“There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

TERRY WALTON

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JOHN CONNOR:      "Can you learn?  So you can be... you know.  More human.  Not such a dork all the time."

Terminator turns towards him.

TERMINATOR:    "My CPU is a neural-net processor... a learning computer.  But Skynet presets the switch to
"read-only" when we are sent out alone."

SARAH CONNOR (cynical):    "Doesn't want you thinking too much, huh?"

TERMINATOR:        "No."

Kind of reminds you of the type of conversation you would have with more than a few Harley owners, now doesn’t it?
Just substitute me for "John Connor," Harley owner for "Terminator," brain for "CPU" and Willie G. for "Skynet" 
and it would work just as well.  -BE

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From:        Terry Walton
To:             blackecho
Date:         4 July  2005
Subject:   Mr.  Dingo

Well I have read a few letters and replies from your fans or foes and laughed my ass off.

Your replies were, for the most part, well written.  Now digging a little deeper on your site, I found the weakness in your “Black Echo armor”.

Darth Vader?  Jedi Jump?  Or Tractor Beams and Blade Runner?  Now it’s getting clearer.  You are a pocket rocket fan that is angry over the state of Harley Davidson, but I’m equally sure you own mounds of Star Trek memorabilia and are a died-in- the- wool Star Wars fan.  Not a problem, my kids liked that also and I did too, when I was a kid.  But as time moves on, so does one’s tastes.  I can imagine you on Ebay, sorting through Star Wars cards for your anniversary collector’s edition and dreaming the star ship will come down on a rice burner with, phasers in hand to zap those pesky classic riders.  So it seems you hate Harley Davidson for a marketing success story, but fall victim to the same.  I would not be surprised if you had full regalia for storm troopers or a Darth Vader hood and mask lying close to your computer or had thoughts of a Jedi flash light for your riding outfit for your 30 mile long distant runs.  It’s amusing to me how you knock the motorcycle that brought the motorcycles to America, when the very crap you ride was driven by dollars.  Not the purest of your nature, but of course your idea of a good time is degrading a person that pays your check, but we’ll touch on that later.

I have owned a Jap bike, a nice “little” Honda Classic 1100.  a Harley look-a-like.  The first thing the Honda dealer suggested was a set of pipes that were “Harley sounding”.  I did not waste the money on the pipes (the phrase, “you can’t make a pigs ear into a silk purse” applies) and loved the bike.  It ran well and you will enjoy this first ride story, at least the start of it.

My Harley owner friend, the person that made riding look fun and could care less what I rode, unlike you with your small-minded view of the world, but then again you do live in a town with a population of 6,603.  I’m sure its quaint, but I don’t expect a worldly view from such a porthole.  I’d bet the job market is booming, so the pay scale for sheriff must really be top notch, ..  The important thing was to ride, and his girlfriend (a professor at Duke University) invited me for a day ride.  After miles of country roads, I noticed Tom reaching down to his left side while riding his Brand new Road King Classic, a really pretty bike in jet-black with whatever accessories he had purchased on his dream bike, a bike that left my “little” Honda Classic in the dust on all rides both on the road and the gas tank.  I could run 100 miles and his Road King could go 200.  Oh yes I do like the looks of the Road King.  After all, ALL Jap manufactures have tried for years to emulate the King.  It’s okay that you prefer a small zippy bike, hell one day they might even make one that fits your frame and style.  From the style of clothes I see you wearing, jeans, leather jacket and dingo boots and a welder’s hat, I wonder if you are a welder also or was that a wrap to keep those few brain cells intact.  I know how you feel about the “look”.  I had to laugh at the “look” you have, the only thing missing was your twin from Deliverance.  I know you have found your level of success in life.  And the even better news for you, the Winn Dixie is going to stay in town so you can get your bargain hamburger meat and won’t have to shop the local 7 Eleven for all your clothes and beans.

We stopped after miles of watching him reach to his left side, his gearshift had vibrated loose and he was shifting by hand.  It scared me, and I remembered all the Honda owners speaking about how reliable their Hondas were and how Harley constantly breaks down.  The “Ah Ha” was rising up in me, “see I bought a reliable Honda, for a fraction of the cost of your vibrating loose Harley”.  I didn’t say a word and watched as he took out an Allen wrench and tightened his gearshift back on the bike. 

Feeling cocky and superior for my wise purchase, a reliable Harley look-a-like, I mounted my bike and turned the key.

Nothing happened I checked the engine cut off switch, it being new and after all, my first bike.  I must have done something incorrectly.  I turned the key again making sure the kill switch wasn’t thrown.  Oh I know!  I must have closed the gas valve.  No, now I’m listening to the purr of a Harley Davidson sitting next to me and my wise never-break- down Honda is dead on the side of the road.

What now?  The short story, Tom rode behind the tow truck on his Harley Davidson Road King with my “little” Honda Classic riding proud as a passenger.  The moral of this story, they all break down, your trusted Honda included.  Oh the mechanics at the Honda store told me the starter switch was melted, and used Bee’s wax to keep it in place, I wish I wasn’t making that part up.  They weakly explained that the starter switch had a tendency of melting and the wax would keep the contacts from shorting out.

Okay so I move on and the day comes to buy another bike, what do I purchase, a Harley Davidson.  Why?  I liked it.  Pure and simple, was money the issue?  No.  Did I look and test ride a Honda, yes the 1800 retro, a nice bike a Harley want-to-be and very heavy and a terrible turn radius.  I like cruisers, because unlike you I do not ride to work on a bike.  I used to take the Honda to work on a 100 mile round trip to the office for fun but mainly I take nice long trips, the last one from Knoxville TN to Charlotte NC and Charlotte NC to Monroe, Louisiana, a bit over 1000 miles.  This past Friday I had a nice lunch in Jackson MS, 300 miles round trip with my wife, so comfortable she fell asleep on the ride home.  I’d love to see your wife on the back of that rat trap you call a motorcycle.  Was I comfortable?  Silly question my boy.

Do I have chaps and a full set of leathers, yes, are they HD yes, I wore them when I rode a Honda also.  The quality of the leather was better and I did not want to risk buying some cheap knock off from the Internet and Winn Dixie we just don’t have here.  .  I didn’t care if it said Honda or Harley and still don’t.  The quality was what I purchased.  I know this is foreign to you, judging by the pictures you supplied and of course the pay scale of a sheriff, it is understandable that you don’t buy expensive things. 

Ride through the mountains at 70 miles per hour and see if you get cold.  Chaps serve a purpose, to reduce the risk of hypothermia in cold weather or for protection in case of an accident to save some limited skin supplies.  Just like in my old Honda, now in my saddlebags are leather shirt, jacket, gloves, a face muffler, tools, first aid kit, pens, cell phone, clothes, and water bottles about anything I need for a road trip.  On the back, there’s a travel bag with extra sets of jeans, t-shirts and travel kit.  I learned that on my little Honda classic when I broke down on a Sunday and the cycle shops were closed till Monday to fix my rear flat tire.  A Honda taught me to be prepared to breakdown.

From the looks of your Honda I see why you were upset at the weather.  If there aren’t clear skies, you can’t ride.  From terrible traction on your racing slick tires to zero storage, you just lie down and get wet and I’m sure you must love the fishtail of water shooting up your ass.  Maybe that is the real reason you love your bike.  You’re secretly into water sports.  The bike is an expensive bidet and a bit strange for a sheriff, but a funny picture I’m sure.  To each his own.  Not a rain suit in those saddle bags <grin>. 

I love watching TV and now and then a public television show will have the Star Trek convention or Star War’s groupie’s convention, I’ll look for you next time.  The guy in the matching leather green race pants and a Darth Vader helmet, picking on little kids that upset your senses or cut in line for the latest bubble gum card.  You must have pretty thin skin, and a tendency to feel less than from years of self-importance and inflated false pride from buying less and expecting more.  The only respect you get is from pointing your service revolver at some shmuck and hoping they resist.  Or asking that people threaten you so the FBI can come looking for them, did that make you feel important?  Hell they are looking for a lost girl in Aruba also, what is your point?  Besides wanting to mention somehow the FBI gives a shit about some dirt track bike rider that 30 miles pushed his brain to far back in the skull cap squeezed it and now your helmet is to small.

