And now for something completely different…

10 years ago today

This is the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death – an event that transformed my life in ways I’m still discovering.

Mom was living in a retirement home a short distance from my Indianapolis northside condo and seemed to be doing fine. Until the evening of Oct. 5, 2000. She’d gone to bed shortly after dinner and a little later the staff found her dead. She had been increasingly miserable since the death of my father almost three years earlier. She missed him terribly. Then, when she injured herself in a fall and had to be moved from her home of nearly 50 years to a retirement home, she became even more unhappy.

I used to drive the 65 miles to Delphi from Indianapolis every Sunday while she was still living on her own. We’d go out to lunch – usually to a cafeteria in West Lafayette where I was almost always the youngest person in the place – and take a drive. Here’s a photo from one of those drives, a rare occasion when I talked her into riding in my Honda del Sol with the top off rather than in her Buick LeSabre.

As it turned out, the end of her life marked the end of my career with newspapering in Indianapolis. The day after her funeral, I read her will and talked with our attorney and realized I could walk away from my increasingly unpleasant job as a reporter and suburban education writer at The Indianapolis Star. So I did.

Most people don’t get to retire at 55. I would be better off financially today if I hadn’t quit when I did, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the decade of personal freedom. And I know I would have hated every day I stayed as a wage slave in what had become a newspaper factory.

But, you know, I’d trade those 10 years of retirement to have my mother back.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2010 BMW MOA rally in Redmond, Ore.

It was the second ‘MOA rally in Redmond. I attended both.

No surprise here

Liberal ‘One Nation Working Together’ rally leaves Lincoln Memorial ridden with trash, much dirtier than Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment

Yes, I've been to the Florida Keys

Bride of Rove is among my readers and, noting my BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day feature, wondered today if I've ever participated in any motorcycle rallies in the Florida Keys where she lives.
I'm sorry to say I've only been to the Keys once - in October, 1993.
That was a high mileage year for me and my 1991 BMW K100RS. I rode to Daytona Beach Bike Week in late winter and Oregon and California that summer. By October, I still had some vacation time left and figured a ride to the Gulf Coast would be a nice wrap-up for my riding season.
I made it from Indianapolis to Valdosta, Ga. the first day and from Valdosta to the KOA at Fiesta Key the next. I had dated a woman from Islamorada a year or so earlier and, knowing my interest in newspapers, she sent me several copies of the local paper. As a consequence, I knew I was just down the road from the Lor-E-Lei Cabana Bar and Restaurant, so I rode there for a couple of O'Doul's non-alcoholic beers (I was on the bike and I never drink alcohol and ride) and to check out the Weather Channel on the bar TV. I also bought a Lor-E-Lei t-shirt.

Preparing to ride back to my campsite, I was putting the t-shirt into my left saddlebag in the parking lot when I heard someone call my name. I looked up to see my old friend Richard Sheek from Franklin, Ind., grinning at me from the driver's window of his pickup truck. Dick, a fellow WWII militaria collector, was on a Florida vacation with his friend Jackie and they had just pulled in to the Lor-E-Lei because a friend had recommended the place.
We went inside and had dinner together to celebrate the amazing coincidence.
I rode down to Key West the next day and had myself photographed next to the Southern Most Point marker.
I rode up the west coast of Florida, revisiting  the Bubble Room on Sanibel Island for lunch, on my way home.
I keep meaning to get back to the Conch Republic, but it hasn't happened since. Maybe this winter...

Savaging the hickory trees

It's nesting season for tree squirrels around here and our yard is littered with gnawed-off hickory branch ends that nest building squirrels fumbled.

Here's how our front yard looked yesterday morning. Each yellow bar marks a branch end that a squirrel fancied as a nest component, but couldn't hang onto after he/she chewed it off.
And here's a close-up view of one of the branches, clipped off as neatly as if  it were done with pruning shears.
I've been collecting them and tossing them into the fire pit for a week or two now and the end is nowhere in sight.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1993 Falling Leaf Rally in Potosi, Mo. The rally is hosted annually on the second weekend of October by the Gateway Riders BMW Club, based in St. Louis.

I first attended in 1993 and have been to several subsequent Falling Leaf rallies. Weather and circumstances permitting, that’s where I’ll be next weekend.

Low threshold of pain

BMW Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2009 BMW MOA rally in Johnson City, Tenn.

I was there, volunteering as a rally photographer and blogging daily. The rally organizers provided free Wifi and the signal was strong enough that I could use my netbook from the Indianapolis BMW Club’s enclave in the camping area. It was nice to have a rally venue that was just a day’s ride from home, although I don’t mind going halfway across the continent for a good rally.

