SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

[dr_bar]

Definitely a totally masculine pursuit...


http://www.bigbuckclub.com/images/cover-only.jpg

[Wrider]

Lol I'm very good at starting up these discussions aren't I?
And honestly SV I'm still going to have to disagree with you on a lot of those points. Personally I own 3 firearms, used to be 5. All three are multi-use. First and foremost, they are mainly recreational. Hey, it's better than standing around looking ridiculous in pads and a facemask with a paddle trying to hit a ball that's trying to knock down three sticks standing behind you right?
Secondly they are for hunting. Yes I realize that hunting caused the problem it's now fixing, but the prey animals are over-populating because there are so few predatory animals left. Colorado has the largest elk population in the US, and honestly if a decent number of animals weren't taken every year there would be starvation en masse. It's been proven repeatedly by the government trying to limit hunting. Why do I use firearms to hunt instead of a bow and arrow or maybe a knife? First off I'm not sneaky enough to get that close to an elk. Secondly it ensures a good kill if the shot is proper (basic rule of hunting).
Thirdly, it's fun to make a big bang and make stuff disappear. Toilets, clay pigeons, punching super-accurate holes in paper at 300 yards (or meters, whatever you prefer.)
I don't even own a handgun for self defense. I used to own one, but I used it as a backup weapon while hunting and for recreation.

Oh, and as for the masculinity comment, my sister is a better shot with a handgun than I am!

Point is that it's not a gun-reliant culture, guns are a part of the culture, and a very treasured part at that. We like our guns, we like to make things go boom, and we like flavor in our foods... Different strokes for different folks, ya socialists!

[blues2cruise]

We have so called gun control in this country.....and a gun registry.....

Fat lot of goos it does.....there are so many shootings here now that it's getting scary.

The gangs have guns....and use them for unsavoury purposes......I somehow doubt that their guns are registered.

It's the honest folks who would never do harm in the first place that have their firearms registered.

I think I should move to GB. Sounds safer.

[blues2cruise]

and we like flavor in our foods... Different strokes for different folks, ya socialists!

I'm not sure hot sauce qualifies as flavour.

[MZ33]

That's a specious argument

Oh, Wolf, you and your "specious"! It is not meant as an argument, dear man, it is an explanation. As for history being history, it's not that easy. Cultures do not change overnight. The idea of gun laws 100 years ago would have been met with something more than NRA opposition: it would have been met with a sense of horror. Look at what we've gone through to establish racial equality, and how long it has taken. The fact that the NRA had to organize at all says something.

I also wonder if arcane facts come into play. For instance, your history started out without guns. Moved through the bronze age to bows and arrows, chivalry, etc. Our culture superimposed itself on another culture because it had guns. I personally suspect that those kinds of evolution, and I'm including the land ownership thing, form deep in a culture's psyche. We've never been without guns.

For the record: I would be happy to have handguns & assault weapons banned for all purposes, and hunting weapons registered. But it is a deep cultural issue for us, it is a mammoth undertaking, and we have bigger fish to fry. Trust me, we would come up with other ways to kill each other. Ever hear of Lizzie Borden?

Okay, to make it about bikes. Hmm, let's see. Helmet laws, anyone?

Any overuse/abuse of the word "culture" are strictly convenient and entirely my fault.

[sv-wolf]

Woooooah! Whooah! Whoah! I can't keep up.


Apologies MZ - That 'specious' was not aimed at you or your comments but at arguments of a particular kind that are frequently made by the gun lobby to justify the continuance of the status quo.

One last time: how can I put this? Unless the material conditions which give rise to a tradition persist, then that tradition tends to die. We are actually very practical creatures. If those conditions don't persist, there has to be some other ongoing reason for that tradition to continue. Usually, it means someone or some segment of society has a vested interest in keepin things as they are. Tradition is not a passive process; it has to be actively maintained and passed on from generation to generation; it involves choice.

(Very few things are actually traditional. The concept of 'tradition' itself was created in the UK in the nineteenth-century for political purposes. Before that time no-one had even imagined there were such things as 'traditions'. Since then the British establishment have been creating traditions like it was an industrial process. I don't think the English Tourist Board would thank me for saying this but most people still don't realise, for example, that the houses of parliament (including Big Ben) at Westminister were designed and built about 160 years ago, and that most of the bizarre 'medieval' ceremonies that go on in them are even more recent in origin.)

