Noisy Kids Who Go Nowhere

I was sitting in my backyard, mostly enjoying the quiet country environment, but being intermittently blasted by various noise machines: motorcycles, jacked up pickups, sportscar-poser Honda Civics, totally illegal-for-street-use ATVs, and other noisy toys. After the umpteenth laughable Hardly yard implement passed by, I started thinking about the two motorcycles I've owned with aftermarket exhaust systems and the one with a hacked up stock pipe.

Back in 1993, I bought a like new 1992 Yamaha TDM from a doctor. I have no idea what he thought a TDM was, but he had spiffed it up with a custom Corbin seat, a Kerker pipe, and some nice luggage. By the time I got home, less than 20 miles later, I went to work replacing the Kerker with the stock pipe (which had been included in the sale). I found a victim for the Kerker with an ad at my local Yamaha shop and got $250 back from my sale price.

A few years later, I bought a barely used Suzuki SV650 from a kid in a Michigan suburb. A friend in Ohio picked up the bike and I took a train to his place to ride it home. The SV  had a Two Brothers pipe and by the time I had ridden the 800 miles back home I was ready to remove the Two Brothers pipe with a sledgehammer. Again, I found a dumbass in Minneapolis who sold me a stock SV pipe for $25 and another dumbass who paid me $250 for the Two Brothers.

My last loud pipe experience was with my Yamaha WR250X. That bike's original owner was a nitwit who took a hacksaw to the last 4 inches of the stock pipe. Having totally screwed up the fuel injection mapping, the bonehead also removed a chunk of the air box and the air filter in a failed attempt at regaining some kind of performance. Again, I found a dumbass on Craigslist who sold me a stock WR pipe for $25 and someone on Facebook who sold me the entire WR air intake system for another $25.

In all three of these instances—two carbureted motorcycles and one fuel injected—returning to stock not only quieted the motorcycle down it improved the performance. I'm not saying that an aftermarket pipe can't improve performance, but I'm saying most of the idiots who diddle with aftermarket pipes are too lame to do all of the dyno, rejetting, intake redesign, and fuel mapping work necessary to compensate for the reduced back pressure.

In the case of the WR250X, I even had the opportunity to drag race multiple times in multiple situations a substantially lighter Rider on a WR250X with an aftermarket pipe, a power commander, and a hacked up intake system. Mostly, we determined that the two bikes were not measurably different power-wise, but the noise difference convinced the other rider to start looking for stock parts. Even riding side-by-side near his bike made my ear-plugged-ears ring.

Now, back to today where I am listening to multiple mediocre-at-best motorcycles blubbering as loudly as a freight train, ridden (to use that word loosely) by total unskilled idiots disturbing the peace for no reason other than their obvious personal insecurities. This isn't a brand new thought, but it is one that has occurred to me repeatedly through this summer: I think it is a safe bet that damned few of the people with loud exhaust systems ever go anywhere on or in their vehicle.

I'd be willing to put some money on that, in fact.

From a bunch of years of accumulating odometer readings on motorcycles up for sale on Craigslist around the country, it's pretty obvious that the more crap someone piles onto a motorcycle the less likely they are to actually ride it. My late step-brother was an example. He poured more money into his Harley then I have invested in all of the cars and motorcycles I've owned in my life. Seriously. And for him, a trip from one end of Springfield, Missouri to the other was “a long ride.”

In the several hundred thousand miles I have ridden motorcycles in my life, I ran into all kinds of people on the road, riding all sorts of motorcycles, and almost universally the people who ride the most miles ride the quietest motorcycles. Even some of the big mile characters on vintage motorcycles, where a stock pipe is only available from salvage yards, do their damnedest to keep exhaust noise at a minimum.

There is nothing about the output from the exhaust pipe that tells you anything useful about the operation of the motor. In fact the less noise the exhaust makes, the more likely you are to be able to hear upcoming engine problems. More importantly, the pounding your ears take from excessive exhaust noise adds exponentially to the fatigue in a long day's ride. Obliterating what little information your ears can provide about hazards and traffic, doing permanent damage to your hearing, and adding to your distraction and fatigue is not conducive to putting in long (thousand mile) days.

And usually, when I've been forced to talk to these noisy pipe characters I hear that they think a hundred miles is an excessive day. And lots of them are really proud of themselves for riding 20 miles to a bar, spending the afternoon drinking and eating, and wobbling their way back home. So along with knowing that the loud pipe character is an asshole, it's pretty safe to assume he or she is a wimp.

The High Cost of Being Stupid

About a year into the pandemic, I was marveling at the anti-vaxers willingness to test their own immune systems often followed by their panicked attempts to jump to the head of the line in healthcare and even begging for a vaccine after being hospitalized and even just before going on a ventilator. My friend said, “Stupidity should not be a death sentence.” And I disagreed. “Stupidity has always been an evolutionary driver behind large scale mortality and morbidity, have you not heard of the Darwin Awards?” “Yeah, that’s true,” he admitted.

In his “The Basic Laws of Stupidity," Carlo M. Cipolla defined a stupid person as “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” Keep that definition in mind as we take another look at loud and illegal exhaust systems.(In the illustration at right, you can see Cipolla’s 4 classifications of human intelligence: Helpless, Intelligent, Bandit, and Stupid. If you follow the link to Cipolla’s article, you can learn a lot more about the characteristics of Stupid.)

Several years ago (2008, to be exact), I foolishly and optimistically wrote a Geezer column for MMM titled “Hearing Damage and Motorcycling.” I had some wild hope that there was a rational way to get motorcyclists to think about how much damage they were doing to themselves while they were irritating everyone else on the planet. I thought this statistic would be an eye-opener, “My generation, the Boomers, is experiencing a higher rate of hearing damage than our parents suffer at their more advanced age and the generation following us is even worse hit by hearing loss. The reason is noise exposure.” Not a chance. When I wrote that article, I owned about $10,000 worth of professional audio test equipment and had access to multiples of that number through my employer (a music school), friends in the audio testing industry, and professional relationships. Nothing I experimented with gave me any significant different data than my own gear. Riding a motorcycle is tough on your hearing, even if you are careful: good quality full-face helmet, high quality ear plugs, and a quiet motorcycle preferably with a decent fairing. Change any of those 3 decisions and you are gambling with your hearing. Once you’ve damaged your hearing, you are unlikely to live long enough for medicine or technology to bring it back.

My wife, for example, is definitely not stupid although she often falls into Cipolla’s “helpless” quadrant. She worked as a professional sculptor for 40-some years, which means she spent a lot of time with a Sawzall and shop grinders. She stubbornly resisted hearing protection for at least 30 years. Today, if she’s watching a movie or television, captions are always on. She misunderstands practically everything said to her, often comically. In any kind of crowd, the conversations around her are worse than meaningless. In the last decade or so she became almost meticulous about wearing hearing protection, the big earmuff things, but it’s too late. It doesn’t hurt to start protecting your hearing anytime, but once there is damage it will only get worse.

I was goofing off in downtown Red Wing yesterday when a pack of biker goobers and a couple of unnecessarily noisy diesel pickups went by. As usual, the noisemakers got the disgusted stare from bystanders that they so desperately crave, but it struck me that as awful as those vehicles sounded at 100’, they were at least 10-20 decibels louder on the bikes or in the truck. The inverse distance law of sound pressure decay masks that one obvious even to the math-disabled. For the motorcyclists, it might even be worse because so much of the exhaust noise that they are so proud of is field-restricted by the road under the noise generator, which means substantially more sound pressure is directed upward toward the rider rather than omnidirectionally toward the intended bystanding victims.