Woof!

Or, if you prefer something a little more direct, click here. Makes a dynamite t-shirt with a slightly apolitical flavor.

Aussies Rule!

I’m trying out the Cafe Press business model, testing the waters with this design that features Pete, our amazing Aussie.

You can get the image on shirts, cups, bags, all kinds of stuff. Check it out here.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the pin from the 23rd Return to Shiloh Rally in 1997. The 37th Return to Shiloh Rally is going on this weekend at Pickwick Landing State Park, Tenn. on the Tennessee River. The pin features the BMW roundel and the Tennessee state flag. The rally is conducted by my “local” club, the BMW Riders Association of the Mid-South (BMW RAMS).

The camping area, situated in a pine forest, is about the nicest I’ve ever see at a club rally and the proximity to the Civil War Battle of Shiloh battlefield makes it a very attractive destination.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2008 BMW MOA rally in Gillette, Wyo.

I was there and worked on the team of official rally photographers under the direction of the late Paul Bachorz, who died unexpectedly last month.

Here I am on a day ride from the rally to Devil’s Tower.

Why am I not in Munich? Why? Why?

Spaten Oktoberfest 2010 Invitation from Gavin Owen on Vimeo.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2007 BMW MOA rally in West Bend, Wis.

I missed this one because we had contracted to shoot a wedding that weekend. I like the design because it incorporates the blue-and-white checker pattern from the coat of arms of the German state of Bavaria. Gemütlichkeit has no precise English equivalent, but “cheerfulness” comes fairly close.

How could they miss Thompson’s epic?

This is American Book Review’s list of 100 Best First Lines from Novels.
How they can claim to have created an authoritative list without this gem from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is beyond  me: “We were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs began to take hold.”
Here is their list:

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn't. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.  —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.  —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Bonus Motorcycle Event Pin

This is the official Indianapolis Motor Speedway-authorized pin from MotoGP in Indianapolis last year.
I didn't make it to this year's Indy event, but I was in Monterey the weekend last July when MotoGP was at Laguna Seca, if that counts for anything.

Duck Commander!

We stumbled across Duck Commander last night on the Outdoor Channel and I think it may be my favorite new (new to me, anyway) show.
These five Louisiana good old boys have made a career out of duck hunting and the interplay among them is instructive and funny as hell. At first glance, they look like Vikings in cammo but they're actually philosopher sportsmen.
It's reality TV built around duck hunting - sitting in the duck blind, shooting at ducks, sitting around the house and talking about hunting ducks, running a duck hunting business and selling duck calls faster than they can make them. They crank out a DVD every year and you can buy them on Amazon.com.
I have absolutely no desire to shoot and/or eat a duck, but I couldn't take my eyes off of the TV screen last night while Duck Commander was on. I found myself wondering if I'd be so fascinated if we hadn't moved to Arkansas three years ago and been immersed in a culture so steeped in hunting. School districts here schedule vacation days to coincide with the opening of hunting seasons.
There is something about Duck Commander that strikes me as being so righteously American that it makes me want to go out and buy a Benelli shotgun and hang it over my cheesy electric fireplace.

Tiramisu!

I'm at Seattle Grind where I just treated my tastebuds to 12 cubic inches of absolute bliss.
I think I've mentioned their tiramisu before, but this stuff has to be tasted to be fully appreciated.
I'd lick the inside of the plastic box it comes in, but that would be, well, gauche. It's that good.
God knows what it's doing to my blood sugar.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2006 BMW MOA rally in Burlington, Vt.

Notice that the person in charge of the rally pins that year didn’t check the spelling and thousands of pins were handed out proclaiming the rally was in “Burilngton, Vermont.” It didn’t matter because the rally was actually in Essex Junction, Vt., a suburb of Burlington.

I was there, along with several other members of the Indianapolis BMW Club. It was my first motorcycle foray into New England and I liked what I saw.

The Ruthie report

The vet says Ruthie is recovering quickly from her Sept. 2 knee surgery.
I took the top off of my Honda del Sol for the trip in to the vet's office, just to make the ride a little more interesting for her in terms of sights and smells. She seemed to enjoy it.
One more checkup in two weeks and then she's done.

In the meantime, here's a shot of the only cotton field I've seen in the immediate area. Looks like it's ready for harvest.

