I was at Two Wheel Motorsport yesterday dropping off the Concours’ rear hub to get the inner gasket re-done. The rear hub comes off easily enough, but the Clymer’s manual said that with the special tools required as well as how much a pain in the ass it is to evenly heat up the hub housing to remove the inner plate (you can’t use a torch, it’ll warp it), this might be one of those times when DIY is more trouble than it’s worth.
Looking at the cost I was in for nearly $200 for two tools I’d probably only ever use once, and they’re rare enough that you can’t rent them. Between that, the heating bit (they suggest maybe using a hot plate), and the fiddly nature of the internal components which have to be shimmed just right or you end up with a very clunky drivetrain, this seemed like a good time to make use of a professional. Two Wheel said they could do the job for about $250 taxes in.
The dangerous part about visiting your local dealer is walking through the rows of new machinery. On my way out they had a flock of Moto Guzzis, which I have to admit I have a soft spot for after reading Melissa Hobrook Pierson‘s The Perfect Vehicle.
As I wandered down the aisle, looking at everything from modern adventure tourers to stripped down cafe styled Guzzis, a young salesman appeared. I’d been reading about the not at all shy and retiring Moto Guzzi MGX-21 Flying Fortress in Motorcycle Mojo and wondered if they had one. It just happened that they did, down the end of the row. He pulled it out for us to have a look at…
If you’ve read anything about my time with motorbikes you’ll know that cruisers and their bagger derivatives are about as interesting to me as a plate of spam, but these recent European designed bikes, while heavy, can still actually lean into corners and are surprisingly usable.
There is nothing about the MGX-21 Flying Fortress, so named because it was inspired by the American World War II bomber (an odd choice considering said bombers probably dropped ordinance on and around the Moto Guzzi factory), that is subtle. The enormous bat-wing fairing, acres of carbon fibre and those big opposing air cooled cylinder heads poking out of it all just in front of your knees make for an over the top look at me statement; this is a machine for extroverts.
As a big guy I find that most machines are tight in the knees and generally look too small for me. I even look like I fill up the tall Tiger, but Guzzi’s Fortress looked and felt like it fit. The salesman said that like so many heavy but well balanced machines, the moment you start moving the weight seems to disappear.
This big, black Guzzi makes a unique statement. You can find similarly styled American bikes, but they don’t have this red-headed Italian’s European flair. At nearly twenty-four grand you’re going to have to be well off or really wanting to make that statement in order to get onto one.
No one does fashion and beauty like the Italians, and this new Guzzi, while seemingly an odd choice for the venerable Italian builder, exudes charisma and charm. If I had my own version of Jay Leno’s garage this Lombardy beauty would be in there for those rare days when I want to put myself on a pedestal.
It certainly is. Even if it’s not your thing, have a look. Like an Italian Comtessa, she might be out of your league but a joy to behold.
We attended the POND family day a couple of weeks ago and the steady, plodding nature of drug based (forget gene therapy, it’s miles away) research around ASD and the frustration expressed by some parents got me thinking about what I’d do if they suddenly could ‘fix’ ASD.
Watching my son growing up with an ASD diagnosis that I never had sheds a lot of light on how my own mind works. When I watch him fly into a rage and begin looping I realize that he is a piece of me. When I watch him hyper-focus and grok something completely, that’s a piece of me too. While I’m frequently frustrated by social interaction, I’m not sure I’d be as good at some of things I excel at if I weren’t neuro-atypical, the same goes for Max.
My undiagnosed ASD has made for a strange educational history. I dropped out of high school before finishing, an apprenticeship before finishing and college before finishing. I was on my way to dropping out of university when I started battling my default approach of getting everything I wanted to get out of something before walking away. The social conventions around education, especially the graduating bit, has never held much sway over me. I only started attending them at the behest of girlfriends who suggested that the ceremony mattered. From my point of view once I’d learned what I needed to know I was done.
I played sports throughout my childhood but the getting of the trophies was always an anti-climax; something I tried to find ways out of. I loved the competition but found no value in the social conventions around the awards ceremonies.
Social conventions have always been difficult for me to grasp. The natural tribalism that neurotypical people seem to thrive on is foreign, abstract and often upsetting. Obviously definable traits that other people cling to like religion, nationality and political affiliation seem like strange abstractions to me. Even obvious associations like gender and orientation seem like affectations. Would life be easier if I just fell into those assumptions and social conventions like most people do? Probably.
