Author: splicer

It was on this day in 2005 that I walked into Gold­en Gate Cycles on Pine Street and paid way too much for an under­pow­ered but shiny and pret­ty minia­ture cruis­er. I’d had my motor­cy­cle endorse­ment for all of thir­ty hours and was deter­mined not to be the squid who liqui­fies him­self on the way off the deal­er’s lot, so I was­n’t con­sid­er­ing any­thing big­ger than a 250cc bike. Oth­er than that, I want­ed some­thing I could buy with … Read the rest

For what­ev­er rea­son, the Tianan­men protests stuck with me more than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I find peo­ple ral­ly­ing against an oppres­sive regime a more com­pelling sto­ry than a large mil­i­tary force sur­ren­der­ing to anoth­er large mil­i­tary force. Maybe it’s just the dra­ma of the sto­ry, or maybe it’s that I don’t believe what Mao wrote about pow­er flow­ing from the bar­rel of a gun. I believe in democ­ra­cy, not just as a prin­ci­ple but as a prac­ti­cal … Read the rest

Did you all hear about that cus­tom and rare car col­lec­tor that died of car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing while run­ning his for­eign cars in his garage with­out open­ing the garage door?

The coro­ner’s report said he died of auto-exot­ic asphyxia.

…

I just bought a sign to put on my wall. Gen­er­al­ly I think these fake old tin signs are sort of tacky, but I remem­ber being a lit­tle kid obsessed with dinosaurs, and when I dis­cov­ered that there was a … Read the rest

New Pro­gres­sive 412 rear shocks on the Stone. They’re all shiny and chromey and I wish I’d got­ten black cov­ers instead. The shiny chrome makes the rest of the bike look dirty. I’ll try clean­ing it and see if the chrome starts look­ing good.

Replac­ing the rear sus­pen­sion was sur­pris­ing­ly easy. It took only about 20 min­utes. OK, grant­ed that Turnsignal Tim did all the real work, but I was there and it was real­ly straightforward.

What amazes me is that … Read the rest

I believe that I’ve got motor­cy­cle parts wait­ing for me at my mail­box and I’d like to get some time at my friend’s garage to do some work on the bike this after­noon, so I got up ear­ly this morn­ing and head­ed in to the office before sun­rise. It was a brisk morn­ing and I did­n’t think to bun­dle up with any extra lay­ers, just put my jack­et and rid­ing pants on over my work clothes and got on the … Read the rest

Gen­er­al John Bur­goyne wrote to Lord George Ger­main in 1777 that Ver­mont “abounds in the most active and most rebel­lious race of the con­ti­nent and hangs like a gath­er­ing storm on my left.”

Hap­py Pres­i­dents Day!… Read the rest

I can’t tell you how many peo­ple have told me that I absolute­ly must read this book to learn to become a bet­ter rid­er. It seems to be an almost uni­ver­sal selec­tion for the motor­cy­clist’s bible.

What I did not know before open­ing the cov­er was that it’s entire­ly ded­i­cat­ed to track rac­ing. There­fore I always felt Code was not writ­ing to me. In fact, some of his sug­ges­tions are down­right use­less to a rid­er of my inad­vanced skill lev­el. … Read the rest

Lets see. In the past few days I’ve done quite a bit of shop­ping. Here’s the list:

• Pro­gres­sive rear shocks
• Rear fend­er
• Corbin sad­dle

Today I fin­ished my list by mak­ing a grand tour of the Bay Area. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t find any­thing I liked at Road Rid­er in San Jose, but thanks to a series of very humor­ous nav­i­ga­tion­al errors Turnsignal Tim and I end­ed up in Dublin.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, “we could go check out the Arlen Ness store!”

So … Read the rest

I’ve read this one a few times and keep on com­ing back to it. It’s noth­ing but a sweet, well-writ­ten love sto­ry. It holds no sur­pris­es and is frankly a bit pre­dictable, but for­giv­able for so straight­for­ward­ly being exact­ly what it is.

The only thing that sep­a­rates The Sound of Waves from any trashy romance nov­el is Mishi­ma’s thor­ough­ness as a writer. His descrip­tions both of phys­i­cal sur­round­ings and his­tor­i­cal con­text are lush. He’ll spend end­less pages putting the read­er right … Read the rest

As a long-time fan and some­times cre­ator of comics, I found this col­lec­tion of inter­views with piv­otal fig­ures in the his­to­ry of the form to be fas­ci­nat­ing. If inter­views with per­son­al heroes of mine like Neal Adams and Joe Kubert wer­ent enough, there were sur­pris­es such as Phil Seul­ing, who for­ev­er changed the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem. To top it all off, each of the inter­views was con­duct­ed by anoth­er of my heroes of the form, Will Eis­ner. Put Eis­ner and Gil … Read the rest