This week we drop down to the #7 album Cocktails by Too $hort. Before listening to this album I had exactly zero Too $hort plays recorded on last.fm. I recall him being somewhat popular thirty-ish years ago, but clearly I haven't thought about him much since then.

Thirty years later, I can't say that his music has grown on me. It's quite misogynistic and explicit about how he treats women. Don't get me wrong, I don't subscribe to moral panics and music. I don't think that just because I don't like this music it should be banned, censored, or otherwise. A lot of music tells stories, which includes boasting, and there are different ways to do that in different musical genres. I just don't dig his way of telling stories, and his stories don't interest me.

My recommendation is to skip listening to this album. Instead, why don't you spin up Wildflowers by Tom Petty? It peaked at #8 in December 1994, and dropped down since then. I didn't review it because other un-reviewed albums were higher during the holidays, which was a shame. Wildflowers is a far, far better album than Cocktails, and it deserves your attention. Links to various streaming services are below 👇🏻.

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Drawn by Kid #1

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Debuting at #1, Balance by Van Halen displaced the un-reviewed Garth Brooks album from the top spot (fret not Garth fans, it returns to #1 next week).

I like much of Van Halen, but this album isn't as good as their earlier work. Albums like Van Halen, 1984, and 5150 all have what made Van Halen great, and this album lacks. Van Halen was about big, energetic songs, and Balance doesn't have those. Eddie's guitar playing is, of course, excellent, but the songs don't grab you like, say, Runnin' with the Devil does.

My recommendation is to listen to the album, but don't expect what you would get out of their earlier albums.

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On the Not In My Back Yard to Yes In My Backyard spectrum, I am definitely on the YIMBY end. I firmly believe that one of the most corrosive elements of modern American society is how expensive housing has become. It has vastly outpaced inflation and has locked a huge swath of Americans out of the ability to afford rent or buy a home where they want to live. It makes moving for whatever reason (job, schooling, family, etc) much harder. I believe that it is one of the biggest contributors to political disfunction and the rise of extreme political division.

I live in Boulder, Colorado, which has a long history of open space preservation. In order to prevent increasing sprawl and encroachment of the iconic Boulder flatirons, in 1959 the city passed the "Blue Line" ordinance that prevented city water from being delivered above a set altitude This made development above that line much more difficult. In addition, the city and county have made large land acquisitions over the years that has basically encircled the city of Boulder in publicly owned open space.

I want to stress that there's a difference between NIMBYism and preservation. I think one of the best things about Boulder is how close outdoor space is. Starting from my front door on a bike I can be on rural country roads or mountain bike trails in five to ten minutes. But preserving open space doesn't mean that already developed space can't change or get more dense. This is where environmentalism can descend into NIMBYism.

The problem is that choosing to preserve open space and preventing increased density means that any new development has to happen somewhere else. Of course, that's the hope of a true NIMBY, but it's selfish, shortsighted, and inconsistent with true environmentalism. Preventing more density in an existing neighborhood means that new development requires converting existing undeveloped open space into developed land. This means more roads, more people living farther away from destinations, more pollution, and less natural open space.

For a long time the Boulder city council was dominated by members of PLAN-Boulder, the group largely responsible for the Blue Line and other environmental efforts in the last few decades. However, in recent elections more development friendly people have been elected, displacing PLAN-Boulder endorsed council members. I think the most obvious explanation is that as more and more people in the community are finding themselves priced out housing in Boulder, the status quo, which is what PLAN-Boulder represents, is less attractive to voters.

Regrettably, and I often contemplate deleting my account, I am on Nextdoor, which is Twitter for old people. The Boulder Nextdoor is a NIMBY echo chamber. Almost daily there is a post from someone lamenting a new building, or something that's been gone 25 years. Posts complaining about the current council have been frequent lately, and on one of them they linked to a new group: Boulder Action. I was curious, and I clicked on the link. Now, dear reader, you get to travel with me into the mind of a Boulder NIMBY.