Since I started riding street bikes in 1979 I’ve owned three motorcycles with illegal aftermarket exhaust systems. I bought them used and they came with that crap installed by the original owners: a 1992 Yamaha 850 TDM with a Kerker exhaust and a 1999 Suzuki SV650 with an even noisier Two Brother’s Two-into-One M2-Oval Exhaust System and my beautiful Yamaha WR250X that came with a hacked up stock pipe. The TDM also came with the stock pipe, so I yanked the Kerker, sold it, and bought something useful with the money. The WR and SV’s original owners had tossed the stock pipe, but I found a super-cheap stock pipe on Craig’s List and sold the Two Brothers POS a couple of years later. I just tossed the hacked-up WR pipe. What I learned from those experiences is that all that noise did make me feel like I was going faster than I was (as The Marching Morons author predicted 70 years ago) and that riding either of those otherwise terrific motorcycles more than a couple hundred miles in a day was torture. The fatigue that kind of noise produces is uncomfortable and dangerous.

Which brings me to my point about the connection between illegal, noisy exhaust systems and stupid people. Yes, they are making a statement that they are untouchable by the law; which are often biker gangbangers themselves. Yes, they are irritating everyone they ride anywhere near. However, they are also driving themselves deaf in the process and deserve absolutely no sympathy when that bill comes due. So, in Cipolla’s terms, Stupid bikers are definitely doing lots of damage to the peace and quiet of every place they ride, and even causing some actual physical harm to those close enough for hazardous noise exposure. But bikers are “deriving no gain” from their noisemaking as every statistic on the planet demonstrates that loud bikes receive no safety benefit from their noise and, in fact, those same people are over-represented in crash, morbidity, and mortality statistics and for all of that the bikers are also making themselves deaf in the process.

That, my friends, is stupid.

#142 Dumb Laws for Stupid Products

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

On my usual mid-week trip to the library, I got stopped by a Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy. As usual, he asked, "Do you know why I stopped you?" I did not.

"You crossed the white line to pass that van on the right." Fortunately for me, the deputy was a good guy (and a motorcyclist) and he let me go with a warning. All the way to the library and through the rest of my day's errands, I thought about what kind of goofy state has a dumbass law like that. Keeping in mind that I believe every state in the nation, except California, is barely sophisticated enough to bang the rocks together in a primitive attempt to communicate -- because of the national ban on filtering and lane sharing. Holding a motorcycle behind a stopped vehicle seems outrageously and unusually primitive.

I can just imagine our hillbilly state representatives creating this idiotic law and including all vehicles in it because one of their inbred offspring blasted by a stopped vehicle that suddenly turned right and tagged the passing vehicle. The obvious "solution" is to create another dumb law to regulate all of the stupid products (cages) and every other vehicle on the road because you never know when the next "special" child will take himself out of the gene pool.

It makes sense to hold cages to the no-passing-on-the-right rule because the damn things are too fat to fit in that small space, even on the freeway. But motorcycles and scooters? That's just stupid. If I'd have been on a bicycle, that would have been the lane I'm supposed to riding in. Does the law insist a bicycle stop in the same situation? The last place I want to be is stuck between a cage sandwich because some hillbilly lawmaker can't tell the difference between a motorcycle and a cage.

Like the ban on filtering and splitting, the fact that a rider can get a citation for saving his own life when one braindead cager slams into another on the freeway or any other place designed to stack up traffic irregularly, this is a dumb law. Aerostich's Mr. Subjective optimistically would like to believe that laws only reflect what the majority of the public is already doing, but anyone who observes traffic in neighborhoods where the "no left turn on red" or various misplaced stop signs have been randomly distributed without rhyme or reason knows that laws are self-perpetuating and lawmakers are a species unto themselves.

In case you're confused about this rant's title, the "stupid products" I'm referring to are cages, cars, single-passenger four-wheeled fuel-and-space-wasters. I have always believed the passenger car is one of the dumbest, most wasteful, most harmful inventions in human history. Anyone with rudimentary mathematics skills has to despair at seeing miles and miles of single-occupant, gas-guzzling cages stacked in congested parallel lines, draining our children's futures and destroying this version of the earth and current life forms for no good reason other than we all dislike each other and can't be bothered to use mass transit. Cars are for people who aren't competent on two wheels.

Likewise, the existence of handicapped parking is irrational. Everyone who drives a car is, obviously, handicapped. Those flags we hang from our windshield mirrors are just identifying those who are incredibly handicapped as opposed to those mostly handicapped. I know that from experience: for three months post-hip-surgery, I used one of those special parking permits because I couldn't get from the bedroom to the bathroom without a walker, crutch, or cane (in that order as my healing progressed). I was trapped in my cage, with my wife driving for most of two months, because I was incapable of riding a motorcycle. Now, I'm better and I don't need the damn car. If we had a civilized public transportation system, I wouldn't own one of the damn things. For those rare moments when I need to carry stuff larger than my side-cases, I'd rent a car or take a taxi. I hate being required to own a cage and am about 90% of the way convinced to move somewhere I won't need a car.

But what really twists my chain is being limited to the handicapped center-lane on a motorcycle because the dimbulbs who make the laws can't tell a handicapped vehicle from a motorcycle. Making the rules the same for all means of transportation is as stupid as punishing everyone for the sins of a few. It would be really nice to be a member of a society that makes laws to reflect what the public does, but I don't see that happening here or many places. A couple of years ago, a kid who was a wannabe cop asked me to list laws that I thought were irrational. I named about a dozen in the few minutes we had to talk. A day later, I emailed him another couple-hundred irrational laws that came to me after we'd talked. A few weeks later, my list had grown so large that I had to give up the whole project because it was taking over my life. Our legal system is downright depressing, when you take time to think about it. It long since has given up pretending to be a justice system and, now, just masquerades as a police state employment-bureau-for-the-mentally-handicapped while exercising its primary function as a tax collection system. 

When I move into my cave in Montana, you're going to hear the verse from one of my favorite Bobby Dylan songs coming from dim light that will be my gas lantern. "You ask why I don't live here? Man, I don't believe you don't leave." There will be only one law enforced from the entrance to my cave: "Get the hell out of my yard unless you want to be picking rock salt out of your lame ass!"

MMM Winter 2015

A Room Full of Elephant

Way back in 2008, I wrote an MMM article titled “Hearing Damage and Motorcycling.” Among other things, that article produced one of the looniest, most illiterate responses anything I’ve written for anyone has ever inspired. This month, Cycle World discovered that motorcyclists are among the world’s most deaf recreationalists. The article, aptly titled “Say What?” by John Stein, concludes that “Hearing damage is motorcycling’s elephant in the room.”

 

Now, we just have to convince ABATE, the AMA, and the cities and towns across the country who tolerate motorcycle noise pollution that these loug pipe idiots are disturbing the peace and doing harm. `

What Kind of Crash Is This?

There is a fair amount of discussion on-line attributing the "cause" of this incident to "target fixation." I completely disagree. Everything about this crash stinks of rider incompetence. Even worse, like the cagers we often whine about, this asshole decided to sacrifice unprotected bicyclists rather than accept the consequences of riding too fast and not being in control of his motorcycle and move his crash off of the road and away from innocent victims. For that, I would suggest throwing the entire rule book at biker bozo and extracting the maximum cash and liberty. Running into the back of any vehicle or person is a symptom of incompetence on multiple levels. In this case, it's also damn near attempted manslaughter.

