A Slow Dance In The Blogosphere
During the next two months Ojo Caliente will drift into a summer slumber, awaking only occasionally to cast a sleepy eye at political outrage. Why is that?
To begin with, the summer riding season and more than one "Blue Highways" adventure will keep The Eye away from the lap top. The best I’ll be able to do is to leave an open thread here with a comment from time to time posted from a public computer.
Secondly, I want to make some changes in the thrust and purpose of the blog, spending more time actually reporting on political activity in what those of us south of the Gila River know as "Baja Arizona." Inescapably personal opinion and political disposition will play a part in story selection, but there are plenty of stories that never make it to the pages of Tucson’s dead tree press.
Last, I want to change the physical appearance of the blog slightly, but even slight changes take time so "slowly, slowly, catchee monkey" is the order of the day.
National Rally
In two weeks’ time I’ll be taking off for the national rally of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America. A good deal of the pleasure of any trip is the planning for it and if you’re clever you can avoid serious work for nearly two full weeks just in the planning. I aim to give it my best shot.
This year we’re all riding to Spokane, Washington. 32 years ago I rode to the first National rally, in Morgan Hill, California. That first rally (according to the mythology) was the largest single-marque rally ever held. It wasn’t very big... perhaps 300 people max, some riding two-up so probably fewer bikes.
Recent rallies have numbered attendees in the thousands. Ditto the number of bikes.
A motorcycle rally hasn’t changed much in the last 32 years. It’s basically a get-together of riders so they can kick lies and tell tires, party a little, do field events, ride a poker run, generally congratulate one another on their collective wonderfulness, and then ride home.
What has changed is the size of the motorcycles and the elegance and expense of the riding gear. In Morgan Hill we wore leather jackets, open-face helmets, and really rain suits that left us as sweaty and wet from the inside as we were rain wet from the outside.
Best rain gear: Belstaff jackets and pants. (English) There were no electric gloves, vests, or pants. If it got really cold we simply padded up under the other riding gear with newspaper.
At Morgan hill there were no motorcycles larger than 600cc engine displacement.In Spokane there will be BMWs with displacements of nearly 1200cc. Heavy, too, at something like 850 ponds. However there’s no chance of rupture when you haul these babies up on the center stand because you don’t do that. The biggest BMW luxo-tourer comes equipped with an electric center stand.
Anything wrong with that picture? Not for me to say. After all it’s whatever floats your boat, or parks your BMW LT. However I have to say I admired a man I saw touring just the other day. He was on a 1200 cc Sportster, and his luggage was some sort of leather bag strapped to his handle bars. He had a leather jacket, no helmet, no rain gear and a primitive bed roll over his shoulder like those you see in pictures of Civil War soldiers.
He was half way through a ten day trip, simply riding off road far enough to roll out his bed roll at night. Not my style, but one I admired just as an act of ballsy historical re-enactment.
Fahrenheit 9/11
Saw it this afternoon. I was afraid that I might be put off by some of it. The press reviewed isolated shots out of context so that they seemed to be (possibly) cheap shots. Tain’t so. See the whole film and you see the context. Moore has made it clear, using their own words, that these administration weasels are liars. It’s clear that the whole Iraq adventure has been nothing but a study in the generation of suffering to no end.
This is tremendously moving film making. Pay attention to the Orwell quotation at the end.
6:06:48 PM 
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