The Drongo

Raw fingers. Right there...

I was once told at school that I AM a Turkey! No lie! The last one was about 18000BC. Did they show you a movie with some bearded Southerners excavating a boat shaped rock outcrop? It had some doped up Southern Belle drawling on about an Ark? I was far more impressed watching the Challenger turn to vapour. I'd hate to think somebody was lying to you, too!

Hmmmm. That thaar Turner looks MEAN, mother! But I had to vote for a Mojo. If I ever got me dirty paws on That, in That colour, you'd better not even Look at it funny and you would need plasters.

SURE !!!!! The extraordinary regional specificity of the paternal and maternal gene trees persisting today has made it possible to trace ancient migrations. It shows us that, as they were filling up the Old World, once people got to where they were going they tended to stay put and, at least until the last 500 years, were mostly able to repel newcomers. What disturbed this conservatism the most was the LGM. In the northern hemisphere, vast areas of the Old and New worlds were rendered uninhabitable by ice, glacial lakes, and polar desert. For the formerly highly successful hunter-gatherers of the North Eurasian steppe there were few choices, and these, as usual, were determined by geography and climate. In the peninsula of Europe, locked in by sea, mountain and desert, the only chance of survival was to be found in refuges in the more southerly temperate zones bordering the Mediterranean and Black Seas. After the LGM, the refuges re-expanded in number and territory, mostly back to where they had come from. In Central and North Asia, formerly covered in grassland and roamed by huge herds of large herbivores, the increasing cold and desiccation forced the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers off the high steppe in several directions to warmer and more temperate regions. These would have included the Ukraine to the west, China to the south and east, and Japan, Korea, and north-east Siberia. As always, the great rivers of Asia could have played a role as highways, but this time the traffic was downstream. The archaeological evidence for this migration of Upper Palaeolithic steppe hunting cultures towards the Pacific coast at the LGM, is best seen in Japan, but is echoed elsewhere. In South and Southeast Asia huge areas of continental shelf opened up for colonization as the sea level fell. How much the population expansion in Sundaland [greater Southeast Asia during the LGM] resulted from local people, and how much from refuges from farther north, is not clear, but the genetic and dental evidence suggests mostly the former.

Prunes.

Oh Bollocks man...just say it! If he wants to be happy for the rest of his life.... BUY THIS ! https://www.bikehub.co.za/classifieds/16507-ibis-mojo-hd-deal-of-the-decade/

For roadies, they pretty much do what these do. You have two options: 1 Pay attention 2 Get a MTB

And now for something COMPLETELY different.....