The fact that jackass-boy is also playing racer on public roads, has a loud pipe (perfectly delineating who he really is), and reacted exactly wrong in every way pretty much puts the nails in his riding coffin. The perfect outcome would be a shit-load of tickets from the cop and learning that one of the bicyclists is a lawyer. I have no more sympathy for him than I would for a cager (especially a cop) who rear-ends a motorcycle.

This is not a poor-biker story, but a dumbass-on-a-motorcycle classic tale. This guy and the thousands like him are exactly the reason "real people" hate motorcyclists and making him into anything else puts us in his boots (or, probably, flipflops). 

Your opinion?

Postscript: This video and opinions about who did what to who and why are "going viral" on the web. A bicyclist's view of the crash is about the same as mine, "What Really Happened." Huffington Post wrote it up in "Motorcycle Crashes Into Cyclists On California Highway." One of the Huffington readers optimistically called the douchebag "Worst motorbike rider ever." We wish that were true.

How to Act When You Rear End A Motorcycle

And now for something to really piss you off, a braindead cop with (yet another) an attitude:




Nothing like misplaced, misbegotten, unearned power to make a boy in a Village People outfit act like an asshole.

Still Thinkin' About It

The TC_DualSport group is one of the few motorcycle discussion boards that I follow. Mostly, that's because I really like  these folks and recommend that every Minnesotan who rides a bike that can semi-qualify as "dual sport" be a part of this wonderful collection of rare spirits. Because I'm not a motorcycling homer, I usually find myself pretty much ostracized for voicing heretical opinions like the ones I have submitted below. Since I'm not much of a fan of crowds, organizations, clubs, or even family units, it doesn't bother me much to be slighted by people, but I don't hang around hoping for change either. So, it's saying something that I've been a lurker on TC-DualSport since 2005. Everybody else has either asked me to leave, moderated me into disappearing, or pissed me off so that I left on my own.

So when one of my favorite people on the list, Allon, asked me what I think we need to do to get lane-splitting and filtering legalized in Minnesota, I took his question seriously. As a reality check, please understand I don't expect any of this to happen, but once or twice in my 64 years I've been pleasantly surprised by human behavior and I'm willing to imagine the impossible even if I still believe it's impossible. So, this was my response:

--- In TC_Dualsport@yahoogroups.com, "allonm55344" wrote:
>
> So Tom, how do we change things here in Minnesota? There was a rumor that things were about to  change in favor of lane splitting in Tx a few years back. I wonder what ever happened with that.
>
> BTW, when I took my  advanced riding class in Israel, they taught it based on the curriculum from the California (I believe MSF) motorcycle safety course. They  specifically teach you to  position your motorcycle in between lanes when stopped in a traffic light. They also encourage lane splitting only when the traffic is at a standstill or very slow moving.
>
> Allon 

I'm probably misusing the term when I say "Americans," but Americans appear to be unable to focus on long term results. Maybe it's the 4-year political cycle, but to make this happen here we're going to have to take a consistent long view and one that will be opposed by the US manufacturers.

I think the Texas attempt got squashed in committee, again. I'd imagine that Dayton would oppose any attempt at a similar law here, unless we did a massive education campaign. The money and time that's been wasted on "Start Seeing Motorcycles" should be redirected toward a unified political and informational (propaganda?) campaign to inform drivers of the advantages of letting 1% of traffic move in congested areas. We (all motorcyclists) should stop being highway irritants and hoodlums and accept helmet law legislation, improved licensing requirements, and absolute compliance with federal and state noise laws so that we aren't automatically seen as a pack of gangsters and an overpriced, undervalue highway risk. Like Oregon, we need to start moving motorcycle fatalities toward zero. That will cost bike sales because many of the people currently on motorcycles should be relegated to closed course kiddy parks. To cost them even more, dealers who sell street legal motorcycles to unlicensed buyers should be prosecuted with the same kind of force that falls on liquor stores who sell to minors (and that offense should be ramped up too). When motorcyclists become good citizens and make a productive contribution to traffic, we'll get the benefits of public approval.

Right now, we're mostly a bunch of useless assholes who stage traffic-blocking, noise-making pirate parades all summer long, who crash by ourselves on country roads and whine about "right-of-way violations," and children who dress in gym clothes and pretend straight sections of the freeway are a race track. You have to do some good before you get something good.

My California "history" is anecdotal from a CHP I knew there in the 80s. He said that California did not have a law prohibiting two vehicles (or more) from occupying a single lane. Motorcyclists took advantage of that and, because they have been a significant (at least noticable) portion of California traffic, that law was not introduced. Now, lane-sharing is sort of formally acknowledged and California has always been a little proud of being different (more progressive and adventurous) than the rest of the stodgy US it's a semi-accepted practice and habit. Unfortunately, California squids are no smarter than ROUS squids and they are doing everything they can to piss off the general public and lose that privilege.

Thomas Day
Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly Magazine
http://http://mnmotorcycle.com/
http://geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/
thomas@motorbyte.com
All of the above is my honest opinion; biased and one-sided as it is. Motorcyclists need a representative organization more desperately today than any time in history and the AMA, ABATE, or any of the other gangbangers' "biker clubs" are not going to be it. The closest thing we have to a possibility of a motorcyclists' organization is Ride to Work and that organization appears to be only a little bit organized. Humans rarely see the need to get active until we're approaching a cliff and, usually, we need to be flying off of the edge before we actually get serious (think of the USA in 1932). I don't see anything like this happening with US motorcyclists, but if it does count me in. I'll even "join."

California, the Exception?

One of the silly arguments I get often during lane-splitting and lane-sharing discussions is "Californians are different. They're used to it." A recent CalTrans survey beat that horse to death this spring. The Office of Traffic Safety sent out a short-form version of the 733 participant survey, in case statistics aren't your deal.

It turns out that only 53% of California's cagers know that lane splitting is legal (with younger drivers being more clueless than older) and 86.8% of them have experienced lane splitting, 87% of the state's motorcyclists lane split, 5.3% have had their vehicle hit by a lane-splitting motorcyclist and 34.6% say they were "nearly hit," 19.1% claim to have seen a motorcycle hit a car while splitting, and 7% of the cagers admit to having attempted to prevent lane splitting. Most important, 63.1% disapprove of motorcycle lane-splitting. Not surprisingly, more women disapprove than men.

In an Orange County Register article on the subject and the results of the survey, a police officer said, "It's legal to split lanes but you can't do it if it's going to be in violation of speed limits or if you're going to be going at a speed that's significantly faster than the traffic through which you're trying to move." That's an accurate summary of the law as it was explained to my by a CHIPs officer in a 1984 California Traffic School. If you watch YouTube videos of idiots splitting lanes at high speed, it's no wonder that most people think this behavior is illegal; it is.

Smacking Home

On the way to an MSF class Wednesday, I got stuck behind a big-ass clubcab pickup and witnessed the cell phone abusing retard wobbling all over Rice Street until he rear-ended a guy on a cruiser. The cruiser guy didn't get much "protection" from his loud pipes, even though I could hear him two vehicles back, through my helmet, with ear plugs solidly in place. Adding noise to the already unhealthy noise levels of the world is a pretty passive-aggressive tactic and passive-aggression is well known to be ineffective.

The definition of "bimbo." Evidence 

that drivers' licenses are handed out

in Cracker Jack boxes. 