As for choice of careers, it’s a noble calling, being a sheriff (by the way in the military the lowest scores in the ASFAB test qualify for 3 positions cooks or military police or sanitation engineer (a very polite trash man reference)).  One of my best friends was a sheriff in NC, he would make me laugh with his stories.  I used to love to hear about when they, the macho sheriffs were bored and would, as a team, group or gang in some people’s minds, but never alone would pick out an arrest warrant of someone they knew loved to fight.  Then 3 or 4 of them would go pick him up, beat the crap out of the guy and feel great afterwards because he resisted arrest.  He said it was great to get the tension out.  I assume you are in the same class of classless.  You seem to enjoy throwing your “I’m a sheriff tough guy image” around.  As it seems a boy and his gun are just as big fools as a “chained wallet”.  At least Barney Fife knew not to load his one bullet, it was the uniform that made his day.  As I assume your little riding costume does for you, Mr.  Dingo. 

I’ll repeat the joke that my sheriff friend told right after giving me the “we love to fight to reduce stress” insight into the sheriffs department..

“What does a cue ball and a Mexican have in common”?

“The harder you hit them the more English you get”

The sad thing, like yourself this person carried a gun and was hired to protect the community, albeit a much larger community.  I would think you have plenty of time to play on your website with a town of 6,603 people.  Jeez a real crime stopper you are, huh?  Oh oh..  Aunty May is squeezing the tomatoes again at the Winn Dixie..  Call the sheriff he’ll know what to do.  Yes, I envision a city of blight, high crime and even a Batman signal in the dark skies of Columbia when a crime is so terrible you have to ride out on your Honda to save the day. 

You have even gotten your 2 year old to buy into the macho image of “Zoom Zoom daddy rides a rocket, honey, he is a space man wanna-be”.  Hey I’ve got it, maybe NASA is looking for a part time security guard.  What I found most amusing are the pictures of you sitting on a bike that barely supports your body and of course the black leather jacket and black dingo boots.  It must really piss you off Honda doesn’t make a RR jacket for you to promote.  Having to constantly defend your choice in style or lack of one.  I can see where your attitude comes from.  I think I’ve seen it in Wal-Mart .  I really don’t care what you ride, it looks pretty ugly to me, and very uncomfortable.  A bike to me is not about laying down and pulling my neck up over my handle bars, but again, to each his own.  I would love to take you on a road trip.  I’d even stop with you to gas up every 100 miles.  I’d even let you borrow a set of leathers when your ass froze and offer my condolences to your back after a 1000 mile ride.  Or does your wife follow you on the exhausting ride to work with a rain suit, so her Darth Vader doesn’t rust.  I just noticed you put over 5k on your toy bike, Wow..  a real rider huh.  I do that in 2 months.  You need a scooter and a plastic helmet a cape and mask and little leather boots the wrestlers wear I’m sure your second favorite entertainment pastime besides the fantasy that you ride a motorcycle. 

You’re a different kind of rider, a short run, Zoom Zoom guy, stay there.  I didn’t choose the Zoom Zoom, you did.  I prefer to ride comfortable, safe and in style.

If you read, and I am sure you do, visit any of the motorcycle sheets and read the reviews.  They have to piss you off when each one picks the Harley over the Jap bikes for road trips, from visibility to comfort to gas mileage to turning radius to storage and breaking power.  In spite of the technical breakthroughs the japs make, they all want Harley’s market share.  Harley leads the industry in the big-ticket items, the Highway machine, the King.  Sure Honda makes one and BMW makes one, both nice, both feature-heavy, from electric stands to air conditioning.  Both are trying to get a slice of a standard Harley has set.  You seem to implode at the idea of Harley not being interested in the kiddies market of race toys.  Those kiddies grow up and want real bikes, maybe you will grow up one day, but from the shape of that forehead, I think we have found the missing link.

And one more thing, lose the Adolph mustache, if you can’t grow one shave or is the idea to look worst then you already do? 

The other thing you may want to consider in your diatribe is taxes.

Taxes pay your salary, yes, a simple and plain fact of your life.  You exist because of taxpayers like myself that make the bulk of your county pay.  On a Jap bike, due to import laws there is not an import tax, just sales taxes on the $ 6,000 product that you love.  Well I’d bet they don’t dent the salary you are paid as an officer, and on a $ 16,000 bike well even a rocket scientist like yourself can see where this is going.  The other thing I would caution you on is your outright predacious attitudes towards those taxpayers, women, and tennis moms, even the dolt that hit you and thank God you are alive to tell the tale.  If you believe in Friday the 13th, we have bigger issues again to deal with.  I hope some senior people in your sheriffs department take that loaded weapon away from you before a black cat crosses your path.

I’ve logged a few thousand miles on my new bike, not a loose bolt, not a drop of oil in my driveway, and not a starter problem on the side of the road.  The only accessory I’ve purchased from the stock model is a can of Glaze Wax, and from the looks of your bike, you may want to invest in some.  But I understand if you only pay a cheap price for a bike, you can treat it like it’s cheap and keep it dirty.  It’s the same logic of why I never give an animal away, if someone pays for it, they will take better care of it.  But I don’t assume you are the type to purchase a pedigree anyway.  You’re the “buy a mutt at the local pound and shoot it if you don’t like it” type.  That way your sense of power can come out all over again.

Don’t worry I’ll wave to you as you hump your gas tank and smile as I cruise down the road while you zip your way through this life.  Oh and sorry for the Mr.  Dingo reference.  As a teenager, I sold shoes at Kenny’s to Dolts like you, the people that lived on limited budgets for new shoes and socks.  Next stop Winn Dixie for some pickled pigs’ feet, kids! 

Best regards,

Terry Walton

 

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To which I have replied...
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Now, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; you should never mix enthusiasm with stupidity. I say so right there on my damn website, on the very page that Al here claims to have read and enjoyed (but as we shall soon learn, just because Al can read, that doesn’t necessarily mean he also understands exactly what he has read).

Al’s rant meanders all over the place, often beginning well with some information necessary to the discussion but then rapidly falling off into laughable personal attacks based on half thought out assumptions, just plain wrong information and subsequently carried out with all the skill and finesse that you would come to expect from someone who continually populated the lower portion of the bell curve in a Special Ed program during their lackluster life. His rant follows the Milwaukee Orthodoxy pretty closely in many areas thus proving that he is a rather devout converted Harleyian, if not a particularly smart or deep thinking one.

In hindsight, I can’t quite decide if Al’s email is a multiple orgasm of ignorance or simply a premature ejaculation of stupidity. Either way you look at it, there’s nothing pretty about it other than the fact that he’s once again, single handedly managed to lower the intellectual bar even further for the dim witted serfs that populate Willie G’s rather large, fashion conscious fiefdom.

“Well I have read a few letters and replies from your fans or foes and laughed my ass off. Your replies were, for the most part, well written. Now digging a little deeper on your site, I found the weakness in your “Black Echo armor.”  Darth Vader?  Jedi Jump?  Or Tractor Beams and Blade Runner?  Now it’s getting clearer. You are a pocket rocket fan that is angry over the state of Harley Davidson, but I’m equally sure you own mounds of Star Trek memorabilia and are a died-(sic "dyed" -BE) in- the- wool “Star Wars” fan. Not a problem, my kids liked that also and I did too, when I was a kid. But as time moves on, so does one’s tastes.”

Ho!  Ho!  Ho!  It makes even my jaded old dark soul glow just a little when a Harley owner feels the dire need to chastise and ridicule a non-Harley owner on the subject of make-believe (to me, that is like Jeffery Dahmner doing a public service announcement on why cannibalism is a seriously bad thing). No, I'm afraid that what Al is telling us all is that as he grew older, he simply failed to advance either mentally or intellectually. While this goes against the natural course of human life (where the longer you live, the smarter you should logically become) it coincides very nicely with the example that Harley Davidson has set as both a business and a "motorcycle" manufacturer.

