wednesday

New Feature!

Nouveau Dispositif !

새로운 특징!

¡Nueva Característica!

新しい特徴!

Новая Характеристика!

Neue Eigenschaft!

Nuova Caratteristica!

One Hundred Miles Before Breakfast can now be enjoyed by non English speakers via the new Babel Fish link in the sidebar. Check it out.

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(OHMBB is also available in jive. Just Gizoogle that shiznit!)

monday

I was recently looking at the "What was your first bike" thread on PNWriders.com and after posting the Tote Gote picture I started thinking about the bikes I've had. My current bike is the only one I have digital photos of, and I'm not what you'd call organized, so finding the negatives with past bike pictures (if it were ever to occur) would be a miracle.

Luckily, other people have had the same bikes and I ganked images of theirs off the net, so here's the parade:

1983 Nighthawk CB550SC I bought in June of '91, replaced after four months with a nearly identical 1983 CB650SC. Excellent first streetbike, the 550 was; light, smoooooth & quiet, shaft drive, decent handling (the Sportster-ish buckhorn handlebars notwithstanding), but not quite enough juice. With the extra 100cc I also got flatter handlebars and a second front disc. I rode the 650 for another eighteen months and I loved it.

...

Then I met her.

A 1981 GoldWing 1100i. Black as sin, stripped-down for lightness and agility... (OK, I am as certain as I can be that the fairing was crashed off, but the price was right and I'm a naked-bike kind of guy, so agility it is)

This is not (to my knowledge) a picture of my 'Wing, but it could be. I wish I still had it. I would, if it hadn't exploded. I only had this bike for three years, but I put about sixty thousand miles on it and held down a (more than) full-time job. I miss being twenty five and able to go days with little or no rest. That sure would be handy now.

Alas, Halloween night of 1996 I was on my way to what turned out to be an extremely good party (about which I will write nothing here) and two different colors of smoke came out of it. I got $200 for its carcass from Bent Bike and counted myself lucky to get anything. Apparently I got the one un-indestructible GoldWing in the hundreds of thousands of indestructible ones. At least when it died it was only blocks from my house rather than hours from my state.

.

Then began the longest three months I had ever endured. The Bikeless Days. At least it was winter and I wasn't missing out on anything good (Author's note: this is foreshadowing). Many miles were logged on Metro as I bussed about from bike shop to bike shop and from one driveway to the next for test rides and wishful thinking. I was on my way from the Suzuki shop to a bus stop where I could catch a bus that went right by my building (worth walking a few blocks for) when all of a sudden the sky opened and a shitload of water came out of it. I wasn't even like it was raining, there were no individual drops, just a mass of falling water. I ducked into a doorway to wipe off my glasses. when I put them back on I saw this:

.

1990 BMW K75. Red. Shiny. German. Not broken. Way out of my price range. Meant to beI had randomly ducked into the doorway of the BMW shop. I didn't even know I wanted one.

Several weeks later, (very) creative financing in place, it was mine. Damnation, what a ride. Being two hundred pounds lighter and nearly a foot shorter than the 'Wing that sewing-machine-like triple could really haul the mail. On a spec sheet (especially by today's standards) the K75 is not a balletic rocketship, kinda heavy, kinda underpowered. Under your butt it's a silent freight train. It had the same kind of acceleration as the 'Wing, just way more of it. The word that comes to mind is inexorable. And it could lean waaaaay over. I became a curve junkie. It was also several orders of magnitude more reliable than my fifteen year and 139,000mi old Honda. I had that red bike until it was removed from under me by a (fucking moron) careless motorist.

Less than a week before I was to make THE LAST PAYMENT.

And then that little punk on the skateboard stole my Ben & Jerry's (from the shattered remains of my saddlebags) while I was laying in the street.

(remember that foreshadowing?)

Right then - at 7.03pm, on 3 May 2000 - began the real Worst Three Months of my life. The "Bikeless And Learning How To Walk Again Days." It was summer, and I was missing stuff. A really nice, sunny summer the likes of which Seattle sees once in a decade, or a generation. At least that's how it looked from the seat next to the GuyWhoSmellsLikePee on the hot, steamy bus. With a huge nylon brace on my foot and lower leg. Luckily for me, human parts eventually fix themselves. Unluckily for me, BMW parts do not have the same "it'll grow back" feature. Luckily for me, about fifty people saw that (fucking moron) inattentive motorist roll right through that stop sign.

A couple of hours after I cashed the insurance check (about two weeks after the brace came off) I was on a (very long) bus ride to Cascade BMW in Kirkland (now defunct) to trade a fat stack of Allstate's Franklins for a newer, shinier green 1996 BMW R1100R with only 16K miles on it. If I'd known I could get a (much, much) better bike in exchange for twelve weeks of discomfort and two of my 206 bones I'd have hit myself in the foot with a pipe years before. It's a fine machine. I've had it for six and a half years and the only thing I really wish for is a bigger gas tank so I wouldn't have to stop riding it quite as often.