On the homepage (see the bottom of this post for a screenshot) they have an info box about Density, Growth and Housing. Let's look at each bullet point:

• Our city just feels too crowded. Not to belabor the point, but one person's too crowded is another's too empty. This is almost meaningless and impossible to measure. It's vibes. More specifically, how do they propose making it "feel" less crowded: depopulation? The only American cities I can think of that depopulated did it for negative reasons such as loss of jobs, or major pollution events. Is that what they want?
• It seems more dense, over-built and less pedestrian-friendly. Vibes! Whoever wrote this copy needed an editor. Two of these topics can be measured (there's no "seems" at all): density and pedestrian-friendliness. Measuring density is obvious, but for pedestrians, I'd think that this can be measured by ability access to destinations by foot and the danger of being injured as a pedestrian. I think that more density correlates with pedestrian friendliness, but it would seem that they don't, which is a tell I'll return to later on
• Small, local businesses are struggling. This may be true, but this needs data compared to local and national trends. Is it any more true now that it was before? Can it be explained entirely by the city council encouraging development? Without data, this is just a vibe.
• Although a lot of housing is being built, much of it is not affordable and not suitable for families. I'd take issue with "a lot of housing," but it probably feels that way to NIMBYs. The cost of the new housing is definitely higher than most would like, but some of the solutions to make building housing cheaper (removing single-family zoning, easier permitting process, no parking minimums, higher density limits, etc) are anathemas to NIMBYS. Their preferred policies directly contribute to the high cost of building housing. Furthermore, the single-family neighborhood of detached homes is not the only suitable place to raise a family. The second half reveals the lack of imagination of the Boulder NIMBY; they can't fathom that not everyone wants to live the way they've chosen to live
• Building height restrictions and some of our light industrial areas are in danger of being eliminated in the service of more housing. Maximum building height is a special topic for the Boulder NIMBY. Being able to see the mountains from anywhere in Boulder is super important to them. I find it fascinating: "we'd like to build more housing so people can afford to live here," and the NIMBY answer is "no, I need to see the mountains from everywhere." I'm not sure about the concern about light industrial areas except as a way to argue against zoning/development changes in general
• Our neighborhoods are threatened by a city council majority who clearly want to increase occupancy and make changes to our zoning regulations, eliminating single family zoning. Well, yeah, duh. Single family housing is probably the top reason why there's a housing crisis. The problem is NIMBYs act like getting rid of single family housing means iron foundries will be built in residential areas. No one wants that, but would it be so bad to have more (any?) missing middle housing in residential neighborhoods? Will a triplex cause your neighborhood to descend into a slum? A corner coffee shop or salon/barber wouldn't ruin your neighborhood, I guarantee. Notice that they cite the "city council majority." I remember voting for the city council and many of the current members openly campaigned on doing the things these NIMBYs dislike. This is how democracy works, folks
• Driving through cross-town traffic during the day is daunting. Here's the big tell of these NIMBYs. They expect to be able to drive in town during the day and not encounter traffic. Above they complain about the city seeming less pedestrian-friendly, and here about traffic. Any measure to make the city more car friendly is certain to be less pedestrian friendly. They want to be able to drive without traffic, and want a pleasant walk where they choose to walk, and they don't care about where other people might want to walk if it makes their drive "daunting." The only want to accomplish that is if their walks never go to any destination one might drive to because cars and pedestrian accommodations are opposites in cities. Making space for cars means taking it from pedestrians, cyclists, and other modes of transportation

There's more on that page, but I'm going to stop here. I think all of this boils down to NIMBYs being selfish and not accepting that places change. I saw the graphic below some time ago, and I think of it often when hearing NIMBY complaints about change. Things (vibes!) were just better in the past, and anything that is change is bad.

Finally, because the group is so new I suspect that the Boulder Action webpage will experience change in the near future. I've put a screenshot of how the page looked when this post was written here.

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Rising to #6 this week, No Need to Argue by The Cranberries was the band's second album after Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? and is their top selling album. It features the international hit song Zombie that according to the Wikipedia page, "wasn't grunge, but the timing was good," but definitely has grunge elements in my opinion. I think the only other single off the album I remember hearing on the radio was Dde to My Family.

The lead singer Dolores O'Riordan had a highly distinctive voice that's instantly recognizable. They surely would not have achieved success without her.

The Cranberries have long-lasting appeal. My 12 year old daughter loves Zombie. This album is definitely worth checking out.

