I learned from Ted White's 1992 documentary, Return of the Scorcher, that the word "scorcher" was used in the late 19th Century to refer to bicyclists, who were then the fastest things on the road. I had already read Ivan Illich's 1973 essay, Energy and Equity, which demonstrated slow cars are when you add up all the time used to pay for owning and maintaining them. Illich concluded that, ultimately, nothing is faster than a bicycle. In the 21st Century, we are still the scorchers.

Cars are also filling our atmosphere with carbon, soot, and ozone-depleting substances. Unless more of us become scorchers, our planet is in for a worldwide scorcher of a much less pleasant type.

I fell in love with the word, and started using it as much as possible. When I found that scorcher.org was up for grabs, I grabbed it. How could I resist? I mostly wanted it to have some snazzy email addresses, but I've shelved that dream until we figure out how to get ridof the scourge of Internet spammers. (My public email address remains at another domain.)

I never actually intended to have a scorcher website, but my domain name provider had set aside some space for me on the webserver, so at first I just put up that silly Important Warning, with links to Ted's movie website and a few other sites that used the word "scorcher."

Time passed, and some of my friends in the San Francisco Bay Area Critical Mass/scorching community could no longer host their bicycle-oriented websites, so scorcher.org found a new calling as a home for these orphaned sites. Then I added a few more.

Credit where credit is due: I didn't author or design any of the Archived pages here, I just host and maintain them. The Screed pages were created by David Powers, and I've kept his design, but I've made changes and updates. The other pages are my own creations.