More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are below:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams
• Project Daily Driver: Who Are You Calling An Antique?!?

As part of “project daily driver” I finally changed the oil and did a test ride on Honey Badger, my fun little Yamaha TW200. Poor Honey Badger has been sitting in my shop waiting for that oil change all winter. Around the first snowfall of last year I pushed it in the shop, parked it, perched a quart of fresh oil and a filter on the seat, and ran off hunting.

After that? Nothing.

I get busy. The bike was ignored in a cold shop.

Sometime in March I serviced the battery, which is new-ish but also had been sitting in a frozen shop for months. I topped it off with distilled water and hooked up a battery maintainer I’d bought months earlier. Sheesh… I feel so bad that I didn’t install the maintainer right away.

Battery Maintainers:

I haven’t had the best luck with battery maintainers. Everyone with a motorcycle seems to recommend “Battery Tender” brand. That’s what you’ll see in lots of motorcycle / ATV shops. When I’ve used them they’ve been hit or miss. I experimented on my own to find better gear; which I have.

Warning, I’m about to get pummeled by what I say:

I think Battery Tender is like Stanley, Craftsman, Briggs and Stratton, etc… brands with a history of good quality that have since declined and are coasting on past reputations.

The three brands I mentioned (and others) come with rabidly dedicated followers. They’ll tear you apart if you complain about “their” brand. They don’t just “like” the brand, they joined the cult of the brand!

They’ll tell you all about the thing they bought many years ago which has served them well. I’ll ask something like “It’s great that the Battery Tender you bought in 1998 works great, what about one made in this century?” This never helps. Once someone joins the cult, they’re in the cult forever.

I noticed the same thing when I bought my farm tractor. People would tell me all about Pappy’s awesome 1943 John Deere Model A “Johnny Popper”. Don’t get me wrong, Johnny Poppers were pretty cool for their time. But that was literally almost a century ago! A John Deere in 2022 has nothing to do with a John Deere made in 1934. Is a John Deere in 2022 worth the massive price differential over a Massey Ferguson in 2022? “Well, let me tell ya’ about the Massey Ferguson my cousin’s uncle’s hairdresser’s neighbor bought back in 1973!” Ugh!*

Anyway, I’ve had better luck with NOCO battery maintainers than other brands. My data comes from the real world… in this century… under hard conditions. YMMV. I will revisit my evaluation if something better comes along. You’ll never find me putting NOCO stickers on my truck or wearing a brand loyalty t-shirt.

I bought a NOCO Genius 1 for my Yamaha TW200 just before winter and installed it around Easter… because I suck. Here’s the link to a NOCO Genius 1. It’s a small maintainer but the battery on a motorcycle is tiny. It’s stupid to hook a monster maintainer to a battery the size of a box of poptarts! The maintainer will set you back about $30 which seems a fair price. They work very well.

Note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) don’t do as well in cold as bigger batteries for bigger things. Physics y’all. (Actually chemistry but whatever.)

The Yamaha TW200 is so small it’s said that a modern LiOn battery the size of a cigarette pack can be installed and it will do the deed quite well. How cool is that? When the OEM battery kicks off I’ll probably “upgrade”.

One other note, little batteries for little things (like motorcycles) used to have little prices so I didn’t really sweat it. Then Bidenflation kicked in. Batteries easily cost at least 50% to 100%  more than they did a few years ago. A $30 maintainer on a $30 battery may be silly but the same maintainer on a $80 battery is brilliant.

A third note: I hate alligator clips! If I have to pull the seat or a body panel to get at my battery to put on alligator clips I be lazy and not use the maintainer.

Don’t look at me weird. I’m busy and I’m lazy. So what? We’re all like that!

The solution is to use the NOCO’s spiffy (and idiot proof) connection. It allows you to ditch the clips. You just click the maintainer’s cable to a pigtail you’ve permanently installed on the battery terminals. It’s slick and easy.

The “normal” pigtail is too large for motorcycles. I had to order a “motorcycle sized” pigtail. The size you’re looking for is NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory. I’ve used the same pigtail on two motorcycles and plan to install a third on an ATV. NOCO evilly charges like $15 for the friggin’ pigtail! This pisses me off. It’s unreasonable for the pigtail’s components. The person who set that price should be thrown into a volcano. However, it works great and life it too short to rail over corporate asshattery. I got over it. I’ve hooked pigtails permanently to each of my motorcycles. They look reasonably professional and work flawlessly.

(Amazon disclosure, I get tiny kickbacks if you buy from any link on my blog that goes to Amazon. It costs you nothing. All hail our marketing overlords!)

With fresh oil and a perfect battery I set out for a test run. The trails are still impassible so I just rode dirt roads. It was too cold to ride far anyway.

I stopped first at a gas station.

Red alert! Gas stations now invoke political rants. Feel free to skip a few paragraphs:

I’ve got old gas slips in my pack. Some are from back when Orange Menace was president. Gas was dirt cheap and lefties complained about all the bad things Trump might theoretically do. Now Biden does the things Trump didn’t do and that’s supposedly OK now.

We were told that Trump was a menace to America but it’s not Trump that jailed American political prisoners!

About when some of the receipts were printed, lefties were pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court nominees. Trump was in charge and they were livid. Now their party is in power and they’re still livid. They’re pissed off and shrieking at Supreme Court justices. It’s as if all they can do is shriek about the Supreme Court.

It’s exhausting. A child who throws a tantrum to get a cookie will at least shut up while they eat the cookie.

Gas is at the highest price in American history. The man who got more votes than any president in American history caused this. (If I deny Biden got all those record vote counts, I’m guilty of mis-information. That’s how “free speech” works now.)

I compared two gas receipts and it was unreal. It’s almost impossible they’re from the same universe. Luckily, all I needed was a tiny bit; less that a gallon. My motorcycle sips gas like a hummingbird.

I remember people going apeshit at Carter during the OPEC embargo. This round seems more self inflicted. I don’t know if that’s the true or not. Carter was a long time ago so I can’t remember for sure.

There was an “I Did That” sticker on the pump. They amuse me. I never thought any human could be less popular than Carter. I think Biden did it. From record highest vote count in history to least popular president in history, quite the wiplash!

Pay attention folks: the events of this year and the last few should NOT be forgotten. Remember! Spend time to memorize specific facts and figures before they’re thrust down the memory hole of our censored media. Take time to observe. “It’s time period X and situation Y is like this.” Observe what matters to you and watch how it changes. Don’t let your own memory fade. Stick with what you experienced and you’ve seen with your own eyes. Don’t just accept what the TV people say.

They’re trying hard to spin gas prices as Russia’s fault. Russia, Russia, Russia! It’s dumb thing I’ve been hearing all my life. I thought it would go away when the Soviet Union collapsed. That was decades ago! It seems like people got caught in the cold war and they never left. It sticks in people’s cult like brains just like brand names. Buy a John Deere in 2022 because Pappy’s awesome 80 year old tractor was super cool. USSR is long gone. But, I digress…

I rode a lonely dirt road through a protected wildlife area. It’s a shitty lake or awesome duck habitat depending on your opinion. The shore is too muddy and brushy for shore fishing. Last year, in a drought, the waterline was waaaaaaay out there. This spring, it’s closer to shore.

I pissed off a bunch of ducks when I walked to the bank and sat down. I saw some turtles. It was mellow. I sat there and watched the sun lower on the horizon.

A half hour before sunset I turned around to loop back on a second dirt road when I discovered the mystery.

