I went to the vintage races at Laguna one year when Mercedes was the featured marque. There was a big parade of spotless Gull Wings, maybe 50 or 60 of them, sparkling like jewels, circling the track in a stately procession, and all the way at the back of the pack there was a beat-to-hell one with one headlight missing…

I worked at Cycle Guide magazine from 1985-1988. We ran a monthly column by LJK (we called him Leonard) about motorcycles. Each one was dense with florid and opaque prose that none of us understood completely, but we admired the hell out of the writing.

#8...you don’t want it? Cool. I have room in my garage for another one.

I’ve read speculation that one of the contributing factors for the Little Ice Age was what’s called the Columbian Exchange, the name given to the effects of Europeans coming to the New World. The theory goes that before Columbus, the indigenous peoples of the Americas practiced large-scale field burning as part of…

Thr guy never learned you don’t bring a shoe to a monkey fight.

San Diego to Maine in a week...on an SR500?! You, sir, are my hero.

My philosophy as well.

A big 10-4 on that. Despite the size problem (mine versus theirs) I love little bikes.

Nice work, and great choices. The GS550E plucks at my heartstrings. My former SO had one when we met in 1984, and brought it along when we moved to the PNW. She stopped riding and it sat in a barn and slowly rusted to uselessness until it wasn’t good for anything but fishing weights. Someone came and took it away for…

Not sure how you came to that conclusion. Neither are my two Golden Retrievers.

I don’t buy this completely. On a motorcycle, assuming you’re wearing some kind of eye protection, you’re still looking through a “window” as Pirsig would have it. But in a convertible with the top down your head’s not stuffed into a fiberglass bucket, and you can hear birds singing as you drive down a country road,…

No biggie, $2500 for a GL1200 is pretty much the going price, at least around here (PNW). This one has a lot of miles, though; most I see for sale have less.

I’m pretty sure Yahoo News tracks my clicks, if only because my feed contains a lot of stories about Formula 1 racing. That’s literally the only sport of any kind I follow—not football, not baseball, not hockey—just F1, a sport with a microscopically small following in the U.S. And yet every time I look there are two…

Bravo. Very well orc-hestrated.

A friend of mine who used to ride a Yamaha YDS-3 swears that one time somebody stole his lock and chain and left the bike.

More detective novel? Here ya go.

Excellent tip, but make sure the lock is visible. If the bad guys hotwire the bike and try to ride it away, the lock can jam up against something in or around the swingarm and cause damage and/or a tip-over. Better than losing the whole bike, but still...

Juliet Hulme took the pen name of Anne Perry, and wrote dozens of books in several genres.

I don’t have a question, but I’d like to urge Joseph to indulge in the complete Britbike experience by eschewing the electric starter and instead using the kicker every time he goes for a ride. Then he can report back about how hard/easy it is to all those whiners who say they’ll never buy an SR400 because it doesn’t…

Back in the days of my youth (he said, revealing just how old and decrepit he really is) these were called engineer’s boots, and sometimes lineman’s boots. My guess is they had their genesis in an industrial context and were later adopted by bikers. I had a pair in the early 1970s. I looked really cool when I wore…