semanticprecision

I'm dragging a group of gentlemen (I use the term lightly) to Austin next weekend for my buddy's bachelor party. We figure it's a good place to each manly food, drink manly drinks, and listen to [...] music.

That's a good start, but it'd be nice to have a couple of offbeat-yet-appropriately-overly-manly ideas (ie, bachelor party ideas) on the side. Like if there were a place we could sip Steel Reserve while detonating foreclosed homes while getting a lapdance while grilling bacon. You see why Googling is hard.

Many thanks in advance.

We're (my fiancee and I) growing a small urban planter-garden in the sunlit space below the stairs to the apartment above ours. I'm not particularly green, but regular water, occasional fertilizer, and Los Angeles weather seem to be more than ample for growing.

We picked up three pepper plants: habanero, cayenne, and banana. The cayenne is going balls out, and the habanero's a little puny due to the holy-crap-I-want-to-kick-this-kid's-face-in 6 year old living upstairs ripping the top leaves off (at least, that's the going hypothesis; I've already caught him terrorizing the tomatoes).

Hello!

I'm going to start bike-commuting again in a week or so. I'm a spandex kinda guy, on a road frame (Klein Quantum Race) without any special trunk threads.

It's going to be 12 miles each way. I used to do 11.5 with a Chrome bag, but that was back when I was gainfully employed, and only needed to carry some clothing (left the shoes at the office). Now that I'm a poor graduate student, I'll be needing to bring shoes, clothes, textbooks, notes, lunch... the list goes on. So sidebags are practically necessary.

I picked up some sweet Ortlieb Back Roller panniers, and I dug up a rack at Performance. Trouble is, since I don't have trunk threads, I'm stuck -- as best I can tell -- with

My morning commute has been taking a little longer than usual, and I've been using some spare moments to -- and mind you this is a little embarrassing -- count the "spokes" on car wheels (not sure if they're "spokes" on a car, but they are on a bike, so I'll stick with it). So far, I've seen counts of 5, 7, 9, and 11; generalizing, I'll assume that most-if-not-all vehicle wheels contain an odd number of spokes.

Does anyone know why this is? I'm not up enough on my physics to put together a cogent explanation that way. Or is it purely stylistic?