Three dead beavers in a pile! Just sitting there at the boat access area. In the middle of an open space. They were reasonably fresh. No signs the coyotes had gotten to them yet. (I don’t know, maybe coyotes won’t eat a beaver?) They didn’t smell bad… yet.

WTF?

I hopped off the bike and circled the pile. I formed a theory. There’s a trapper around here. He’ll be back for his excellent results soon. Trapping is a legit thing where I hang out. I’ve no idea of seasons but whatever. I spend 99.9% of my time in the woods solo. It might be fun to meet a trapper and shoot the shit. But no trapper leaves his hard earned quarry in a pile in the road.

I also noticed the tails were cut off each beaver. Is it a bounty? Can there be a beaver bounty? “Bring us the tail and we’ll give you ten bucks?” From a wildlife preserve?

Why leave the pile in the middle of everything? It’s like someone gut an elk on a highway! In general, people chuck yucky shit into the adjacent forest. This beaver pile looked like someone was proud of their beaver harvest. Or maybe it was a warning to other beavers?

The missing tails have got to mean something. Maybe there’s a redneck out there that likes beaver tail? Is there such a thing as beaver tail soup? It sounds awful!

The sun started getting low on the horizon and nobody showed. No sound of an ATV. No humans at all. I never did figure out what was going on. I decided I wasn’t going to be there after dark waiting for the beaver tail death cult to show up. I rolled out.

I’m open to theories. Put them in the comments. I haven’t the slightest idea.

A.C.

*I believe if I ever meet a person who owns both a Harley Davidson motorcycle and a John Deere tractor I’ll go bankrupt on the spot. The combined marketing power will form it’s own gravity well and hit me with a public relations tractor beam that remotely drains my bank account. I’ll wake up in debtor’s prison with no money at all but I’ll be wearing a really spiffy hat and a super cool t-shirt.

I have a large generator. I got it because society is desperately trying to collapse.

When I signed for the outlandish price, I accepted future bullshit as a done deal. It wasn’t “if“, it was “when“.

I don’t recommend expensive generators for everyone. Cheaper options come first. Buy some canned goods and stack firewood. A generator is next level.

The timing seemed appropriate. A year too early is better than a day late! I think I timed it right. We haven’t gone completely to shit but we’re trying. We sure haven’t pulled our collective head out of our ass! There’s no sign that America (or several other nations) will return to the state of reasoned and intelligent self governance. In particular, the election of 2020 resolved nothing and the election of 2022 won’t fix anything significant.

I initiated the purchase just as things drifted from conspiracy theory to fact. It went on-line as a vast and irrelevant portion of the populace went on a year long hissy fit over COVID. This had repercussions. Resilient people determined to maintain the civilization they inherited were always rare; now they’re endangered.

Back then there was talk of “return to normal”. That wasn’t going to happen. I expected social breakdown in cities. On cue, several cities devolved into riots and arson, as if it was planned. (I’ll leave that to the reader to assess.)

The riots of 2020 aren’t over. They’re part of the background. They’ll be an “unexpected” feature of life as long as one or both parties benefit from them. Nothing under the sun, Paris has been having riots every summer for as long as I can remember. America had enough riots in the late 1960s that everyone had a hangover that lasted clear to Reagan. Riots continue until people improve. Idiots acting like idiots in places that tolerate idiots will continue so long as they’re encouraged and financed.

What worries me more than riots was the “hunt down the unvaccinated” shitshow. So dark! It was not about vaccines any more than past madness has been about witches or Jews. Find an other and force them to be like us! A monster wired deep in the heart of evil!

I didn’t anticipate the speed of evil. Crowds went full Nuremberg faster than I’d planned! It flamed out for now but still lurks beneath the surface. Self destructive people lust for scapegoats and that way lies horror. Advanced peoples can and have completely lost their shit. Germany in 1938 wasn’t a backwater of clueless rubes, nor was Salem in 1692.

In the meantime, we experience new and improved forms of collapse on a 3-6 week cycle; double digit inflation, record gas prices, supply chains slowly giving out, and that perennial favorite of Boomers in both America and Europe, war with Russia. These things are not a sinking ship so much as society choosing to commit suicide.

Observe things as they are. If you think a generator will ease the transition, so be it.

My guess is the grid won’t “go down” so much as “suck more over time”. I don’t expect an EMP type “power’s off forever beginning some random Tuesday” event. However, there will come a time when “It’s the third outage this week and my beer keeps getting warm” will become a regular topic of conversation. Our power grid fades slowly, like a photograph in the sun. (Or like the rule of law.)

There are mile markers on the path. I remember the first time I saw empty shelves in grocery stores (in America). It was 2020. Less than 2 years have passed. Are you shocked when you see an empty shelf at a grocery store? Of course not. It’s “normal”.

The good news is there’s still food. I might have to go without my favorite flavor of Doritos but I’m not in a knife fight for a can of beans. Yet. Shit could get worse. For a while it will. But I’m not completely pessimistic about the long term.

It’s best to be thankful for what you had than bitch about the loss. The power grid has been surprisingly solid my whole life. What good fortune! Now times have changed and things are different. The grid was built by and for serious people. A grid run in a half assed manner by a half assed society will have longer and more frequent interruptions.

It’s tempting to shrug off incremental grid degradations as “one off” situations. Don’t. There’s a clear trend. California led the way. They’ve been having “rolling blackouts” since the early 2000’s; sometime before Enron croaked. (I’d never heard “rolling blackout” in America before that. I’d heard of “scheduled outages” in Ecuador. Same thing but CA’s grid started out vastly stronger so it can degrade a long time before it’s all that bad.)

Recently, forest fires became a reason to sue electric companies. Predictably, power companies got gun-shy during dry conditions. So CA has “brownouts” most summers. It’s not a “one off” event like a Florida hurricane. Will you be surprised when California (or Arizona) has power supply issues in August 2022? Why?

California isn’t the only sign of decline. In 2003 most of the Northeast went down. A city of eight million (New York) going dark for a few days isn’t Armageddon but it’s not a sign of Pax Romana. In 2021, Texas conked out for a week or two. A week is a very long time.

Deciding to buy a generator was easier than getting one installed. Through a comedy of errors, conflicting contractors, and endless compromises I wound up with “more” than I wanted. I wanted a crude diesel beast that I’d have to turn on myself. I imagined pressing a big green button to manually start it. Later I’d press a big red button to shut the thing down and go back to the restored grid. That was my plan.

Instead I got a sophisticated, LP powered, pain in the ass. It’s supposed to detect an outage, turn on, power the house with ample (actually excess) juice, detect when the grid comes back on, and gracefully shut itself down. The “decide to turn itself on and off” mechanism sucks! There’s just too many ways it can go wrong. Also, it’s installed by folks who are well meaning but probably shouldn’t be messing with things more complex than a lawn sprinkler. Don’t tell me I shoulda’ stuck with the buttons. I know. You can’t always get what you want.

On the other hand, the generator is pretty awesome when it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. The unreliability will be no big deal until it is a big deal.

I’ve spent years pussyfooting around with the genset company. I finally evolved from polite to um… not polite… and that did help. They’ve actually tried to work it out. I don’t doubt their intention. It’s just that they can’t muster the level of support a sophisticated machine needs. Tale of life right there!

It sorta works better now than it sorta worked before. I don’t trust it. My past history with the Acme parachute company isn’t confidence inspiring.

It was a windstorm when the real world test came. The lights flickered. Once, twice, third time. Then they were out. I assume the flickering was the nearest substation trying to decide if it was a temporary issue or the real deal.

It was very windy out. Can’t be too upset if a tree nailed the line. These things happen.