I have few friends but that doesn’t make me feel lonely. That idea of loneliness and belonging is another one of those neurotypical assumptions that I find foreign. When I started motorcycling a number of people immediately tried to get me into group rides; I don’t get them. The whole point of motorcycling is to feel free. How does riding in tight formation all over the place accomplish that? Others feel power in that social affiliation and get a real rush out of publicly expressing it. Being out in public in a big group makes them feel noticed and important, but I just don’t get it. This has led to ongoing difficulties, especially with groups that thrive on hierarchy and social presentation (which is to say most of them). Because I’m not bothered with the group dynamic I’m seen as an outsider and potentially disruptive to the organization. People who get a charge out of the drama and politics of group dynamics find it easy to alienate me from a group, and tend to do so.
I generally undervalue my influence on other people because I assume they feel the same distance I do. I’m almost pathologically unable to remember names. This is often described in terms of introversion or shyness, but if this is what ASD feels like then it’s more like being a stranger in a strange land all the time; I’m always a foreigner. I used to think this was because of my emigration to Canada when I was a child, and that certainly set the tone, but I’d been odd like that even before we left. My lack of belonging is endemic. Every so often I meet an exceptional person who is able to see me as I am and not be frustrated by it, I never forget the names of those people.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to better define my strangeness and I’m trying to manage it more effectively. I find that exhausting, but not having giant lists of friends or feeling an important part of an organization? Not so much.
This is made doubly tiring because of the career I’ve wandered into. Teaching is a social process, and while I love the intellectual complexity of pedagogy, technology and curriculum I’m constantly frustrated by the political and social pressures associated with it. Whether it’s union, administration or parental social expectations, I’m often oblivious to what people expect of me and baffled by their responses. I expect ethics and reason to dictate people’s actions, but those things aren’t guiding principles in many decisions. Self interest hidden in socially normative ideas like class, religion or group politics are what drive many interactions between people.
I recently backed out of headship and tried to refocus on the parts of teaching I’m good at rather than trying to herd the cats. Even when refocusing on teaching I find that I’m having a lot of trouble with social expectations. In 2017 a student’s attendance is optional, their willingness to learn is optional and any failure seems to be entirely because I can’t teach. Parents can pull their child out of classes for weeks at a time in the middle of a semester and I shouldn’t wreck their holiday by assuming they will keep up with class work while they’re gone. At some point teaching has turned into daycare, which means the things I enjoy (curriculum and pedagogy) don’t matter so much any more. For someone who doesn’t intuitively understand socially motivated change, this lack of clarity around the evolving expectations of an education system that is evolving into a social support construct is very challenging; it has been a bewildering and upsetting couple of weeks at work.
So here I am, feeling quite out of place, but that’s nothing new. If I was suddenly told that they could cure ASD with a drug would I do it? Would I be less stressed falling into the same political and social conventions neurotypical people seem to thrive on? Would I be better off thinking like the majority? Probably. I can only speak to my own experience, but if it meant losing my ability to focus, which happens because I’m not predisposed toward social or political gamesmanship, on creative and technical expression then no, I don’t think I’d volunteer to become less of what I am.
I’d let Max decide for himself after researching the science, but I’d hope he values his independence and uniqueness of thought as well, even if it generally annoys other people and isn’t the easiest way forward.
The only reason other people want you to think like them is so that they can manipulate you. Why play to that?
Riding a motorcycle is episodic. You experience thermoclines of temperature… the rush of cold air in a pocket, it’s exhilarating. In life that’s a good thing too, surrender to conditions rather than mind managing everything and see what happens.
The Fireblade project has the main bits (fuel leak leading to an engine drowned in gasoline) fixed with a carb rebuild and a new petcock. But there are lots of bits and pieces to sort out before I go get it safetied and put on the road.
The weather warms up tomorrow so I’m hoping for a ride, but Saturday was a -20° March 7th kinda day, so into the garage I went to get the little details worked out.
I was initially going to hold off on the LED indicators, but dead bulbs and broken covers on a 23 year old motorcycle meant the LEDs were actually the cheaper, easier and more modern looking fix anyway. I’d brought a second set when I got the ones for the Tiger, and also got an adjustable indicator relay, so I had all the parts on hand.