Canceling the noise, enjoying the music

I'm sitting at my favorite table at Seattle Grind listening to Bob Dylan on my iPod with my Sony MDR-NC7 noise canceling headphones.
I'm especially glad I brought them this morning because there's a lively discussion about Anglican Church theology and structure going on at the next table and I don't care to hear it. I find other people's religious or philosophical conversations tedious and annoying . Actually, I think that could apply to pretty much anything strangers say in public places.
I bought my headphones a month or so ago at Sam's Club for $34 and change, but I see they can be had cheaper on Amazon.com. Whatever. They're comfortable, have good bass response and do a credible job of muting extraneous sounds. They also come with an airplane stereo adapter plug in case I find myself on a flight with entertainment available. Seems unlikely, but better to have it than not.
Here's what one Amazon.com reviewer says about them:

The NC7 is a great upgrade from the older model. They noticeably cancel more of the ambient noise than the NC6. Also, there is virtually no lag time between when the noise cancelling is switched on and when it actually kicks in. The NC6 took a few seconds to begin actually cancelling ambient noise. Also, a common complaint that I've had (and read about) with the NC6 is that there's a faint, yet audible hiss while the noise cancelling is on. This has been greatly reduced to a hardly noticeable, faint background static with the NC7, which will probably annoy the audiophile, but doesn't bother me. These headphones are much more comfortable than the previous model. I must note that these headphones don't cancel out all of the noise, just the constant background noise, like the engines of an airplane or the hum of loud equipment. You can still hear people talking or the keyboard while you're typing (faintly), but they're not meant to drown out these noises, so keep that in mind when trying out headphones. 

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1989 BMW MOA rally at York, Pa.

I didn’t make it to this one, but my old 1971 R50/5 did. It carried Indianapolis BMW Club friend John Rode there and back.

Happy Anniversary, Sean and Ruth

A very happy sixth wedding anniversary to my son Sean and his lovely bride Ruth. They were married six years ago today and Maria and I were privileged to be able to photograph the festivities.
I am so happy that my sons are so well matched with wonderful wives.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1999 BMW MOA rally at Rhinebeck, N.Y.

I skipped this one too. I think I decided to ride west that year.

Sheri? WTF?

The always entertaining Sheri Gilmour blog – part of my daily “must read” list - has undergone a transformation.

After a few days of being down for maintenance, the blog now features a picture of a creeped-out Dr. House and a password box. No clues as to the password. But it’s not “house” or “sheri” or “sherigilmour” or even “fuck.”

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1990 BMW MOA rally in Rapid City, S.D.

I was there on my ‘81 R100RS, having ridden out from Indianapolis with Tim and Linda Balough. It was a splendid rally and marked my first visit to Devil’s Tower. We arrived a day early and camped at the Rapid City KOA where a late night storm fatally damaged my Frostline kit backpacking tent that I spent a whole winter sewing back in the mid-‘70s. I replaced it with a two-man Eureka tent from a local sporting good store.

Quilting 101

Maria and Morgan are back from a week in Indiana where they helped Maria's parents through the period immediately following her mother's knee replacement.
From all reports, they accomplished much. Including bringing back a dozen or so Shapiro's Delicatessen bagels and a bag of fresh tomatoes from Maria's dad's garden.
Tonight's dinner was pizza from Papa John's followed by a quilting lesson. Morgan has Maria's older Bernina, so the techniques learned here will easily transfer to Arizona when Morgan returns home.
I'm taking her to the airport in Little Rock on Monday.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1994 BMW MOA rally in Moodus, Conn.

I didn’t attend.

Revisiting old negatives

Having my negative scanner back in service has inspired me to revisit some of my older images and make a few Photoshop tweaks that were not possible until a few years ago.
Like, for instance, this shot of the moon over the Pacific Ocean that I shot the evening of July 9, 1997 from a campsite at the South Beach primitive campground at Klaloch, Wash. I used a cheap little Olympus point-and-shoot film camera on that trip. (Click on the image to see it properly large.)
My son Sean and I were exploring the Olympic Peninsula by car and had visited the Hoh Rain Forest earlier in the day. The rain forest was insanely humid and not a suitable place for camping.
Sean whipped up a tasty dinner of tuna and Raumen noodles.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2002 BMW RA rally in Red River, N.M.

That was the last long-haul trip to the west for my 1991 K100RS. I rode to Alma, Colo. and Tim Balough and I rode down to Red River for the rally. Then I continued west to Monterey, Calif. where I met Maria for a week on the Big Sur coast. She flew home and I rode home, listening all the while to a terminally expensive noise in the engine that eventually resulted in my parting out the bike on Ebay after more than 160,000 miles.

So it’s not just me – there really IS a problem with Facebook this afternoon

From CNET.com:

Facebook struggled to maintain service availability today during the same period of time as a prominent Internet service provider dealt with a major outage.

We're getting countless reports of Facebook problems from users both inside and outside of CNET, with most reporting that the site has been up and down all morning. Facebook acknowledged that it was experiencing "latency issues" with its API, but it was not immediately clear what was causing those issues.