I waited. My desktop computer is on a UPS, it kept running, as did my monitor and some other gadgets. My wifi antenna stayed live, that’s on a UPS too.

It came to my mind. “If the damn generator doesn’t fire up I’m scooping it up in the bucket of my tractor and shoving it through the front door of the assholes who sold it.”

I waited. After about six seconds the generator decided it was “go time”. It turned over and fired.

I waited. The pause from ignition to actually generating power was about 30 seconds. The lights came on.

Nice! I guess I won’t have to killdozer the office that sold the generator; how awesome is that? I’m very happy!

It ran about 45 minutes and then the grid came back. Smoothly, without the slightest flutter in voltage, it switched back to the grid. (I have no way to know when the grid comes back. I have to trust the generator to sense it.) After a short cool down cycle the generator shut itself down. If it was a dog I’d give it a treat!

It was textbook perfect! I couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration. I didn’t lift a finger the whole time. It worked great!

WIN!

More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are here:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams

Guy at the desk: “We don’t see a lot of these antiques.”

Me: “Antique?!? Da fuq?”

I took my ATV to the shop for basic repair as part of “project daily driver”. I don’t think of it as an “antique”. I think of it as “completely paid off / fully depreciated”. It’s old and unreliable but still a handy workhorse. It’s a 325 CC Polaris. It’ll haul my fat ass without complaining so it’s plenty useable. It was the biggest baddest thing of its era but time has caught up (and blown past) it. It’s hopelessly slow compared to the amazingly powerful  monstrosities of modern times. I don’t care, it’s still a great little machine.

I was still smarting from the front desk calling it an antique when I met the mechanic. If there are people with fewer fucks to give, I haven’t met them. This mechanic just plain gave not one shit about anything.

The guy at the front desk had written down all my specific issues to get it from “wouldn’t start all winter” to “daily driver to trail ride solo in the mountains right now”. It’s not much. It’s an ok machine, just wore out a bit.

Me: “Here’s the list from the front desk.”

Mechanic: Grunt. Takes the list and tosses it, without looking, on one of a dozen toolboxes and heaps of parts scattered all over the workshop.

Mechanic: Waving at the ATV on my trailer. “Drop it right there.”

Me: “Ok, the battery is shot so I’ll have to jump it with this battery pack.”

Mechanic: Grunt. He pops it into neutral, gives it a shove, and sends it rolling down the trailer ramp. It’s headed in a random direction. It rolls dangerously close to some other ATVs but stops with a few inches to spare.

Me: “Well that’s one way to do it.”

Mechanic: “Whatever.”

The mechanic never made eye contact. He spoke very few words and even his grunts were half hearted. He was as friendly as a kick in the head; as engaged as a zombie on Quaaludes.

The ATV wound up “parked” randomly in a dirt patch. It was now in a “herd” with a dozen other randomly positioned ATVs, all of which look newer and more expensive than mine. The dirt patch was circled by an asteroid belt of dead and dismembered ATVs. If your ATV is in the inner circle it may drive away, if it’s in the outer circle it’s “parts”. I shuddered.

I drove away wondering if I’d ever see it again.

ATVs are super cool but they amaze and frustrate me by getting a little too sophisticated and therefore ridiculously expensive. They’re too close in price to a used 4×4 “farm quality” jeep for me to have one. The last time I got close to buying an ATV I literally had nightmares over the thought of financing. I completely abandoned the idea.

My failed attempt to buy an ATV happened a few years ago. First, I test drove an Argo (nicknamed Battle Duck). The Argo was too much fun! I wound up chased out of some guy’s ditch. (Battle Duck’s story is here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) I’d love an Argo but I’d probably be arrested in a week if I owned one. After the Argo I test drove everything in sight. (The story is The Mr. Bean ATV Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.) I wound up with a Yamaha TW200 dirtbike and have been very happy.

The image below is my vision of financing an ATV. It’s what I see any time I sign any payment plan. (It’s from Mr. Bean ATV part 6.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love a new ATV. I’m just too cheap. (On the other hand, I’ve done pretty well with a dirt bike that costs 1/2 to 1/3 the scratch to buy an ATV; so that’s something.)

I did wind up with a used ATV through inheritance. I’m incredibly grateful to have it. Given my attitude about finances it’s literally irreplaceable. I’ll have to keep it running until the end of time. It’s a bit old (apparently an antique!) and it’s too unreliable for trail riding. (I ride solo in the middle of nowhere.) But I use the hell out of it for hauling firewood and homestead chores (which is why ATVs were originally made!). I work it hard and it makes sense to keep it in useable form.

Last year a friend wanted to go trail riding. In a fit of brilliance I spiffed up the old ATV, parked him on the saddle, and led the way on my dirtbike. It was a strange arrangement but we had fun.

The ATV had a weak battery. I was a bit low on funds so I didn’t replace the battery. Luckily, my dirtbike never goes anywhere without my Noco Boost Sport GB20 battery pack. (I get a kickback from Amazon if you buy shit from that link.) (The “charger” fits perfectly in my bike’s “kit” and it can jump the ATV without breaking a sweat.) It’s not the same as replacing the battery but it was good enough for the moment.

Note, the ATV has a super cool rope pull start. How awesome is that? Unfortunately, it never runs well enough to start before my arm gives out. I need electric start to use it.

Then the poor thing was abandoned. All summer long I was trail riding on my dirt bike. The ATV just didn’t float my boat like the shiny new Yamaha. Then I leaned more on my tractor for firewood than the ATV. I didn’t always have a good tractor but now I do and the front bucket is just too handy to ignore. For various reasons the ATV wasn’t needed during hunting season.

By Christmas it was froze, dead, and lonely in the woodshed.

Last weekend I tried mightily to start it. The battery pack turned it over but no luck on starting. I tried to “resurrect” the battery with my fancy charger but that didn’t happen either.

I assumed the gas was bad. If it’s not stabilized, modern gas has a lifespan like mayonnaise. As a treat to myself I bought a siphon with a hand pump… no more mouthfuls of gas for me! The siphon sucked. I’d be better off with a few feet of tubing. What man hasn’t gotten an occasional bit of unleaded mouthwash?

I siphoned it out but I had no fresh gas on hand. As an experiment I used some from my 1 gallon dirt bike rotopax. Non-oxygenated with Sta-bil refilled maybe in Sept or Oct last year. She fired up well.

So that’s how I got it running enough to get it on a trailer and haul it to a place where she’s been insulted as an “antique” and kicked into ATV repair purgatory.

More “daily driver” tasks will ensue. Wish me luck.

More posts about ongoing “project daily driver” are here:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me

My cruiser is back on the road! When snow was 3′ deep and hauling firewood was a daily issue, I planned this moment. I’d made an appointment months in advance at a motorcycle shop.

Was this always necessary? I live in an empty location in an increasingly empty society. If I walk in the door looking for motorcycle service on the fly I’m doomed. I’ll hear something like “we’re really swamped during this unexpected temporary situation that’s been ongoing since about 2010. We have only few decent mechanics and they’re exhausted. We try to augment that with a handful of clueless Gen Z flunkies but they never show up and can’t operate a motorcycle anyway. We can fit you in for service six weeks from next October.”

Such is the decline in society. Look around. You’ll see it.

I adapted instead of bitching. I made a motorcycle appointment during a season of snowmobiles. Good for me. (If I owned a snowmobile I might make an appointment now for sometime around Christmas.)

My bike came back and I pried open my wallet to pay the price. Worth it! The old Honda looks more or less like it did the day I bought it. Except it’s slathered in 20+ years of dirt. (Some people wax bikes like showpieces. I don’t.) It also runs more or less like the day I bought it. All hail well built, simple, engines!

