Motorcycle safety, “Edmond”, “MI3”, “Miami Vice”, entertainment center changes,“Wordplay” (posted from home)

(this post covers 13-19 January)

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Friday, 19 September –

I spent the morning finishing up the reconfiguration of our entertainment center. Our little 27-inch TV and supporting gear are now in one re-habbed cabinet. We moved the other cabinet to our bedroom for much-needed storage. Amazingly, everything still works! We’ve de-cluttered the area, removed a lot of dust-attracting older electronics, video tapes and CDs (anybody need a Betamax copy of Friday Night Videos from 1985?) and changed the focus of the room. Well done!
That afternoon I installed the window-sash locks in the basement windows and took a motorcycle ride to return DVDs and pick out some new ones. In the evening we watched ‘Wordplay’, a terrific documentary about the New York Times crossword puzzles, puzzle editor Will Shortz and the annual NYT crossword puzzle convention. I had bypassed this one several times thinking ‘what could be interesting about crossword puzzle fans?”. But I was wrong. It’s engaging, delightful, and awe-inspiring. Long live the puzzle-nerds!

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Thursday, 18 Jannuary –

I blogged for a bit in the morning but then Labashi asked me to work with her on reconfiguring our entertainment center. As she plans an upgrade for the living / dining room we’ve been looking for a better solution for the entertainment center. Our solution to this point has been two entertainment-center-style cabinets side by side. We did this to hold all the gear and yet still have storage. One cabinet held the TV, stereo amplifier, and a CD-player and one speaker while the other held a cassette player, two video-cassette players, the DVD player, a cable amplifier, cable modem, wireless router and the other speaker. We had an open shelf after trading in our Dish Network receiver for a better deal on cable but otherwise things were chock-a-block. But as we worked out what we would need in a new entertainment center cabinet, I realized we have a lot of stuff we don’t need and ALL of it is old. The tape cassette player and VCRs are passé and the CD player is not only passé, it recently broke. That means the stereo and speakers are no longer needed. Which means, heck, the remaining stuff will fit in one cabinet! Today was the day to start that project.
That evening we watched “Miami Vice”. Yeccch. One RT reviewer correctly says “There’s no style, glitz, glamour or music! The movie is called MIAMI VICE. How can you have Miami Vice without at least one good music montage? At the very least you would think the movie would have some, oh, I don’t know, ACTION.”

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Wednesday, 17 January-

After much of the day on the web, Labashi and I drove into Lowe’s and bought window-sash locks for the windows in our basement. Afterwards we decided it was late enough in the day to stop at our favorite ribs place-- Texas Roadhouse. We had tried to get in there at 1700 one day last week and they were jammed. But today we tried at 1600 and got in (and laughed about turning into ‘Early Birds’ in our retirement). The ribs were fantastic!
That evening we watched the extras on the “Mission Impossible 3” disc. Not bad.

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Tuesday, 16 January –

This morning I found a treasure-trove of good podcasts. I finally thought to search for “CBC” (Canadian Broadcasting Company) podcasts in iTunes and there they are: “Saskatchewan This Week”, “The Maritimes This Week”, etc plus “The Best of The Current”, and “Editor’s Choices” and several others. This is great!
That afternoon I rode the Concours over the Trans-Am Cycles in Lititz to look at several used motorcycles I’d seen on their web site. They had two interesting BMWs (which, it turned out, were spoken for already), a smokin’ red VTX1800 cruiser and a show-perfect older Gold Wing for cheap. Dream on…
I stopped at Starbucks for an Americano and today’s Times then spent an hour at Lowe’s shopping for some security stuff for the house.
That evening we watched Mission Impossible III. I had been avoiding it but we’re running out of movies at our local video store (we’ve seen them all!) But it was surprisingly good (in a suspension-of-disbelief way). Afterwards we watched a Frontline special, “The Hand of God”. It’s the story of a man who had been abused by a priest as a boy and the shocking discoveries he and his brother (the film-maker) make as they research the background of the priest and how abuse cases were handled by Catholic church officials. Good documentary.

