Having Very Little to do with Motorcycles or Rider’s Gear... …Unless you happen to be looking for a thin sheet of titanium to cut-up and use to fabricate something for your moto. A few days ago before falling asleep I was watching a few YouTube videos and at one point was presented with a five-minute infomercial starring a nice young woman making a sales pitch about ‘revolutionary’ and ‘sanitary’ titanium cutting boards. More out of naïve curiosity, and with zero interest in purchasing one, I clicked the ‘buy’ button and was presented with this online storefront: https://trytitachef.com/pp/en-2/? I’ve deleted the coded sales-source tracking information which followed the question mark at the end of the link above, but here is some of it: gad_source=2&gad_campaignid=22666324047&wbraid=ClkKCAjwvuLDBhBvEkkAAPopvbR-ZAYH9qKikK3DC_DwVUk9bpgPV6FE5vwE6fDRT7ZvtZDOpCyYus03MCMl09jQnx66TgOF-v69jidQYY2hqDLNJBpwGgIu8A   Any YouTube keyword search for titanium cutting boards will display dozens of other similar videos about these miraculous new cutting boards, each fronting another online store: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=titanium+cutting+board+video The reason I’m sharing this is because though you may come here for great motorcycle gear and interesting stuff about motorcycling, you also are likely to be an online shopper for Aerostich products, so I thought you might enjoy a brief description of my experiences with some of today’s online marketing, using these titanium cutting boards as an example. Short version: Most online marketing today is just as irritating and misleading as the broadcast television commercials and infomercials were during my childhood. (The more things change, the more they seem the same… Ain’t technology wonderful?) Here are my experiences with titanium, cutting boards, sharp kitchen knives, and germs: My personal preference is for wooden bowls and plates with ultralight titanium eating utensils (from camping/backpacking outfitters), and for having food prep knives about as sharp I can make them with two different grades of ceramic stones plus an improvised leather ‘strop’. I’ve also long favored hand-washing my daily-used wooden plates and bowls, and the titanium utensils, rather than dishwasher-washing anything. All dishwashing machines use extremely hot water (and some electricity…) to clean and sterilize whatever is placed inside them. Wooden bowls and plates can only be hand-washed, and I enjoy that as another simple dexterity-improving task. The bottom line is I don’t know from personal experience if titanium cutting boards keep one’s knives sharp longer. If you watch any of the videos about them, you can make up your own mind: Scam or innovative germ-eliminating solution? My guess? Scam. The relative softness of the wooden plates I use helps my knife blades stay sharp. I know microscopic germs get stuck and live inside even the hardest wood, and some kinds of germs can make one very sick. I’ve experienced food poisoning a few times, but never from my wood plates and dishes. Salmonella can be very serious and generally means at least a day of high fever and multiple brief-but-severe episodes of (projectile) diarrhea, cramps, and vomiting. I will never forget the worst time. I was riding and homeward-bound near the end of a week-long motorcycle trip, and I’d eaten a quick lunch made from a decent-looking salad bar at a questionable-looking truck stop. By 4:00 PM, I was on a toilet in a motel room maybe a hundred and fifty miles past the poisonous salad, and in great agony with a high fever and all the other symptoms. I was a mess. It took my body two or three days to recover and be able to complete the trip. Fortunately, there was a Walmart less than 1/8-mile away and the person I’d been riding with was able to purchase a few things to help me get through this ordeal a bit easier. Lesson: Avoid ALL truck stop salad bars. Despite that experience, I still prefer hand-dishwashing-wooden plates and bowls. The reasons I like wood over other food handling materials are: Very easy to keep clean, germ-free and safe -- if one knows how. Very lightweight and unbreakable in normal use, plus the attractive patina of long use (I know appearance is subjective). Environmentally friendly and ‘natural’ compared to all plastics and titanium. No harmful plastic micro-particles released into the world and titanium takes large amounts of energy to mine and refine. Plus, most