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Garth Brooks remains at #1, so we'll drop down to #7 and listen to My Life by Mary J. Blige. Looking through my listening history, it appears that I've listened to this album once before in 2012. I do not remember it at all and none of the songs seemed familiar 13 years later. Other than the listens to this album, I've barely listened to Mary J. Blige. Her music is fine, and this album feels extremely 90s to me, but clearly she's not my favorite.

I do want to highlight that she has successfully pivoted her career in music to other fields. On her official website she is promoting/selling:

• A new album from November, 2024
• A 2025 tour. For a measly $740 I can get a VIP ticket when she comes to Denver. If I'm reading the seating map correctly, for the concert in one month she's sold 10 of 68 VIP seats. I don't know the economics and velocity of ticket sales but that doesn't seem good
• $1,500 high-heeled, thigh-high boots
• A new music video
• A TV show she's in called Power Book II: Ghost that streams on "Starz"
• Jewelry that, in my opinion, is quite gaudy. The men's jewelry section is titled "MAJESTY FOR MEN," and I'm sorry, the only majesty I'm interested in is Trogdor's.
• More new music

All the above is good for her, but I am not interested. I have no ill will; I hope she sells all of her concert tickets, boots, and gaudy jewelry. The album itself is, again, fine, but clearly not memorable to me. I'll probably never listen to it again.

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This week CrazySexyCool by TLC hit #9. I didn't pay much attention to this all-female trio at the time, so only now I learned that TLC is an initialism of the band member's nicknames, not of "Tender Loving Care." The "L" in the name died in 2002 in a car collision in Honduras, but the band didn't change their name and have been active in the last few years. I'm struggling to think of a band name that used the member's real names (or initials) and didn't change or stop using the band name when a member died or left. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are no more after Tom died. Some bands even change their name entirely even when the original name wasn't a member's name. New Order came after Joy Division following Ian Curtis' death. On the opposite side, Crosby, Stills & Nash added "Young" to their name when Neil joined.

I have definitely heard a few of the songs off this album, Waterfalls, in particular. According to the wikipedia page, this album is highly regarded and I can see why. It was innovative R&B for an all-female group that previously was more in the rap genre in 1994. I can't say that TLC is my favorite, nor is the album, but I don't dislike it. My suggestion is to check it out, I think it's worth your time.

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I realized that I've written here about my Santa Cruz MTB and my Orbea Road Bike, but that I never wrote about my commuter bike because I purchased it during the period when I stopped writing to this blog. Today I'll fix that omission!

In late summer 2020 I purchased a Priority Continuum Onyx to replace my Frankencommuter bike. My old commuter was a hodgepodge of parts: a Nashbar road bike frame (called the "Framé" and no longer available for purchase), along with various used bike parts I acquired over the years; mostly from when I upgraded parts on my bikes. It was fine for what it was but after using it for about ten years it was wearing out and I was ready for something nicer. There were aspects of the bike that could never be fixed. In particular, the inability to fit fenders to the frame led me to decide something else was needed.

After doing research I decided I wanted a belt drive bicycle. I was interested in belt drive bikes because all the positives (listed here) seem perfect for a commuter and the negatives unimportant, or at least less important than the positives. They are low-maintenance, long-lasting, and clean. There are negatives (listed here; more later), but even some of the negatives have positives. For example, it's impossible to shift gears on a belt drive using a standard derailleur. To have more than one gear requires an internal gearing system, often placed in the rear wheel hub. This makes the bike more complicated, heavier, and less efficient. However, because the gearing is internal, it's sealed away from rain and dirt and requires less maintenance, exactly what I want from a commuter bike.

Priority bicycles sells only belt drive models, and I settled on the Continuum Onyx. It had basically everything I wanted:

• Belt drive
• Continuously variable transmission (CVT) internal rear hub (more on this later)
• Fenders
• Built-in lights using a front-hub dynamo
• Hydraulic disc brakes
• Reflectors everywhere, including the tire sidewalls
• Upright seating with flat bars
• Forgiving 32C tires
• "Acoustic" a.k.a. non-electric. At home I have to carry my bikes up and down a flight of stairs and I didn't want a bike that weighed 50-60 pounds

About the only thing they omitted, and probably should include on a city commuter bike, is a bell. Like reflectors, bells are legally required in many jurisdictions (but never enforced, really). I have added a bell and it's useful.