Ah!  Science fiction!  Granted most of it doesn't even come close to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliott or Ernest Hemingway but a vast majority of the stuff is still better than all the likes of Gore Vidal and anything by the company that churns out those gaudy Harlequin Romance novels that seem to be the mainstay fantasy retreat for fat ugly women with no hope of a social life short of a chance encounter at the all you can eat buffet line.  Do I like science fiction?  Yes, very much so and I feel no shame in admitting to that fact.

Oh, I must apologize as it seems that I have just taken away a good deal of your fire and thunder with that bit of open honesty. Here is a piece of friendly advice (and I will have more to share with you as we debate further); If you’re ever going to insult someone, you should make sure that what you say to them actually is an insult, at least to them, otherwise you're just spinning your wheels making smoke.  Now, I see that you’ve done some spirited research on the Internet but, alas, your detective skills (if they can even be called that) are about on par with something you would expect to see from the target age market of “Blue’s Clues.” You see, www.goingfaster.com is my domain, the entire domain is my personal (and favorite) playground on the Internet. If you had looked beyond the American Angst site (and I even give you a link to do so right there on the contents page), you would have seen that I have many other sites in the root directory, several of which deal explicitly with science fiction and some which do not.

Since you haven’t noticed (and trust me, you haven’t), people who can dream, people who like science fiction (i.e “nerds” or "geeks") define the world in which you live. We dream grand designs and we build what we dream; we just allow people like you to populate it (when you don’t get in the way of progress or bother us by asking too many silly questions such as “how do you make that there light bulb glow so bright?"). Smart people (like me) invent stuff like “reality shows,” “monster trucks” and NASCAR to keep dumb people (like you) mentally placated and out of our busy way while we continue to move forward as a species.  After all,  it wasn’t a bunch of nit wit hayseed chewing hillbillies (using an old football goal post as a big slingshot and a garbage can with a window cut out of it for a space capsule) who went to the Moon way back in 1969. Hillbillies didn’t invent the microprocessor or the scramjet engine or superglue.  Extraordinary people with vision some where, some when accomplished these wonderful and great things and it’s a good bet that they weren’t wearing leather chaps or a tasseled vest when they were doing it either!  No, they were probably wearing glasses (taped together in the middle) with a white lab coat while working a slide rule feverishly and wearing the tip of a pencil out on a pad of scratch paper or a piece of chalk out against a black board.  I bet there isn’t much in your immediate little world which you can lay hands on that some “nerd” some where, some time, didn’t once dream of and later invent. Atomic power.  Radio. Television. VCRs. X-ray machines. Calculators.  Computers.  Radar. Microwave ovens. CD players. DVD players. Lasers. MRI. MP3 players. Artificial hearts.  Rocket ships.  Space shuttles.  International space stations.

The wheel.

One of my favorite horror authors once said something rather prolific about the human imagination and I would like to quote him here now.

"The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of hopes and dreams that in centuries of relentless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart."  -Dean Koontz

If no one dreamed, if no one ever used their imagination, then we, as a race, would still all be living in caves, wearing stinky animal skins, scratching ourselves and eating greasy old brontosaurus burgers, now wouldn’t we?  Is science fiction just stupid kids stuff or is it important after all?  I think that science fiction is very important because the science fiction of yesterday is the science fact of today and will be the stuff that we take for granted tomorrow. I see that you mention Star Trek in your rant so let's discuss Star Trek since you obviously don't have much knowledge of the subject. In Star Trek, the members of the crew of the good ship Enterprise were surrounded by high tech gadgetry in all phases of their life, from how they ate to how they slept, how they studied and how they defended their selves. Their flip open communicators, once thought to be very cool, are very similar to today’s flip open cell phones. What the crew of the Enterprise once did, talking to people far away with a small flip open communications device that was wireless (i.e. what once was fantastic science fiction) is now science fact. Today, people walk around with a small “communicator” stuck to their ear, talking to people not only around the block, but in other cities and even in other countries, halfway around the world, all with crystal clarity. When they are finished, the user simply closes the cover on the “communicator” and slides it either into their suit pocket or a special clip on their belt, just like the crew of the Enterprise did. We call these high tech personal communicators “cell phones.” Perhaps you’ve seen one of these “cell phones” being used in your village, possibly by the kind hearted Christian missionaries who are there trying to educate you and your ignorant tribals in the ways of the modern world.

Star Trek also showed that people could access personal computers, a concept unheard of back during the apogee of the show (when computers back then were big, super expensive things owned only by governments and a very few select businesses). Information (audio, visual, text format) in Star Trek was stored on small, rectangular blocks that were inserted into the computer, a far cry from the punched cards and magnetic reel to reel tape then in use in real life. The data blocks could hold (in the future) on average, what it would have taken (circa mid 1960's) an entire library of punch cards or an entire room size archive of magnetic tape to store. What was more amazing is that these personal computers responded to a variety of inputs, from keyboards to spoken commands.

The producers of Star Trek were very forward thinking for their time because they realized that storage and computing power would only increase as time and technology rolled by. Their only mistake was that they didn’t realize how soon that technology would arrive nor could they predict in their wildest dreams of just how fast technology would advance (not in the next three hundred years, but rather in the next three decades). These colored data cartridges that the Enterprise crew used seemed a logical way to store vast amounts of information in a small media format. A few decades later, in the last part of the 1980’s, people used 3.5” floppy disks to store their data and entered these disks into their personal computers to share information or access specialized programs.

Today, we have USB flash drives (no bigger than your little finger) that can store several gigabytes of information (or the equivalent of several thousand floppy discs circa 1990) and digital media such as CD and DVD that can store even more, stuff that not even the forward thinking writers of Star Trek could have guessed would come into use not in the last part of the 23rd century, but rather at the last part of the 20th century. In the 1960’s, a personal computer was a thing of science fiction, in the 1970’s, it became science fact and today, you would be hard pressed to find a job or family that didn’t take care of some aspect of their life by using a home or work computer. Forty years ago, the smallest computers filled an entire building and required a dedicated support and programming crew. Today, you can buy a laptop computer at Wal-Mart, slide it in your briefcase or backpack and the power of that computer would be equal to many, many of the 1960's building sized computers and its speed would, back then, have been undreamed of.

Remember the really nifty wrist TV communicators you saw in the Dick Tracy comics?  Science fiction, silly stuff that could never happen in a million years?  Right?  Wrong. Today’s streaming media, wireless networks and personal high speed hardware such as video capable cell phones and PDAs allow you to not only receive streaming media in the palm of your hand but also to send it. Today, we have cell phones that can take high quality digital pictures, hundreds of them stored in the phone itself. Thirty years ago, stuff like that only existed in the imaginations of the fans (and the mind of “Q”) in a good Sean Connery “007 James Bond” movie. Today we take it for granted. What once was a technology only available to the greatest fictional spies and assassins in the world, most teenagers have access to (and thoroughly abuse) today.

Science fiction becomes science fact, Al and it becomes fact far quicker than you (and unfortunately, most science fiction writers) might think. Technology advances in a rapidly expanding explosion, a supernova of knowledge. Today’s breakthrough may not only cure a problem or a disease, but the material learned and the hardware developed may (and probably will) lead to other paths of development being opened. Technology is a vast snowball that, once started rolling, only gets bigger and faster as it goes. You can’t stop it, short of destroying knowledge (like bombing someone back into the stone age) but technology is also a harsh mistress that doth tolerate no fools. If you’re not surfing the leading edge, the forward wave, if you’re not at least keeping up with those on top of the wave then you are going to be left in the dust, much like Harley Davidson was left behind several decades ago when they decided to drop out and stop learning. You can knock science fiction all you like but as William Gibson once said, “all societal change is essentially technology driven.” If you aren’t part of the driving force, then you’re part of the societal drag it is experiencing. I deal with people like you all the time, Al, the people who are afraid of technology. The people who don’t want to learn anything new, who don’t want to exert the effort to think new thoughts or adapt to what the rest of the human race is embracing. I swear I don’t understand people like you, somewhere in your life you just stopped learning… the switch in your mind that let you keep up with the rest of us flicked off and you have no desire to throw that switch back on again, no desire to trip your breakers and restart yourself. No desire to get up and start moving again, moving forward, as fast as you can.

