goes insane! Flop a motorcycle engine into the trunk and stand back! I shudder to think how fast the original motorcycle was. For comparision, this Smart has significantly less than 200 bhp. That is probably less than your car.

Bicycling covered the ride

Check this out- The 633 MPG ride was covered by Bicycling magazine (Nov. 2006), and it wound up on their website as well. Click here to be taken to the article--they did a great job capturing the spirit of the ride.

In other news, I've just seen Contested Streets, an absolutely fascinating documentary about street usage. It was so compelling that I decided to review it for a local newspaper to spread the word, but then I learned that they will let you do it yourself! On the website, there is a place where you can sign up to host a public or private screening at your own house or workplace. Get a free DVD and have a party with your friends? Sounds like a deal to me.

Shop smart, shop S-Mart. YA GOT THAT?!

Here's a pic I took a few weeks ago of a Smart car in a parade. They (well, the rest of them) are coming to the US in 2008.

as my dad said, "The old lady standing by the smart is holding on to her stuff for dear life, in case it gets dithered out of her arms...!"

tRSSsssssst in meeeeee

If you get your news online, you've gotta check out RSS feeds (wikipedia). They allow you to gather news from all over the internet and read it in one place. I've made a feed for this site, so if you use Yahoo! News, Google Homepage, or any of the other RSS-enabled readers in the graphic, you can now pour The Gallon straight into your regular news page.

Click the to add this page to your RSS reader, or to learn more about what RSS can do for you. I don't know how I lived without it.

Me? I use Google Homepage (click on the "Personalize Home" link in the upper right corner of google.com while you are logged into GMail). I clicked on "add more to this page" , then searched for "The Gallon Race" and clicked "Add it Now."

Now my Google Homepage looks like this:


Swift

Fixing things

You know, when I am trying to eat something disgusting, I just think of the Mayflower, and how on that boat, at a certain time, anything made out of food was a delicacy. Then the bbq ribs I dropped on the hair-covered mat at the foot of the refridgerator in the garage taste delicious.

Same type of deal goes for fixing things. When something breaks, I imagine I'm a kid in India and that thing is all I've got. If you gave an impovershed kid a perfect cell phone with a broken charger and a bike with broken gears, he'd already be pedalling his way up a dusty path on his new bike sad that nobody he knows has got a phone to call.

The other day, that Indian kid (me) got a water-damaged and 8-year-old watch that even Dicken would agree had no life about it. It was dead. I immediately took it apart and looked inside. There were indeed traces of water in there--it was dirty and kind of greasy, no condition for the inside of a watch.

I pried the movement away from the case and took a look. As I looked closer, I saw that there were actually individual parts to the movement, and that the battery cage had fingers which held the 3 main parts (the display / microchip, the microchip housing, and the plastic battery house *note, in the pics the display / microchip is never removed from the microchip housing*) together. I pried the cage off and the movevment fell apart. Oh, and a teeny tiny spring sprang. Oops.

I looked very closely at the microchip, and saw that there was greenish foamy corrosion between some of the contacts. I took the display off the microchip and saw the same thing at the corner of one of the connections. I held the movement with my left hand and gingerly removed the corrions with a knife in my right.

After putting the movement back together, (sans itty bitty spring) and popping in a new battery, it came to life.

Good news, except the backlight didn't work, and the water sealing issue hadn't been solved. I looked at a "change your Baby-G battery" tutorial online, and saw that the watch was missing a rubber O-ring. I called Casio and ordered the part (For $0.50 + $1.13 shipping!). It took two weeks to come.



I opened the package and got back to work.

There was still the problem of the escaped spring, and so I took the movement completely apart and started looking as closely as I could at all the contacts to see if they looked worn in anyway (aka they used to have a spring against them).


Finally I saw it! What a relief. The spring went through a seriously small hole and provided an electrical connection between the metal battery cage and the back of the microchip. This, I thought, must provide power to the backlight. I put the spring in the tiny hole and snapped the movement back together.



It worked!!!


Now I was getting really excited. I gave the inside of the case a thorough cleaning with Q-tips, which put tiny cotton fibers everywhere, so I had to spend a couple of minutes using tweezers to extricate them. I finally used a layer of lightly-Windexed paper towel over the edge of a knife to get rid of all the gunk.

Then I put the new o-ring in its place, cranked down on the caseback, and gave it a water test (in this picture you can see the other spring *from two pictures above* poking through the rubber movement backing).



And... The finished product:



I can't decide whether or not I'm surprised that it works, but I do know that I'm the proudest kid in India.