The rear indicators look like they were attached by a monkey. I ended up pulling them all off and removing all the stripped, half installed wood screws that were holding them in. I then drilled a hole in the rear plastic under-tray and mounted the second set of LEDs I had on hand from the Tiger upgrade.
The wiring was pretty straight forward with green being ground on both indicators (connected to black on the LED) an orange to LED power (yellow) on one side and light blue to LED power (yellow) on the other. The LEDs also have brake light function where they strobe when you first press the brake. Both red cables on the LEDs go together into the middle pin on the brake lights. It works a trick:
Some other odds and ends are also proving troublesome. Living in rural Canada means everyone’s still in love with imperial sized fasteners. All our local hardware stores have rows of ’em, and maybe 2 metric bolts. It was tricky figuring out the sizes of missing fasteners anyway, but some internet research into OEM parts supplier parts listings got me this far:
A 6×40 metric bold means (as I understand it) a 6mm wide bolt that is 40mm long. But metric sizing also looks like M6x40. I’m assuming their the same but don’t understand why there isn’t a consistent format for metric bolt sizing.
The bolts into the frame that hold down the fuel tank and the brace for the windshield are 6×40, but I couldn’t get an M6 bolt in there. I ended up cleaning out the thread by tapping it out again and then it went in nicely.
***
Rubber parts are particularly hard to find on this kind of bike – it’s just old enough for existing stock to be gone and just young enough not to have a classic aftermarket parts ecosystem.
The cracked airbox rubber connector to the carbs is nearly impossible to find. The only
online place I can find them is for a full set of four plus shipping from Europe is over 70 Euro ($110CAD)… and I only need one of the damned things.
I’m looking into some cunning fabrication options. Some people have tried plumbing PBC couplings as a kind of secure bandage over the original rubber tube. Though if I can find one that is the right diameter and well put together I might simply be able to trim it and substitute it.
Others have tried various fixes like heat shrink or inner tubes. I’ll do some more research and figure out next steps…
These guys suggest silicon hose as a temporary measure. Since what I need is on the airbox side (I was easily able to get carb side rubber replacements), it shouldn’t see too much gasoline so the silicon fix might be the quickest way forward.
These guys suggest a sealant. Again, because it’s not on the carb side this might do the trick. In terms of cost this is the cheapest fix, so I’ll probably start there and see how it goes.
A wide range of imaging from the summer of 2020 into the autumn stretches out beneath you. On-bike photos usually taken with a Ricoh ThetaV firing automatically and attached to the bike with a tripod. Close-up/macros usually done with a Canon T6i DSLR with a macro lens. Drone shots taken with a DJI Phantom4Pro drone. Other shots taken with a OnePlus5 smartphone when I had no other choice (the best camera is the one you have with you). Most are touched up in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom depending on where I am and how much time I’ve go for post processing. Some of them are very post processing heavy verging on digital illustration rather than photography.
The stop motion video was hundreds of photos taken with the 360 camera on bike and then composited into a stop-motion film in Premier Pro. It’s a tricky process you can learn more about here if curious. The SMART Adventures videos are using a waterproof/shockproof action camera from Ricoh.
What’s it like teaching in a pandemic? Frustrating and exhausting. My best guess is that we’re running at about 60% of what we usually cover curriculum wise. There are a number reasons for this, but the underlying one is that we’re letting a virus dictate our pedagogy. SARS- CoV-2 is dictating a lot of things about being human at the moment, so it isn’t surprising that it’s also dictating how we educate our children, but COVID19’s ways are alien and harsh. SARS-CoV2 might be even more mean spirited than the politicians we have running Ontario at the moment. It’s at least as equally short sighted, self-serving and cruel. It’s no wonder that the two get along so well together, COVID is the hammer this government has been trying to hit us with for the past two years. They’ll still be gleefully holding our heads under water for weeks after the rest of the province has shut down.
For those of us trying to ride this out in the system, COVID19 throws everything into a permanent state of panic. The system, which has been struggling under political attacks for over two years now, has been forced into reopening without any central plan or consistent support. The result is a calcified, wounded thing lacking in flexibility and responsiveness. In the rush to force school re-openings a number of strange inconsistencies have shown themselves. If students aren’t in the building it’s perfectly OK to stuff up to forty of them on a poorly ventilated school bus for up to an hour at a time while transporting them to and from their socially distanced classrooms. There is minimal oversight on masking policies at that time as the only adult in the vehicle is busy operating the vehicle. Students then disburse from their crowded buses into carefully sized cohorts of under 20 so they aren’t in big groups… like the one they just sat in to get to the school.
