Ironies

- I read that 22 of the states that have outlawed texting while driving offer some type of service that allows you to receive live traffic updates to your cell phone...

- I saw that a restaurant will soon be opening in San Francisco (United States) that is going to call itself a Brasserie...

OK...I have to add an edit as I am told that the irony of an American restaurant calling itself Brasserie has been missed. The irony is in the definition of brasserie plus that fact that the place is in the United States. You see, a brasserie is "an unpretentious restaurant" IN FRANCE! In the US, a brasserie is a pretentious restaurant, or at the very least, a pretentiously named restaurant. Have I made my point?

OK... A final word on this subject as someone has now told me that they could come up with lots of ironies that are better than these ironies. To this is I say "so what?". These were just a couple of ironies that struck me one day and so I jotted them down. This post was written more in the spirit of a tweet as opposed to being a literary composition on Irony with a capital I. Please look at my blog. This is not literature. It's confessions from the research department.

Motorcycles- Part II

I said that I had covered all of my motorcycles except the Suzuki's. I know as I am posting this that the picture is too big for the page but it is the closest thing I could find to the first Suzuki I owned. The GS 1100. I believe it was an '82 or an '84. It looked exactly like this one except I don't think it had the square headlight. Check it out though. Mostly just engine and tires. It was the fastest stock motorcycle on earth for a while. This was my first scary-fast motorcycle. Back then I was fearless and the fact that it was scary-fast escaped me. By the way, this will be the last post on motorcycle's I've owned. I think there was just one other; a green Suzuki GS 550. Now that I think about it, it was kind of embarrassing. It had ape hanger bars (blush). Nuff said about that one.

If I Had a Ton of Money and a 10 Car Garage...#3

Suzuki Hayabusa. This is the bike that I went into the motorcycle shop to purchase back in 2007 but I walked out with the Ducati instead. I can't help it. I'm attracted to Italian motorcycles! The Hayabusa currently shares the title for fastest stock bike on earth with the Kawasaki ZX14 Ninja. I believe that both are electronically limited at 189 MPH! The salesman told me there are ways to get around that governor. He said that he has done 212 MPH on his. Nice!

If I Had a Ton of Money and a 10 Car Garage...#2

Yamaha V Max. I remember when it came out back in the early '80's. I had just bought a Suzuki GS 1100. This V Max dethroned my GS as the fastest stock bike on earth. It kinda pissed me off. What a total beast the V Max was and is. I believe the one in the photo is the 2009 model. It's the first major upgrade to the V Max since it came out back in the early '80's. It's still the same basic concept. Sit atop massive engine. Go!

If I Had a Ton of Money and a 10 Car Garage... #1

It's a Ural. It's Russian. The side car is standard equipment.
My understanding is that the Russians stole the engine design from BMW during WWII. They are still using the basic 1940's BMW engine to make these. I can see at least one upgrade since I last checked these bikes out. A single front disk brake! When I saw these bikes about 10 years ago (there was a dealership in Sacramento back then) they still had the old drum brakes. What fun this would be!

Motorcycles

I've owned a few motorcycles in my life...


This is my current ride. It is fun. Not my favorite of all time, but fun. Scary fast.



The 1998 V11 EV was definitely one of my favorite bikes of all time. There is nothing like a Moto Guzzi. This is a torque beast. I would definitely like to have another one of these. Unfortunately this one got hit by a car out on the 50. It got torn up pretty good (so did I).



I had a '74 Harley Sprint. It was my first motorcycle. It looked much like the one in the photo above except mine had flames on the tank! This was a piece of shit. If not for this experience with this particular bike, who knows; I may have wound up a Harley guy. But after this, I never owned another Harley.




This 250 CC Bombardier (found online) does not do justice to the Can Am Bombardier that I owned back in the early '80's. Mine was in excellent condition. Yellow. 400 CC's. Some time I will blog about the time I rode it into my apartment while alluding the police during a minor police chase one night in Sacramento...

As a footnote, Can Am is a Canadian manufacturer and they make 4 runner type vehicles as well as those cool looking 3 wheel motor cycles that you see around now and then. In fact, they call one of those the Bombardier.




This is very close to what my Yamaha looked like. I believe that the one pictured is a 175. Mine was a 200. What a blast this bike was. I have a hilarious police chase story for this bike too. Another time...

This is all of them , except for 2 Suzuki's. I will do another post about them another time.

Photo & Article from WIRED Magazine...

In an age of biotechnological juicing, not even the easygoing pastime of fishing is free from controversies over artificial enhancement.

On September 5, Saskatchewan fisherman Sean Konrad caught a 48-pound, world-record rainbow trout. The fish came from Lake Diefenbaker, where trout genetically engineered to grow extra-big escaped from a fish farm nine years ago.

The previous world record was held by Sean’s twin brother Adam, who pulled a 43-pound, 10-ounce rainbow trout from Lake Diefenbaker in 2007. That catch sparked online debate over the legitimacy of Lake Diefenbaker’s farm-born, genetically-engineered rainbows. Technically known as triploids, they’re designed with three sets of chromosomes, making them sterile and channeling energies normally spent reproducing towards growth.

In 2007, on a message board of the International Game Fish Association, the angling world’s record- and ethics-keeping body, some fishermen argued that triploids were unnatural, as divorced from the sport’s history as Barry Bonds’ home runs were from Hank Aaron’s.

The IGFA refused to make a distinction between natural and GM fish. Neither would they distinguish between species caught in their traditional waters and those introduced into new, growth-friendly environments, such as largemouth bass whose extra-large ancestors were imported from Florida to California in the 1960s.

But to purists, there was a difference between transplantation and outright manufacture.

The Konrad brothers’ response on the message board was curt: “Stop crying and start fishing.”

Now they’ve caught another record-breaking trout. Or have they?