However, during the same period of time representatives for Qwest, a major Internet service provider, used their Twitter account to alert customers to "a known outage in WA" that "our techs are currently working to restore service as soon as possible." A quick check of the Internet Health Report around midday Pacific Time showed major packet loss on several key routes between Qwest and other Tier 1 providers, such as SBC and Saavis.

It's not at all clear that the two issues are related: representatives from Facebook and Qwest have not returned multiple requests for clarification. We'll continue to update this post as we receive more information, and please let us know if you're having problems with Facebook and where you're located, as these issues can often be regional.

Updated 1:22 p.m. PDT: Facebook released a statement: "We are experiencing an issue with a third party networking provider that is causing problems for some people trying to connect to Facebook. We are in contact with this provider in order to explore what can be done to resolve the issue. In the meantime, we are working on deploying changes to bypass the affected connections."

We're trying to get them to confirm whether Qwest is that "third-party networking provider," so stay tuned.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20017463-265.html?tag=cnetRiver#ixzz10O6WjpaZ

Semper Paratus

  Here are a couple of reasons why I almost always have my Olympus 850SW digital point-and-shoot camera with me.

The first is a note posted on the Brookland Post Office bulletin board where the author took two shots at spelling “bushel” and missed both times.

The other is a license plate I spotted this morning on a Hyundai Santa Fe headed south on Stadium in Jonesboro. I was so intent on getting the shot before the vehicle turned that I couldn’t tell who was driving it. My guess is it’s a woman who likes dogs and is clever enough to invoke the idea of dogma. At least I hope that’s the thinking behind it. You never know here in Arkansas.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2001 BMW RA rally. I didn’t go, but I'd been to the MOA rally at Morganton five years earlier.

Hey, I've got my scanner working again!

I found some negatives the other day that I wanted to scan and had some time this afternoon to revisit the thorny problem of trying to get my "orphaned" Nikon Coolscan IV ED transparency scanner to work with my 64-bit Windows 7 system.
I say orphaned, because Nikon decided not to write a driver for the 64-bit Windows 7 system. They apparently figured all of us Coolscan IV guys could go get screwed or dig deep for a newer scanner. That's not happening.
I've searched several times since I got this system last December but never could find a solution, so my scanner sat inert on my desk.
This afternoon was different.
A Google search turned up this page on Controlspace.org that provides step-by-step instructions for installing a 64-bit Windows 7 driver that updates Nikon Scan 4.0.3.
The newer version of Nikon Scan has more bells and whistles than the last version I used and it works like a charm as a free-standing program or within PhotoShop.
I can't tell you how happy it makes me to have my old scanner back in action. I say "old" because it's at least seven years old, which is ancient on the scale of technological evolution.
But what the hell? It scans negatives and slides at 2,900 dpi just fine - way better than any flatbed scanner I've seen. And it's paid for.

Apre moi, le deluge, eh Lisa?

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1993 BMW MOA rally in Oshkosh, Wis.

It was the second time Oshkosh hosted an MOA rally and I was there. It was a special rally for the Indianapolis BMW Club because Charlie Thomas, one of the club’s founders, won the grand prize – a new K75LT. Charlie took delivery of the bike a few weeks later at BMW Motorcycles of Indianapolis. Charlie is no longer with us and neither is the dealership.

The story of Goobertown

This is the source of the famous Goobertown, Arkansas t-shirts. I bought one yesterday and mailed it to my friend Howard Mudd this morning.
Both of my sons have them and Steve says he wore his while playing at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
The other cartoon representation of the town's namesake appears on the Christmas tree farm sign about a mile north of the Goobertown Store.
 
It bears an unfortunate resemblance to Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo from the South Park TV series.

Pointless rambling on a Tuesday night

I just spent a few minutes with my spotting scope and tripod checking out the moon and Jupiter. Both were rising over my neighbors' house and I hope they didn't think I was looking at them.

The scope is a Tasco 18-36 power that's terrific for terrestrial and moon viewing, but only if you stay down at the lower magnification. The resolution deteriorates as you zoom up toward 36x, so things actually look sharper at 18x. Consequently, I could only make out one of Jupiter's moons.

I built a 3" reflector telescope from parts I ordered from the Edmund Scientific Co. catalog back in 1956. It gave me pretty spectacular view of the planets, especially Jupiter, but it's long gone now. Our wooded subdivision offers very limited views of the sky, so I have no plans to waste money or time on astronomy. While I like the seclusion the woods provide, I miss being able to see anything farther than 150 yards away.