I also wouldn't mind if money came out of it from time to time, but you can't have everything.

.

That's it. Five bikes, sixteen years, a little over a quarter million miles and I cannot imagine wanting anything but more of the same.

sunday

See, enclosed vehicles do cause dain bramage.

So I’m riding to work yesterday and this fucking moron...er, I mean, nice gentleman...pulls out of the Staples parking lot (chirping his tires in the process) and attempts to insert his Dodge Magnum(TM)* in me.

I executed the official Fucking Moron Inattentive But Not Intentionally Homicidal Motorist Avoidance Maneuver (MSF calls it a “Swerve”) and let him have 125dB of Fiamm music (there was some in-helmet cursing and questioning of said Dodge owner’s parentage, sexuality and sentience as well). Just another day of commuting in an urban environment.

What made this particular incident stick in my mind was what the fucking moron...er, nice gentleman said when he pulled up beside me at the next stoplight. “You should be more careful on that thing, I almost hit you.”

I sat on that for half a second or so, absorbing the sad irony of his statement. Then replied “You almost hit me, and I should be more careful? How does that follow?”

The confusion on his face as he tried to grasp my question lasted longer than the red light so I don’t know if he ever formulated a response - or even understood what I meant. But I bet he later told the story of the nutjob on a bike (who, like all motorcyclists, must certainly have a death wish) that almost scratched up his shiny car by wantonly occupying the space that he wanted to occupy.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s just too goddam easy to get a driver’s license in the US.

*A station wagon with fat tires and a Hemi is still a station wagon, dude.

monday

Yeah, but what the hell

is it?

I've been visiting motorcycle and sports car fora over the last few weeks to get the locals' take on the CanAm Spyder, which has been much the buzz of late.
The motorcycle guys and the car guys both seem to come in two major flavors: 1.) Those who are cautiously optimistic: "a 3wheeler might possibly provide at least some fun to its (probably foolish) owner until the novelty wore off" - and 2.) Those who find 3wheelers to be an abomination that wantonly spits bile in the face of the motor gods just to be pissy.

These two groups make up an easy 80%.
The remaining twenty percent either don't care or have already drunk the 3wheeler KoolAid.

I won't dwell on the car guys (and gals) because their point of view is as foreign to me as that of a retarded tapir. It essentially boils down to variations on two comments:

"It's dangerously unstable because of its lack of a fourth wheel."

This is simply due to lack of understanding of the physics involved.

and:

"I'd hate to get T-boned in that thing."

This is the line of thinking that has brought us 6000 lb. all terrain combat vehicles being used as one-occupant commuter cars in dense urban environments. That's simultaneously environmentally stupid and evolutionarily maladaptive. And willful stupidity is far and away the worst kind, so we'll disregard that perspective since spending all of one's time in an enclosed vehicle obviously causes brain damage.

What does concern us today is the reaction of the motorcyclist community. And by and large the motorcyclist reaction to Bombardier's first pavement-specific vehicle is:

"What good is it if it doesn't lean?"

A valid criticism found on every peg-dragger site I lurked in.

It doesn't lean.

It doesn't lean because it's not a motorcycle.

It's not a motorcycle, and - Ago forgive me - I like it anyway. But it's not a car either. It's something else. And we need as much something else as we can get.

Motorcyclists already use an "alternative" vehicle (from the POV of the majority) and are therefore more open to an alternative alternative, but ultimately bikers seem to be stuck on what they see as the "loss" of the tilting horizon. Some will eventually be able to get their heads around it (sidecarists first, I 'speck) and some will not. Ever. So it goes.

There will be (and indeed has been throughout history) considerable resistance to a "new" type of vehicle sharing the road with "regular" vehicles. Automobiles were once the catalyst for the same sort of resistance from the horse and carriage crowd. I imagine there were fur-clad naysayers in a torch-waving circle around Thor (the inventor of the wheel) shouting "What's wrong with walking from place to place like we've always done?" and things of a similar nature. It will pass. Eventually.

The thing about any change of paradigm, even a limited one like what constitutes a "proper" vehicle, is that it doesn't fully manifest until the last of the people who hold the old paradigm have died. So it's gonna be awhile before vehicles with even and odd numbers of wheels - both leaning and non-leaning - can share the roads in peace. But it will happen.

I just wish it would hurry the hell up.

Coming Soon: Guzzi Stelvio and a cohovision update.

wednesday

Biggest 3wheeler Ever!

(and it's right way 'round, too)

This is the Lebedenko (aka:"Tsar") Tank. State of the art military tech in 1914. Its front wheels are almost nine meters in diameter. Unfortunately, during testing its tiny (1.5m) rear wheel got stuck in a ditch and the engine wasn't strong enough to pull its forty ton weight back out again.

Imagine if the Imperial Russian army had had a powerful-enough-to-pull-its-own-weight version of these in 1917...Empire of the 3wheelers!