How far have we come, as a species, as a race?  In less than seventy years time, we went from the Wright Brother’s primitive glider at Kitty Hawk to putting two American astronauts on the Moon. Looking even farther back, in the span of just one hundred years, it is breathtakingly amazing to see that in one single century, we have advanced, technologically, more than we have advanced in the sum of the twenty centuries before combined. Since you show a decided tendency to be a slow learner and not a particularly deep or original thinker, Al, I’ll understand if those statements don’t have as much impact on you as they will on others who read them and understand the implications and the magnitude of what we have done, as a race, in so little time (compared to the amount of time that we have been living on this planet).

I’d like to offer a quote at this time to show you the progression of technology over time.

"Today, when I throw away a musical birthday card, I am casually discarding more computer power than existed in the entire world before 1950. A camcorder wields more processing power than the IBM 360, the stupendous machine that launched the mainframe age." -Dr. Dennis Waitley.
 

That’s a pretty heady concept to try to wrap your mind around. Considering that it would have taken a king’s ransom or the entire GNP of several small nations to possess that amount of computer technology just six decades ago (and the fact that it would have been built using vacuum tubes and taken up the space and the size of a large warehouse instead of the size of a postage stamp today) is awe inspiring. Compare that fact to the notion that we now consider that trivial amount of computing technology to be not only nothing more than a novelty, but readily disposable as well really begins to put things into perspective on just how far we have come in such a short period of time, doesn’t it?  Or maybe not. It all depends on whether or not you have forgotten how to think big thoughts or whether or not you have laid your imagination to rest long, long ago.

As for myself, I have personally chosen to always keep myself moving forward, mentally and educationally, never stopping the learning process long enough to gather any dust on the mental cogs, so to speak. I have also discovered that science fiction expands the mind wonderfully because it makes you think new and larger thoughts (a process which I can imagine is extremely painful in your case and one which you try to avoid if at all possible). Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." It’s easy to see that Mr. Holmes wasn’t talking about anything remotely related at all to Harley Davidson or its ilk.

You may scoff at science fiction and claim that your tastes have changed in your arduous journey from child to adult but what you are really saying is that as a child, you used to look up to the sky and dream of grand things, you used to stretch your mind as far as you could and now you don’t. Somewhere along the way you lost that ability, you lost that desire to not only put your brain into gear, but to sidestep the neural clutch and leave one hell of a smoky burnout from the staging area of the mind down the quarter mile of the imagination. I find that quite sad, Al, that as you grew older you became less likely to have big ideas or think new thoughts. The mind is, simply put, a tool that is best kept sharp at all times and is most effective when it is honed to a razor fine edge. If you choose to disuse your mind, if you let it lay fallow for season after season, if you think small thoughts for long periods of time, then you unknowingly shape your mind into that way of thinking and you begin a reformatting of your thought patterns. This is not a good thing.

When you were younger, you used to think grand thoughts and now you don’t. As such, your mind has atrophied over the years which makes it no small wonder that you subscribe to the Harley lifestyle and dislike anything that makes you not only think for yourself, but also makes you ask questions of what you think and why you think it. Over the years, you have found that it is simply easier and more convenient to let others do all of your thinking for you.

At one time you evidently had some slight intellectual promise, Al ... but now your mind isn’t fit to be donated to science (where it would undoubtedly be preserved in a small glass dome and used as a paperweight to hold down the pending work orders on the ramshackle desk of an underpaid part time night custodian on the campus at a backwoods junior college).

“I can imagine you on Ebay, sorting through “Star Wars” cards for your anniversary collector’s edition and dreaming the star ship will come down on a rice burner with, phasers in hand to zap those pesky classic riders.”

Huh?  “… the star ship will come down on a rice burner with, phasers in hand to zap those pesky classic riders…?”  Diagram (or better yet, explain) that sentence for five bonus points on your mid-term exam, kids.

That magnanimous virtual garage sale found on the vast modern technological marvel which we lovingly call the Internet!   Ebay, where you can buy and sell anything and everything!  Yes, I like to look through Ebay, mainly to find classic science fiction, books by the masters like Heinlein, Asimov and E. E. “Doc” Smith, old original versions, first series runs and sometimes hardbound editions, not the tirelessly reproduced copies over the years. I’m also interested in the older stuff, stuff from my father’s childhood, the glorious golden age of science fiction, of space opera, ray guns, rocket ships to the moon, bug eyed monsters and shiny robots. I’m interested in the old radio shows that people my father’s age once listened to, spell bound. Tom Corbett-Space Cadet, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers (the old Buster Crabbe type serials) and others pique my interest because they are from a time when Americans had not only a vivid imagination, but these artifacts are of a time (and a school of thought) long since past.  The stuff that I collect online hails from a time when we, as a nation, looked upwards to the sky and still dared to dream of grand designs, of space stations and moon bases and bases on Mars … when the stars we looked up to were in the heavens above, not on MTV, driving counterclockwise real fast in a big circle or jumping up and down on a couch screaming about Scientology on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Ebay is a wonderful way of putting buyers and sellers in touch with each other around the world. While I am on Ebay, I constantly browse for old sci-fi artwork, artwork collections, history books, toys I used to have as a child (to stroll down memory lane and to see what they are worth today if I still had them) and a lot of other pretty cool stuff. Ebay has been wonderful about allowing me to reclaim books that I once loaned out, many years ago, and never received back. Using Ebay, I've pretty much built my entire pre-marriage library back to what it once was, in regards to science fiction. I also own several collections of artwork by various artists, my favorite being Peter Elson who has an uncanny eye for mechanical detail in his designs. Here is a painting of his that I would very much like to have as a large, poster sized prints.  For those who can't tell, the painting is a collision between two spacecraft.  The detail is hard to make out but on the full size painting, you can actually see the crew in the cockpit of the black ship (the red lit area in the front of the nose, beneath the white "9"), the painting is that detailed.

After all, I’d much rather have something by Mr. Elson proudly displayed in my house than, say, the waste of perfectly good paint, canvas, time and effort displayed below… though I would definitely have to qualify this as a “science fantasy” painting. May I proudly present this fine piece of officially licensed and endorsed Harley Davidson tacky crap entitled (I laughingly kid you not) ... "Evolution."

"Evolution" proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Harley Davidson motorcycles really are designed and built by and for knuckle dragging Neanderthals.

Probably not … but your idea intrigued me and I wanted to show you how it could be done properly, limited in scope as your original idea was.  Oh, I’m sure you probably wanted to hear a daring story about how the Harley owners all stood united against the ominous alien threat, how you all rode your powerful rumbling Milwaukee iron horses, thundering to the defense of a terror stricken humanity and saved the day but I just don’t think it could ever be that way. Why?  Simple. The way that I see it is in an interstellar war between aliens from another star system and Harley owners, then I’m going to have to freely admit that force fields and portable death rays are going to beat tire irons and rusty old chains hands down, like it or not, every single time. If Harley owners are used at all in a military capacity, it's probably going to be as a diversion or some kind of human shield. All that metal and fat in front of our troops is going to make for a damn fine barrier against those horrid death rays, why, it might take the aliens hours upon hours just to burn through all of that scrap iron and pudgy lard ass thus giving our troops the critical time needed to stage a successful counter attack and drive the aliens from our planet's surface!

This has potential, Al!  Extraterrestrial life that is interested in Harley owners… Hmmm… Maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe that is the whole intention of the SETI program, to sell you and your insipid kind into profitable interstellar bondage the likes of which would make the Israelite captivity in Egypt seem like a primo Caribbean vacation in comparison. Maybe we’re not really “listening” per se for intelligent life out in the universe, maybe we’re beaming signals out into space, advertising that we have a lot of stupid people here on Earth that we’d like to sell or trade (as a commodity) to other space faring cultures!  Yes, perhaps SETI doesn’t really stand for the “Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence,” maybe that acronym really stands for the “Sale of Extremely Tacky Ignoramuses!”