In celebration, I did a shakedown ride. I dug through my mishmash of protective gear. I’ll admit I’m a disorganized mess. It’s not that I haven’t been riding, it’s that the last two years have been 40 MPH and slower on a Yamaha in the forest and not 75 MPH and faster on a Honda on the slab. Two very different worlds. Also, I’ve bought the absolute bare minimum equipment over the last two decades and used it all until it’s frayed.

Everything I own was probably shot 10 years ago. I just keep riding anyway. Ignoring its increasingly ragged condition might have caught up with me.

I grabbed my trusty helmet, which has been carefully stored. I had to wipe off a ton of dust. I put on my leather chaps. (They may look silly but if I attack your kneecap with a belt sander I guaran-damn-tee you’d prefer them to denim alone!) I put on my jacket (which is looking a bit worn).

I do have new gloves. I’m not an animal!

Now I was suited up and ready for a daily driver shakedown cruise!

As I rode my helmet didn’t fit like it once did. It seemed to be rubbing my skull. Like someone took a perfectly good helmet and stashed a brick in it.

For dirt bike riding I bought a new helmet a few years ago. It’s perfect for 45 MPH but it would suck eggs at 75MPH. Hence the old helmet which is meant for highway speeds. It used to fit like a glove but now it was hard and uncomfortable.

I stopped for a cheeseburger and to assess the helmet situation. When I took off the helmet a bunch of foam came out. I found more foam bits in my hair. More fell down the back of my neck. The helmet got old and the soft padding inside is literally falling to pieces. It’s just plain wore out. I suspect the shell is still good but the soft padding inside is toast. Unfortunately the soft stuff is part of the protection. Without the soft stuff, the harder parts of the helmet were grinding into my skull.

No denying it. I going to have to throw out a good looking but decades old helmet. I wish I could retrofit the inside. I’m sure it’s a PITA and it’s definitely not recommended for safety reasons.

I hate trying on helmets. It took me forever to buy a simple dirt bike helmet and by comparison that’s practically a cheap ass bicycle helmet. Plus there’s not much of a selection locally and the real crux of it is that I don’t like shopping.

After a righteous cheeseburger I suited up; gingerly fitting the helmet on a slightly sore head. Then the chaps showed their age…

Flashback to buying the chaps; Sturgis 2000:

Me: “So you’ll hem to fit?”

Grizzled biker chick with scary big sewing machine: “Yep. Stand on this box.”

I stood on a box and she fitted the waistband and then the legs; marking them to cut & hem to length.

Me: “It’s a little loose around the waist.”

Biker Chick: “What kind of bike do you have?”

Me: “Honda Shadow.”

Biker Chick: “Metric Cruiser?”

Me: “Yeah, the belt is loose maybe you could…”

Biker Chick: “You’ll grow into it.”

Sigh… she was right! The waist is now more… um… form fitting. It’s not too tight, but it sure as hell ain’t loose. Fuckin’ covid weight gain!

There’s a little pocket on one leg of the chaps. The snap that holds that pocket closed ripped out years ago. I can’t put anything in it because it will immediately blow out onto the pavement. For at least 30,000 miles I’ve literally had a pocket flap buzzing in the wind on my right leg every mile I ride. Being cheap is like that.

Plus there’s a decades’ worth of dead bugs and road grime. But hey, ride with what you got eh? In fact, I’ve been wearing the chaps on the dirt bike too. My theory is that if I bounce off a tree it’s better to have them than not. They’re not ideal for off road situations but they sorta’ work when it’s not too hot. I’m still alive right?

Then the zipper pull ripped off. Nooooooo!

So there I am in a burger joint trying to make assless chaps (over denim jeans!) work when they’re totally shot. There is nothing graceful about any of this! I’ve got one leg zipped up and the belt (which I definitely grew into) tight, but the other leg flapping around like I’m some sort of demented incompetent one leg flasher.

I was wearing recently purchased motorcycle boots (the first motorcycle boots I’ve ever owned). They don’t fit great and they’re not broken in. Thus, my balance wasn’t great. I stumbled and flopped over into the booth while trying to extract my Leatherman from a jacket pocket. (Even as I did this, I realized the pocket’s zipper pull is also shot. Years ago I replaced it with a gadget I found in a camping store somewhere. I’d forgotten about that.)

Then, while I struggled face down ass up in a burger joint’s booth… with chaps half on and half off and a Leatherman dropped on the floor where my helmeted head couldn’t fit to reach… I ripped one. It’s not my fault, it just happened. Trip over new boots, crash into the booth, drop the Leatherman, and then broooonk. God has excellent comedic timing and I’m one of his props.

People were watching. I was fatally embarrassed.

Then the phone dings. Usually it’s off in the saddlebags but I hadn’t brought the saddlebag keys with me. (Another part of “project daily driver” is managing some missing keys. When my dog died we got a puppy. The puppy is another Great Pyrenees and eventually it got tall enough to reach my chest high key rack. I only figured out what was happening after the puppy ate several keys. The damn dog didn’t inform me what keys it ate so I’m still figuring out what keys are missing. My saddlebags that are perma-locked until I fix them.)

I ditched the helmet, forgot about the Leatherman, pretended the chaps were not a tangled mess, and tried to sit properly. If I couldn’t manage actual human traits I’d at least mimic them. As I fiddled with the phone the people watching me got bored. Phones create invisibility; a new thing I just learned.

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Enjoying your ride?”

Me: “I’M FALLING APART AT THE SEAMS!”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Stress will do that. Maybe take a longer ride?”

Me: “The shit I wear is falling apart.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Are you wearing that jacket you bought from the guy in the classified ad way back years ago?”

Me: “Yeah, so?”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “You do realize that there’s no such thing as classified ads anymore. Nor does anyone read a newspaper. Wait, are you wearing those skanky chaps?”

Me: “They’re perfectly good.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “You wore them into a mud pit last spring!”

Me: “That was not exactly an intended thing.”

It wasn’t this bad.

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “The mud was probably cow shit.”

Me: “Farming is why we’re not starving.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “Those chaps smell funky. Get your ragged ass home and buy new stuff.”

Me: “Shopping sucks.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “I will help you shop.”

Me: “Thanks!”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “I will drove to a store, kick you out, and lock the car door until you’re wearing a new jacket.”

So there you have it. I hate shopping and all my shit is worn out. Meanwhile, Mrs. Curmudgeon is trying to keep me alive and also keep people at burger joints from having to deal with bikers that smell like agriculture. The universe is at balance.

I have now re-defined “daily driver” to include protective gear.

I try to ignore my blog’s hit count. Investing too much in that little dopamine meter leads to madness. (We’ve all seen what social media does to people!) However, I’m only human and when I get a zillion hits, I can’t help but notice.

I decided to link to a few posts that lead here. Maybe you’ll follow them back and enjoy their point of origin. I think wordpress used to do this automatically with something called “trackback” but it’s gone now. Life is too short to fret about wordpress programming. Here goes:

A few weeks ago I wrote Attack Of The Gell-Man Effect and it sent the count meter spinning. The whole thing is Sarah Hoyt’s Fault! Her initial post got me to thinking. Thinking got me to writing. Then Sara linked to my my cogitations on Instapundit (where she posts often). Instapundit has rounding errors bigger than my blog so a simple little link there was an earthquake on my local hit counter. Thanks Sarah!

There were other links to that same post. I appreciate them too. Unfortunately, they’re already lost in the aether. Blogs, especially those that generate lots of attention, are transient. Lose the link and the knowledge is gone. If you linked to me and didn’t get mentioned here, I’m sorry about that.