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Monday, 15 January -

I spent much of the day reading shooting forum articles and later shot a few airsoft rounds. That evening we watched a Travel Channel series “Living with the Kombai”, where white guys Mark and Olly learn how to survive in the jungle with Kombai tribesmen. I loved seeing the subtitles when the Kombai spoke-- like (while hunting with the whites) “those pale boys don’t smell good. We’re not going to see any animals.”

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Sunday, 14 January –

Today I spent most of the morning watching videos on the NothingToxic.com web site. I enjoy them and they often lead me to research something or other. In the afternoon I rode over to the video store to pick up a couple of movies and then shot air-soft targets in the basement. The air-soft gun is fun and ultra-cheap and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I make the targets by marking a giant plus sign in the middle of an 8x10 piece of paper and mounting it on my BB-trap target-holder. I shoot a clip of 18 shots then pull down the target for evaluation and reload the BBs from the trap. I vary something each time, whether stance, grip, sighting picture, lighting of sights, whatever I can think of. It’s a LOT like being a kid again!
That evening we watched “Edmond”, a David Mamet thriller starring William H. Macy. We were a little disappointed but it’s definitely Mamet. I see RottenTomatoes gives it a 54% on the critics tomatometer and that seems about right. I agree with one reviewer’s comment: “…. a powerful film, but not a completely coherent one.” Yep, that’s classic Mamet. Well worth it to see Macy at work, though.