As the Palaeolithic clock rolled on towards 20,000 years ago, however, events in the Earth’s spin axis and influences on its orbit hundreds of millions of kilometres away from our planet took tighter hold. Three great heavenly cycles of the solar system moved into a conjunction that ensured a minimum of the Sun’s heat reached the northern hemisphere during summer. The weather became colder, and the recurrent brief warm periods, or interstadials, which had characterized the period of 30,000–50,000 years ago, just stopped. It was these warm periods and their summer sunshine that had helped to melt the accumulated northern ice and prevent the ice caps from advancing across Scandinavia into Northern Europe. Now, the ice caps were able to expand in the north. The sea level started to fall again, eventually by 130 metres (430 feet). In short, the Earth was approaching its most recent ice age, or glaciation. (There had been quite a bit of ice on and off for the previous 100,000 years, and archaeologists tend to call the height of the Big Freeze the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM for short, rather than an ice age.) The LGM and its aftermath saw far more dramatic disruption and movement of northern human populations than at any time since. A glance at the world climate map around 18,000 years ago begins to give us the reason why. Huge areas of land became totally uninhabitable. For a start, the ice caps, some of them 5 km (3 miles) thick, clearly prevented the land they covered from being occupied. These white sheets were not laid evenly across the northern hemisphere. In Europe they mainly affected the central and northwestern regions. The British Isles, then part of the European mainland, were frozen down as far as Oxford in the south. Scandinavia will for ever bear the scars of the glaciers in its lakes and fjords and in the crustal depression now known as the Baltic Sea. Northern Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states bore the southern edge of the ice sheet, which extended north-east around the Arctic Circle across Finland and Karelia, into Archangel, and as far as the northern Urals. Farther south in Europe, mountainous regions such as the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Alps, and the Carpathians were ice-bound. As we shall see, however, Eastern Europe came off rather more lightly than the west. Asia fared rather better than Europe. Most of North and Central Asia remained ice-free. Just to the eastern side of the Urals, a large cap covered the Tamyr Peninsula and spread some way to the south. The other part of the continent which could have sported an ice cap was the huge Tibetan Plateau much farther south, its great elevation making it a very cold place. Even here there is some doubt of the extent of ice cover, since surprising forensic evidence of the presence of humans in Tibet dates back to the LGM. North America was particularly severely affected, with Canada, the Great Lakes, and the north-eastern states – in other words the entire northern two-thirds of the continent – weighed down by two massive ice sheets that connected on the east with the Greenland ice cap. Alaska, on the other hand, was then connected to Siberia by a huge ice-less bridge of now submerged land, Beringia, and to some extent shared Asia’s freedom from ice. The largest of the two American ice sheets, the Laurentide in the east, left its vast imprint as a deep dent in the Earth’s crust in the form of the great inland sea now known as Hudson Bay. In some places, in both Eurasia and America, huge lakes (known as periglacial lakes) surrounded the ice caps. The best-known remnants of these lakes are the Great Lakes of North America. The ice sheets themselves were not static, but flowed like the glaciers they were. Not only did these frozen rivers grind out new valleys and fjords, they also obliterated much evidence that humans had ever lived in the north. Ice was not the only barrier to human occupation during the big freeze. The world’s deserts expanded to an even greater extent. Around the ice caps, huge regions of North Eurasia and America became polar desert in which only the hardiest of plants and animals could survive. In Europe, the polar desert stretched east from the southern edge of England and due east across northern Germany, to the south of the Finno-Scandinavian ice sheet. The whole of the region from the Levant and the Red Sea to Pakistan, normally pretty dry, became a continuous extreme desert. Southern Central Asia, from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan by the Caspian Sea in the west, through Xinjiang (north of Tibet), to Inner Mongolia in the east became continuous desert either side of the 40th parallel. This desert, which effectively replaced Guthrie’s Mammoth Steppe heartland, also split North and northern Central Asia from the whole of East and Southeast Asia.

Touche'

It's for sleepy motorists, not cyclists. You should both stay off the yellow line! ***Seriaaasly now. If you dose off, are sms texting, have dropped your cheeseburger in your lap, and your vehicle strays over the yellow line, you clip these, and it wakes you up to the fact. At least it is supposed to. Likewiseish: If you are on your tubbies, and you dose off, are sms'ing, or can't hold your line, and you stray to yellow, you clip these, it also wakes you up.

We think we are so influential....

Chap. If your beer stays in ANY glass long enough for the sun to affect the taste.... THEN YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG !

Dude! Please let me know where you gets them for 25ZA rond. I need some more. Mine have Holes. Shot