of the world’s titanium comes from Russia, and all these new titanium boards are manufactured in China and sold online via Amazon. Three entities I choose to support as little as possible for reasons outside this short story. The only downside to wooden dishes is that one must diligently hand-wash and then let them air dry fully after each use. The requirements are dish soap, water, and air. (Some online videos also teach how to use lemon juice to sterilize regular cutting boards, etc...) The key to my wooden plate sanitizing process is air, which means letting the dish or bowl dry completely between uses, preferably after a hand-wash using dish soap. The key is they be allowed to dry fully after each use. Dryness is the key to ensuring all germs are long dead by the time one re-uses a particular wooden plate or cutting board. Germs die when the moisture they require goes away. Every time. All of them. The washing tool I prefer is a clear plastic soap-and-sponge wand with a detachable/replaceable old-fashioned cellulose sponge and a handle filled with dish soap that slowly filters out through the sponge. It makes lots of suds and is fast and easy to use. When not in use this tool sits upside down in a broad-based ceramic mug located on the kitchen counter next to the faucet. (A repurposed narrow-necked French condiment container - an actual ‘Grey Poupon’ stoneware thing). Stored this way it nearly always dries fully overnight, killing any soap-loving germs which might be hiding inside the sponge. The only risk to storing this tool upside down is having soap drip off the sponge onto the kitchen countertop, but if you press the face of the sponge against the side of the sink to squeeze out most of the water just before putting it away, there aren’t any drips. Humans have been safely eating with, and cutting food on wood, for maybe only a quarter of a million years. Eating tech does not get more old-school than this. Ten minutes after watching the online titanium cutting board pitch, I’d viewed/scanned maybe a dozen similar YouTube infomercials touting these miraculous cutting boards. Lots of viewer comments beneath each, and 95% of ‘em were highly favorable testimonials. Also, all the videos seemed to have been made by young computer-and-social-media-savvy people. The reviews and testimonials were so overwhelmingly favorable that their preponderance alone seemed suspicious, at least to me. If nothing else, today’s younger people are acutely aware of how affiliate and online marketing work. Thus, I’ve come to suspect that most of the videos were intentionally misleading to simply help businesses sell more stuff.* Combine high levels of affiliate-payment awareness with strong digital fluency and generationally raised levels of fear about many kinds of risks (germs, motorcycles, you-name-it…) and the unusually high profit margins from selling many Chinese manufactured products, and it adds up to a lot of YouTube videos intentionally presenting falsehoods or partial falsehoods about the desirability of titanium cutting boards. Beyond all that, today’s popular toothpastes, laundry soaps, and hundreds of other consumer products are now labeled as ‘clinical’ or ‘sterilizing’. Such marketing buzzwords appeal to all generations but are extra-effective with today’s younger people. Random free-range boomer parents: “Where did we go wrong?” Titanium cutting boards may be ok for cutting fruit, provided only the tip of your knife is run across the titanium, but for easier cutting of meats, fish, cheeses, and vegetables, they will dull a sharp knife far more quickly than any softer cutting surface. This one advantage of old-school cutting boards far outweighs all disadvantages, at least for me, but in the current online video universe, I’m clearly part of a small minority. Just another foolish geezer who loves riding motorcycles and making my kitchen knives sharp enough to dry shave a few ‘test’ hairs on my forearm. -- Mr. Subjective, July 2025 PS – These Ti boards do look like a possibly nice source-material for DIY fabricated ultralight bicycle or motorcycle brackets or side panels, though far more difficult to work with than aluminum stock. *A reasonably smart but unethical person could become rich and powerful spreading lies online. Hmmm… If you are looking for a very good comparison-review of cutting boards, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tm7mVpUIOk  It’s nerdy, honest and useful.

1% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration “Maybe I’m being generally stupid, but I prefer that to being artificially intelligent.” - Tales from a Roll Top Desk, by Substack blogger Kent Peterson kentpeterson@substack.com on Friday, Sept 13, 2024 (Friday the thirteenth…) This blog post is a follow-up on last January’s post about A.I. titled: ‘FFFFlaws-in-the-Algorithm’. Find it here.  ‘Chat GTP4’ quickly provided near-instantaneous detailed-yet-simplistic answers. I projected this reason why: All A.I. source data was online thus could never quite capture real as-lived experiences. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato reasoned how descriptions and representations of experiences and objects (and everything in between) could not be the same as the actual experiences and things themselves, and this is an important distinction for understanding A.I. and it’s limitations. Motorcycle riders know and feel things about motorcycles, riding and rider’s gear which cannot easily be translated into words, sentences, stories, photos, numbers, or 1’s and 0’s.  So following the old “garbage in, garbage out” principle in computer programing, when it comes to motorcycling A.I.’s results must always be incomplete, somewhat predictable, and uh…a little boring. By extension this probably means no project-able future version of A.I. is likely to ever become the existential scifi-type threat to humanity futurists worry about. Because A.I.’s algorithms rely entirely on preexisting digitized data, no matter how unimaginably huge that resource is (or ever becomes), or how powerful any algorithm might be, the wonderful “Aaa-Haa!!” bolt-of-lightening-black-swan moment riding’s magic, or the of outside-the-box moment of inventive craziness can never be perfectly replicated or synthesized. If an A.I. program could somehow be magically transformed into a living human being, most people encountering that person would fairly quickly label this individual a ‘tool’: “In modern slang, calling someone a ‘tool’ typically refers to them being seen as foolish, unintelligent, or lacking in self-awareness. It is often used as an insult to describe someone who is thought to be easily manipulated or controlled by others. While the slang usage of ‘tool’ has negative connotations, it’s important to note that it can also be used playfully or sarcastically among friends without intending any harm.” – from Neuralword.com (Side note: the above definition reads as if it were entirely A.I. generated. Hmmm…) Any true out-of-the-box experience or solution takes a leap-of-faith. For example, in 1983 at the time of its introduction, a one-piece Roadcrafter armored coverall was an answer to a question very few riders in America were asking. Simplified, that question was: “What would rider’s gear be like if it were narrowly optimized to help riders living in advanced and rich countries use their motorcycles more often, and mainly as utility transportation?” At that time I knew only one person who’d been asking that, a motorcycle magazine editor named Steven L. Thompson, so I sent him the first one. A few days after he’d received it his close friend Bob Sinclair, who was then the strong-willed motorcycle-commuting president of ‘Saab of America’, appropriated it, so I had to send Steve another one (which I was happy to do.) Sinclair’s enthusiasm was a good sign. Auto pioneer Henry Ford supposedly said (paraphrasing): “Prior to the introduction of the Model T automobile if you’d asked people how to improve their transportation, the response would have been 'we want a faster horse'. Even if he never said that, his Model T automobile was far more (and less) than simply a faster horse. Today, A.I. provides a lot of ‘we want a faster horse’ results, and as near as I can tell, exactly zero Model T car results. Today, Henry Ford and Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs are both remembered as visionaries who were adamant their businesses should never ask their customers what they wanted. These two believed people-in-general have little knowledge what they want until they actually see and experience whatever any something might be. Yet both visionaries were able to invent, create, finance and produce things they knew would sell well. Their strong belief was at core entirely based on an intangible inner faith that if they personally wanted one of whatever they were imagining, others might want one too. I can personally relate to that. Einstein famously described what all inventors do, and what no A.I. can simulate. He called what he did to develop our current understandings of light, energy, mass and gravity ‘thought experiments’. Such experiments involved asking questions in the simplest conceivable child-like ways and coming up with revolutionary analytic answers. Answers which initially depended on intangible faith. Only later were those answers experimentally tested and proven as truths. The “AaaHaa!!” and “Eureka!” moments when new ideas and new solutions arrive always come with adrenaline and endorphins. You can absolutely feel them being important and right, as much