When an institution like the gun lobby states that the U.S. has a long and proud history of bearing arms they are not simply making a statement of (assumed) fact, but using a technique designed to actively influence people's behaviour. Tell people that something is embedded so deeply in their culture that it would not be easy to change it, and they will stop trying. Give the statement some emotional content and it works ten times as well. It is a technique well known to the PR industry, hypnotherapists and Buddhist monks (!?!). It is also frequently used by media editors and by politicians to control public opinion and by pressure groups to promote their point of view. Edward Bernays, the founder of the PR industry is very interesting on this subject.

Now, please understand, I'm not saying that your comments here on TMW are going to perpetuate gun crime in the US for ever and a day. (it would be nice to think we had so many members on the boards or that much influence), but exactly this kind of (yes, thoroughly 'specious' ) argument/technique is commonly used (consciously or unconsciously) by the gun lobby to promote its views.

History is not just history. It is always chosen (constructed) at any particular time by particular power groups to have a particular effect. Ther is nothing particularly controversial about this idea. History, as is often said, is written by the victors. The history of wartime Britain was written to present an image of a society where the interests of government, industry and people where all in harmony and everyone worked together for the common good. The history of the War of Independence was written for the same purpose, to create an image of a nation rising as one and heroically throwing off an oppressor. Both histories are false because both societies are, in fact, riven with internal conflicts of interest - an idea that is not good for business or for patriotic sentiment and must therefore be squashed!

Phew! OK unless you poke me in the eye with a stick or start calling me names, that will be my last outpouring on the subject. My attempt to write up an account of what is going on with the Daytona is fading more and more into the distance.

I'm afraid , though, you willl have to forgive me for my 'specious-ness,'. I was educated in linguistic philosophy - that was many years ago, I hasten to add - before I realised there were more entertaining things to do in life. Is this fact beginning to show? I fear so. I'm beginning to feel like someone who has just realised his trousers are falling down and he's been displaying what in the UK is known as 'builders' crack".

[sv-wolf]

Lol I'm very good at starting up these discussions aren't I?

You certainly are!

Where can I send my bill for time wasted????

Secondly they are for hunting. Yes I realize that hunting caused the problem it's now fixing, but the prey animals are over-populating because there are so few predatory animals left. :

Not sure what your point is. You can register guns in this country for sporting purposes. The differences in the way guns are used in the UK and US lie elsewhere. When you commiserated with 'us' on UK gun laws I don't think this is what you had in mind.

Colorado has the largest elk population in the US, and honestly if a decent number of animals weren't taken every year there would be starvation en masse. It's been proven repeatedly by the government trying to limit hunting. :

To be honest, I'm not convinced by the necessity for shooting elk. Or, put it this way, if it is true, then some enterprising American is missing out on a big market opportunity there. Not like you guys!

...guns are a part of the culture, and a very treasured part at that. We like our guns, we like to make things go boom, and we like flavor in our foods... Different strokes for different folk...

LOL is this the royal we? (Is there a hidden monarchist in there, somewhere? ) Not everyone in the US agrees, but as long as the U.S. exists as a separate political entity then yes, thankfully, this is an American problem. I see it the same way as you: horses for courses - so the longer the problem stays on your side of the Atlantic, the better.

ya socialists!

Socialists? Where? For all I know Lizzie (our own dear queen!) dislikes American gun laws. Nowt socialist about that, or if there is I've been badly misinformed.

[noodlenoggin]

Wow, all of those words about Americans and our guns... theories, cultural whatnot, rationalizations, justifications... Wow...sheesh!

I can sum up our guns really easily:

We Americans are a bunch of fvcking cowboys who like yelling "whoop whoop" and shooting our six-guns because they're shiny and they go "bang!"

That's it, really. Shiny. Go bang. Whoop-whoop.


Now what's going on with that Daytona?!

[sv-wolf]

Thank you for those words of sanity, noodle, from the university of life. Henceforth I shall include you on my list of wise men to be consulted on all things loud and shiny. (It takes a poet to be able to express these matters so succinctly.)

And I'll take your further advice as well.

The bikes...

First, the Daytona
Putting this as prosaically as possible, the Daytona is sitting idle in my back garden because she has problems with power delivery. She's not charging the battery. I stuck a multimeter on her. The voltage is low, but more to the point it doesn't respond when I rev her. Perhaps the regulator has gone? Perhaps it's something else. I need to know more about these things.

Putting this less prosaically, the Daytona is a big bag of dodo which f*ucks me up every few months with some new problem.

Other than that, she is running beautifully.

Now the SV
The SV, to put this as prosaically as possible, had developed a bothersome rattle in her clutch. And it is getting louder. Also, when I got home from a rideout last Sunday I noticed that the clutch reservoir was pretty much empty. There was also a pile of carbonated gunky stuff all over the engine casing below the slave vale to the hydraulics. This has all happened before. I'm living in a world of deja vu.