It looked like the cell phone douche was planning to duck out, so I made a show of scribbling his plate number down before I parked to look at the damage. There was a lot of damage, but the biker's injuries looked survivable if disfiguring. His face was pretty messed up. A nurse from a car on the other side of the road was doing first aid and she'd already called 911.

Two of my top five warning signs of 

driving incompetence. A baseball cap

and a cell phone.

Ten minutes, or so, later, a Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy showed up and started collecting information. That's what I was waiting for. We had a brief conversation during which I called the truck-cell-phoner a liar (He'd claimed not to have a cell phone in the truck.) I offered to testify against him, if the cop searched his truck for the phone (which he found and confiscated). Supposedly, smashing into someone while jabbering on a phone is at least $500 over the usual fine, so that ought to be an expensive phone call.

MN Helmet Law

Big surprise, ABATE is opposing the new attempt to pass a helmet law in Minnesota. I can't remember the last time I agreed with ABATE, but this is sort of one of those times. I disagree on the need for a helmet law. Motorcyclists lost their "freedom" argument when seat belt "violations" became a primary offense in Minnesota. (Babble on about cagers wearing helmets, but we all know that's a non sequitur.) Our out-of-proportional miles ridden to highway deaths statistics are more than enough to move any sensible legislator to either do everything possible to improve motorcycle safety statistics or get the damn things off of the public roads. I'd rather they do the first.

ABATE chitters about having government "focus on public awareness, rider education, and crash prevention" as if that has a chance in hell of accomplishing anything. "Public awareness" of what? The 0.0001% of traffic that motorcycles amount to on a typical roadway? How about increasing the public's awareness that most motorcycle crashes are the fault of the motorcyclist (look at Colorado's data, for example)?

"Rider education" is such a empty promise that the MSF cautions its state providers not to try to connect training with lower mortality, morbidity, or crash statistics because "in societies where rider training was both widely available and in generally mandatory, they were unable to find conclusive evidence that riders without training were more likely to be involved in accidents." Wikipedia has a fairly extensive page on Motorcycle Training and their entry is consistent with everything I've read.

And, finally, "crash prevention." Gotta love that brilliant idea. "Hey, I just thought of something, let's all quit crashing." That'll work. We just put our heads together and make a wish, "I wanna stay rubber-side-down for ever, so help me Kenny Roberts."

Nope, the place where I agree with ABATE is the idiotic kiss up to rich guys on garage candy that allows folks who can put up a half-million dollar "reparation security" on their motorcycle "that provides medical expense benefits of at least $250,000 and at least that amount for the total of income loss, replacement services loss, funeral expense loss, survivor's economic loss, and survivor's replacement services loss." As Bruce Mike said in his From the Hip column this month, if this makes sense why can't the same 1%'ers "demand the same option regarding seat belts?"

Just pass the helmet law, fools. Quit trying to find revenue venues that you can pretend are not "taxes" (like every other charge, fine, levy, fee, or resource enhancement you fruitcakes who signed the No New Taxes Pledge have tacked on to the 99% to protect the assets of the 1% who own your useless asses) and do something useful. Either man-up and pass a helmet law or stick your heads back in the mud and pretend you're giving taxpayers some value for their money.

Easy Fix, Never Happen

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Thomas W. Day

The news report read, "Hennepin County attorneys say that on the morning of Oct. 7, 2010, 20-year-old Amanda Elizabeth Manzanares was driving without insurance and under a restricted instructional permit when she drove her car across the centerline of Excelsior Boulevard in Minnetonka and struck a man riding a motorcycle. The man suffered severe injuries that have, to-date, required $500,000 in surgeries and other medical care. . .

"After retrieving Manzanares' cell phone at the scene, Minnetonka police investigators found a series of text message exchanges and calls on Manzanares' phone that were made and received in the minutes surrounding the collision.

"But, according to court documents, Manzanares denied using her phone at the time of the accident, telling Minnetonka police she had “blacked-out,” was tired, that she hadn't taken prescribed medication and that she was still getting comfortable as a driver."

This is what passes for "news" in modern America. Tainted, slanted "information" intended to inflame the unwashed, illiterate masses without providing any solutions, context, or depth. Back when he was funny, Dennis Miller defined television news as a series of unimportant but bad things we could all be glad didn't happen to us.

Don't get me wrong, Manzanares ought to prosecuted for nearly killing an innocent bystander with her miserable, incompetent (for whatever reason) driving. But by shining a bright light on this pitiful excuse for a human being, the law and the media are doing their damndest to distract the blame from the real criminals in this all-too-common sort of incident; cell phone providers. On one hand, television reminds us at every cop-show opportunity that any cell phone can be tracked if it is on. If it can be tracked, its trajectory and velocity can be determined. If all that is true, any communications attempted while the phone is in motion can be terminated. End of problem.

Driving while yapping on a cell phone use is clearly an example of driving while incapacitated. Every study that has examined the relationship between driving drunk and driving while asking "whut r u doin?" has found that cell phones are linked to driving mental retardation. One study (published in Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society) found in simulated driving conditions that drunks (at least those with a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level) are better drivers than cell phone yappers. None of the drunks crashed in that study, while three cell phone morons did.

Why it took a study to identify this character of cell phone abuse says more about academia, society, and capitalism than it tells us about the actual problem. Any half-conscious motorcyclist knows that you stay as far from a cell phone user as the road permits. They are erratic, marginally conscious, and as dangerous as gangbangers. I'm no less worried about riding near a cell phone user than I am about trying to get by someone who is tossing out the occasional empty beer can or has an Easy Rider rifle rack loaded with automatic weapons.

If you're brand new to this planet and these United States, you might ask, "Why is this tolerated if the solution is so simple?" The reason, dear alien life-form, is money. The slim splinter that remains of our democracy is dedicated to the idea that the profits of a few override the security, health, safety, and quality of life of the nation and its not-rich citizens. Those trust-funded, grossly overpaid and under-skilled corporate executives who are the only real beneficiaries of the death and destruction their products cause (not the cigarette executives, this time) are more important than the lives of every other person on public roads. Why that argument doesn't hold true for alcohol-pushing corporate executives is a little inconsistent, but I'd bet it's because the cell phone execs are richer.

Of course, my electronic trigger isn't the solution I'd recommend in an ideal world; too passive and forgiving. Personally, I'd rather see cell phone manufacturers forced to install a spring-loaded 4" spike in every cell phone that would be triggered by cell phone use at any velocity exceeding 10mph. At worst, the cell phone user would have some part of his/her anatomy skewered for violating rational cell phone laws. At best, one more idiot would be spiked from the gene pool.

Honestly, I don't expect either idea to take hold in my lifetime or before the next comet blasts an idiot wind across the planet and restarts the evolutionary cycle. The rapid degeneration of our species depends on the right of the dumbest and most corrupt evil spawn's access to every damn toy their idiot heart desires. So, my favorite solution is dead in its tracks. Second, the attention deficit disordered have grown to depend on knowing what their friends and family are doing at this very second and they are perfectly happy to kill anyone in their path to have that knowledge. What's the worst thing that can happen, being prosecuted for "felony texting and driving?" That sounds slightly more serious than unpaid parking tickets.

Why They Hate Us

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

A while back, I taught an MSF Experienced Rider Class (ERC) with a guy who, apparently, doesn’t get out a lot. During a discussion about scanning for hazards, he intro’d the subject by saying, “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but a lot of people don’t like motorcycles. I don’t know why, but it’s true.”