Modern views as to the heavenly movements that influence the timing of the waxing and waning of the ice caps and the resulting rise and fall of the oceans, are still influenced by astronomical theories pioneered by the nineteenth-century glaciologists. These theories have been collected in the twentieth century under one name, the 'Milankovitch hypothesis' of ice ages. The genius of Milankovitch: Out of place, out of time Milutin Milankovitch was a Serb. He was caught in the wrong country at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 and interned. Luckily a friendly Hungarian professor had him paroled and moved from his cell to Budapest where he had access to the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Oblivious to the war, he continued his calculations and finally published his first set of predictions in 1920. The genius of Milankovitch lay in the correct combination of astronomical cycles and meticulous calculation. When he died in 1958, the theory was falling out of vogue partly because of various discrepancies between his predictions and geologists' findings. Since then, the older techniques of geologists, particularly the accuracy of carbon-dating, have been found wanting and the Milankovitch model has emerged triumphant, thus standing the test of time. A detailed description of the theory can be found elsewhere (see A.G.Dawson, Ice Age Earth, Routledge, London, 1992, chapter 13). But it is important to realise that frequent, apparently random, episodes of warming and cooling of the Earth can be explained to a great extent by the interplay of at least three celestial cycles, all running at different speeds. These cycles affect the warmth transmitted by the Sun to various parts of the Earth in a complex way. Of particular importance for the onset of glaciation is a decline in heat transmitted to northern temperate latitudes during summer with the resulting failure to melt last winter's snow. The amount of summer sun is controlled by three important heavenly cycles, which can be called respectively: the 100,000-year stretch, the 41,000-year tilt and the 23,000-year wobble. Every year when the Earth circles the Sun, it moves alternately nearer and farther at different points of the circuit. This motion is called elliptical and the Sun lies to one end of the ellipse rather than in the middle. Over a period of approximately 100,000 years this ellipse stretches somewhat, and then shortens and fattens until it is nearly circular. The process is rather like taking a child’s hula-hoop and distorting it intermittently with two hands to make an ellipse. Over the cycle, the distance between the Earth and the Sun varies by as much as 18.26 million kilometres (11.35 million miles). Although the change in heat delivery over this cycle is relatively small, the effect on the Earth's climate is, for some reason, greater than with the other two mechanisms. At present the Sun's circuit does not particularly favour an ice age, but the onset of the next major glaciation can be predicted accurately from the cycles. As we know the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted at an angle to the Sun. The situation is rather like a top that will not spin upright. This is the reason for summer and winter, as the globe presents first its northern then its southern face to the Sun during one circuit. At present the tilt is about 23.5 degrees, but it varies between 21.5 and 24.5 degrees over a cycle of roughly 41,000 years. The greater the tilt, the more the seasonal imbalance in heat delivery from the Sun and the less the chance of ice remaining through the summer in temperate climates. At present we are near a neutral point between the extremes of this oscillation of tilt, thus neither favouring nor promoting an ice age. The Earth is very like a child’s top in other ways. Not only does it spin at an angle of about 23 degrees to the Sun, but it also performs a slow pirouette as the sloped axis gyrates round itself. If you were a god accompanying the earth on its orbit round the Sun but perched up high looking down on the North Pole from directly above, you would see the pole performing a slow circle every 22,000 to 23,000 years. If you could see right through an imaginary glass globe to the South Pole you would see it performing the same circle 180 degrees out of phase. This spinning of the axis on itself is called axial precession, and all spinning tops can do it. The effect of this precession is that the Earth slowly changes the face it presents to the Sun at different parts of the elliptical orbit. Precession does not change the angle of tilt, merely the direction of tilt. As a result, in the next 11,000 years or so, 21 June will become mid-winter in Europe and North America, and mid-summer in Australia. A fancy term for this slow ballet is the 'precession of the equinoxes'. At present, the Earth presents the Northern Hemisphere to the Sun (i.e. during summer) when it is at its furthest away from the Sun. Conversely, the Southern Hemisphere has its summer when it is nearest to the Sun. Today’s position of axial precession, therefore, actually favours glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere. There was a similar situation about 20,000 years ago at the height of the last great ice age, but then the position of the other two cycles happened to tip the balance towards glaciation. About 11,000 years ago the summers were warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, which should have favoured melting of the polar ice caps. The Milankovitch cycles are thus three elegant and stately celestial dances completely out of time with each other. They play out infinite yet predictable variations of heat stress on our planetary climate. In the last twenty years geologists and oceanographers have developed methods that enable them to measure indirectly, the past course and variations in the melting and freezing of the ice caps. The more refined these measurements have become, the better they fit Milankovitch’s model predictions of the waxing and waning of the ice ages of the past 2 million years

Dude. Fork, or shock? Fork: Pull it apart, carefully, get it wet sprayed at a panelbeater. There is a bloke on the classifieds called Tyrone. Does decals. Do not powdercoat. The heat will wreck the bushings.

Dude. Just take it to a friendly engineering shop. Most of them can turn or modify something at about 1/3 of the cost that the AGENTS supply.

Only if you follow the Freedom C route. Off to drink. ANOTHER damn storm blown up here! Turn off your geysers dammit, your all overheating the planet! Bye.

Unless you got the wrong Drongo? In which case, another round is in order.

Eish! That looks MEAN. Post the specs dude, and then once you have finished crowing, or getting dissed, post it on the BLACK BIKES ONLY fread.

Hoi ! What did I say that got mine edited? BTW By The Way. What rating I got at the mo, Slo?

That would help too. edited by SB

Strewth dude! It took me a full 5 minutes to stop sobbing! I'm off to Cycle Lab. WHO'S WITH ME LADS?!!

Having trouble now with the GPS accuracy. Capture points are too far apart, so switchbacks become straight lines on map, and repeated laps do not overlap! Seems this might be a problem with Samsung GII and Endo. Anyone using Google MyTracks? Downloaded. Going to give it a try.

On you or the bike? If on you, a double wrap around the head section. Use insulation tape on the neck area. Keep on wrapping down. You will need help to finish off. Otherwise, it is easier not to ride in the rain. Exspecially at 100kph.