Putting this less prosaically, the SV is a great bike but right now I would like get hold of a f*ucking welding torch and eviscerate her.

Other than that, she's a sweet machine and I love her dearly.

The SV is booked into SDC, dealers in Stevenage for some TLC and remedial engineering this coming Thursday. I have to ring OnyerTriumph in Aston Clinton tomorrow (they are closed on Mondays) to arrange to get the Daytona back to them (or for them to come and collect the Daytona) as soon as possibe and certainly before the National Rally on 4th and 5th July.

So there is no chance of me doing any wild spending or partying this month.

The Daytona's story
When I arrived to pick up the Daytona from the dealers in Aston Clinton where I'd taken her for a service last Friday, I was hoping that all my miseries had been soothed away by the healing balm of Jeremy's mechanical genius. And for a while I thought they had. I paid the bill (ouch!), set off down the Aston Clinton High Street, and was immediately wowed by the huge improvement in the Daytona's power delivery. She was like a new bike.

At that moment, I can tell you, Hud was a very happy man. The smile survived all the way down the A41, and didn't even quiver as I wound my way through the ordered chaos of the 'magic roundabout' at Hemel Hempsted. It grew briefly bigger on the long swooping curve to the motorway. And it continued all the way along the M10 till I neared the big roundabout at St Albans. It was then that I first heard the clicking sound.

Before I fully had time to take in what was happening, the digital gauges on the dashboard caught my alarmed attention. As I watched, they fluttered briefly and then died. The empty grey-green surface of a digital screen on a moving bike is a terrible thing to behold. Fifteen seconds later, as I slowed up behind the bunching traffic at the junction, I heard the engine die too. It was a meek and painless death in the larger scale of things, but with that death my smile uncurled at last, and in the spirit of the moment - died. I pulled up onto the last bit of hard shoulder before the roundabout, dismounted, poked at a few exposed bits of wiring half-heartedly and wondered what to do.

You see, I was in something of a pickle.

Earlier that afternoon I'd left work on the courtesy bike (a repro Bonneville) that the dealers had lent me, and rode her over to Aston Clinton as fast as I could in the heavy traffic. I'd been delayed by a meeting that had gone on far, far too long and I was in a blinding hurry to get to the dealers before they closed. In my haste I'd left my document wallet locked in my desk drawer.

This wasn't a big problem - at least, it wasn't a big problem until the Daytona's battery died. It suddenly became a big problem at that moment because it had the telephone number of my insurance rescue service in it. That gave me pause for thought. But as I came to realise, even then, it wasn't perhaps my biggest problem. I only discovered what that was when I tried to ring a friend and found that, perhaps out of some strange electro-mechanical sympathy, the battery in my mobile phone had died too. There was an awful lot of dying going on by the side of the A414 near St Albans that Friday afternoon.

When I considered my situation, I decided that there was one and only one thing I could do, and that was to sit down on the grass by the bike, look miserable and wait.

Fortunately, I had to wait no more than five minutes. While I was looking in the opposite direction, I heard the sound of a big sportsbike pull up behind me.

Enter Trevor.

"You alrite mate?" he said.

Don't you just love bikers?

Not only did Trevor have a mobile phone that worked, but he was also with the same insurance company and had their telephone number handy in his wallet. The insurance company, with consummate efficiency, assured me that someone would be with me within an hour - standard practice. In fact, a mechanic arrived in his van within fifteen minutes. Trevor waited with me all that time - just in case - and in that time we discussed the merits of his R1 and my Daytona. He was a big Triumph fan, he said. I did think about asking him if he wanted to do a swap but thought better of it.

The mechanic poked around with the Daytona's electrics rather more efficiently than I had done, pronounced her no less-decisively as dead and loaded the bike into the back of his van before driving us back to Hitchin.

So, looking on the bright side, if I hadn't broken down I wouldn't have had the opportunity of experiencing fifteen minutes of camaraderie. It was fifteen minutes which restored my faith in humanity - but it tarnished my faith in bikes. Big time!

But I'm largely over that now and am feeling much more at peace.

Now, where's that welding torch!

[fireguzzi]

Trevor's are a helpful people. Glad ya ran into one over there.

Sincerely, Trevor




P.S. I believe I have said this before but I'll say it again, your Daytona is frustrating me. I guess it's the mechanic in me wanting the problem(s) sorted out for good.
( I would accept a video of a flaming mechanical disemboweling too though.)