The are definitely negatives to a belt-driven bicycle. The bike is fairly heavy, especially in the back (although I'm probably spoiled by my other quite light bikes). It's also clearly less efficient than a standard chain-driven bicycle. I am not as fast as I think I would be on a similar non-belt driven bicycle at a given level of effort. Many parts of the bike would be hard to fix on the go. However I only ride it in town, and worst case I'll leave it locked up somewhere and use my bus pass to get where I'm going and return for it later. Doing any kind of maintenance that requires removing the rear wheel is a decent hassle.

The CVT rear hub has its plusses and minuses. On the positive side, in contrast to a traditional derailleur, it doesn't require any fine adjustment. It uses a single grip shifter(*), meaning that the bike can reasonably be operated with one hand that can both shift and brake (e.g. you're carrying a pie in your other hand). Coming from typical bikes with set gear ratios the CVT is at first very weird, but being able to change the ratio by just a smidge is useful. The minuses come down to the same issues mentioned above: weight, efficiency, and difficulty of working with the rear wheel. In my opinion the plusses outweigh the minuses.

After four and half years of ownership, it has indeed been a very low-maintenance bicycle. Other than pumping up the tires once or twice a month:

• I recently replaced the brake pads (front and back) and bled the hydraulic brakes. I've done this before on my mountain bike, and once I figured out how to shimmy the bleed block into the brakes, it was actually easier than the Santa Cruz
• I can't remember the last flat tire, and I think I've had less than 5 flats overall
• The new (see below) kickstand spring mechanism gets gummed up with road grime and about twice a year needs to be cleaned out

I do have some minor to medium complaints about the bike that mostly consist of the items Priority saved a few bucks on:

• The factory-spec kickstand was flimsy and I had to replace it when it broke. I replaced it with a two leg kickstand (holy moley, how can someone write hundreds of words about a kickstand?) that is far stronger and better than the original one. The one I purchased is especially nice and I spent more than I could have, but the one Priority supplied was not very well made
• I'm on the third bottom bracket. For both previous the bearings holding the spindle went bad and the bottom bracket developed a very annoying click. It is likely that a higher quality bottom bracket would solve this issue
• The connector that links the dynamo hub to the wire that runs to the lights is cheap and needlessly difficult to reattach after removing the front wheel. It's probable that this connector is matched to the hub, and the dynamo hub is not manufactured by Priority, but it's annoying
• The provided pedals were plastic which I replaced with some metal ones I already had. Looking at flat pedals online, the cheapest metal pedals are only a few bucks more than the least expensive plastic ones. Surely this price difference is smaller when buying in bulk
• I have replaced the saddle. Saddles are a very personal choice and it's impossible for one saddle to work for everyone. No fault to Priority here

Overall I have been and am very satisfied with the bike. It has delivered on almost all of the promises of a belt-driven bicycle. If Priority & the dynamo manufacturer made the choice to spend a few more bucks (and really, just a few bucks!) in a few places, my complaints would be basically zero.

(*) I generally dislike grip shifters, but considering how the CVT works, I think this is an exception, and it's a good solution.

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It's been two weeks since my last album review because there were no un-reviewed albums in the top 10 last week. This week Big Ones by Aerosmith hit #8 on the charts. Big Ones is compilation/greatest hits album covering their prior three studio albums.

I remember when this album came out; a friend had a copy and I borrowed it for a short time. Aerosmith was experiencing a resurgence of popularity and the songs on this album seemed really cool. I didn't have MTV at home, but I was aware that their music videos featured attractive young women, something I was, ahem, interested in. Hilariously, the video for Amazing reminds me of Celery Man.

Ultimately, I can't say I've been the biggest Aerosmith fan. I don't dislike them, but they're not often the thing I go to. Looking through their music library I think I should spend some time (re)visiting it. There are albums I know I like, e.g. Toys in the Attic, so there are probably more. I would therefore say that this edition of 30 Years On is a win. It reminded me of an album I enjoyed, and to also explore the Aerosmith library more fully than I have done. It's too early for me to suggest Big Ones over the three albums the songs are drawn from, but it's not a bad compilation album and it's likely you'd enjoy it.