At first, I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. He was truly clueless as to why much of the public has a grudge against motorcycles. He’s not alone. Several of the experienced riders in that class were equally stumped, even though a good number of them were obviously part of the problem. I often hear sportbikers complain that people cut them off, intentionally, in traffic. I’ve heard half-ton, black leather incrusted, biker gangsters wearing satanic and Nazi patches and decorated by more scars and tattoos than a retired pirate ask why other citizens shy away from them. Apparently, in our eyes we’re all a bunch of harmless innocents who are being unfairly singled out for discrimination. An informative Cycle Attorney article in Motorcycle Consumer News recently discussed the likely anti-motorcyclist bias of the typical jury in liability claims. Apparently, it's hard to find 12 of our "peers" who would decide in our favor in almost any circumstances. A nation of victims and we’re the most abused of the lot.

Actually, my family could provide a bit of insight regarding how the rest of the world regards motorcycles. My oldest daughter, who grew up amidst a small forest of moderately silenced 2-stroke dirt bikes, lived in Daytona for a year and came away solidly disgusted with motorcycles and motorcyclists; mostly thanks to “Bike Week.” My youngest daughter lived in Vegas and developed the same allergy to noisy and ill-mannered 2-wheel transportation. My son-in-law considers motorcycles to be pointless, dangerous, environmentally and socially irresponsible and suspects all motorcyclists are hooligans. He knows me pretty well. The rest of his family barely bothers to separate me from their generally low opinion of motorcyclists. My own father hasn’t removed Marlon Brando’s disrespectful biker from his mind and I’m solidly linked to that goofy bunch and have been for more than forty years. Of his four sons, I'm still a "dumb kid" and I'm the oldest. I can carry this list on for miles or days. About one-eighth of my immediate family rides motorcycles, the other seven-eighths dislike bikes and fear bikers. Practically every Minnesotan I know, who isn’t a motorcyclist or a wannabe, dislikes motorcycles somewhere between a little and infinitely. In this regard, there is nothing unusual about Minnesotans or my family.

Here are some of the reasons people dislike motorcycles, for those of you who have limited peripheral vision and no personal awareness:

The top of the list is noise. Mad TV’s Michael McDonald does a great imitation of the loud pipe mentality with his “look what I can do” spoiled brat. Loud pipes don’t save lives, but they do attract attention and piss people off enough to make them consider taking a motorcyclist's life or two. A while back, my editor, Victor, received a fair number of hate letters when he made critical comments about loud pipes. At least one of the writers made the claim that no one had ever complained about her loud pipes. Anyone who really cared to learn what people think of loud pipes should spend a few hours in downtown pedestrian traffic. Every time a loud bike potato-potatoes its way past the peds, the comments directed toward the rider always include “f****n’ a**hole” and “there ought to be a law. . .” and “where are the cops when you really need them?”

When an unmuffled twin-cylinder farm implement blasts through my neighborhood, I’m not much less negatively inclined toward motorcycles than my neighbors. Loud pipes are, obviously, a legal violation and the assumption is that either the criminal making the noise is well connected or the local cops are lazy, corrupt, and doing everything but “protecting and serving” the public. People have the same reaction when they see a pollution-spewing rat-truck fogging up the neighborhood. Pollution is pollution; air, water, noise, or otherwise.

That strongly negative response comes from low rpm, low frequency noise exposure. At road speeds, the response is more dynamic. When a bone-rattling, window-shaking, ear-damaging exhaust rolls up next to your cage at 70mph, the natural response is either to get the hell away from the noise pollution or squash it. Another way to quiet the noise is to ban it. Due to the limited technical capabilities of most police departments, many communities will find it easier to ban motorcycles than to limit their noise output. In the meantime, we’re going to be disliked by millions of folks for this reason alone.

That’s not good enough for some bikers. They want to be universally hated and feared and won’t stand for anything less.

On the road, we are the poster boys and girls for bad behavior. The sportbiker model for uncivil road manners is to play the wannabe-road-racer, constant-lane-swapping, tailgating game, which practically makes the motorcycle appear to be an irritating vanishing mirage to the typical cager. To be as irritating as possible, this crowd buzzes from lane-to-lane, running up on to the bumper of every vehicle “in the way,” making a whole new collection of enemies for the rest of us.

The cruiser parade really goes a long way toward making sure that nobody can recall motorcycling’s positive qualities. This isn’t completely limited to cruisers, because touring groups, sportbike groups, and even dual-purpose groups like to create their own special variation on traffic congestion. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, however, cruisers are the predominant parade masters.

A friend who lives in Hudson, WI, considered running for city council solely on the platform of ridding the city of loud motorcycles and motorcycle parades. He has contested the city’s practice of allowing parade “sergeants” to direct local traffic for the benefit of parade participants. He’s devised some clever experiments to force the city to admit that they don’t have an enforceable noise ordinance, which might eventually result in some changes being made. In the meantime, you are within your rights to invite a rock ‘n roll band to perform in your backyard, because even Iron Maiden makes less noise than a herd of big twins.

If you hang out with a group of motorcyclists, you can document your own list of reasons the rest of the population, including other motorcyclists, hate bikers. Here are a few that I’ve heard or read recently:

• “Some dumbass tailgates me, I toss a handful of marbles (ball bearings, paintball pellets, etc.) back at ‘em.”
• “What I like to do is, I see one of them yuppies with a brand new Harley hanging out in one of ‘our’ bars, I show him my colors and I let him know we don’t appreciate boys like him in our places. One of those Jap rice-burners parks next to our bikes, I kick it over. That let’s them know what’s what.”
• “Every time I see another biker on the road, I salute him with a straight-up wheelie. I really like doing that in heavy rush hour traffic. It scares the crap out of all the cagers.”
  “When I get through tuning, I test my bike by blasting up and down my neighborhood. Nobody ever says anything, even when it’s two in the morning.”
• “I can’t ever seem to hit a light change before I get off of the phone. People are so rude, they honk at me until I have to hang up and ride through the light. Do they think I can ride my motorcycle and talk on the phone at the same time? Usually, it’s yellow before I get through it, so those ill-tempered people are stuck waiting for the next green light.”
• “I say ‘screw the damn tree-huggers.’ I pay taxes, too, and if I want to shred a state park, I ought to be able to ride anywhere I want to ride.”
• “I put on my leathers, the do-rag, and my wraparounds and go out ridin’ and give ever’body I see a hard look; kids, ole’ ladies, yuppies, the crotch rocket boys, everybody. I make ‘em all afraid of me. Makes me feel good about bein’ a biker.”

And on we go, making enemies, restricting our own access to public roads and parks. We're on our way toward segmenting ourselves so much that even motorcyclists don’t like other motorcyclists. Sooner or later, we’re either going to grow up and treat riding as transportation or keep regressing until only rich guys can play biker on private property.

Product Review: Added Insurance

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

Thirty-nine years ago, I began my collection of protective gear. I started with a helmet, which promptly proved its value when I did an unintentional headstand on a large pyramid-shaped rock. A while later, I started wearing calf-high linemans' boots instead of hiking boots or sneakers. I followed that brilliant triumph with denim coveralls (no kidding!) with factory-installed knee and hip pads. Later, I moved up to tear-off goggles, hockey-style shoulder pads, real motocross gloves, High Point racing boots, early Malcolm Smith racing pants and armored jacket, and racing gloves.