You might think the walk-in students in the afternoon cohort are managing better, but driving home I regularly see large groups of 20+ students not wearing masks while play fighting and jumping on each other after a long afternoon of mask compliance and rigorous rules. When COVID dictates your school’s daily activities it’s with an iron grip powered by fear and blame. I don’t remotely blame those kids for jumping on each other after a frustrating afternoon of being kept apart and muzzled, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think all the rules are reducing transmission routes, the water’s just running around the rock that is the school. Meanwhile, in school we’re making classroom maps of who is sitting where so we can trace contagion in the place it’s least likely to happen. We don’t trace it anywhere else because it doesn’t affect system liability. Compliance with liability issues appears to be what drives system decisions, not efficacy against this virus.
There is a reason we don’t didn’t do quadmesters when viruses weren’t dictating our school schedule. Human attention is a limited resource (these days it’s being strip-mined too). In education speak this is often referred to as engagement. Some media has conflated this into a reduction in attention spans, but my experience in the classroom doesn’t support that. I’ve watched CyberTitans and Skills Ontario competitors peak perform for hours at a time, so sustained attention is something today’s students are more than capable of, but it only seems to work in genuine learning opportunities. Overly fabricated lessons with fictional connections to the real world are where engagement fails. Students can quickly see through that kind of fabricated value. You might get away with inauthentic learning in a 76 minute class, but in a 150 minute class you’re going to run into problems.
The quadmester fire-hose curriculum is problematic on a number of levels. Fast moving students who are fluent in the system can adapt and even benefit from that kind of focused attention on a subject, but for the other seventy percent of the class, massive burst f2f and then remote/elearning classes are damaging their ability to learn, but we’re not dictating pedagogy any more, a virus is, and the virus actually benefits from disaffected, frustrated people. It’s odd that we keep handing these kinds of people to the disease. SARS-CoV2 isn’t intelligent in the traditional sense, but it is a reflexive opportunist that will and does benefit from our ham-handed responses.
In addition to student focus, quadmesters produce a number of other issues that are especially difficult to manage during a world wide medical emergency. I’ve just spent three weeks trying to order IT parts in for my second grade 9 class. The first one took out enough of what parts we had in the lab (many of which were in rough shape because we’d been in the middle of using them before March break) that I couldn’t do the IT unit with the second class. In a normal year I’d have weeks to sort that out, in the drink-from-the-firehouse quadmester curriculum where we’re covering 4+ days of material each day and almost a month a week, there is no time to wait on parts. They take longer to source and deliver anyway because there’s a pandemic happening. I’m now trying to line up a month’s worth of coding curriculum to deliver next week instead – online and f2f at the same time all day every day.
Another one of those inconsistent system responses is the withdrawal of support services within the school. Special education support rooms are closed, guidance is closed and libraries are closed, presumably so students aren’t mixing in school. When you’re facing 16 bused in students every morning who are bringing over 500 secondary connections with them into your classroom, the idea that sending students who need support to specialists who can help them, or sending one of the many students I’ve had in emotional distress over the past few weeks down to guidance seems like a reasonable expectation, but evidently it’s absurdly dangerous.
COVID19 seldom transmits through airborne droplets. You’d have to be within two meters of someone when they sneezed or coughed while not wearing a mask while you’re also not wearing a mask (though COVID can infect through eyes too) to even have a chance of transmission that way. Yet we fixate on masks and ignore the most common means of transmission. The single thing that’s made SARS-CoV2 so difficult to manage is its ability to survive on surfaces. Smaller groupings and frequent spot cleaning is what will strangle this thing, not myopic mask fixations. Following the actual pathology of the disease, there is no reason why we can’t apply effective cleaning regimes and distancing to guidance, spec-ed support and library access, but we don’t because we’d rather panic and shut them down while giving the virus the frustrated people it needs to thrive. Less is more when it comes to ignoring special needs in a pandemic.