as understand them. The short essay which follows breaks down a simple “AaaHaa!!” product idea having nothing to do with Aerostich directly, but a lot to do with A.I. and how original inventions, new products and new recipes are created. Lastly, the product outlined below is simply a mashup of already existing ideas and technologies combined in a novel new thing. Without using any type of A.I. algorithm I know on faith alone this new idea is good, because I experienced a little adrenaline/endorphin hit as its pieces came together in my imagination. No A.I. can feel or do this. Someday I’d enjoy having and using this doesn’t-exist-yet product… A Perfect Hard-Sided Roller (or Spinner) Carry-On Bag The perfect hard-sided ‘roller-board’ or ‘spinner’ carry-on bag does not (yet) exist. I’ve spent some time trying to find this bag from among the hundreds of variants available today. None offer the combination of features I’d like. Not one. In addition to the baseline of being sturdy, lightweight and fit-able into an airliners overhead cabin bin, what I’d like needs to have a couple of unique characteristics. Essentially it would be a carry-on sized hard-sided bag configured more like an old-fashioned footlocker or steamer trunk than a shrunken hard sided suitcase. Visualize a rectangular-shaped acoustic guitar case with a thin-ish lid and a deep-ish bottom into which a guitar lays into. Add wheels and a retractable handle. No hard-sided spinner carry ons have ever been made this way. (Note: Spinner = four smallish 360º swiveling wheels on the bottom end. Roller = two larger diameter wheels set into cavities in the bottom end.) Elements the same as current carry-on spinner and roller bags: Shaped like a current hard-sided carry-on bag. Size like a current hard-sided carry-on bag. Material like a current hard-sided carry-on bag with similarly radius-ed corners. Either four wheels like a current hard-sided ‘spinner’ or two wheels like a current soft-sided ‘roller’ bag. Telescoping handle like a current hard-sided carry-on bag (must be narrow enough to ‘piggyback’ another bag). Lining of the bag and lid is fabric with pockets along the sides. Elements different than current carry-on spinner and roller bags: Lid is piano-hinged on the longer dimension, and the deeper side has two or three low-profile recessed latches. Lid is about 2” from the top ‘side’ of the bag. Lid seals against a waterproof gasket (with a small air-pressure equalizing vent separate or as a gap incorporated into seal). Gasket is a rubber extrusion along the top edge of the deeper ‘bottom half’ of the bag. Lid has a single small, compressed gas strut as a hold-open (like car trunks, hatchbacks). Lid opens 90º with strut, more than 230º with strut disconnected (via quick release). Advantage(only one, but it is an important one): 50% smaller ‘footprint’ when laid down and opened inside a hotel room or bedroom. Which is where bags of this type are usually opened after being placed on a chair, table, bed or luggage rack. Without specific prompting I know of no A.I. algorithm capable of weighting this consideration strongly enough to produce this design solution. When some inventor added wheels and a telescoping handle to a basic soft-sided carry-on bag, air travel became far easier. That humble innovation seemed in hindsight so obvious it was universally taken-for-granted but it also probably increased the number of potential air travelers by millions. Today’s air travelers overwhelmingly favor the increased protection and easier maneuverability of hard-sided four-wheeled spinner-bag versions, but unfortunately all of these types split bilaterally down the middle like the shrunken version of an old-fashioned suitcase. This means when you open them up the bag’s ‘footprint’ is that of two bags, not one, so using them is more difficult within the confined space of a bedroom or standard hotel and motel room. Only the now out-of-favor ‘drag-behind’ soft-sided roller-bags are set up with an opening lid (always secured by a perimeter zipper). It would take a very brave investor to finance the creation of a hard-sided spinner (or roller) carry-on bag set up with a side-hinged hard top lid faith alone:  1.) It would be different than the hundreds of hard-sided carry-on bags, and 2.) it might be slightly more complex to manufacture, and 3.) the ‘target market’ for such a bag does not know they would prefer using this type of bag, since it does not yet exist. There’s never a Henry Ford or Steve Jobs around when you want one, and no A.I. program can do the required on-faith creative stuff like this, either. – Mr. Subjective, Sept 16, 2024 PS – We (Aerostich) are not planning to enter the ultra-competitive carry-on bag business. The description above was written to serve as an example of a limitation of A.I. programs. I’d still like to have one of these bags, though, and would be happy to serve as an unpaid design consultant for anyone wanting to develop this design. PPS – This blog post was inspired by my wife, who was looking for and not finding a perfect roller bag. She writes a cool substack called ‘Peeled Grapes’.