The thing that I discovered about real riding gear is that the more of it I owned, the more experimental I became on the track and trail. That might sound like I was only taking extra risks, but I was also experimenting with my riding style, control techniques, and exploring the connection between myself and my motorcycle and doing it with less fear. Fear is not a useful component of a learning environment. The more we are afraid, the more conservative we become, the fewer options we have when exposed to hazards, and the less we learn from riding experiences. My protective gear allowed me the luxury of feeling confident in moments where I'd previously felt exposed to danger. On the practical side, when those "educational moments" turned into a crash, the gear did its job and protected me from serious injury. If today's chest protection had been around in the 1970s, I'd have probably managed to avoid broken ribs and busted collarbones.

All this brings me to a new kind of protection I used on a trip to Alaska in 2007. While studying what others had experienced in Alaska and on adventure tours, I stumbled on an article about a serious deficiency in medical insurance. Mainly, most US medical insurance providers only cover basic doctor visits in the 50 states and rarely pay for medical evacuation from remote areas. Most policies don't reimburse you for emergency medical expenses outside of the US. Since evacuation can cost as much as $50,000 and there appears to be no upper limit to hospital bills, an adventure tour could be a lot more of a financial adventure than most of us can stand. The more I learned about the crap we call "medical insurance," the more I realized I needed additional protection from a bankrupting accident and visit to a hospital; US or Canadian. That comforting Canadian national medical system doesn't apply to non-taxpaying, non-residents. Everyone else has to pay for a visit to a Canadian hospital and those unprotected visits aren't much cheaper in Canada than they are in the US.

There is a type of insurance that appears to be designed for adventure touring; it is called "Emergency Medical Evacuation Insurance," also known as "Supplemental Medical Coverage for Travelers." This kind of policy can provide coverage for emergency evacuation to the nearest medical facility. It will pay your "reasonable travel" expenses for a spouse or caregiver who may need to come to where you are hospitalized until you can travel home. When you are ready to travel again, the insurance will pay for the cost of returning home.

I ended up going with MEDEX (http://www.medexassist.com/), but there are several companies providing various levels of coverage for a variety of costs. Some other possibilities are:

• MedJetAssist http://www.medjet.com/
• SkyMed http://www.skymed.com/
• AeroMedical http://www.travelinsuranceservices.com/
• IMGlobal http://www.imglobal.com/

In 2007, I paid about $300 for 30 days of coverage. When I crashed 100 miles north of the Artic Circle on the Dempster Highway, one option available to me was to ask a truck driver who stopped to provide assistance to radio in a helicopter to fly me to a hospital. I was on the 9th day of a 30 tour and I was pretty sure, in my crashing past, I'd suffered through each of the injuries caused by the Dempster crash. Over the years, I've become a rehab semi-expert and while I was testing my limbs and bodily functions I was figuring out what I'd need to do to get better fast. When I made the decision to turn around, keep riding, and head for the semi-civilization of Dawson City and a hot bath, I had the security of knowing that if I was wrong needed medical attention, I could call it in at any time. My Emergency Medical Insurance was like a piece of gear that added confidence and security. Without it, fear would have had more control on my decision and I might have missed out on the next 20 days of the adventure of my life.

The next year, when I rode from home to the tip of Nova Scotia, I bought another 30 day policy for that trip. The price wasn't much different than it had been the previous year. To the surprise of everyone who knows me, I didn't have a single moment of excitement on that trip. There aren't a lot of interesting dirt roads out east, though.

When friends and family tell you that you are crazy for riding your bike from Timbuktu to Bolivia, you might have to concede that point. But you don't have to be stupid. You can armor up to minimize the damage when things go wrong and you can be prepared to deal with all sorts of disasters and distractions. "Emergency Medical Evacuation Insurance" is one more way you can put some padding between yourself and catastrophe.

A New Traffic Violation

On our trip north, my grandson had a lot of time to observe traffic and he came up with a new traffic offence category; DWBAD. Like DWI and DUI and the crazy list of drunk driving acronym's, we decided that DWBAD should have some serious consequences. Wolf is a beginning filmmaker and is always thinking scripts when he describes anything. Here was the first scenario we worked out together:

Cop
Sir, I need your license and insurance information, please.

Driver
What's the problem, officer?

Cop
License and insurance, please.

Driver
[Digs into his pants for his billfold and roots around in the glovebox for the insurance info, while complaining]
I don't know why you stopped me. I wasn't speeding. What else could I do on the freeway that would make you pull me out of the crowd?

Cop
[Looks at the license and paperwork]
Would you step out of the car, please?

Driver
[Now looking very worried, but getting out of his car.]
What's going on?

Cop
Step away from the vehicle, sir.

[As the driver moves away from his car, he notices another cop climbing out of the cop car, lugging a huge weapon. It looks, in fact, like a cannon of the sort you see in science fiction movies.]

Driver
What the . . . ?

[The second cop aims the cannon at the driver's car and, in an instant, vaporizes it on the spot.]

Driver
What the holy hell are you assholes doing? You freakin' destroyed my car? What did you do that for?

Cop
DWBAD, sir. I have you on camera, clearly DWBAD and I have authorization to prevent you from continuing to risk the safety of other drivers. Have a nice day, sir.
[The cop turns to leave. The second cop loads his cannon back into the car and climbs into the passenger's seat.]

Driver
What the f**k? What the hell is DWBD?

Cop
DWBAD, sir. Driving while being a douchebag. Two miles back, you cut off a motorcycle when you changed lanes for no good reason. A half-mile later, you were tailgating a station wagon full of kids so closely that they could count your nose hairs. In the last half-mile, you were so involved in your cell phone conversation that you took up three lanes and that still didn't give other drivers a safe margin. DWBAD, sir.

Driver
Where are you going with my license and insurance stuff? How the hell am I supposed to get home?

Cop
Sorry, sir. You can have the insurance card back. My mistake.
[The cop returns the insurance card.]
The license has been cancelled. You can apply for a new one in 2015.
As for getting home, I'd suggest you start walking. You're going to be doing a lot of that for the next six years.

And that's the story. My father used to have a saying, "fire a couple of warning shots to the head," when he described what cops ought to do to stupid drivers. The "driving while being a douchebag" concept is just an extension of that fairly radical suggestion from an incredibly non-radical man.

Look for the animated video of this on YouTube, any day now.

Getting Parked and My Opinion

A while back, Andy Goldfine asked me to write a Geezer column about motorcycle parking laws and other irrational human activities. I took a first shot at it and sent it to Andy for his opinion. His opinion was "you get more flies with honey than with . . . " whatever the opposite of honey is. He thought I should tone it down so I might have a chance at changing some official opinions rather than hardening their opinions even further. He might be right. At any rate, I toned it down and the column is sitting out there in the temporary ether waiting for my editor, Victor, to decide the time is right for publication.

My personal opinion is that, at least in the United States, things do not get better. About 40 years ago, a Canadian politician came up with a fable that pretty much sums up the way politics works here. He called it Mouseland. The idea, to put it briefly, is the mice keep electing cats to run their country and the cats (surprise!) keep passing laws that make life easier for cats and much worse for the mice. That's the system we've built and we're #1 at it. Nobody has more cats governing the mice than the US. Something to be proud of.

My grandson , Wolf, and I took a short the-week-before-school-starts motorcycle camping trip to Duluth this week. We wandered from the Cities to Duluth through backroads and had a great 270 mile trip to a place that is only 130 miles from home, by freeway. We spend the afternoon and that night at Jay Cooke State Park, one of Minnesota's great unknown natural wonders and a terrific motorcycle road. We hiked a half-dozen miles of the park's trails and camped there Wednesday evening.

