Holiday motorcycle tour

Just returned from a brief motorcycle tour through the South (Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia). Outsmarted myself a bit, actually. Ms. X teased me when I returned that it had been warmer in Michigan than where I had been riding. I'm a bit busy today (my lovely daughter is getting married tonight and I have to shave off a week's worth of scraggly beard), but here are some photos. Looking at the morning ice on the bike, I get cold all over again. I'll add some additional text later.

When travel becomes pointless

Whenever I've traveled in the South, I always made it a point to do three things:

1. Drink an RC Cola


2. Drink a Mr. Pibb


3. Eat a Moon Pie

As disgusting as these three tasks might be, I felt obligated to perform them. They meant that I was "in the South." These were things that you couldn't do in the North (unless you managed to find some very specialized stores downriver from Detroit).

On my recent motorcycle tour, I found that these products had disappeared from the stores I stopped at in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. In the stores I visited I had the choice of Coke products, Pepsi products and Lays products.

We've now reached the point where you can step off a plane anywhere on the planet and have your choice of Coke products, Pepsi products and Lays products. And McDonalds, of course.

At some point the plane ride (or motorcycle ride) ceases to make any sense. You're just experiencing the same thing at different GPS coordinates.

I once wanted to be an anthropologist. Now it would be too depressing. Imagine hacking your way through the jungles of New Guinea and finding a Neolithic village. There at one end of the village is a Pepsi machine. At the other end is a Coke machine. And the headman is negotiating for a McDonalds.

P.S. added later ... After I posted this, the next time I visited Ms. X she reached into her fridge. Like a cold, brown rabbit, out she pulls an RC Cola. "Where did you get that?!," her straight man sputtered. "Down at the store on the corner," she said, with no additional comments. Don't you hate it when they do that?

On motorcycles

Funny you should ask.

Yeah, this motorcycling thing is kinda growing on me. At first I thought it might just be a pale substitute for flying, but it has revealed to me some aspects that are as fine and maybe even -- gasp! -- finer than flying.

It's really not fair to compare the two, but here goes:

• Beauty -- That's a toughie. It's hard to match the beauty of a vista viewed from the air. On the other hand, wildlife, waterfalls, even fields of flowers are surprisingly beautiful from a motorcycle. Nicer than from a car, you ask? Yes, for reasons I'll explain another time. As far as seeing those things from an aircraft, Bambi looks like an ant from 5000 feet.
• Sensation of Speed -- Motorcycle -- with a few rare exceptions -- wins this one hands down. The feeling that you're going fast is to a great extent sensing motion relative to other objects. I remember the first time I went Mach 1. I was really looking forward to it and ... ho hum. I mean you see the Mach meter pass 1, but at 30,000 feet there's really no sense of going fast. I imagine going that speed down on the deck, like in an F-111, would put a little extra curl in your pubes, but it's anti-climactic at altitude. The sense of speed on a motorcycle is amazing (unless you're on a Harley). My bike is just about the slowest one Suzuki makes and it can still do 0-60 in less than 4 seconds. That's faster than a Maserati. The effect is heightened by the fact that your fanny is hanging out in the wind. Oh, and the roar is cool, too!
• Risk -- Hmmmm. This one depends on a lot of factors. It depends on the kind of flying you're doing and it depends on what kind of motorcyclist you are. One motorcycle writer says Jesus speaks to him on every curve. I try to have that same conversation only once in a great while. Suffice it to say that motorcycling is as risky as you want to make it.
• Overall Thrill (See Sensation of Speed and Risk entries) -- This one's been a surprise for me and is why the bike is kinda growing on me. It really is exciting! I thought it would just be a drafty car that's missing two wheels.
• Sense of Accomplishment -- Sorry motorcycle ... here's one place where flying's got you all beat. I've met some motorcyclists who only learned to walk erect this morning. And flying is some pretty complex stuff that requires at least a modicum of brainpower and skill. But I must say so far the motorcyclists I've met seem NICER than most of the pilots I've known, who often tend to have outsize egos (See: Me) and arrogance to match.
• Cost -- Big points for the the motorcycle. I recently rented a Cessna 172SP for $110 an hour. My cost for the motorcycle is about $110 a MONTH! Plus, nearly all your maintenance on an aircraft has to be done by a vampire called an A&P Mechanic, whereas I'm doing the maintenence on the bike myself.
• Convenience -- Another big win for the bike. Preparation for flying is a pain in the ass, quite frankly. You either call Flight Service or comb the web options for the weather and any pilot notifications, then you preflight the aircraft, then you (at some airports) wait in line to take off, etc. The bike is in my attached garage. I check the tire pressure, walk around it to make sure nothing's falling off, fire it up and go. Ahhhh, bliss!
  

I'm really surprised at how many miles I've put on the two bikes this year (I'm on my second one) and how much I look forward to riding.

More updates to come.

I love outer space, but I despise Star Trek

As a child in the '60s, I immersed myself in everything to do with the fledgling American space program. Like so many kids of the era, I not only knew the names of all seven Mercury astronauts, I knew the nicknames of their spacecraft. I was all gee whiz over apogees and perigees. I was reenergized by reentries. And EVAs were A-OK with me.