Ah, that was fun, wasn’t it, Al?  Perhaps not for you but it was fun for myself and many countless others who read all of that and who had the imagination required to enjoy it immensely… The imagination is a truly wonderful thing. Too bad you don't have one anymore because you're really missing out on some good fun in this journey we call "life."

“So it seems you hate Harley Davidson for a marketing success story, but fall victim to the same.”

Ah! 

This is something I had never even considered!  Hell, Al!  There might just be hope for you yet. Why, if you keep this kind of spontaneous neural activity ginned up long enough, we might just have to go and reclassify you into a higher thinking life form, say a step or two above the level of moist green common rock lichen where you now reside. Let's see if I understand you correctly; you (erroneously) think that because I like “Star Wars” (yet constantly make fun of it every chance I get) and because I dislike Harley Davidson (and constantly make fun of that every chance I get as well) that I am somehow a hypocrite. Do you want to compare “Star Wars” to Harley Davidson?

Fine by me, padowan. It should be interesting, to say the least.

“Star Wars” is a huge marketing success, yes, that much is without question ... but is “Star Wars” a success in the same manner as Harley Davidson?  Hmmm. Yes, I believe that it is. Harley Davidson and “Star Wars” are both tremendous commercial successes because both have given something to a generation of people who lacked something to begin with. In the case of “Star Wars,” George Lucas wanted to “give a fairy tale to a generation that had no fairy tales.” In the case of Harley Davidson, Willie G. wanted to give a make believe life to a generation of people who had no life of their own. Both enterprises are fantasy, like it or not, and they are both very good fantasy at the start but soon collapse under their own tedious weight the farther along the convoluted story is spun.

Now, I would like to step off the path for a second to give you some background information that will be germane to our discussion. You see, the original movie “Star Wars,” today, exists in no less than four different versions. I’m not talking about the other movies that came later in the series, I’m talking about the original, 1977 movie “Star Wars” of which there are four different versions of the very same movie. For what it is worth, there are three different versions of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” but “Star Wars” is the movie with the most versions and the one which carries the brunt of this discussion.

The original movie, “Star Wars,” appearing in 1977, was a stand alone movie, a tale of good and evil, with good triumphing in the end. It was a visual masterpiece and a technological tour-de-force that redefined movie making and special effects for decades after its introduction. When the movie was re-released later that year for an encore performance, Lucas went back and added the words “Episode IV: A New Hope” to the title scroll and thus we suddenly had two versions of the original movie in one year; a stand alone science fantasy and then a version which indicated that the original movie was not only part of a much larger story, but that it was the fourth part (which meant that the first three parts were missing, as well as anything to come afterwards).

Now, the so-called Special Editions (revamped original trilogy with extra CGI eye-candy added) appeared during the closing years of the 20th century and thus created three versions of “Star Wars” and two versions each of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” The fourth version of “Star Wars” (the original movie) appeared (along with the third version of "Empire" and the third version of "Return") within the last year with Lucas releasing the “original trilogy” on DVD (with yet more CGI added eye candy) and, much to his chagrin, having to go back (by fervent demand of the fans) and unfuck up what he had fucked up in the Special Edition versions (which have often been referred to as the "Special Ed" versions). Why is this information important?  Simple. It shows that George Lucas is a revisionist and a rather active one (if not a very bright one) at that.

I like “Star Wars,” the original 1977 stand-alone, unedited, un-tweaked, un-CGI added movie because it is pure and wholesome. It’s something I would show my two year old daughter (and I have, she loves it) and not feel bad about it. Do I like “Star Wars?” Yes, very much so and I feel no shame in admitting that fact to you or anyone else. You see, “Star Wars” changed me. Before I saw “Star Wars,” I was just another 8 year old kid playing with twelve inch Hasbro G.I. Joe action figures, running around with toy guns and cap guns and playing with toy rockets from the Space Race. When I saw “Star Wars,” my whole life changed because I saw things I had never seen before, sights and sounds and wondrous music. It was magic. I immediately went home and started trying to recreate what I had seen, on paper, by building models, by any means I could. I started to get spiral bound notebooks and try to write science fiction stories. I drew spaceships. I drew aliens. I drew giant space battles on huge sheets of roll out paper. I learned about robots and electronics and computers. I learned about the science in the science fantasy. “Star Wars” jump started my brain, it opened my mind up and made me think and once that event happened, it was a chain reaction that is still going on today, nearly thirty years later. “Star Wars” made me want to understand science and technology, to express myself creatively. “Star Wars” made me want to learn and I've never stopped learning since.

Oh, yes. I like “Star Wars” very much. I also like a lot of other movies, covering many genres; some of them not very good at all (many you’ve never heard of) and some of them quite great and unique. I think though, of all the movies I have ever seen, “Star Wars” is my favorite and always will be because it holds a special place in my heart, a place it earned when I was eight years old and saw Lucas’ masterpiece for the very first time on the big screen in that air conditioned cinema, sitting there, eating a bag of popcorn and drinking a grape drink, mesmerized by what I was seeing which was, quite literally, nothing short of a fairy tale come to life. Now as for the other movies in the series, you can have them; from the soap operish “Empire Strikes Back” and its cliff-hanger ending to the laughable “Return of the Jedi” which, IMHO, should have more aptly been called “The Muppets Take The Universe” (the idea of a galaxy spanning Empire getting defeated by a bunch of teddy bears with sharp sticks is about as plausible as the Roman Empire getting usurped by The Care Bears).

One other striking similarity between G. Lucas and Willie G. is that both take established portions of their intellectual properties (movies for Lucas, models of bikes for Willie) and they tweak them here and there, never really producing anything radically different from the original but different enough that each feel compelled to reissue the modified property as a "new" version of the old item.  Lucas does this with his original movies, taking three movies and creating ten movies out of the original trilogy.  Willie is more content just to swap pieces around from one bike to another and call the end result a "new" model.

Yes, you are correct, Al… Harley and “Star Wars” really are very similar in most respects. Both are vast commercial empires built on the marketing of a specific logo as well as merchandise that is tied to that logo (but which may not necessarily be tied to the original product). That is why you have Harley Davidson kids pajamas, along with “Star Wars” kids pajamas. That is why you have Harley Davidson telephones shaped like motorcycles and “Star Wars” telephones shaped like robots. That is why you have “Star Wars” action figures and Harley Davidson edition Barbie dolls. That is why you have Harley Davidson pin-ball games and “Star Wars” pin-ball games, Harley Davidson video game motorcycle riding game simulators and “Star Wars” video game starfighter simulators. I guess the most obvious similarity between “Star Wars” and Harley Davidson that pops to mind is that both Willie G. and G. Lucas have made tidy personal fortunes by selling their own personal myths and fairy tales over the last three decades.

“I would not be surprised if you had full regalia for storm troopers or a Darth Vader hood and mask lying close to your computer or had thoughts of a Jedi flash light for your riding outfit for your 30 mile long distant runs.”

As for the “Star Wars” outfits, I can honestly say that I have neither nor do I care to own either of them. I don’t personally know what the SNELL or DOT rating is for a set of Stormtrooper armor but I haven’t seen anyone riding in full field kit locally so it can’t be very high, if it is tested and approved at all. Still, seeing someone on a Suzuki Gixxer 1000 riding in full Stormtrooper armor (let alone someone dressed as Darth Vader or even Boba Fett) would probably make me laugh so hard I would piddle my boxers. I would most definitely have to pull that person over, get a picture of me taken with them by their bike, thank them for the laughs and probably offer to buy them lunch just for making my day. I wouldn’t even write them a ticket for “not wearing a helmet” even though they were wearing something that was not approved for use on a motorcycle and I'd let them off with a warning (as long as they promised not to do it again).

I also think that it is hysterically hypocritical for a dyed-in-the-wool (note proper spelling of the traditional phrase) Harley owner to make fun of someone who dresses up like an Imperial Stormtrooper from “Star Wars.” I really see no functional difference at all between some diehard fan of George Lucas’ fairytale wearing a full set of Stormtrooper armor (with a fake laser blaster at their side) mingling with other “Star Wars” fans at a sci-fi convention and some diehard fan of Willie G.’s fairytale wearing all of the officially licensed and endorsed fashion clothing (while sitting on their fake motorcycle) pretending to be a real biker among a group of similar pretenders at a rally like Sturgis. Both are simply different examples of someone enjoying (perhaps enjoying a bit too much) the same type of make-believe lifestyle that is available to the average consumer today, for a (rather hefty) price.