More recently I wrote THAT Is How It’s Done! Folks seemed to like it. I followed up with THAT Is How It’s Done! Part 2 and inadvertently hit a vein of pure Zeitgeist. Raconteur Report noticed and sent some traffic my way. In the MIDDLE of the RIGHT did the same. Thanks to both of you! Borepatch mentioned and tied in a post by Larry Correia. (Being mentioned along with Monster Hunter(!) is pretty awesome for a guy like me. I talk to trees and then blog stories that go nowhere; I just assume nobody reads my shit (except for Squirrels of course), Larry’s the real deal. Thanks Borepatch!

Also a warm shout out to Filthie’s Thunderbox. He lives behind the maple syrup curtain where the leaders wear gay socks. I live where the president dresses normally but has mentally degraded to the intelligence of dish soap and can’t reliably finish sentences.

Filthie could probably join in any discussion I’ve had with an oak tree. We might both lose a debate to a particularly smart spruce.

He directly and indirectly referred (several times) to my recent heresy. I shelved my efficient, lightweight, fast JetBoil campstove and began fiddling with a slow, heavy, gasoline burning, Coleman campstove.  Because of course I did!

Filthie is into polls lately. Everyone go over there and tell him the proper name for his truck which totes around his homemade RC airplane. He offers a poll with four likely names but everyone knows it has already been noticed by America’s NSA. The Squirrels tell me it has been tagged as “Darkweb Bringer Of Death From The Sky”. After all, everyone knows a tiny homebuilt RC plane is more or less exactly like a Predator Drone and they’ll post all about it to piss him off. I figure Filthis is one 3d printed “ghost wing”, a two stroke motor the size of a beer can, and a bag of corn chips shy of being blamed for all war crimes on earth.

My last post was about the Kentucky Derby. A surprise winner came from behind with all the heart and athleticism that makes life wonderful.

I watched the video(s) over and over again. An 80:1 horse, literally the longest odds on the track, kicked ass. It was improbable. The biggest upset in 109 years. Likely the biggest Kentucky Derby upset that’ll happen in my lifetime.

It. Was. Glorious!

It made me happy to see the true winner of a true competition. A true competition allows us to see who is best.

The unexpected winner of the Kentucky Derby is glorious because it is true.

Kentucky Derby organizers worked hard to make the competition fair, honest, and transparent.

Every detail is setup to limit even the slightest hint of cheating. The horses all faced the same circumstances. During the race nobody left the track and nobody entered the track. The horses left the gate all at once, on the day that had been determined years in advance, on the time that was scheduled, and they raced exactly as planned.

Nothing ruined the competition. There was no pile up of tripped horses. No idiot ran out into the arena. No external forces affected the track once the race began. The race happened on time, in public, as expected; as befits a serious endeavor.

There was constant vigilance. The race happened in full view of thousands of observers. Anyone could buy a ticket to watch. It was not a closed arena with a hidden track.

There were observers in every nook and cranny; watching from every angle. There are timers and cameras everywhere. Not just at the race’s conclusion but every foot of the track was under constant watch. Thousands of people watched, many with binoculars, others with cameras, plus there were overhead shots and live video broadcast on many venues.

Nor was the race won by a nose; Rich Strike won like a boss! I can verify one view of the finish by looking at a totally different camera angles of the same finish. They should, can, and do match up. I can get these images from dozens of sources.

It was transparent, monitored, broadcast, performed live, uninterrupted, and therefore scandal free. It wasn’t scandal free first and then monitored as an afterthought.

The Kentucky Derby was deliberately planned and executed in such a way to convince everyone that the results were trustworthy. Trust is earned, it’s not an accident.

I watched the race and I believed it. I’m not filled with disbelief and anger at the wacky 80:1 finish. As far as I can tell it was not a lie; it was simply a statistical oddity. I enjoyed viewing it. I trust what I saw. I have many legitimate reasons to believe it happened just as it was reported.

I’m not the only one. Thousands, possibly millions, of very careful gamblers watched it too. They put money on it. They had skin in the game. We all believe that the Kentucky Derby ran a clean race. Bookies burned on 8:1 sure bets and watching their money go to some loon who foolishly put cash on 80:1 longshots are taking their lumps and shrugging their shoulders. That’s how it goes.

The Kentucky Derby was done right.

This is why I could believe an improbable outcome; even enjoy it. Now brace yourself for the second part:

Everything done right at the Kentucky Derby was done wrong in the American Election of 2020.

I watched every single minute of the Kentucky Derby. There was not one second excluded from live video. That’s not what happened during the 2020 election.

Here’s a photo of the absentee ballot counting facility in Detroit. This image was taken during ballot counting. There’s no reason on God’s green earth to block the view and a million reasons why it looks corrupt.

If the Kentucky Derby blocked the view of the race then someone announced an 80:1 longshot completely nuked the other 19 horses would you believe it?

Here’s the announcement of a pause in counting absentee ballots in Georgia. The famous water main break:

Here’s an image of a suitcase full of ballots being counted during the time when election observers were sent home and counting was said to be stopped. I can presume you’ve already seen videos and images of this event.

Dozens of events were sketchy during the actual campaign too. We call campaigns a “race” but they are sloppy and pathetic compared to the Kentucky Derby; our elections, in comparison, are hopelessly corrupt.

The image below is a fact that emerged during the election. You’re looking at the Presidential Candidate’s son with a crack pipe in his mouth:

The press called it misinformation. They said it wasn’t true. But it was true.

That’s the thing that makes the 2020 election a complete disaster. A year and a half later and we’re still getting confirmation that bullshit happened. What was called  “misinformation” before the election is absolutely completely undeniably known to be true after the election.

51 “intelligence experts” claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation. They made this claim publicly in writing before the election. Now that the election is over, it’s is a known fact that every single one of them lied.

Let me repeat this known and undeniable fact because it’s important; I could watch the Kentucky Derby and see every damn hoofbeat frame by frame if I wish. But during an American election campaign 51 “intelligence experts” all collectively lied. One single event like that would ruin horseracing pari-mutuel betting for decades and yet we watched it happen in a presidential election. This was not one or two bad apples. It’s 51 of the motherfuckers. They all lied. I can’t get 51 people to agree on the best pizza topping but the press got 51 of them to sign their names on the record to an actual verifiable lie.

The FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop and somehow “lost” it. A law enforcement agency is supposed to manage chain of custody of evidence. “We lost it?” Really? That’s pure bullshit.

Of course, lies only last so long. The data is out there now and everyone has a copy. But the corruption accomplished what the corruption was meant to accomplish. They maintained the lie before the election (when it mattered) and only admitted the truth after the election when the truth is a moot point.

What does the press say about the situation that they created and pushed? Whoops… it was true after all.

What about the race itself?

Candidate Trump went everywhere, racking up huge audiences. There were boat parades and full stadiums. Here’s Trump in Duluth, Minnesota:

Here’s Trump campaigning in Jacksonville, Florida:

Here’s his campaign in Swanton, Ohio:

There are literally hundreds and hundreds of photos of Trump in front of huge happy crowds all during the campaign. Usually one or two packed arenas per week.

I personally saw a Trump rally. It was exactly like all the photos. Huge audience, happy people, His Orangeness sounded exactly the same at the rally as he does on video. (For both good and bad, the dude appears to love it. He could do a campaign speech to Penguins in an earthquake on top of a volcano and I think he’d rock that audience too.)

Just as I personally verified Trump’s… um… Trumpness, I could have gone to Kentucky and personally watched the Kentucky Derby.

