Below, for your clicking pleasure, is HOME, a 1.5 hour movie about Planet Earth. It’s eye-candy, but it’s also eye-opening, even though you already know all the Al Gore/climate change stats.
HOME is bad for cars, Las Vegas, Dubai, Israel, cows. Good for greenies and fans of HD gyroscope cameras. Forget about the ragtrade sponsor, that’s how the movie is going to go viral: it’s free.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, GoodPlanet Foundation President and photographer of ‘Earth From the Air’, produced the movie and he says:
“We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth’s climate.
“The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.
“For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because HOME is a non-profit film.”
HOME can also be found on . If you want the movie on your iPod, iPhone or other players which can spew out MP4’s, subscribe to the Quickrelease.tv podcast on iTunes.
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Aug 07, 2008
Do you have a singletrack mind?
Got bikes on the brain? You need this tee.
It’s from Cardigan’s third biggest clothing company. And it’s only available for a week. Howies has a short-run fetish.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what goes on inside the mind of a biker. Two wheels, some cogs and a crank is all it takes to get their brain into gear (pun definitely intended).
If you ride a bike, then this is probably an accurate picture of how your brain works too. Don’t worry though, many people have gone on to lead normal, productive lives after cycling.
Thanks to Charles for the tip.
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Apr 26, 2008
“Petrol: we’re running out”
Two of Britain’s tabloid newspapers lead with the current “fuel crisis”, reporting that petrol is running out, leading to panic buying at the pumps.
The Daily Express headline above is run in caps on the front page and is doing its best to fuel the crisis. The story beneath the headline, of course, is all about how we’re not running out of petrol but slams a government minister who said he couldn’t guarantee every petrol station in the UK will have limitless supplies of go-go juice.
No doubt the energy minister made the comment when pressed by a journalist to make such an (impossible) guarantee.
The Daily Express accused Malcolm Wicks of starting a panic.
PETROL stations began running dry yesterday after the Government tried to reassure drivers about supplies – and instead started a panic.
The Lib Dems accused him of talking the country into a crisis. And the Countryside Alliance said he had inflamed an already intolerable situation, with drivers in rural areas at risk of being stranded.
The AA urged motorists to cut down their number of journeys, try walking to the office and even work one day a week from home to conserve supplies.”
A motoring organisation urging motorists to use shanks’ pony for short journeys? To the Daily Express that’s eschatological talk, the beginning of the End Times.
The Daily Mail’s front cover poured biofuel on troubled waters by screaming “Petrol price to break through £5 a gallon as forecourts sell out amid fuel panic.”
Ten bucks a gallon. Sweat on that, America!
And the cause for all this pump panic? A Scottish oil refinery is closing down for the weekend because of industrial action. This refinery produces ten percent of the UK’s petrol. The government has assured us that the petrol won’t dry up overnight but the merest hint of petrol shortages puts the willies up the masses.
The Scots Gaelic term for whisky is uisege beatha. It means ‘water of life’. To motorists, there’s a more important ‘water of life’: they can’t imagine life without limitless access to petrol. If the past is a different country, the future is Mad Max.
Kibbutz Be’eri is a great place to ride a bike. There are bike paths that wind through wheat fields and pass by eucalyptus trees. There’s a bike shop and a cyclists-friendly cafe.
But business is down right now. Is it any wonder? Kibbutz Be’eri is just 8kms from the Gaza Strip.
This tiny sliver of land, home to 1.3m Palestinians, is at the moment. Hamas fighters and Israeli troops are at each other’s throats.
Yesterday an Israeli tank fired a shell that killed a Palestinian cameraman and three other people. Every death is shocking but, being a cyclist, I am somehow hard-wired to sit up and take notice when something bad happens to somebody on two wheels. The TV images of two teenage boys, killed as they were minding their own business, was personalised for me by the fact the lads were riding a bike. One was pedalling, the other getting a backie.
This is a normal thing for teens to be doing. In the UK you’d get a ticking off by a policeman if caught doing it. In the Gaza Strip you could be hit by an air-exploding tank shell. One second riding along with your mate, the next second lying in the road dead.