Now, if I remember correctly, a full kit of Stormtrooper armor will set you back about two to three grand, done professionally from a reproduction company that specializes in duplicating movie props. The fake blaster will probably set you back a couple hundred dollars, adding that to your bottom line. What this means is that for about two to three grand, you can either look just like an extra in George Lucas’ fairytale or (for the same amount of money) you can look just like an extra in Willie G’s fairytale; take your pick. Now, while nobody ever said that playing make-believe was cheap, the biggest difference between you and I is that I have far better uses for three thousand dollars than to dress myself exactly like someone else is dressed and pretend to be something that I am not.

A “Jedi flashlight” you say? 

Whoa! 

Let me ask you something, Al ... Have you ever seen one of these?

Did you know that not only do these things exist but that they are officially licensed and endorsed Motor Company products?  What is it, you may ask?  Well, let’s look at the product description: 

"This flashlight combines the look and feel of Harley-Davidson® with the power and durability of Rayovac®. The heavy duty corrosion resistant chrome casing and genuine leather grip is the ultimate combination of function and fashion. The unique lens engraving projects the official Harley® bar and shield at short range. Also, the Harley-Davidson® logo is embroidered on the grip and stamped on the end cap."

Give me a break…

“Your word is a light onto my feet and a lamp for my path.” Psalm 119:105.

That one Bible verse could be taken out of either the Holy Bible or used as a tagline in a Harley Davidson accessory catalog and it would have equal meaning for this sacred Milwaukee Orthodoxy religious artifact (though we might want to change "word" to read "logo").

“Your logo is a light onto my feet and a lamp for my path.” Psalm-O-Willie G. 119:105.

"The ultimate combination of function and fashion?" Bwahahahaha! Who the hell are they trying to kid (or market this thing to)? That statement can only be true if you consider cheap white trailer trash to be the leading edge of fashion sense. Hillbillies such as yourself call these powerful religious artifacts “magic moon beam casters” (or "electric candles") but the proper name for it is the Rayovac Harley Davidson Flashlight complete with the bar and shield logo (aka the “scoggin signal”) built right in to the design of the lens itself. That’s right, folks! It’s leather trimmed and when you turn it on, it casts an outline of the bar and shield logo on the wall or way up on the clouds above so that other HD owners will know you are in trouble and come running to your rescue with their pickup trucks and flatbed trailers (though seeing all of those signals waving around in the sky at one time might become a bit confusing, after all, there’s only so many pickups and flatbed trailers to go around).

A word of friendly advice here, Al (and I will have more friendly advice to share as we go along); before you try to insult me by saying that I dream of riding around on my bike with a “Jedi flashlight,” perhaps you should first make damn sure that Willie G. and his disciples have not only already given their official stamp of approval to just such a device for use by your pathetic kind but that they aren't trying to make a profit off of it as well.

Thus I refute thee and you do stand corrected, chimp.

“It’s amusing to me how you knock the motorcycle that brought the motorcycles to America, when the very crap you ride was driven by dollars.”

Oh, dear!  I guess with a mind as small as yours, the Harley Davidson dealer probably got by with using just a Q-tip to brainwash you. Yes, everything in the world is driven by dollars, Al, especially Harley Davidson.  The point is, you get far more for your money buying a Honda than you do buying a Harley Davidson (and you spend far less in doing so as well).

So ... you erroneously think that Harley Davidson brought the motorcycle to America?  Your stupidity is as humorous as it is sad.  Not only do you know nothing of motorcycles, but apparently you also know nothing of motorcycle history. Let me give you a little lesson, Al.

An American, Sylvester Howard Roper (1823-1896) invented a two-cylinder, steam-engine motorcycle (powered by coal) in 1867. This is considered the first motorcycle, if you allow your description of a motorcycle to include a steam engine powering it (or any non-human mechanical supplied motive power). However, it wasn’t until 1885 when Gottlieb Daimler, a German, invented the first gas-engine powered motorcycle. His motorcycle was an internal combustion engine attached to a wooden bike (a fact which marked the exact moment in history when the dual development of a viable gas-powered engine and the modern bicycle merged). So, in essence, the gas powered “motorcycle” was invented first by a German in the 19th century.

Gottlieb Daimler used a new motor design in his motorcycle, a motor invented by engineer Nicolaus August Otto. Otto’s contribution to motorcycling history was that he invented the first "four stroke internal combustion engine” in 1876. He called it the "Otto Cycle Engine" and as soon as he completed his engine, Daimler (a former Otto employee) took the new design engine and integrated it with the bike frame to form the first gas powered motorcycle design.

Over in America, the first motorcycle to be created domestically and successfully marketed was the 1902 single cylinder Indian “Camel Back” or “Hump Back” (whichever term you prefer to describe the model). One long year later, Harley Davidson introduced a single cylinder engine powered bicycle and that was the first Harley Davidson motorcycle produced (a year late behind the Indian design). In 1903, Indian introduced their first V-twin powered motorcycle to good sales and success. It wasn’t until 1909, six long years later, that the first Harley V-twin powered model was introduced (I guess it took the founding hillbillies that long to take apart an Indian motor, figure out how it worked, put it back together and duplicate it). Harley has always been a follower, never a leader. The only time that Harley Davidson has ever gained first place dominance domestically was when all the domestic companies that were its competition ceased to exist (and last place subsequently became first place by default when no one else was around to contest it). Hell, prior to World War One, Indian was the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the entire world, producing well over 20,000 bikes per year (a figure Harley could only dream of at the time). I think that was the only time in motorcycle history when an American motorcycle manufacturer truly was number one in the world. It was Indian, not Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson can only dream about being number one (hell, they can’t even be number one in their own country of origin, let alone in the world).

Harley did not bring the motorcycle to America, it didn’t have to. Indian was building motorcycles before Harley ever did. In fact, the motorcycle was so popular (since at the time roads were few and cycles were easier to work on, afford and drive on the mud ruts that passed for roads in America) that by 1910, there were around 150 different motorcycle manufacturers in the United States. Sears even built and sold a motorcycle (and later also built and sold automobiles). Building motorcycles was a kit / garage industry to be sure at the early start (and still is if you look at OCC and WCC). Where are all of these manufacturers today?  Gone. Dead. The Great Depression killed just about every cycle maker except the big ones like Harley and Indian. Poof. Gone in the blink of an eye. It was only due to severe mismanagement at Indian and a problem with line workers stealing the Indian company blind that Harley became number one domestically.

Indian was always the innovator, Harley the imitator. Unlike Harley-Davidson, Indian strongly supported racing during this early period as not only a way to improve their product (competition leads to innovation and improvement of the breed) but also as a way to present its machines to the buying public. When the Europeans first heard that Americans were building speedy motorcycles, they scoffed and laughed. Indian factory machines dominated all forms of racing in the US and as such, Indian was unwilling to take this insult from across the pond. Indian sent three of its factory motorcycles over to Europe to compete in the prestigious Isle of Mann TT race in 1912 where the Indian built cycles won first, second and third place, completely setting the Europeans on their collective ears. The Europeans stopped laughing at American motorcycles after that but it wasn’t Harley that had saved America’s reputation for engineering and performance, it was Indian.

You hillbillies like to point to the 1957 Sportster as some kind of benchmark by which modern sport bikes grew out of but that is wrong. Sport bikes grew out of the café racers in England in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Sportster itself was a copy (in form if not design) of the British performance bikes of the day, so much so that the 1957 Sportster had its gear shift on the right side, just like the British bikes, as opposed to the left side like the other Harley models in production. Always the imitator, never the innovator; that was, has been and still is the corporate mindset of Harley Davidson.