The next morning, I headed us to Duluth for breakfast. My goal was a coffee shop/bakery in Canal Park. My wife and I stumbled on to that place on our 40th wedding aniversary two years ago and I thought Wolf would enjoy the atmosphere and great food. When we rolled into Canal Park, I was surprised to discover the place had been decorated with parking meters. Obviously, Duluth is continuing its recessive decline into oblivion and the City Douchebags are doing everything they can to hurry the city's demise. Big sections of this ghost town are littered with parking meters and downtown is about as close to dead as a once-lively city contaminated by braindead officials can be. All of downtown is now metered and the city's parking mafia has turned the city's empty spaces into empty parking lots manned by politically-connected deadbeats. It has the feel of Chicago without any of the rebellious attitude or the architecture.

I didn't have a pocket full of quarters (also known as "metermaid foodstamps") and the new electronic metering system Duluth is using for much of Canal Park is extremely biker-hostile. Instead of plugging a meter in front of your bike, you have to buy a parking pass at a kiosk and find a place on your bike to put the pass. Obviously, cagers will be inclined to rip off the bike pass and put it on their cages. It's also impossible to bag up your bike with your gear under the cover and leave the bike and gear so that Lovely Richard the Metermaid would see the biker had paid his welfare-tariff. I gave up on the Canal Park restaurant and cruised the downtown area looking for a meter-less place for us to eat. Every restaurant was open, but empty. The meters had done their job. Finally, we ended up at a Perkins on the north end of town that had a parking lot. The place was jammed, unlike all of the metered businesses.

I had a brief conversation with an assistant manager when we paid for our meal. He said the downtown meters had caused a boom in their morning business.

Figures.

While we were waiting for our food, I snagged a Duluth paper and read a really funny-sick article about a dude (check out the Duluth Faux News video, it's hilarious) who got into an argument while partying with another dude. To sum it up, the first dude shot and killed the second dude. Within an hour or so, 60 of Duluth's finest had the neighborhood surrounded with So-Where-Are-They'ers dressed in full Iraq invasion outfits. They looked fierce, just like they do in the movies. However, the guy they were surrounding looked like he'd be about as likely to sneak out and run away as Michael Moore. Look at him. He couldn't hide behind a mountain.

After cutting the phone lines, the Duluth cops hid behind armored cars, barricaded the streets into the neighborhood, posed with their automatic weapons for news camera crews, and had a bunch of huddled meetings with each other for five hours. Apparently, messing with a guy and his gun is a lot cooler than their usual metermaiding duties and they wanted to try out all of their gear before they outgrew it. Finally, the guy came out and they loaded him up and went back to patrolling all those parking meters. Now that I know how much firepower is behind a parking violation, I'm going to be even more inclined to spend my money in the burbs.

After breakfast, we gave up on Duluth and headed for Two Harbors. We stumbled on to a great tour of an old steampowered tugboat and a short history lesson from the curator of the lighthouse and museum. We kept going north for a few miles and had lunch on the way back at Betty's Pies. Yeah, we ate a lot for such a short trip. Get over it. It's a guy thing.

On the way back, I decided to put up with the meter crap and parked in front of Duluth Pack. I used my credit card to buy a $0.75 hour and discovered the meter gouges you for an extra quarter if you use a card. Something not advertised on the &^%$# meter kiosk. Since we couldn't close up the gear, we carried it around with us, which finished off any good feelings I had about Canal Park, since it got hot and carrying all our crap limited what we could do and wanted to do. I guess the good side, if you like parking meters, was that the park area was pretty much empty for a perfect last summer week afternoon before school started the next week. I've never seen that before in 12 years of hanging out in Duluth. The meters were doing their job of draining the city of downtown tourists and locals.

We gave up after 1/2 hour and went back to the bike to get the hell out of Duluth. Another biker was parked in our space, which looked like a bad idea, based on what I know of metermaids and city meter laws. As we were packing up, the other bike owner came over to ask about my luggage badges and the V-Strom. Turned out, he was from northern Minnesota and was making his once-a-year trip to Duluth. He hadn't noticed the new parking meter system and was surprised to learn he was parking illegally. I gave him the last 1/2 hour of our pass and left him looking at the damn thing, wondering where to put it so it wouldn't get stolen if he left the bike to get lunch. I recommended the Perkins north of downtown.

It would be cool to believe that the simple stuff, like parking for motorcycles, is fixable. Obviously, there are logical solutions and all of those solutions provide economic and social benefits to a wide range of citizens. However, we're a mousy "conservative nation," which means we're afraid of our shadows and we're even more afraid of pissing off the cats. Political correctness is just another form of mousy-ness. Burying ourselves in make-work jobs like metermaids and stuffing millions of citizens behind bars and hiring another few million to convict and guard them and all of the useless crap government does instead of providing useful services to working citizens is exactly the tactic every other failed dynasty has taken in the history of humanity. I would freakin' love to believe we're going to be different. But I don't.

It's all part of that fear of change and risk avoidance thing we're growing so proud of. One thing we used to know out of our manufacturing experience is that "change happens." You don't have to do a thing and change will happen. Hoping that it won't is stupid. One of the concepts I'd hope people would get from riding motorcycles is that you have to constantly adapt to change; changes in the road, in yourself and your abilities, traffic, weather, and even laws and cops. The cool thing about getting young people into motorcycling is that they might learn this lesson from riding, since they won't learn it in school, from their parents, or from video games. The not-so-cool thing about the Boomers getting into motorcycling is that they are too inflexible to learn anything new. They are constantly surprised when the universe doesn't notice their existence and fails to adapt to their all-important-selves. When they crash and burn, as they will, their reaction is to sue and pass more brainless laws to try to force the world to accommodate them. Like my home state, Kansas, passing laws to require pi to be a nice round 3.

I don't see this getting better. As much as I'd like to believe gentle argument and logical persuasion will convince the cats to allow us mice the right to lane splitting, filtering, multi-bike parking space access, and all of the cool things that motorcycles and motorcycling could bring to culture, I don't believe any of it will happen. Honestly, I think the best I will get is the right (for a while) to be pissed off about the incompetence of city, state, and federal officials and to say something about it. The problem with using sugar to catch flies is . . . who wants to catch a fly? When I see a fly, I always reach for a flyswatter.

I am pissed off. You're right. I used to love visiting Duluth, especially for hanging out around Canal Park. I've spent a small fortune on chocolate penances at Grandma's for my wife, since she often didn't get to go to Duluth with me. The Canal Park Famous Dave's is my 2nd favorite place in that chain. The lift bridge and ship harbor entry are pretty near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on my "favorite places" list. But I hate parking meters. I don't care much for metermaids, either (unless they look like these three, Australia knows how to do everything better). From now on, until Duluth meters-up 18th Avenue West in front of Aerostich, I'll probably limit my Duluth sight-seeing to the RiderWearHouse, Jay Cooke Park, and points north of town.

It's a weakness, I know, but human-waste like toll booth operators and metermaids bug me so much that I can't get past that irritation to enjoy the good stuff that's left of the city. There are too many places to be to have to put up with that kind of drivel. If Duluth doesn't want my money, Elie, International Falls, Redwing, and more mid-sized towns than I can count do. (Even some Duluth residents have a clue about what the city's tourist gouging is costing.) Like most Americans, I do as little business as possible in my own downtown, St. Paul, because of the transportation hassle. Between the near total lack of useful public transportation and the miserable parking experience, I'd rather skip downtown and miss out on everything that happens there than risk a $40 parking ticket for some obscure unpublished rule or from being beaten to my car by a metermaid.