Here’s an interesting 57-minute video about how highly processed foods connect to increased levels of obesity. This seems unrelated to motorcycling, but dig a little deeper and it is not difficult to connect a few core ideas to similar considerations involving riding and other personal mobility choices. More specifically, this video indirectly supports what I suspect about the differences between riding and driving, and how riding is comparatively more ‘nutritious’ than driving, even (especially?) during crappy weather and in difficult conditions.   Like most people, I live in one of those glass houses where one should avoid throwing stones. That’s because I own a car and enjoy driving and eating junk food and many other highly engineered processed foods. And I’m maybe ten pounds over the recommended weight for my height. But hypocrisy aside, I try to do most things with some appreciation for the pluses and minuses involved, especially when it comes to eating processed foods, and driving a car instead of riding there.  The video reflects a ‘paleo’ nutritional logic - a currently fashionable way of thinking about how the past several hundred thousand of years of human existence shaped us in ways that are now not such a perfect fit with many kinds of recent technological, cultural, and economic advancements. Examples include desirables ranging from central heating to efficient industrial agriculture, Excel spreadsheets, nuclear weapons and power, social media simulacrums, artificial intelligences, and, in this story highly engineered processed foods, and efficient, comfortable, and safe automobiles. The overall conclusion: 1.) For every benefit technology provides, something else useful is also taken away, and 2.) it’s not always clear the overall gains outweigh the negatives.   Fortunately, nobody is required to live within the technical and knowledge limitations of last week, last year, one hundred years ago, or several hundred thousand years ago. We expect access to the latest advancements in ice cream, pizza, motorcycles, smartphones, medical care practices, and everything else as it exists in real-time. At the same time, more than a few people seek the wisdom to somehow evaluate relative +’s and  –‘s involved. Including yours truly.  Also, it’s not so easy to improve artisanally crafted pizza and ice cream and thousands of other hand-crafted and traditionally made, raised, or grown items. Like many examples of Aerostich gear. When it comes to moving myself from A to B, motorcycle riding fits on the continuum somewhere between walking and flying in a jet airplane or helicopter. This is due to a mix of fortunate circumstances, deliberate planning, and compromising. Most importantly, I’ve never lived too far from where I work and shop, and this allows me the daily luxury of choosing between several wonderful personal mobility options. My commute was only three miles (4.8km) one-way between home and work for more than forty years, and during the past five years, I’ve lived only a little over five miles (8.2km) from Aerostich. My routes are also a dream, being mostly via 30mph two-lane surface streets with little traffic. And my errand-shopping-home routes add only another four or five miles and many feature easy bicycle lanes and low-traffic surface streets. I’ve always lived, shopped, and worked in older pre-automobile platted areas, not modern sprawl. After moving five years ago the additional two-mile distance was important: What I’d been used to, three miles, translated to a one-hour walk, a twenty-five-minute rollerblade skate, a seventeen-minute bicycle ride, a thirteen-minute drive in a car, and a twelve-minute motorcycle ride. Now being five miles from Aerostich translates to an hour and forty-five-minute walk, a forty-minute roller blade, a thirty-minute bicycle ride, a twenty-two-minute e-bike ride, a nineteen-minute car drive, and a sixteen-minute motorcycle ride.  Riding is always fastest (including putting on gear) and the most fun, but now most of the time I choose an e-bike. Mine is a beat-up four-year-old model having 37 volts and 17amps of battery turning 500 watts of motor, and it's already seriously obsolete, but for this application that doesn’t matter. It was easy to set up when new and now has over 6,000 miles beneath its wheels, though it’s on the second motor and battery, third chain, third chainring, third cluster, and second derailleur. My average speed of pedaling it across level ground is 19-21 miles per hour. Eight months of the year this E-bike rolls on smooth ‘street’ tires and the other four months it’s on different wheels set up with carbide-tip studded knobby tires, which, compared to smooth regular tires are completely terrible. They are noisy, vibrate-y, and feature much lower cornering limits, but I’m living in northern Minnesota where one is forced to make seasonal adjustments and sacrifices.  