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I don't subscribe to Spotify, so I don't get an end-of-year Spotify Wrapped summary. But not to be outdone, Last.fm offers a "Playback" report. It's basically the same thing as Wrapped except that Last.fm waits until the year is actually over before sending out the report.

I managed to scrobble a few more tracks than last year:

My Playback report isn't all that interesting so it's not worth sharing. What I do want to highlight from it is the need for people to learn when to use averages, and when to use medians. Here is one of the factoids my report tells me, that my top track was Right Back to It by Waxahatchee with MJ Lenderman. My 17 listens puts me in the top 5% of listeners of that song.

Next, the reports gives me this graph which shows the cumulative number of listens to the track by me and by the average of all users who also listened at least once. Despite being in the top 5% of all listeners, you'll notice that my line is below the average line. These two facts combine to illustrate why averages are often misleading, and medians are more informative.

Let's put it this way, if I was serving food with Warren Buffet at a shelter for 100 homeless people, on average we would all be billionaires. Then asking the question "on average you're all billionaires, why are most of you homeless?" abuses statistics. The median wealth in that shelter would be zero, which is far more accurate of the financial condition of most of the people there.

In the same way as a few people can be immensely wealthy and skew averages into meaninglessness, all it takes is a few people who put Right Back to It on repeat to heavily skew the plot into absurdity. It's likely that the median line for this track might be nearly flat at just a few plays. Maybe the people at Last.fm think that looks funny, but if I'm in the top 5% of listeners, my listening history should look very different from the median (most other) listeners!

Here's the end of year report I'm sending to Last.fm:

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2024 was a pretty good year for me in terms of cycling. Late in the year I purchased a new road bike which is only the third road bike I've ever owned (I bought my first racing road bike in 2001, a Trek 5200 in black with Rolf Wheels). But most of all I managed to increase the hours of cycling from 2023 by over 50%. For me, the enjoyment of cycling is proportional to the time I get to do it, so this increase has been great.

2024 was my twentieth year using a GPS to track my rides. In April 2005 I started with a Garmin Forerunner 301. Garmin had been making GPS receivers for years and this was an early athletics-focused device. Compared to modern devices it was imprecise and buggy (especially the heart rate monitor), but it was still very cool. I was a pioneer of "out front" bike mounts when I jury rigged the 301 to my handlebars. Not long after moving to Colorado in 2010 I upgraded to a Garmin Edge 705 that was bike-specific and had a host of upgrades, including maps, a cadence sensor, a color screen, and a barometric altimeter. A couple years ago I upgraded again to a Garmin Edge 530 which is even more accurate with the addition of GLONASS and Galileo compatibility.

I started using GPS in 2005 a full four years before Strava existed. A few years ago I took the time to upload my full history to Strava including activities that predate Strava. It's kind of fun looking at these old rides, I have historical KOMs all over San Diego. They have long been claimed by other riders, but because I was the only one using GPS back then I was the fastest!

Below I've compiled some statistics in bar chart form covering all my rides with GPS data since 2005. There are a few very clear trends:

• Through 2010 the activity trend is downwards as I sacrificed riding time in the interest of finishing my PhD (2005 is lower simply because I didn't get the Garmin until April)
• My peak year is 2011, my first full year after finishing my PhD and my second to last full childless year
• Totals continue to trend downwards with another child in 2016, and then only start to rebound in 2019 and ongoing as the children get older and require less attention
• 2018 was super rough; only 28 hours of recreational riding over the whole year

The bottom two graphs, the average speed (KPH) and rate of climbing (Meters/Kilometer), show some interesting things:

• All the years with better than 24KPH average speeds are years I think I preferred road cycling over mountain biking. For example, in 2019 I got a new mtb and I wanted to ride that all the time. Mountain biking is way slower than road biking and 2019 has the lowest average speed
• Correlated, I think all the years with more than 12 meters / kilometer of climbing are years I preferred mountain biking. Again, 2019 is an outlier because I did proportionally more mountain biking
• Years before 2010 are mostly in San Diego. It's hard to disentangle the fast speeds 2005-2007 between being younger, still racing, doing less elevation, and less mountain biking. San Diego is not flat, but it's harder to get the kind of elevation changes available along the Colorado front range

I have not included the distance I commute by bike in these plots because I can't be bothered to turn on GPS tracking when I commute. It's likely that each of the last few years, perhaps since 2019, I've commuted 500-1,000 KM by bike each year.