I couldn’t do that with Candidate Biden. Biden “ran” most of his race from his basement. A schmuck like me wouldn’t get into his few and very closely controlled events. I’ve personally seen Trump and I’ve personally seen Trump crowds. I’ve never personally seen Biden and (in the last few months at least) I’m having a hard time fining people who are happy to have voted for him.

Here’s Biden with his basement in the background.

When Biden finally left the basement, he looked exactly like someone losing a race. Here’s Biden’s campaign in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s barely got enough people there to field a softball team. This is the candidate that is said to have gotten more votes than any other candidate in history:

Here’s Biden’s campaign in Pembroke Pines, Florida. You could feed that crowd with two large pizzas. I’ve personally had more people in my house. This is the candidate that is said to have gotten more votes than any other candidate in history:

I watched the votes get tallied on election day; you did too. I watched the election results come in and it looked pretty straightforward, just like the Kentucky Derby race. I went to bed at midnight having watched Trump’s solid win. I woke up the next day to a different result. The Kentucky Derby didn’t “restate” who won its horse race. America restated it in very special and select places where it was statistically um… necessary.

Within hours of the election’s weird and unprecidented overnight shutdown, the new results in the morning started showing up as images like this. You’ve seen them too. You can find dozens of such images. It’s a pattern found to the largest degree in states where it was important that Biden win. Here’s an image from Wisconsin:

Here’s an image from Michigan:

Those charts became a meme:

A weird chart might have a reasonable explanation but it surely doesn’t smell good. Mixed with every other sort of shenanigan during counting (covered windows, counts that paused for no reason, counts that shift in huge strange ways) it has the undeniable appearance of bullshit. Even if there’s a great reason for dozens of really weird results all in very key locations, it looks incredibly shady. Nobody sane would invest in a company that had financial records like that.

If Kentucky Derby races had finish lines like the election results, there would be no more Kentucky Derby. If you go to bed thinking Horse A won and wake up to find Horse B won, you’d call bullshit. You’d never place a bet again.

Speaking of bullshit, a few months after the sketchy election pissed everyone off, there was a Time magazine article about how the campaign was “fortified”. Obviously, it was published after the election:

After a while and some diligent research we started seeing videos of “vote mules”. These are people who are illegally casting more than one vote. Here’s a mule in a purple dress voting more than once… which is illegal. A person with different political views than mine might get all pissed off about it, but nobody can deny it at least looks like cheating. It smells like cheating. It sounds like cheating. This is a video of someone stuffing ballots in a ballot box. It’s a video of a felony:

Here’s another video of a bald guy voting more than once. It’s really hard to construe this as anything other than cheating and a felony. In this case there’s a license plate visible. The plate is evidence, of who is doing the ballot stuffing and it’s caught on tape; along with the actual crime taking place:

I could go on. I could link ten times as many images and endless bits of evidence and statistical anomalies. You’ve seen the same information as me. You’ve seen the images. You watched the vote tally change enormously in the middle of the night. You saw the vote counting stop in the middle of the night and then restart with vastly different results. You’ve seen the vote count charts. You’ve seen the mule videos. You’ve seen the Hunter Biden photos. You read the same Time magazine article.

Does any of that sound, look, or smell like the Kentucky Derby race?

I suppose someone could very carefully try to refute all the evidence but by bit. Suppose it’s all crazy right wing bullshit; even if that was all stipulated to be true, it still indicates an election that looks exactly like a cheat. The appearance of impropriety is exactly what the Kentucky Derby avoided. The Kentucky Derby was done right. The American election of 2020 was a complete and utter fuck up that we will remember for the rest of our lives.

Lets go even further. Does anyone believe the best horse won an honest race for president? Has Joe Biden led like a man who earned his position? Has he gotten good results? Do people seem to accept him as the de factor president of the United States? Does he have the popularity ratings that would go with the highest vote tally in history?

The Kentucky Derby convinced me that 80:1 longshot Rich Strike honestly won a fair race. The American press convinced me that Joe Biden did not win. I wouldn’t believe an 80:1 horse race if it had that much bad evidence any more than I believe Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history.

Everything done right at the Kentucky Derby was done wrong in the American Election of 2020. I wish we cared enough about clean politics as we did a horse race.

I’ll wrap this up with a photo of Joe Biden shaking hands with nobody:

Something cool happened Saturday. I recommend you take time to simply enjoy what I’m about to talk about. Don’t let the moment go by. It’s too easy to be distracted by mundane shit and miss excellence when it’s not shoved in front of your nose. Take time to freebase the roses!

While normal people were settling in for a happy mothers’ day weekend and abnormal ones were getting all frothed up to commit mayhem against Supreme Court Justices, the Kentucky derby happened. The press was busy advocating fighting the Russians down to the last Ukrainian and the Ministry of Information is busily punishing all why don’t toe the line about “penumbras” which “emanate”. And Biden said… look squirrel…

Amid Rome’s continued decline, the Kentucky Derby happened like it was managed by adults. It happened on time, on budget, as planned, and without drama. It’s a reminder we were once a civilized people who could do civilized things.

I don’t generally care about horse racing, but I’m happy someone does. A world where people had horses and didn’t race them would be unspeakably sad. For that matter, I’m a man and therefore think that virtually anything that moves can and should be raced. Only wimps and vegans disagree.

This time the race was extra special. Twenty horses run in the big event. Each year there’s a few with a shot at the big win but the rest are destined to never make it further than they are now; like Bernie Sanders at a Democratic primary. Everyone knows this. Pari-mutuel betting is as close to a “free market” as any and it ruthlessly cuts the shit. It’s rarely “incorrect”.

Yet this year a horse won against very long odds. (I think it was the biggest upset since 1913 or something.) This horse, which virtually nobody cared about, came from the back of the pack and curb stomped all competition like Godzilla with an attitude. It was amazing!

A horse paying at 80:1 won! (For the pendants reading, I’ve seen reports, that it was 73:1 but Forbes tells me that a $2 bet would have had a $163.60 payoff, which smells like 80:1 to me.)

When a horse pays like that you’ve seen something improbable and, in this case, awesome. I watched the race and then re-watched it several times (it’s only a two minute race).

It. Was. Beautiful.

You simply must see it. Grim’s Hall has a link to a good video. There are others. All are awesome. This one benefits from “after the fact” arrows pointing out where the action is happening. The first few videos I watch lacked that and I had to watch a few times just to understand what I was seeing. Stop right now and watch it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DsQyMvPwtg

Words don’t do it justice. It helps to know what you’re looking at; especially if you watch the whole race; which I recommend. (It’s a 2 minute race, has our attention span eroded so much that 2 minutes of flat out running horses is too boring?)

Horse #21 is named Rich Strike and the jockey has a red helmet. At the start of the race look wayyyyyy in the back. The real action starts back in the loser section, amid the horses that skipped leg day and the jockeys that smoke. Our, as yet unnoticed, hero starts out there and then something snaps and he goes into beast mode!

The horses at the front of the pack were having a fine race already. They were tearing the place up. They truly set a blistering pace. It was a fast tract this weekend. If any of the leaders had won, it would have been pretty cool to watch.

But the dial goes to eleven around halfway through. Some of the horses are slowing down from just plain rocking the first half and meanwhile Rich Strike is surging past them one at a time. In the last quarter… something magic happens. And that’s the best I can describe it. Grit? Full on brutal insanity? I’ve no idea where that horse reached to find the extra strength and spirit, but it pulled up a fucking tornado. Rich Strike got something in his equine head and was going to get what is best in life.