When I heard that a TV series was planned that would follow an intrepid band of spacefarers as they explored the universe, my anticipation level was sky high. Oh, boy! Outer space, here I come!

There was just one problem: When “Star Trek” finally arrived, it wasn’t about outer space. The show’s lead-in credits seemed promising. There was a spacecraft with stars in the background. There was a voiceover about space exploration that aspired to be inspiring. But after nearly a decade of learning what it meant to travel in space and what challenges we would face, I was flabbergasted to find almost none of those challenges given even a cursory nod. For example:

• Even in our modest solar system, there is a staggering variety in gravity and atmospheric pressure. Even with the best and most protective spacesuit we could produce, a space traveler would either be crushed by the gravity or would bounce along with strides that would take them 50 feet up each step. On Star Trek, atmosphere and gravity were always whatever was present on the studio back lot. Not only were Enterprise crew members never seen in spacesuits, the whole universe was apparently visitable in spandex jammies. None of them ever even wore a coat for god’s sake! (Speaking of spacesuits … one of the few pluses I detected, as my teen-age libido went to full afterburner, was the outfits the female Enterprise crewmembers wore. Vavavoom!)
• In addition to tremendous variations in atmospheric pressure, many – if not most – of the atmospheres visited would be toxic to a human and would kill them both instantly and horribly.
• No acceleration or deceleration forces are ever seen on the show. Occasionally the cast is told from off camera to lean left or lean right while the director kicks the camera.
• Nearly every creature encountered on every planet walked on its hind legs, had binocular vision, and looked suspiciously like an extra in heavy makeup. As any evolutionary biologist (or sports physician) will tell you, the fact that we walk on our hind legs is one of nature’s horrible screwups, or at least a minor miracle. The vast majority of creatures on our own home planet live in the sea and have no legs at all, but among land dwellers, two legs are very unpopular. Four, six, eight or “bunches and bunches” are the preference, except for us and praying mantises. Oh, and birds. But they don’t really like to walk anyhow.
• Very little attention was ever paid to language. In China, they have two major languages and several thousand dialects. But across the span of the universe, nearly everyone speaks English with a California accent.

I know, I know. Some of you “Trekkies” are even now sputtering about the basic unfairness of my tirade. Yes, I know that its predecessors like “Buck Rogers” also ignored these things. But they had an excuse … no one had ventured into space yet. Yes, I know that Star Trek was a low budget program with little cash for special effects. Yes, I know that I’m ignoring some of the deep, philosophical issues (yawn) that Mr. Roddenberry and his writers explored (“The Trouble with Tribbles” comes to mind), but would it have been too much to ask for at least SOME attention to have been paid to these things?

The legacy of this program is that its spiritual descendents – like the Star Wars series – have also felt free to ignore these realities. Even when George Lucas has all the money that Steven Spielberg doesn’t and employs a virtual army of CG technicians, his films are still space soap operas of the same ilk as Star Trek. For shame.

The only prominent filmmaker who has made any effort to be true to the challenges of space is director Ron Howard. During the making of “Apollo 13, “ his actors made countless parabolas in NASA’s “Vomit Comet” KC-135 so that the truly amazing weightless sequences of that film could be created. Bravo, Mr. Howard.

As for Star Trek, it will always be – for me – “As the World Turns” in orbit.

Does ray me

The hardest part of writing is beginning. So I won't bother.

We'll just jump into the story at a random point in the continuum. I've been thinking about doing this for a while and tonight appears to be the night.

I was let off work early because Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I'm not sure of the reasoning there. Did they think I needed to get home and start beheading turkeys? Harvesting cranberries? I didn't question it, I was just grateful. Especially since we were blessed with that rarest of things ... a beautiful, sunny, warm (50ish) November day in Michigan.

I jumped on me trusty motorcycle Sue Zookie and rode for a couple hours on the leaf-strewn two-lane blacktop that covers Michigan this time of the year. Delightful!

Sue is a new member of my Toy Family and I've been amazed to find that she's a quiet girl. Unlike the blatting, rumbling motorcycle she replaced in my affections.

At the end of my ride I glided in second gear up the hill that tilts my driveway and pressed the small garage door opener that I've mounted under the windshield.

After securing the motorcycle in her stall and walking around to insure that no Japanese plastic, steel, alloys or rubber had been left behind on some lonely road, I walked over and looked out the garage door.

Standing no more than 30 feet away were three whitetail deer -- all does.

There are a lot of things that whitetail deer don't like, but apparently they don't mind well-mannered motorcycles. I must've passed within 10 feet of them as I came up the drive. Between their camouflage and the grove of trees they were standing in, I never saw them.

I grabbed my camera and banged off two frames. Because the light was fading, the shots were both two-second time exposures. I knew they'd be soft. I quietly went to get my tripod, but by the time I returned the gentle ladies of the forest were gone.

Be careful, ladies. It's hunting season here in Michigan. But you're safe from me. Unless I get REAL hungry, of course. Never say never.