While quadmesters are problematic in a lot of ways, the dual cohort is also an imperfect solution to a problem we’re only half addressing. The initial idea was to make every classroom teacher do twice as much prep work designing both face to face and online instruction and then being both online and face to face with alternating halves of the class all day. In practice the splits didn’t happen evenly because we’re a country school and way more students get bused in than walk, so our morning/bus cohorts are often 2-3 times bigger than our afternoon cohorts (16 vs 6 last week for me). Our union then worked out how to provide us with prep time by having covering teachers come in for 30-45 minutes in each two and a half hour marathon face to face session, but in practice I’ve yet to have a covering teacher qualified to teach what I teach and none of them have the faintest idea what we’re doing. From a safety perspective, if the covering teacher isn’t tech qualified I’m supposed to pull students off hands-on work (which is the main focus in technology classes) and do seat work (which isn’t)… with someone who has no background in the subject? We were told to just work through our preps. It’s bandaids all the way down in 2020.
Having to produce days of remote lessons for the half of the class not face to face is another place where a bandaid was thrown on. The teachers covering the online work? Yep, they’re not qualified to teach my subject and have no background in it either. Furthermore they were told that they are to do no marking and make no material for the class, so they’re… what? Taking attendance? On any typical day I’m trying to teach a face to face class while also trying to respond to online emails from students at home at the same time. Not only is this an incredible burden to bear for classroom teachers, but it also casts the no-contact rules with people still doing support work in a stark light. If feels like we’re expected to go over the top every day into no-man’s land while other staff are experiencing minimal workloads.
Overflow classes for students who need special one on one support? That would have been a good use of teachers not in the classroom. We could have pivoted around student need instead of ignoring it. Emotional support spaces for students struggling with the last six months? That would have been a good use of teachers, but thanks to an arbitrary and rather inconsistent response, support is dead while people on the front lines are being snowed under.
The reflexive tightening of the system while under this extraordinary pressure while also two years into a provincial leadership vacuum has resulted in an inflexible response that is providing the appearance of safe, face to face schooling without actually delivering it. I struggled early on with system leaders telling us to just provide day care and not worry about curriculum, but I didn’t take years of schooling to provide day care, though, of course, I’m very cognizant of my students’ mental well being. Others have suggested that it doesn’t matter if we cover curriculum as long as we just make sure the kids are OK, but that’s very difficult to do when the very systems in schools that ensure child well-being are inaccessible. Do you want to be having surgery done on you by COVID-grads who never actually completed a credible education system? Do you want them fixing your brakes? Building your bridges? We ignore expertise at great cost to our society. We have to get back to maximizing human potential because that’s what society needs us to do – our students need us to do that too. Summer should have been all about planning and organization, but it is clearly evident that the government and the ministry its mismanaging didn’t plan anything. We’re watching boards scramble with no clear funding or central planning by provincial governance to try and make this work, and it really isn’t.
Where to next? Well, Ontario’s second wave is breaking on us quickly. Where is it coming on strong? In school aged kids and the people most likely to be in contact with them. Some have suggested that younger children aren’t at risk because they’re not showing a lot of high positives, but considering COVID19’s strange habits, such as the fact that the vast majority of under twenties who get it show no symptoms at all, and considering that Ontario’s half-assed back to school plan has had parents missing work to take their kids with colds, asthma and allergies to day-long line ups to get COVID tested, I’m not surprised. We’re good at skewing our own data.
Here’s a happy thought for you: what if students are freely spreading COVID19 on overcrowded buses and before and after school by being non-compliant with safety protocols (young people are the most likely cynical spreaders, along with conservatives, so our area is doubly blessed). They then take it home where older siblings and parents produce the biggest spike in cases. Give it a bit of time and it’ll spread to older groups where it is much more likely to be fatal. After a week in school, a weekend visit to grandparents might be about the nastiest thing you can do. It took less than two weeks for me to personally know a teacher who was sent home to wait on a COVID19 test. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, it’s inevitable.
How to fix it? It’s self correcting. Thousands of parents are starting to see the holes in this government’s lack of planning and are pulling their children back home for fully remote learning. As in everything else in this pandemic, people are leveraging their socioeconomic advantage and privilege to look after themselves. Rather than creating fictions around a normalized return to school (for the kids’ mental health!), we need to focus face to face schooling on the students and families that specifically need it. Instead of using the school system as an underground transmission system for the virus, we should be using it to focus on providing equity and support for people in distress. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (when I’m not teaching face to face and online simultaneously in an accelerated curriculum all day every day) talking down students and their parents – both of whom I’ve seen burst into tears while venting.