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Saturday, 13 January –

I spent this morning emailing and posting my blog entry. The latest issue of Motorcycle Consumer News came in the noon mail. I believe MCN has begun featuring more motorcycle safety articles since the untimely deaths of motorcycling icons Christian Neuhauser and Larry Grodsky. Or maybe it’s just me. Christian was the very popular publisher of RoadRunner Magazine and was killed when he apparently lost control of his sidecar-equipped motorcycle on an interstate entrance ramp and veered into the active traffic lane just as a truck came along. Larry Grodsky, safety editor for Rider Magazine and founder of a motorcycle-safety training company, died after striking a deer on a lonely stretch of Texas highway. These two deaths struck me hard as they did thousands of motorcyclists. We all are thinking the same thing—if these experts could be killed, what makes me think something like this won’t happen to me? Another recent motorcycle death also haunts me. I had met Allen Brown at a Concour’s Owner’s Group winter technical session. He was preparing his bike for a summer cross-country trip to the Sacramento area where he had grown up. We all chatted quite a bit as he went through the long and involved valve-adjustment procedure with the help of other club members. He lived in Hanover and worked in Columbia, MD and commuted to work and back on his bike. He was very experienced and very interested in safety discussions our group had that day. But that summer Allen died when his Concours drifted left out of the passing lane of an interstate highway and hit the guardrail at speed. A following driver said he appeared to slump forward a bit and his bike just drifted off the road until it hit the guard rail. There was no other information. I could not understand how something like that could happen. I couldn’t imagine Allen had fallen asleep so the only other possibilities I could think of would be medical or heat-related. I checked the weather archive in Wunderground.com for that day’s weather there in California, knowing Allen had died by early evening. The afternoon high had been well over 110 degrees and was still above 100 at 7 p.m. Allen always rode with a full-face helmet and had installed an extra-high, extra-wide windshield to reduce turbulence. Though I have no way to confirm it, I suspect the extremely high heat factor was the root cause of the accident and have to wonder if a summer windshield and evaporative gear wouldn’t have made a difference. (Note: Concours riders in hotter climates generally switch to a cut-down windshield in summer to increase airflow. ‘Evaporative gear’ is a specially-designed jacket or vest which is soaked in water and cools the rider as the water evaporates. They are most effective in lower-humidity heat.)
Since Allen’s accident I’ve taken to occasionally going to Google News and typing in “motorcycle accident” to read through accounts of accidents to get a feel for the biggest threats to me. The number one reason for motorcycle accidents is failure of the rider to control the motorcycle. It’s amazing to see how many motorcycle accidents are single-vehicle accidents, meaning the motorcycle ran off the road and hit a guard rail, a fence, a tree, a curb, whatever. These accidents are often alcohol or speed-related and I have some hope of avoiding these failure-to-control accidents by riding safely. There are occasional reports of a single-vehicle motorcycle accident caused by spilled diesel fuel or some other slippery substance on the road and this falls into a ‘bad-luck’ category. The most prevalent bad-luck accidents are deer strikes. And guess what state has the highest number of deer-strikes in the nation? Yep, good ol’ PA. Larry Grodsky’s death by deer- strike drove home how vulnerable we are to this. Some Monday-morning quarterbacks question Larry’s riding in the evening and reportedly at relatively high speed in a well-known Texas deer-strike area. But Larry was riding cross-country from a motorcycle-safety conference in San Diego to his home in Pittsburgh and I understand he had stopped at a motel but they had no vacancy and he was moving on to the next motel when the accident occurred.
A category that gives me the willies I call ‘soccer-mom syndrome’. It’s the vehicle-turning-left-into-the-path-of-the-rider problem where the somewhat-distracted driver of an oncoming vehicle fails to see the rider and makes a left turn across his/her path. These are often fatal to the rider and gory accounts of riders propelled into the windshield of the oncoming vehicle abound. What do you do about that? I choose to wear hi-vis-yellow gear and I’m convinced it does indeed make me safer but an impaired driver could easily cause me a very bad day.
So if it’s so dangerous, why ride? Well, first I don’t think it’s so horribly dangerous as it sounds. We read about auto-accident deaths at least weekly yet we still drive. Motorcycling is definitely riskier than driving a car but I can also reduce a large portion of the risks by riding sober, controlling my speed, wearing hi-visibility crash gear, practicing maximum-braking, anticipating developing situations and making good decisions on where and when to ride. I like the safety aspect of riding a bike and spend a good bit of time reading about it and thinking about it while riding. Since getting back into motorcycling in 2003 I’ve ridden some 35,000 miles and I’ve had several near-misses. Coming home from work one evening I saw a deer racing across a field ahead of me. I grabbed the brakes hard and saw it cross less than four feet in front of me, still running at full speed. Another time a car pulled out in front of me as I drove along blissfully ignorant I had forgotten to turn off my turn signal after the last turn. I slid sideways toward the car and had enough time to think “I probably won’t die but it’s going to crush my leg” just as the car lurched to a stop. I missed its front bumper by an inch. I came very close to hitting a car from the rear when it abruptly stopped in front of me to talk to someone she knew coming the other way. And my one fall so far came when another woman stopped abruptly in front of me. I couldn’t swerve past on the left because of oncoming traffic or the right because she had stopped beside a mail van (she apparently thought there wasn’t enough room for her to pass the mail van and an oncoming truck at the same time but misjudged how quickly she could stop behind the mail van and ended up right beside the mail van). I came very close to stopping in my lane but realized at the last second I wasn’t going to stop in time so I swerved into a driveway and the bike top-sided as the crowned roadside transitioned to the flat driveway. I was thrown off the bike but my safety gear prevented any road-rash (uh, ‘driveway-rash’) and there was no appreciable damage to the bike. While I was angry about the woman doing such a stupid thing, I have to admit I was following too closely.
So the answer is I don’t think the risks are so high I shouldn’t ride. Perhaps that’s a selfish view. In a recent letter to Motorcycle Consumer News a writer declared he had looked at the risks of motorcycling and had decided he had to give it up. He had recently married and he and his new wife were planning a family. As he put it “I ride a safe ride but no amount of MSF or Joe Rocket can guarantee my continued existence in her life… and the thought of her pain from my death or serious injury wrenches my gut.” (Note: MSF = Motorcycle Safety Foundation, a safety-training course provider. “Joe Rocket” = a brand of motorcycle safety clothing). I’m lucky in that we have no kids (and if we had had children, they’d be grown by now) and Labashi is a remarkably independent person and I ride with her support. Here endeth today’s digression on motorcycling!
I spent much of the afternoon reading some of my favorite shooting forum web sites and shot a few targets with the airsoft pistol to work on my two-eyes-open aiming skills. That evening we had supper with buddy rar and his wife at Pagliaro’s Trattorias near Harrisburg. We had a nice long dinner and closed the place down.