I’m not a horse racing fan. Maybe I miss the subtle nuances. But by God I loved this race. Rich Strike comes out of mid pack like a fuckin’ dragon. The horse doesn’t want to win… it wants to kill. That horse had a direct line to Valhalla. The damn horse could see it. It was going to go past, over, around, or through anything in its way.

Here’s a different video I cued to start at 1:40. Look for a red hat jockey mounted on pure hell. He’s coming in on the inside and practically runs over the ass of the third place horse. Does Rich Strike slow down? Hell no, he moves to the outside and blows his opponent’s doors off. That pass is an amazing feat of man and animal. After that, it does some sort of supernatural turbo boost to gain the lead:

The jockey was no slouch either. In a pack of athletes, all of which were going for broke, Rich Strike’s jockey did shit that would be sketchy on a liter class sport bike. I’m not much of a horse rider so I hardly know what I was seeing. All I can say is I was impressed. He squeezed into places he couldn’t fit and bludgeoned his way into places smaller than that. And the horse was totally on board with this… if it had a knife it would have stabbed its way to the front.

The front horses had been trading the lead in a righteous battle of their own. They didn’t see the cruise missile with a jockey coming up their tailpipe until it was too late. Nor did anyone slack off. Rich Strike gained the lead and pushed until it won by half a length. I was practically jumping up and down just watching the YouTube video. I wouldn’t have been surprised if horse and rider had exploded as they crossed the line.

It’s not often you see such completely unfettered competition. That is what adds heart to life! To see an upset like that makes me smile. Rich Strike was pure determination wrapped in excellence and something clicked such that the beast detonated during the competition. Well done!

There is glory in excellence. Don’t let clingy socialist losers tell you anything different. Shifting student loan debts or whining about masks will never get the blood pumping like watching a horse charge into Valhalla!

A.C.

P.S. There will be a second part, but you shouldn’t wait for my bullshit. Instead just watch every camera angle of the marvelous race.

Note: After Rich Strike finished completely obliterating everything in his path, it took a bit of doing to calm him down. There’s a video of that here. A few pansies and dipshits are whining that it was bad but I see it differently. From the horse’s point of view it had just run the greatest chase it would ever experience. It probably had no idea if it was in Valhalla or Kentucky. It probably had no idea the race was over. It was on an adrenaline high and it was a bit unhinged for a minute. So be it! If you watched the last 30 seconds of that race you know what the creature was doing and how hard it was trying. No horse, perhaps no being, can switch from that close to God to fat flabby American on a couch without a struggle. If you don’t get what I’m talking about, keep watching Netflix because you’ve never run on your own ragged edge and will never understand. Loser!

I haven’t mentioned how much I hate the AMC Gremlin for a while. Does this mean I’ve mellowed? Have I allowed distance and time to soften the edges? Have I changed my mind? Hell no! I still hate ‘em!

I watched this review and was flooded with all the bad memories of AMC cars. It’s easy to forget the complete and utter level of suck that only Detroit and the cars of the oil embargo could produce. If you weren’t there to see it for yourself you simply must witness the fullness of the AMC’s Godawful majesty. Enjoy!

Given the same stimuli, different people will do different things.* Faced with a reduction in the sophistication, resiliency, and efficiency of society, I’m trying to “get my vehicular shit together”.

I came up with a name for it; “project daily driver”. (Not a creative name but I’ve been busy. Throw me a bone.)

A “daily driver” is a machine you can fire up and use right now without drama. If you’ve got a rusty Civic that you drove to work Tuesday and you’re confident it’ll be able to get you to work on Wednesday and thereafter without immediate issues, then it’s a daily driver… even if the radio is broke. For a daily driver, all the important shit is “good enough”, tires, engine, etc…

In 2022 I’m trying to level up so all of my machines are a daily drivers. I’ve never done this before.

Rural redneck cheapskates like me have many non-daily drivers in our lives. One variant is “I can jump start it when the snow melts”. Worse versions are “I’ll fix it someday” and “a tree fell on it but it’s still basically salvageable”. (Note: chainsaws that only start after much swearing or lawnmowers that are always throwing a belt are examples of non-daily drivers.)

Project daily driver isn’t a common reaction to modern times. I take it as a given that inflation, supply chain disruption (either by design or stupidity), and a teetering society drives a moment of action. That which can be done in 2022 is less than can be done in 2019. Will the trend continue in 2023? Who knows? I don’t know. You don’t know. We all have our guesses though. I’m acting on my guesses.

I made the leap from $5 gas and “parts that come from China are routinely stolen from container trains in LA” to “I’d better get my daily driver tuned up”. That’s my opinion. Your choices are yours to make.

The popular alternative is denial; “this inflation is transitory”, “things will get back to ‘normal’ once everyone has a vax”. I suppose another alternative is to freak out; “Musk bought Twitter, free speech is violence!”, “the Supreme court may rule in a way I don’t like, this is the worst thing in the history of all things that suck!” Preppers (at least of the simplest sort) have a steady state. They “stack ammo and gold!” But when does a prepper not stack ammo and metals? Do they stop doing it in good times? In bad? During inflation? During shortages? When do they sell the precious metals they’ve been stacking? What will they buy with it… more ammo?

Me, I want my machines fixed while I still can. I have (limited) access to (almost) competent mechanics, parts are (mostly) in stock, and I can still use greenbacks (of ever decreasing value) to buy both things.

There’s a problem with this. I have never ever managed to have all my machines running reliably at the same time. Most of my life I’ve owned shit. Fixing shit is a way of life. You’re never really done… you’re likely to spend decades treading water.

Also it’s tempting fate to have too many things running at once. Fixing a piece of shit car just means your piece of shit tractor breaks. If you fix the car and the tractor simultaneously, it just means your roto-tiller will catch on fire. There is no winning. In my life I’ve had a certain percentage of my mechanical stuff functioning and it’s always <100%.

Yet that’s my goal right now. I’m tempting fate. I’m burning cash. I’m giving it a shot.

Pray for me!

First step of project daily driver: 

I just got my cruiser running. I have a 20+ year old Honda cruiser that’s (as far as I’m considered) “good as new”. Ok that’s a bit optimistic. It’s not really new and it has 10x the miles that the average bar crawler would have put on one of similar age, but it’s not mechanically fucked either.

It’s a simple machine and I didn’t hot rod it. So it’s been amazingly reliable for me. There’s a lesson in this!

Anyway, when I bought my little Yamaha TW200 stump jumper I got distracted. The cruiser was ignored. It never left the garage in 2021. That’s bad! I have sinned. I must repent and atone for my bad behavior.

I started by shoveling through he wall of ice that blocks my garage. It’s still waist high!

Then I addressed the battery which (as predicted) is deader than a door nail. I’d like to be one of those guys that wisely and carefully maintains all their equipment batteries, but I’m just not that cool. I had a battery maintainer but it broke; I meant to replace it and then… didn’t.

I assumed I’d need a new battery (which is a bitch because this bike takes a weird size) but I put it on my charger and the charger resurrected it. I have a sophisticated charger with all sorts of features. It can’t fix all toasted batteries but it can coax life from some that I’d assumed were long dead. Go charger! (I’ll have the battery tested and replace if needed… it’s a daily driver after all!)

I assumed I’d left the carbs all gummed up but they sounded ok. A wise man runs the carbs dry before shutting down. I didn’t remember doing that but maybe I did. Yay me!

Then came the tank. Any gas that’s been sitting 2 years is shit. Especially the modern witches brew they call gas. But I opened her up and it looks like I topped off to the rim with gas. I think it had Sta-Bil in it!

It took a few cranks but eventually she fired. No tools needed!