We realized an important distinction early on in the emergency cancellation of classes in the spring: this isn’t elearning, it’s emergency remote learning, and expecting students to be open and able to learn while under that kind of stress isn’t reasonable. I knew we were going to struggle to get through curriculum in the circumstances, I just didn’t expect the system to redesign itself to make it harder as well. We’ve tried to reopen schools while our pedagogy is being driven by a virus rather than how people best learn. The result is a problematic system of delivery that is causing more problems than the virus itself. We’ve lurched from video communications getting you fired to video communications being essential in a matter of one weekend, and we’re still working out the social conventions around that. But that stumbling forward into readily available technology also suggests a pathway out of this mess. I honestly believe that our reluctance to understand and explore the possibilities of digital communications has put us on our back foot over and over again in this medical emergency. If we embraced the opportunities to be found in digital pedagogy we could not only provide a pathway around COVID limitations but also reveal enrichment opportunities that we could continue to leverage well after this pandemic has passed.
Face to face schooling has always been a series of compromises, but the pandemic has made those compromises increasingly stark while also ignoring a number of health gaps that might end up hurting people. It’s difficult starting another day of trying to be in two places at once knowing that students in crisis have no where to go. I’m not going to leave them dangling, but there is only so much of me to go around. All in all we’re just another brick in the wall. I always keep that song in the back of my mind when I teach so I see my students as people. SARS-CoV2 doesn’t see them as people, it sees them as a resource to be used up. I wish the people running our education system didn’t see our classrooms in the same way a virus does. I wish we could find a way forward that leverages the technology we have so we could focus our limited face to face resources more effectively and sustainably.
For me it’s another week back in the trenches being told to drag kids in distress through a sped up schedule designed by a virus. I’m not sure how long we can all keep this up, pandemic or no pandemic.
Does education have to be about bricks in the wall? It seems to be what we’re reduced to during this pandemic piled on top of two years of government abuse. This has to end eventually, surely.
After the success of taking Ricoh Theta 360 images on the roll a few weeks ago, I brought it along for a ride over to Erin and the Forks of the Credit on a sunny Saturday.
The embedded full 360° images above you can save on https://theta360.com show you the full range of the camera, but you can also use the desktop editing software to capture the views you like:
If you’re looking for an on bike camera, you’ll be happy with the Ricoh Theta – it’s cheaper than much of the competition and is the easiest to use and most fully 360° camera you’ll find.
The garage is looking pretty spacious this weekend. The Concours sold yesterday so the Tiger is alone in the bike-cave for the first time. I ended up selling it on if I could sell it for what I bought it for, which I did. I owned it for five years, rescued it from retirement, doubled the mileage on it, had some great adventures riding around Georgian Bay and down to the last MotoGP event at Indianapolis in 2015.
I was ready to go in 2016 when the Concours wouldn’t start. With the Canadian motorcycling season agonizingly short I lost my patience, but then a Tiger appeared as if by magic and suddenly the Concours wasn’t a necessity. It’s hard to believe I’ve had the Tiger for three years already; it isn’t going anywhere.
With the money from the Concours set aside, I’m already considering my next project. I’m aiming for a bike that is significantly different from the Tiger, which is a great all purpose machine, but it’s heavy; a lighter specialist is the goal. The guy I sold the Concours to already has one and half a dozen other bikes. Having that many bikes would be a handful, I’ve always been about a functional garage. Jeff, the motorcycle Jedi, has three very different bikes, that’s the direction I’d like to go in.
In a perfect world I’d have the Tiger, a sports bike and a light dual sport. A generalist, a tarmac specialist and an off-road specialist. Time to peruse the Ontario used bike market.
The worrying bit is this guy managed to blow a Honda engine, which are famous for being bulletproof. If it has been abused (the dent in the tank suggests it’s been dropped, though it’s a dualsport that goes off road, so I shouldn’t read too much into that) then the engine could have more major damage and require big end cranks and such, which could make this a money hole.
The fact that it runs is promising and it does sound like a top end issue – but I’m guessing it’s a head replacement or major remachining situation. It’s an air cooled single cylinder, so after the complexity of the water cooled, four cylinder Concours, this’d be lawn mower simple. I’m tempted.