I see that summer officially ends at 9:09 p.m. CDT tomorrow. I can't say that I'm sad to see it go. This has been a beastly hot summer here in the Mid-South with temperatures continuing in the mid-90s this week. We got our all-time high electric bill last month of $270, and that was with what I thought was judicious use of the air conditioning. This month's bill should be less than half that figure since I'm able to turn off the a/c for extended periods.

The change in the seasons also has me thinking about motorcycle rallies again. The Return to Shiloh Rally at Pickwick Dam State Park just north of the Tennessee-Mississippi border is the last weekend in September and the Falling Leaf Rally at Potosi, Mo. is the weekend after that. I could conceivably make both of them or one of them or none of them depending on the weather and whether any of my Indianapolis BMW Club friends plan to attend.

I am, however, losing some of my enthusiasm for camping. Specifically, I'm not crazy about sleeping in a tent and those late night struggles with zippers and boots to answer nature's call are a real annoyance. That said, I did sleep remarkably well - for being in a tent and on the ground - at the BMW MOA rally in Redmond, Ore. in July. I think it was because I had a decent pillow setup, having left my lightweight sleeping bag in its stuff sack for pillow duty and acquired a $50 heavy weight car camping bag for the chilly nights. I need two pillows - one under my head and the other clutched to my chest - to sleep comfortably. My Thermarest luxury camp air mattress that my son Steve got me for Christmas a couple of years ago continues to be the best I've used.

My Eureka special edition two-person tent that I bought just before Galyan's went out of business is in its sixth year. It's still pretty much like new, pitches and strikes easily, has kept me dry through several serious downpours, has door zippers that don't hang up, and has short pole segments that let it pack down smaller than any tent I've ever owned. But with me and all of my gear in it, it feels a bit cramped. Some of my friends who rally and camp with their wives have invested in Big Agnes tents, which come in some pretty outrageous sizes. I suppose I could buy a larger waterproof bag to carry my sleeping bag, Thermarest, tent and pillows and step up to a Big Agnes or some such circus tent, but that's a thought for another evening.

Damn! I’m missing Oktoberfest in Munich again.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1976 BMW MOA rally in Oshkosh, Wis. The MOA returned to Oshkosh in 1993.

I missed the first one but was there for the second Oshkosh Rally.

Why alcohol, guns and kids don’t mix

From an Iraqi wedding celebration.

Working a trade

 Today's mail brought a promised t-shirt from Howard Mudd, a fellow expatriate member of the Indianapolis BMW Club.
Harold is the retired offensive line coach for the Indianapolis Colts, having hung it up after this year's Super Bowl loss to New Orleans.
He had a bunch of t-shirts made up to mark the occasion of his retirement and I think they constituted his entire shirt wardrobe, except for a long-sleeved rally shirt, at the BMW MOA International Rally this summer in Redmond, Ore.
The shirt says "I quit" on the front and "Kiss My Ass, No Forwarding Address" on the back.
Howard thought it was funny as hell that I live between Goobertown and Buck Snort and really lit up when I mentioned that the Goobertown Store sells Goobertown t-shirts. He knew immediately that he had to own one.
So we worked out a trade - a Goobertown shirt for an I Quit shirt.
The only problem is that he requested a 2X in black and those have been out of stock for several weeks. I'm going to drive up to the store this afternoon and see if they finally got his size and color so I can complete the exchange.

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 2001 BMW MOA rally in Redmond, Ore. It’s plastic and the design is kind of lame.

In contrast, the venue was spectacular. The Deschutes County fairground was brand new and the facilities were so good that the BMW MOA returned this year for an even bigger and better rally. I was there (see blogposts from July for more about that).

BMW Motorcycle Rally Pin of the Day

This is the rally pin from the 1996 BMW MOA rally in Morganton, N.C.

I was there on my ‘91 K100RS, having ridden down from Indianapolis with several Indy BMW Club friends. It was a good rally and the townspeople turned out in amazing numbers when we rode down to the courthouse square in a parade to benefit a local charity.

I refuse to watch the whole thing

 

From Wikipedia:

Acrophobia (from the Greek: ἄκρον, ákron , meaning "peak, summit, edge" and φόβος, phóbos, "fear") is an extreme or irrational fear of heights. It belongs to a category of specific phobias, called space and motion discomfort that share both similar etiology and options for treatment.

Acrophobia can be dangerous, as sufferers can experience a panic attack in a high place and become too agitated to get themselves down safely.

Yep. That’s me. This video freaks me out completely. I get jangly sensations in the backs of my legs just watching a minute or two of it. I’m glad there are people who can do this, but there is not enough money in the universe to get me up there.