PSSST: Any bike that clocks in anywhere near 1,000 pounds unloaded and without rider is far too heavy for beginners, and Ultra/Classics come in at like 900+. Throw in a couple hundred pounds of shit in the bags and the back rack and you’re asking for a tank slapper, the weight being so high. Even dropping one of these…

I believe the true value of any company lies in their branded sock line. You can’t dress up in all black leather and wear plain white socks - if the design teams are doing their jobs, any respectable H-D rider would feel something missing if they weren’t head-to-toe in H-D branded gear.

Yeah come visit Portland. I’m twice the age of most of the dudes I see tooling around on what can only be called antique motorcycles - most of them well over 25 years old, much older than the riders.

Chrome does not rust. The chrome plating might chip, or the underlaying material might rust, but Chrome itself does not react with oxygen in that fashion.

You haven’t looked at an H-D in, what, 25 years?

btw THE EXISTING CUSTOMER BASE IS GETTING REALLY FUCKING OLD AND DYING OFF AT A REMARKABLE PACE.

I moved to Portland for beer, and honestly, the places where I encounter this attitude are geared towards a younger crowd, almost explicitly. There’s a beer bar here called ‘Apex’ and it is the supreme example - the beertenders are rude and impatient, the first time went in they couldn’t wait for me to examine the…

You don’t know how close you are to the truth right here. That shit takes almost nothing to make - a 4.5% adjunct lager without any noticable hopping at all.

So, they use cheap barley purchased in bulk and package the beer within 2 or 3 weeks of brewing because of the low ABV. Since they don’t hop for shit they don’t…

I’ve got a couple thoughts here, since I used to deliver beer in Portland and Eugene for a small distributor, and I moved to Portland to be in the brewing industry specifically...

When people tell you it’s better to learn on something that won’t smear your thinky parts down a half mile of interstate at 150 miles an hour, they’re saying it with actual experiences they’ve had in mind.

NONO - cover everything in a ‘1' that’s stretched to look almost like the Punisher skull without the resulting copyright issues.

When I worked at Thunderbird in ABQ, I started on a Kawi 250cc Super Sherpa dualsport. The mechanics all gave me massive shit for riding a ‘thumper’.
About a month later I showed up on an ‘83 KZ1100 and they all shut the fuck up because none of their brand-new bikes could even touch me at the light. It was liberating.

The V-Rod’s water-cooled engine was designed in partnership with Porsche, if I recall. They came out with that about the same time they were walking away from Buell, which is where the real action for younger riders was.

Clothing and accessory (non-mechanical) sales can account for as much as 70% of the revenue at your local H-D dealership. I worked at Thunderbird Harley in Albuquerque back in the day, and the monthly staff meetings was always pushing more clothing sales. They had more staff for that area than for anything else.

You’ve never gone shopping for an H-D full-sized cruiser have you?

...because you can get a cd player in-dash, and I’m sure someone somewhere has a console replacement with that 30-pin connector.

And there is fanfic for 50 Shades - Fanny Merkin wrote a little book called 50 Shames of Earl Grey.

I may know the author personally but that’s besides the point. AFAIK, he never recieved any notices or blowback from the original authors of 50 shades - but as you’ve mentioned, that’s probably because it started out the…

well he really doesn’t have to be here to fuck things up, actually, to be honest, it helps b/c he also hasn’t installed the staff or given directive to people in charge about what they’re actually supposed to be doing, so all the staff still there are like ‘wtf yo?’ and it’s generally a shitty work environment when…

on 3:
Deepest darkest secrets is why it didn’t come up earlier. The orb was her second infinty stone mission, we now know, and she knew what Thanos intended by that point, so she was going to keep that quiet until she couldn’t keep it secret anymore. If she didn’t tell anybody about the soul stone then they wouldn’t…

So incredibly shortsighted.

Hvae you been to Austin lately?