This was on the menu...
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Hot Wheels
I kinda forgot about the Indy 500...
Other stuff on my mind I guess.
The IRL seems a bit worthless these days anyway.
But this seems pretty awesome.
Monday, May 30, 2011
This Little Girl...
I was waiting for something to fall off, the whole time. There was some untested shit, going in.
I was all bungee straps and good hopes heading out.
In a sea of baggers, this bike stood out and held her ground.
She held her own and gave me no trouble, til a few miles from home when she was hot enough to let a plug wire fall off.
Given the roads we passed over, I can not fault her for that.
She brought me home...
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Laurel and Hardy
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9
Friday, May 27, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
The Ride
You may have heard m mention some kinda ride this weekend...
What's up, you ask?
Well, I am headed down to DC for the Rolling Thunder ride.
I know, that sounds about like the exact opposite of anything I might jump in on...
But that is what it is.
My Dad mentioned this deal about a year ago, said it was something he wanted to do.
I sorta gave it a whatever, as a passing fancy, but he kept talking about it...
Said it was important to him, something he wanted to do.
Now, my Dad and I have had a policy of not expecting much from one another in the past. We just sort of passed by each other when it was convenient.
I think we have both grown up some and developed a degree of understanding about each other in the past few years...
You know, we're family.
So, with that in mind, I came to the conclusion that I needed to get on board with deal.
It has a lot to do with why the T is gone and the bike is here.
If I was gonna do this ride thing, I was going to feel good about it.
I was gonna be all in on the deal...
I guess I am.
He is to.
The two of us are going to pound out some miles, get lost, drink a beer or two, laugh and squeeze into some kinda crazy huge motorcycle parade.
A couple of guys, a couple of bikes, a couple of miles together...
I am sure we both have our own reasons for doing this thing. I think a lot of them are similar and some a bit complicated.
Just because we are grown-ass men does not mean either one of us has this out shit figured out.
Sometimes, just watching mile markers pass by with somebody is enough...
That is the story, I am not sure what else to tell you until it's done.
Song of the Sausage Creature
A brief HST literary interlude.
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.
Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.
It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."
Thrasher Thursday
I can remember when Thrasher was a glossy cover and newsprint.
There were music reviews that would inspire me to save up for a cassette tape.
It had photographs of dudes that seemed cool, doing bad-ass things in sketchy places...
Having fun.
Thrasher...
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Wheelie Wednesday
One sure way to impress hot chicks...
Wheelies.
Sure, they will pretend to not care.
Women cannot resist the lure of a man able to masterfully navigate any vehicle on the rear wheels only.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
A Little Tour
I didn't want you to think that I had given up on taking over the world.
No, not at all...
But moving meant getting together a new secret lair and all of that.
I can't really show you too much, because it is a secret lair, but how about a little virtual tour.
We will enter through one of the tertiary doors, 'cause I don't want to reveal the location or anything...
Pardon the mess, I am still working on some things.
Down that hallway/tunnel is a lot of important stuff, like...
Well, just trust me, there is some really cool stuff.
The power source for the base, the monorail station, all that sorta secret lair shit.
And a really nice gym.
I don't know why I put a gym in...
I mean who has time for working out these days?
Especially when you are taking over the world...
Here is a thing, never mind what it is, in one of the upper level labs.
It does things, just don't worry about it...
Really cool, especially when you combine it with some of the stuff down on the lower levels.
Anyway.
Down on the lower levels is where the real genius stuff goes on...
The baboons are down here, too.
They make a hell of a noise.
Man, baboons are noisy...
Like I was saying, just down these stairs is some really awesome shit...
Yeah, this is not an actual picture of the work on the baboonbots...
You get the idea from this one though.
I could post up more, but I really want the baboonbots to be a surprise and can't wait to see everybody's reaction when we reveal ourselves in a tidal wave of glorious world conquering domination.
I like a good surprise, don't you?
So, yeah, that was kinda the tour...
I hate to have all sorts of wacky agents tailing me and what not, so I am not going to reveal much more right now.
Remember, it is a secret lair...
Which means it is a fucking secret.
So, don't tell anyone. OK?
Keep it on the down low, between you and me...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Quotes
With all the random unaccredited quotes flying around, on line these days...I thought I might serve up something myself.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Cinco de Mayo
It's May 5th, which means I am wearing my sweet sombrero all day...
It doesn't have anything to do with Mexico's independence, today is the only day I can wear this around without people thinking I am crazy.
Well, anyway...
My unflagging cravings for Mexican food still exist, but it seems like a bad day to sort that out...
With all of the amateurs clogging up the beaner joints, acting all loco and shit.
I found out that it is also some sorta Dutch independence day?
Their liberation from Germany, or something, also happened today.
So, yeah, perhaps we should all hit up the local Dutch joint?
We could order up some...
Whatever the hell they eat in Dutchland.
Sausages or...shit, I don't know...
Weed is legal there, right?
They must have good snacks...
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Two Wheels Tuesday
This may just be internet legend, but this bike just turned up a bit ago...
Reportedly, an unused, never uncrated XR that has been lingering in some back room somewhere for years.
I want to believe...
Monday, May 2, 2011
Two Wheels Tuesday
I think this work on the seat is sorting itself out.
When I stare at things, I think things are getting cool.
Not in a settling way, but real.
Slim, rough, business...
There is a pile of stuff that has been pulled, trimmed and removed on the shelf.
Scrap.
Fat.
We will get some good wind...
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8
Bin Laden?
Not here.
Not today.
I imagine you can find something about him somewhere else, today.
Me, I am going to show you a picture of William Carlos Williams with some kittens.
I like poetry and kittens...
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