The plots below are interactive thanks to Plotly, a tool I highly recommend!

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Today we visited the Denver Zoo for the annual Zoo Lights event. Every year the zoo sets up hundreds of light features all across the zoo. Most lights are static, but there are some animated light features. It's a fun way to spend a cold evening doing something different at the zoo. Here are a few photos!

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The top-selling un-reviewed album this week is not Live at the BBC by The Beatles, it's The Hits by Garth Brooks. The reason I am not reviewing Garth Brooks is that he has chosen to prevent his entire catalog from being on any music streaming service except Amazon Music, and I don't have access to Amazon Music.

According to that article linked above, his stance seems mostly reasonable: most/all streaming services probably underpay artists for the music they serve to customers. The whole world of music for $15-20 a month is an incredible deal and as a consumer it's amazing. What's not reasonable is his choice of Amazon. Amazon is a notoriously bad company to work for as an employee (every word is a link to a different article about unsavory Amazon business practices). The article says that Brooks chose Amazon because they're also a retailer. I guess that as long as a consumer can choose to buy a physical album from a retailer it's okay if the same retailer streams his music? But that physical album would be shipped by underpaid, overworked, and exploited employees largely for the benefit of one of the richest people on earth. Are underpaid warehouse and delivery drivers better than underpaid artists? Brooks' choice of Amazon seems to ignore all the bad things about Amazon and suggests that it really is only about money: the money Amazon gives to Brooks.

My household used to pay for Amazon Prime, but we cancelled it and don't miss it. I admit to occasionally still buying things from Amazon, but only when I absolutely cannot find it anywhere else. I try to buy things online from specific retailers: bicycle stuff from bicycle retailers, electronics from electronics retailers, etc. I do see my own hypocrisy: I listen to music at very low cost (that pays low royalties) but also am trying to not support very low cost shopping (that pays low wages). I think the bottom line is I have basically zero market power; my choices are imperceptible to these affected groups. I don't matter. However, a big star like Garth Brooks has power, and he's chosen to use his power in what appears to be a mostly self-serving way with morals at least as flexible as mine.

I could pirate the album, but I don't care enough about Garth Brooks to do that. It's not available at my local library, either. Instead I'll drop down to #7 and listen to some Beatles, an outcome I don't dislike.

This album is mostly covers performed by the Beatles for various BBC radio programs. On the one hand, I generally disfavor covers unless they do something the original didn't. In this case, what's been added is that these covers are performed by the freakin' Beatles. The Beatles got their start (including going back to The Quarrymen days) playing covers in clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. By the time of these BBC recordings they were surely more polished than those early days, but I'd like to think that these songs have some of the quality and energy of the Beatles before they got world famous.

You should definitely check out this album. The only asterisk is that it's over two hours long with 56 songs and a few spoken tracks. Perhaps take smaller bites of the album with breaks so you may listen without becoming overwhelmed.

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After two weeks of Christmas music, the decidedly non-holiday Vitalogy by Pearl Jam hit #1 after three weeks on the chart.

I listen to Pearl Jam relatively frequently, but not that often to Vitalogy. It has a few good songs, like Better Man and Corduroy, but overall it's nowhere near as good as Ten. Of course, that's not exactly fair because Ten is one of the best rock albums ever, and one of a few that defined grunge rock.

Overall, I'd recommend checking it out, but if you don't like it as much as Ten, that's fine.

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Following last week's Christmas album, this week we get the album with songs everyone hears (perhaps too much of) this time of year, Merry Christmas by Mariah Carey. Hitting #3 thirty years ago, this album has sold over 18 million copies since then. To mark the importance of 30 years, Mariah Carey released a 30th Anniversary Edition which I've linked to above.

My feelings about this album largely mirror how I feel about the Kenny G album last week. At the right time and in the right way, I'm completely fine with Christmas music. Christmas music can help to set a mood and that's great. I would never pick this nor any other Christmas music to actively listen to, but in the background, it can be just the right thing.

I have no doubt that this album will continue to get plays for decades to come. The songs on this album have a permanent place on many Christmas song playlists. Between Thanksgiving and New Years, you have my permission to play it, but not necessarily listen to it.

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