In the mid-1980s I spent a year in Israel. I did a lot of bike touring in the West Bank, something that would be impossible now. I rode my first mountain bike there, a Specialized Rockhopper specially imported by my bike-mad friend, Gil Bor, author of one of my favourite bedtime reads Bochner formulae for orthogonal G-structures on compact manifolds.
After university, in 1993, I went back to Israel to write the Berlitz Discover Guide to Israel. This was researched from a touring mountain bike.
Today, cycle touring in parts of Israel is tougher than it once was. Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that bookings are currently 50 percent down at LaMedavesh (Hebrew for ‘Pedal’) bicycle centre at Kibbutz Be’eri .
LaMedavesh owner Erez Manor said:
“Today most customers are experienced riders who come alone. Families and children prefer to ride elsewhere.”
The forthcoming Passover holiday would normally be peak time for Medavesh. Manor thinks business will be well down but that a few religious people would come.
“They aren’t afraid like the non-religious are.”
Israel is a fantastic country to cycle through. In Quarto Publishing’s ‘Classic Mountain Bike Routes of the World’ (2000) I did a chapter on Israel’s putative long-distance bicycle route, the Israel Bike Trail, a dream of Jon Lipman of the Carmel Mountain Bike Club. Some of it couldn’t be ridden today because of safety fears.
The 850km Israel Bike Trail - modelled on the Israel National Trail, a hiking route created by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel - runs from Metula in the north of Israel to Eilat in the south.
Last week plans were revealed for lots of local links to the Israel Bike Trail. This new network of joined-up routes is being promoted by the Ministries of Tourism, Environmental Protection, Transportation, Finance, Culture, the Nature and Parks Authority, and the Jewish National Fund.
Getting more people on bikes is a good thing, especially if it helps the political situation. And it can.
US-Israel religious charity Hazon (Hebrew for ‘Vision’) quotes 19th Century politico Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism, who said “the light bicycle that brings new life.” Light bicycles? Yep, we can all relate to that.
Hazon is the creator of the bi-annual Israel Ride, an organised ride across Israel, mainly attended by Jews, mostly from America, but Arab Israelis and Arabs from other nations also take part.
Hazon is a supporter of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, situated on Kibbutz Ketura in Israel’s Southern Arava valley. This organisation has a logo with its name in English, Hebrew and Arabic. It champions peace, saving the planet and cycling.
“It brings together lots of things that the Institute is all about, the environment, getting people to see Israel in a way that they can’t normally see, you see it very differently than from a car seat. It’s bringing diverse people together – from the US, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians – a chance to learn from each other, a chance to see that we have more in common than separates us.
“It’s the opportunity to come together on an issue that concerns all of us and that affects all of us, the environment, the earth, and this particular part of the earth – only by working together, Jews and Arabs, can we protect our shared environment. Nature knows no boundaries.”
Hazon founder Nigel Savage said:
“This is what happens when the People of the Book become the People of the Bike.”
(People of the Book is an Islamic phrase to describe the Abraham-linked religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Talking after the Israel Ride of 2005, Danny Ronen of Oakland, California, said:
“Me and Muatassim, a Palestinian, ended up staying in the same room together and spending time getting to know each other, and realizing that we are incredibly similar. Me being Jewish and him being Muslim is a non-issue. But you can’t build relationships without personal connections.”
It’s good to see that cycling isn’t just a sport, a form of transport, a means of keeping fit, it can also bring people together. Amen to that.
Map sourced from Walla, the Israeli equivalent of Google Maps.
Not to be confused with Dan ‘Polar bears are gay’ Power seen in this viral vid earlier in the week:
A reminder about this Earth Hour campaign has been placed on the Quickrelease.tv iCal and Google Calendar. Sync your PC or Mac to this calendar and get daily agenda emails, dates on your cellphone and other fancy stuff.
can be loaded to your calendar program. Any changes or additions are automagically updated on your machine seconds after I make the changes on my machine. Once you’ve sync’ed to Bicycle Dates 2008 you choose which of them you want to highlight with alarms and auto-emails.
You can also set up Google Calendar so it emails you an agenda each morning so you don’t have to look at your PC/Mac calendar to know what bicycle events are coming up that day.
iCal meshes beautifully with the iPhone and now Google Calendar does too. Both cal programs also mesh with standard cellphones.