No, the sport bike I ride has more in common with Indian’s heritage of innovation and performance rather than Harley Davidson’s heritage of being a come-along has-been. My bike is driven by continually advancing technology, by experience and its ongoing engineering evolution is fueled directly by international competition among its peers, by the desire to be number one, to be the best. That is the legacy of an American motorcycle company, the legacy of Indian’s example to the world. The antediluvian copy of a decades old design that you spastically putter along on is driven by fashion mandates and profit dollars if it’s driven by anything at all other than hillbilly ignorance and sheer good luck. Your bike is assembled by a team of beret wearing academy trained fashion artists instead of college educated mechanical engineers, that should be your first big clue that you’re not riding a real motorcycle.

Milwaukee is too scared to try anything new or infuse anything different into their business formula because they might break the fragile profit bubble that they lucked up on after their fortuitous, government aided resurrection. It also might be that they don’t try anything new because they don’t know anything new. After all, while there is a big difference between a 1984 Honda VF500F Interceptor and a 2004 Honda CBR600RR, there is almost no difference at all between a 1984 Harley Davidson Sportster and a 2004 Harley Davidson Sportster, save an increase in price.

Al, Harley didn’t bring the concept of a motorcycle to America and Harley wasn’t America’s first mass produced motorcycle, Indian was. The joy of motorcycling in America was a campaign waged by many companies, both domestic and foreign; Harley Davidson, Indian, Norton, BSA and Triumph all competed for sales in this country over a long period of many decades. Harley may have been here over five decades before Honda ever arrived on these shores but from the first step into our great nation, Honda did things right, from the start, and they never looked back after that. The memorable ad campaign “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” probably sold more bikes for Honda and got more Americans into riding motorcycles during that short time than Harley had sold or gotten into the saddle in the entire decade before. It was Honda’s marketing of their products which changed people’s opinions of motorcycles and those who rode them from a negative image to a positive image. It was Honda who was the future wave of motorcycling in America, not Harley and that is why today, here in America, Honda is the number one retailer of motorcycles and Harley is number two. Number two, in your own country of origin!  That’s got to really torque you the wrong way, doesn’t it, Al? 

“Not the purest of your nature, but of course your idea of a good time is degrading a person that pays your check, but we’ll touch on that later.”

No, my idea of a good time is intellectually crucifying sub-par dullards like you for sport and offering the result up to the more erudite members of the species as entertainment. My idea of a good time is ridiculing idiots like you, clueless people who think their motorcycle gives them specific American rights and American privileges above and beyond what I have as a natural born American citizen, that somehow your American birthright can be purchased or artificially augmented through the simple influx of money or by obtaining a costly material good. That’s my idea of a good time or as Galileo once said:

“I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob.”

Smart people making fun of stupid people has been a favorite past time of the more learned throughout the history of the human race. I also think that an old biker adage works best here, Al:

“You make fun of me because I’m different. I make fun of you because you’re all the same.”

Oh, and I have some personal information for you as well, information that is going to take the bitter wind out of your tattered intellectual sails faster than a broadside of chainshot but like you said, we’ll touch on that later… Of course, you would have been privy to this personal knowledge about me long before hand (and thus saved yourself a right good deal of personal embarrassment in the process) if your reading comprehension skill had been able to keep up with that runway mouth of yours. However, it does make for some damn nigh hilarious situations to let you hillbillies ramble on and on about something that you don’t have the first clue at all about. Give a man enough rope… or so the saying goes.

“I have owned a Jap bike, a nice “little” Honda Classic 1100. a Harley look-a-like. The first thing the Honda dealer suggested was a set of pipes that were “Harley sounding.” I did not waste the money on the pipes (the phrase, “you can’t make a pigs ear into a silk purse” applies) and loved the bike. It ran well and you will enjoy this first ride story, at least the start of it.”

No, Al.

If you try to make your Honda sound like a Harley, the correct phrase to use when attempting that asinine endeavor is “you can’t make a silk purse into a pig’s ear.” As for your Honda Classic 1100 being a “Harley look-a-like,” I don’t know, personally, of one single Honda owner who refers to their cruiser or standard or tour bike as a “Harley look-a-like” unless of course the only reason that they bought their Honda in the first place was that they really wanted a Harley but all they could afford at the time was a Honda and they were simply expressing their bitter resentment of the financial situation. You can generally tell the Harley wannabes on the Hondas from the HD leathers they wear and the fact that they are quick to take the emblems off of their Hondas in order to try to pass them off, at a distance, as Harleys. Such is the incredible pull of the make-believe Harley Davidson lifestyle on the weak minded fools who give that sad pagan religion such pious devotion.

As for the Honda dealer telling you that they would sell you some pipes to make your Honda sound like a Harley, well, I’m going to have to call bullshit on that and for one very good reason. You see, Al, when you are the number one retailer of motorcycles in the United States, you don’t tell your customers how to make their bikes sound like the overpriced, underpowered, lackluster products offered by the number two retailer of motorcycles in the United States. A Honda dealer telling a customer that they can get some pipes to make their Honda sound like a Harley would be like a Ferrari dealer telling someone that they can get some mufflers to make their GTO sound like a Fiat. If you’re going to try to pull our leg at least give us the common courtesy of throwing something halfway believable in our direction.

Now, as far as sound goes, I’m very proud of my Honda and its characteristic high performance sound. I’m even more proud that my Honda doesn’t sound anything at all like a Harley. The “Harley sound” is the characteristic sound combining poor design, dubious build quality and piss poor engineering. Yes, if my Honda ever starts sounding like a Harley, I’ll know that not only is it time to kill the motor, get a trailer and haul the CBR to the Honda shop for some major, major, major internal engine repair work but also that I’m really not going to enjoy looking at the bottom line of the repair bill when I get it.

“My Harley owner friend, the person that made riding look fun and could care less what I rode, unlike you with your small-minded view of the world, but then again you do live in a town with a population of 6,603. I’m sure its quaint, but I don’t expect a worldly view from such a porthole. I’d bet the job market is booming, so the pay scale for sheriff must really be top notch.”

I’m far better traveled than you would like to believe, Al. I’ve been out of state in all directions, as far east and north as possible (even to the capital in Washington, D.C. and beyond to the Canadian border) and down south into good old Mexico (the other country, not the state of NEW Mexico). I’ve been to the tip of Florida where it is just ninety something miles south to Cuba and I’ve been up all along the Eastern coast.  I would one day like to head out west and view the Rockies and ride my bike through them, but for now I’ll wait until my daughter is old enough to appreciate the views as well and we can all travel as a family. I believe it is important to share such things with your children so that one day, they may in turn share such things with their own children but that may just be me.
 
I also wouldn’t know very much about the local job market as it doesn’t really concern me unless I’m looking for a spare job to make some fun money for my hobbies and to spend on my hot rods. I work in Hattiesburg, thirty some odd miles to the east and I make damn good money (probably far more than you which should piss you off even further). I choose to live in Columbia because it is slow and quiet, far more so than Hattiesburg. Columbia is "Small town, USA" defined right down to the main street with its quaint little shops, the mom and pop stores, the family owned businesses and the clear view of the courthouse in the middle of the city proper, its grounds all illuminated at night and often the background for some spectacular sunsets. I can take my daughter to the city park to let her play on the playground and not worry about her having to witness gangs fighting, shootouts between thugs or seeing drug deals go down. I don’t have to worry about grid lock traffic, excessive taxes, smog or rolling blackouts during the summer. No, we don’t have a murder every week, but we do have murders. We have rapes, we have child pornographers, child molesters, drug dealers, gangs and drug problems. We have car wrecks with fatalities, stabbings, shootings, muggings, and beat downs. We have bar fights and drunk drivers. No, Columbia isn’t perfect but it’s far closer to being perfect than say Los Angeles or New York. You can have your big cities, Al, you are welcome to the urban jungles.  I’ve been there, I like “Small Town, USA” much better than “The BIG City.”