I’ve always had a soft spot for VFR Interceptors, and this lovely example is up for sale at a pretty reasonable price considering how much work has gone into it. Hugo, the editor of BIKE Magazine recently got one of these and went on and on about how bullet proof they were, so even an older machine like this would be readily usable. With this RC-36-2, last gen version you get a VFR at the pinnacle of its Honda evolution. It’s technically considered a sport-touring bike, so you don’t get caned in Ontario’s ridiculous insurance system, and it weighs less than 200 kilos, which would make it the lightest road bike (ignoring the KLX250, which wasn’t really a road bike) I’ve ever owned.
If I could get it for $3500, I’d be able to ride it for years. Rather than depend singularly on the now 16 year old Tiger, I could split duties between a generalist and a road specialist. This too is tempting.
It’d be nice to have both, the XR as a project and the VFR as an immediate gratification machine; they would make for a very diverse garage. I think I could have both on the road for just over six grand CAD.
My escape is usually to find some motorcycle media to get lost in but a theme this week in it was ‘getting old’, which is a tricky one to navigate. I’ve started watching Long Way Up and seeing two of my favourite adventure motorcyclists getting old is difficult. I got into Long Way Round and Long Way Down early on in my motorcycling career and they’ve saved me from many a long Canadian winter. I’m up to episode four now and they’ve hit their stride and are coming close to their earlier trips, but watching everyone looking for their reading glasses and groaning as they saddle up has been difficult to watch.
Long Way Up happened because Charlie almost killed himself and it prompted Ewan to reconnect with him again after they’d drifted apart when Ewan moved to the US. Maintaining friendships among men as they age seems to be exceptionally difficult these days. I recently worked on a charity program for The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride that considered ways to keep men socially connected as they age. Speaking from personal experience, getting older is a lonely experience. Men seem uniquely suited to doing it poorly in the modern world. As I watch the boys figure out their new fangled electric bikes and work their way out of deepest, darkest Patagonia it’s nice to see the power of travel and challenge bring back some sense of their former selves, we should all be so lucky.
Harley Davidson’s involvement in the program has been fascinating. I can hand on heart say that I’ve never once had the remotest interest in owning one of their tractors. I don’t like the brand or the image, but what they did with Long Way Up was daring in a way that KTM was incapable of being way back when they did the first one in the early naughties. I admire that kind of bravery, especially when it’s with such untested technology. Harley’s involvement in Long Way Up is even braver than BMW’s has been in previous trips where they provided the measure of long distance adventure travel that had been evolved and refined over decades. Even with all that it sure did seem to break down a lot though. That the bikes appear to be doing so well doing long distance adventure travel when our battery technology is so medieval makes me wonder why the brand clings so tightly to its conservative cruiser image, they could be so much more than big wheels for red necks. If I had the means I’d drop thirty large on a Livewire tomorrow (I’m a school teacher, there ain’t no thirty grand bikes in my future).
While I was acclimatizing myself to the reading glasses and stiff joints of the Long Way Up I also watched the Barcelona MotoGP race. Valentino Rossi is an astonishing 41 years old and still a regular top ten finisher in this young man’s sport. He managed his 199th podium finish earlier this year and looked like he was on track to hit 200 podiums in the top class this weekend when his bike fell out from under him while in a safe second place. It was tough to watch that opportunity fall away from him after he lined everything up so well, but old muscles don’t react as quickly, though Vale was hardly the only one to crash out of the race. I’m hoping he can make that 200th podium happen, but it’s just a number and if he doesn’t, who really cares? He’s still the GOAT and will be until someone else wins championships on multiple manufactures across multiple decades through radical evolutions in technology. He managed wins on everything from insane 500cc two strokes through massive evolutionary changes to the latest digital four stroke machines. Winning year after year on the top manufacturer on a similar bike just ain’t gonna cut it if you want to be GOAT.
He just signed a contract for another year with one of the top teams (Petronas) in the top class of MotoGP. He has battled against generations of riders who have come up, peaked and been beaten to a pulp by this relentless sport, and he still seems able to summon the drive and discipline to compete at the highest level. If that isn’t Greatest Of All Time inspirational I don’t know what is. I suspect Charlie Boorman might empathize with him. Charlie’s another one who doesn’t know when to stop, even when he probably should. Watching him bend his broken body onto his bike in Long Way Up is also inspirational in a way.
It all reminds me of a poem…
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