Holy shit! I never have that kind of luck!

There’s more! I remembered the rear tire was shot. I planned to buy a new tire. But I looked at it and the tire looks fairly new. It’s fine.

She ran pretty well and I took her to a garage for routine maintenance and to check on the electric fan (which I recall didn’t work). I’m waiting on word about that. If I’m lucky I’ll have it up and running to daily driver level for a couple hundred bucks.

Yahoo!

Gift from past self:

This is a gift from my past self. Back in 2020 I must have swapped in a new tire, topped it off with fresh stabilized gas, and run the carbs dry. How awesome is that? I’d like to go back in time and thank myself. It’s like a magic gift from motorcycle Santa… but it’s really a gift to me / from me!

In case you’re wondering, I plan a 3-5K mile road trip this summer. Not anywhere photogenic or fun, just a place I’ve got to go so I can do a thing that needs doing. But gas is expensive so I’m going on 2 wheels. Why not? There’s no reason to sit at home bitching about fuel prices now that I’ve got a high MPG daily driver! Plus, motorcycles are fun.

Anyway, that’s my lucky day. How’re y’all doing?

A.C.

*This is why socialism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism always fail. All force “one size fits all” solutions on human beings. Humans aren’t widgets, they’re varied. If you like vanilla ice cream and I like chocolate and the guy across the street likes strawberry, socialists would force us to fight it out. In the end, we’d all get banana flavored ice cream and be forced to pretend we like it. The strawberry guy would get his teeth kicked in as a lesson to the rest of us. Chocolate ice cream would be a black market luxury good. It would be smuggled in from some better place and served to politically powerful people who enjoy it more because I can’t have any. The vanilla guy would be allergic to bananas and break out in hives. Also the banana ice cream would have dogshit mixed in, because the people’s ice cream factory is run by people who are basically serfs. Beaten workers who don’t care about ice cream would get paid the same even if there’s a dog living in the mixing plant.

[Warning, the first few paragraphs went off the rails but I left them anyway. Feel free to fast forward to the horizontal rule below.]

Politics has gone from stupid to cosmically hyper-panicked AND galactically stupid. We all knew it was coming… or that it’s here. But does it have to be so… obviously dumb? Regardless, we shouldn’t let it into our heads.

I’m going to try to avoid bullshit today. I’m going to talk about something totally unrelated; camping gear! It isn’t deep but at least it’s a thing that doesn’t belly flop into the gravity well of impossibility. Seriously, I just have to say this because I can’t hold it in; none of us should be dumb enough to volunteer to get mired in bullshit like what’s happening now. “What is truth”? No sweat Plato, humanity has haggled over this since the first smelly apelike dude drew a mastodon on a cave wall… but we’ll handle it in 2022 as a reaction to Twitter having opposing viewpoints? “It’s all fixed, just fill out a form and the government will tell you what’s true.” Wow!

Who do we hire to know what is true? A lefty Fed of course! The Office of Personnel Management will follow that up by evaluating requests to get into heaven.

It’s a kind of dumb we didn’t used to see. Not long ago, people would be embarrassed to get that flaky. A government bureaucracy to determine which statements are true and which are “disinformation” is dumb on a level with… I don’t know, cutting your dick off or something. Which, now that I think about, has gone from a punchline to a thing schools suggest for children.

What’s next? I suspect the committee to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin has already drawn up plans.

Also, I’m sick of the word “misinformation”! The word is “lie” or “false” and for fuck’s sake, no organization can unerringly recognize truth any more than it can recognize beauty. “Trust us, we can only tell truth.” Really? That sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot device. “Smooth move Deckard, you whacked the replicant and are now twisted up about the meaning of humanity… you’re a fuckin’ cyborg aren’t you?” Modern politics has made Philip K. Dick relevant to daily life! The monsters!

People are struggling with concepts normal adults understood long ago. The Department of Misinformation will be followed by the Bureau of the Easter Bunny. People who never stopped being an eight year old shouldn’t be at the adult’s table.

Damn… fell off the wagon there. Sorry.

Well fuck it, I’m not deleting it.

Anyway, I’m on a kick with gasoline / white gas camping gear lately. I didn’t really organize my thoughts so it became a bunch of posts. In lieu of some clever arrangement, here’s the links in reverse order:

• Camping Discussion: WIN!
• Camping Gear Discussion: Photos & Testing
• Camping Gear Discussion: Restoring Old Friends And Buying Their New Counterparts

I just tested out my new Coleman Powerhouse Dual Fuel lantern. (Link goes to Amazon, if you buy from the link I get a haypenny kickback.) Unlike the dual fuel single burner campstove, which appears to be made of unobtanium, the lanterns seem to exist. Though even that is weird. I searched all over, found two and only two in a single brick and mortar store. I bought one and left one for some other lucky person and thought that I had something rare. Alas, I’d have gotten a better deal on Amazon. Whoops!

So what? I spent an extra five bucks, who cares?

Do I like it? I love it!

Do I recommend it? NO!

Unlike stoves, which must burn something to generate enough heat to make your morning coffee, modern pure-electronic lighting options are just so darned good that a lantern is only worth it if you enjoy it for it’s own sake. For most purposes, something made of batteries and LEDs is better for nearly any situation.

I freely admit I bought the lantern, unlike the stove, for illogical and romantic notions. I wanted a lantern like I used to have because they’re a happy memory to me. I’m Gen X, I wanted a hot, burning, hunk of explosive materials. If you’re Gen Z you’re probably thinking I’m nuts. You also probably harbor happy thoughts about your Nintendo Wii. To each his own!

Anyway, I didn’t get a free carrying case like the Amazon link. It kinda’ sucks I didn’t get a case, but then again I don’t like the Coleman cases that much. I’m already stuffing my stove in a coffee can, I’ll figure out something for the lantern in due time.

Lanterns (of these sort) need mantles. It came with a two pack in the box. I’ve got a few spares hanging around somewhere. Mantles are delicate so always have a spare set.

Burning off mantles is the weirdest process. It’s like voodoo, but it works.

The lantern came with a special funnel. So did the stove. I’ve never had a decent funnel. In all my years back in the old days when I used Coleman lanterns and stoves all the time, I was the third or fifth or tenth owner of a rusty old thing. The funnel was long gone. I’d spill gas on everything. The funnel does make a difference.

Another photo before the mantles are burned off. In case you’re wondering, I was indeed smart enough to tank it up, seal it up and do a leak test, and only then did I dink around with matches burning in the mantles. You just know someone has lit mantles while pouring fuel. They probably burned their eyebrows off.

Fuel lasts longer than it seems to when using propane. I’ve done many pots of coffee on the stove and refueled it a few times as part of the testing process. I wasted half the can trying to revive my old lantern and stove last fall. And now I’ve filled up a bone dry lantern. Yet, I’ve still got plenty left.

If I’d done the same with propane one pound cans I’d have a small pile of them accumulated somewhere. (Actually I do have a pile of 1# propane cans, I use them on my Mr. Heater while hunting or doing other cold weather things.) Anyway this is a genuine “pre-soaring gas prices” can. I’ll mourn it when it’s gone.

And there she is! Once it was lit up like a friggin’ monument to old school camping I just couldn’t stop smiling. For many practical reasons, a battery and LEDs is the far superior way to go. But there’s something more to the universe.

A few people own horses in a world that has the Honda Civic. They don’t think a horse is better than a car, except on a different level it’s vastly superior to sit in a leather saddle on a big smelly animal.

It’s good to enjoy something simply because you like it. I’m sure the Ministry or Truth will declare my statement invalid, but they’re just plain wrong.