Your other fatal intellectual mistake in our debate is that I am not a sheriff, I am a police officer and a volunteer one at that so I don’t get paid (zero, zip, zilch, nada) for my service to my community. For me, it is a duty that I feel called to answer and I consider it an honor to serve my community, giving back what little I can in order to make it a better place to live for everyone. The truth is that I have been asked to join the PD as both a part time and full time officer, with pay, but I have politely refused. I don’t care for politics (local or state) and if the local politics ever get to be too much, then I want to be able to walk in, put my badge on my chief’s desk, thank him for the opportunity to serve my community, shake his hand goodbye and be able to walk out knowing that I’m still going to be able to feed my family at the end of the day. It’s an honor for me to serve my community, Al, it isn’t a career, rather it is a choice. I volunteer some of my spare time (what little I have to give), I don’t get paid for it.  After all, being a law enforcement officer isn’t my primary job, it’s just something that I have found that I’m good at (just another of my many God given talents and gifts).

My primary job is being the senior systems administrator in charge of fourteen counties worth of network, wireless communication, software and hardware, a network (part of one fifth of the total network in the state) covering several thousand square miles and several hundred users. As for the pay scale, well, let’s just say that what I take home from my IT job would pay three police officers salary locally so you see why, if I were to quit my primary job and become a full time police officer, I’d have to take about a sixty-six percent cut in pay, something I’m simply not willing to do.  I know the pay scale for a sheriff and the pay scale for an IT professional.  I’ll stick with the higher paying job, thank you.

“The important thing was to ride, and his girlfriend (a professor at Duke University) invited me for a day ride."

Hold on there, Al!  You included a piece of completely extraneous information with no foundation to back it up.  When you do that, I’m just going to have to call you on it.

That's patently weak, Al.

Does this university professor actually own and ride a Harley herself or does she just climb on the back of your friend Tom’s bike?  If this university professor just rides on the back, then she’s not so much a professor or a biker as much as she is a piece of self loading baggage.

Oh, and here’s a joke for you. You can pass it along to your esteemed Duke University professor if you like.

Q:         What do you call an (educated / attractive) woman on the back of a Harley?
A:         Slumming.

Al, if you’re going to name drop then at least use a respectable educational institution to choose your names from. I really think I would have more respect for your friend’s girlfriend if you said that she taught grocery bagging as an online correspondence course through DeVry and moonlights her meager income by rhythmically sliding up and down a greased brass pole, lackadaisically swinging her bony hips around and around to really bad renditions of White Snake hits while drunk truckers stick ten dollar bills in her fringe adorned G-string and slap her on her pasty white, roadmap-like, varicose vein blemished scrawny behind.

“After miles of country roads, I noticed Tom reaching down to his left side while riding his Brand new Road King Classic, a really pretty bike in jet-black with whatever accessories he had purchased on his dream bike, a bike that left my “little” Honda Classic in the dust on all rides both on the road and the gas tank. I could run 100 miles and his Road King could go 200. Oh yes I do like the looks of the Road King.”

Ah!  Pavlov would be so very proud of you.  Your vivid description of your friend’s Harley evidently is drool worthy on your part.  That’s okay.  I can fully understand how the primitive sound of the Road King’s technologically retarded engine spastically trying to stay lit with each anguished rotation of its crankshaft must send every neuron in your Post Grape-Nut" sized brain firing off at once in a spasm producing cascade of gleeful pleasure and involuntary muscle spasms.  After all, one of the biggest selling points of a Harley Davidson is "simple minds, simple pleasures" as long as those simple minds have deep pockets.

My little CBR 600 gets, on average, 44 miles per gallon, with a few highs near 48 and a low or two near 41 (spirited riding and we’ll leave it at that). I get almost 170 miles to a tank of 93 grade premium before I hit reserve and have to start looking for a gas station (probably more if I stuck entirely to the highway and didn't have a third of my trip in heavy stop and go urban traffic). Even such, I’ve got a half gallon reserve which means that if I really wanted to coast into a gas station, I could probably get 190 miles before my tank ran dry. That’s ten miles less than your friend’s bike. Now, is that 200 miles with reserve or without reserve, Al because that does make a difference... So your friend’s bike gets ten miles more on a tank full of gas than I do?  Yee-haw. I’ll run circles around him on the road, on the drag strip and most definitely in the curves. If the price of all of that performance means I get five percent worse gas mileage than he does, I’ll suffer that penalty and smile, thank you very much. I’d rather have a 400 pound, 600cc bike with 115 horsepower than a 1000 pound, 1200cc bike with 57 horsepower, any day.

Fuel economy is not important to me, at least not in the same way that it apparently is to you. You see, the CBR600RR may not get as many miles to the gallon as your friend’s Road King but it gets almost twice as many miles to the gallon as my occasional driver / restoration project; a 1989 Pontiac Firebird Formula 350 (5.7 liter L98 TPI V8, THM700R4 four speed automatic transmission with overdrive, 3.27 geared rear limited slip heavy duty Borg Warner rear differential, WS-6, four wheel disc brakes). Al, I don’t care if my sport bike gets worse gas mileage than your friend’s Road King, I just care that it gets almost twice as much gas mileage as my car and that’s what really matters, at least as far as fuel economy is concerned to me.

“After all, ALL Jap manufactures have tried for years to emulate the King.”

Great gorilla gonads!  Please don’t start this tired old over the parts counter strength mental retardation again!  Let's think about this logically, now.   If the Japanese are copying Harley, then where in Milwaukee’s lineup did they steal the idea for the CBR?  Why would the Japanese try to copy an inferior design, Al?  The Honda Gold Wing (and any other import full tour class bike) stomps the ever living monkey snot out of the Harley Road King year after year. Not only have the Japanese “emulated” the King, they’ve taken the design, improved it, added more value, more options, fixed the problems that Milwaukee could not and turned around and sold a far better product for less.

Oh, and unlike the King, the Gold Wing continues to evolve, year after year. The descriptive adjectives "nostalgic," "retro," "heritage," and "classic" when combined with the noun "styling" are just PC excuses for being outdated and unable to catch up with the rest of the world.  It's a pity party thrown by Milwaukee.  In the years to come, putting a brand new Harley Davidson Road King next to a brand new Honda Gold Wing is going to be like putting Fred Flintstone’s chiseled rock car next to a brand new Lexus.

“It’s okay that you prefer a small zippy bike, hell one day they might even make one that fits your frame and style.”

So, what you’re saying here is that you’re a size queen, Al…  You’re a little man that needs a big shiny, loud bike in order to feel good about yourself but more importantly, you need a big, shiny loud bike to get people to actually notice you because without your bike, you're unremarkable as a human being and not really worth noticing in the first place.  You need a bike that swallows you whole rather than a bike that you can wrap yourself around, rather than a bike that conforms to your body type.  No, you become your bike, your bike becomes your persona, your character, and your charisma.  Your bike is like a strap-on replacement for everything in your life that is missing, for everything that you can't provide naturally on your own.

The only “style” that you have to your name is the one that Milwaukee has created for you, not one that you actually put together or generated by yourself. Your “style” belongs to someone else, your style is someone else's idea and someone else’s fashion, you just got to choose the parts you wanted to wear out of a catalog but what you don't realize is that anyone can buy the same stuff that you buy.  There's not just you out there, Al, but somewhere there are probably ten other Harley owners who look just like you, who dress just like you, and all of them think that they are individuals.  I find it both funny and sad that who and what you are is dictated by what you wear and what you ride.  Without your Harley, you are … nothing.  Seriously and honestly.  You didn’t create the style that you project, you’re just renting it as you go, you're paying someone else to look like they want you to look, you’re living up to their idea of what you should look like, of how you should dress.  After all, you can hardly be an original or an individual if you’re wearing and riding the exact same thing that everyone else is wearing and riding, now can you?  You can't be an outlaw if you're riding what the pop culture worships and embraces.  Harley has turned from outlaw to pop culture, which would be like Fear Factory releasing a cover album of Brittany Spears' Greatest Hits.  The only people who take Harley Davidson seriously anymore are the fools who keep them in business, the pretenders who are trying to be something they never could in real life so they rent a costume and make believe.  The only people who take Harley Davidson seriously are those who need them the most in order to be complete.

I’m five foot twelve and weigh in at 200 pounds, give or take a ten spot from time to time and I find the CBR600RR to be the perfect size for me in regard to arm reach and leg length. I’m also w