Fat Bikers and the Law

While looking for a picture to link to in a different column, I stumbled upon this website, Biker Law Blog, and this topic: Does Being Overweight Affect Your Rights in a Motorcycle Accident Case? Check it out. The picture the lawyer chose to emphasis his point is amazing.

The important part of the biker lawyer's conclusion was, "I do not see why a person who is overweight cannot safely operate a motorcycle. As a matter of fact, I personally know people who I would consider to be obese, and yet are outstanding motorcycle riders."

Holy crap! I know that the law is supposed to be blind, but I'm a little discouraged with how stupid lawyers and judges can be. How can anyone call motorcycle a "sport" on one hand and, then, claim that having the maneuverability of an overweight walrus and the shape to match would have no affect on a rider's capability?

My reasoned, calm, dispassionate response on his blog was "Well, that would explain why there are so many successful fat professional racers."

At some point, outside of the irrational territory of a court of law, common sense ought to prevail. Yeah, I know, "motorcycling is different than racing." It is: it's way more dangerous and demanding. Those giant bellies you often see perched on top of a lounge chair cruiser wouldn't fit on the seat of a motorcycle that has 21st century brakes, suspension, or handling characteristics. I've often considered most of what Hardly sells to be "motorcycles for the physically challenged" or "'rolling wheelchairs." If you are limited to a particular style of motorcycle because of your physical condition, it's obvious that you are equally limited in your capabilities. You might be able to compensate for those limits with experience, judgment, and by limiting your exposure to complicated riding situations (such as only riding in your backyard), but you're still less capable than someone not so encumbered.

While it's obvious that your "rights" will not be reduced because of obesity, it is equally obvious that a jury's sympathy for a lard-ass on a Harley will be dramatically different than it would be for a healthy adult riding a less stereotyped motorcycle.

In Motorcycle Consumer News, a while back, a much more reasonable lawyer spent some time explaining how successful trial lawyers would be well advised to avoid jury trials at all costs when they are representing a motorcyclist. Our public image sucks. Most people don't like us and we appear to be doing our best to further that opinion.

Regardless, imagine you're a juror in a trial where someone turned in front of a motorcyclist and the biker was unable to stop his bike and smashed into the cage. The biker is claiming, "There was nothing I could do."

The cager's lawyer shows you a picture of the biker on his bike, pre-crash. He's 350 pounds of sedentary flab and he's helmetless, armed in a wife-beater and sunglasses, and riding the bike of choice for the over-aged, Angel-wannabe (sort of like the bike Mr. Lawyer is pictured beside in his blog photo at right). Imagine the biker's lawyer is the guy in that picture.

You're a reasonably intelligent person. You can do a quick p=mv calculation in your head and-- adding the 900 pounds of the biker's rolling wheelchair to his 350 pounds of inert flab--you decide that anything changing directions faster than a glacier would catch this dude unaware and unable to avoid a crash. The cager goes free and un-fined and bikers all over the country cry "foul!"

The unfairness of the jury's decision causes even more flab-layered bikers to buy worthless loud pipes, eat more barbecue, and get even wilder tattoos. That alienates even more cagers and the next biker in court finds himself part of a routine on Jon Stewart's program.

Unlike Mr. Lawyer, I don't know a single obese "outstanding motorcycle rider." Not one. I know some once-outstanding riders who are still pretty good in their lard suits. I know a lot of guys, like me, who were once pretty good and are now on the edge of cycle-disabled because of their lack of flexibility, poor motorcycle posture, disproportionate weight-to-strength ratio, and limited choices of vehicles. If that really is a picture of the Law Blog lawyer, I suspect his definition of "outstanding motorcycle rider" and mine are radically different. He should look up the word "outstanding." I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

Now this is a pretty funny story:
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Judge Rules on Boston's EPA Stamp Act "restraining order

Justice Riders who filed suit against the City of Boston's "EPA Stamp Tax"Ordinance received word late Tuesday afternoon the Superior Court denied theirrequest for a temporary restraining order for enforcement of the $300 findOrdinance.

Yet the riders cheered the Court's decision that places the City 'on notice'that it may be held responsible for reimbursing motorcyclists for any finesimposed, and their costs associated with defending the $300 citations, if theirComplaint to strike down the Ordinance is successful.

In her well reasoned five-page decision, Suffolk Superior Court JusticeGeraldine S. Hines, found the five Plaintiffs, Paul W. Cote, William E. Gannon,II, Michael D. Longtin, Vincent A. Silvia, and Lawrence Cahill, although notBoston residents, had "standing" to bring the action that would void theOrdinance. However, the plaintiffs did not meet the standing that "irreparableharm" would be caused to riders if enforcement took place, as none had beencited and fined yet.

Judge Hines, in her ruling, opened the door that the City of Boston, and it'staxpayers, may be responsible to reimburse cited riders for fines imposed and"costs" associated with defending those imposed fines, should the Court laterfind the Ordinance be struck down.

"This is still a partial victory for riders," claimed Plaintiff Cote ofAmesbury. "While we hoped the Judge would temporarily restrain the misguided EPA stampenforcement, this is better than what we hoped for."

The Justice Riders will co-host a EPA (Either Pay or Act) Citizen-Biker RallyMonday night from 7:00 until 9:00 p.m. at the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston tocelebrate their Court Victory, give further legal direction for riders, andraise legal offense funds for the lawsuit by selling stickers reading "Don'tTread on Me - I refuse to be ruled by Boston City Councilors" for $2 each.

"I am glad the Judge gave us legal standing we hoped for in this case," saidPlaintiff Mike Longtin of Easton. "Today is a good day for New England area riders."

"If the City issues 100 repugnant citations that conflict with State Statutesand Regulations, those 100 riders may appeal spending at least $1,000 each inlegal fees contesting those $30,000 worth of citations. Then, should the Courtstrike down Boston's Ordinance, the City and its taxpayers lose that $30,000 andwill have to reimburse the contesting riders $100,000.00 in legal fees."

Plaintiff Vince Silvia of Haverhill was more blunt saying, "The City wants to cite me, I'll contest. I've had my bike sound tested 5 times, I will appeal and they can pay me whatever I spend when they lose."

Plaintiff Bill Gannon explained, "Generally, when you contest a citation, youbear the appeal fees and costs of proving yourself right and not wrong."

Gannon continued, "Judge Hines told the City of Boston in her decision that theyare exposed. If the five Plaintiffs successfully prove that that this Ordinanceis repugnant and in conflict with Federal Codes and State Statutes andRegulations, Boston must reimburse the harm (costs) riders incur."

On July 20, 2009, sets of Interrogatories (questions), admissions of fact, andrequest for documents were served on the 13 City of Councilors and Mayor Meninoto be answered under oath. Copies of those discovery requests can be viewed on www.BostonBiker.com and www.JusticeRider.com.

Stay Tuned to www.massmotorcycle.org for updates and action plans!

Justice Riders encourage riders with EPA stamps on their bike attend Mondaynight's Citizen Biker Rally at the Hard Rock Cafe to get updated information anddirection for further action.

"This matter is not about noise," claimed Cote`, "It is about the City of Boston wrongfully imposing this standard that is improper."
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Cote's statement reminds me of all the southerners who claim that the civil war was fought over states' rights, not slavery. Of course, the only "right" the southern states were protecting was the right to own slaves. The only "standard" these characters are concerned with is their right to subject the general population to their unnecessary and excessive noise.