E-bikes are ‘gateway drugs’ to motorcycles. Many are enough faster than a regular bicycle you intuit the need to wear a helmet. In some areas, motorcycle rider training and licensing programs are starting to see influxes of students with e-bike backgrounds. E-bikes are more approachable and less threatening to new riders than even small scooters and motorcycles. This is good. But if one wants to be able to ride all the time, and to the widest possible range of destinations, in the widest range of weather, you flat need to have a motorcycle. There is no substitute.   My relatives, friends, and acquaintances living in large cities all must live farther from their workplaces and deal with tremendously more complex and challenging kinds of traffic environments and transportation infrastructures than I. So, they don’t have the luxury of as many personal mobility options. Separately I’ve visited a few developing countries where population densities are high and the road environment is so chaotic it is frightening enough to discourage daily transportation riding.  Such riding is far more doable where: A) There’s already a reasonable number of bikes in the traffic mix as then drivers expect and accept riders, and B) Where population and traffic densities are low, and C) Where ‘rules of the road’ are highly respected and enforced, and driving behaviors are disciplined. Think places like Northern Europe and Scandinavia.  Despite all this variability, a classic observation by fishermen, golfers, and other sportsmen and sportswomen goes: “A bad day of fishing (or golfing, etc) is still better than a good day at work.” But setting your life up so you can ride nearly every day is neither easy nor simple. It can be about as difficult as eating a healthy diet of mostly fresh foods. The benefits are similar though because riding is just a lot more ‘paleo’ than driving. There is no single specific best way to eat properly for optimal health and long life or to logistically organize, maintain, and employ a quiver of personal mobility options. But there are some useful generalizations: When I have enough time and the winds are not high, and it’s not terribly storming, I’ll choose the semi-crappy e-bike, year-around. And for me the worse the weather is, the more likely I’ll choose the comfort of an Aerostich suit around me, a modular helmet covering my head, and a motorcycle under me. Almost any motorcycle. But for my small-town route’s moto-choices are between a very old 1994 650cc bike, an almost very old 2006 400cc bike, or newish 2019 200cc bike. None of these have been modified for higher performance, though over years of use each has been ‘personalized’ in various ways. Lastly, the more you do anything, the less vulnerable you feel and the more fluent and proficient you become.  Riding in a busy city only a few nice days a year is a far different experience than riding nearly daily.  The old saying about how “a long journey begins with a single step” is never truer.  The first time you try using your motorcycle instead of your car is guaranteed to be stressful. Even getting the gear on is awkward. But a week later if you’ve managed not to get killed or injured everything has become more natural. Rain-or-shine, riding a motorcycle, bicycle, or e-bicycle is good for you, both mentally and physically. It clearly is a lot like eating a ‘paleo diet’ of fresh less-processed food. But it’s never easy and in some situations, it isn’t appropriate. So, use your head and “be careful out there”. (Oldsters may remember that phrase becoming an every-week signature line of dialog in a popular police TV drama called “Hill Street Blues”.) PS – If you haven’t yet watched the short ‘paleo’ food video linked above, do it. As you watch, think about applying its ideas to your everyday utility mobility choices. PPS – Here’s a link to a short essay I liked about how most people today tend to “over-consume” and are easily manipulated to do so. This story fits with a kind of mosaic precision adjacent to the above video about processed food and with my personal views about the health and societal benefits of riding bicycles and motorcycles. Warning, it’s thirty pages, so you may want to print it out to read that way. Which is what I did. PPPS – Here’s a link to a recent story in the New York Times about how overeating highly processed foods apparently has an adverse effect on brain health.  Mr. Subjective, November 2023 Audio Version (12:31), reader: Mr. Subjective

This is a great question. We don’t actually know much about this, and very little useful information is available online. What we’ve found there is not precise. The Gore-Tex® membrane on the back side of the Cordura fabric does not seem to have a wear-limit in normal use. It’s good as long as it’s cared for and the outer Cordura fabric is good. All fabric durability varies by fabric type, weight, weathering and wear. The Cordura we use is fairly heavy weight, which helps it last longer and resist wear and UV exposure better. Our direct material and workmanship warranty is for two years, which I felt would cover the most severe wear scenarios. I.E. - Someone who rides over 150,000/miles a year for two years, on a bike without a windshield or fairing. Only a very few Aerostich customers ride that much. Based on what we see every day in our repair department, wear varies greatly, and this is very different than age. Some garments still look almost new after ten or even twenty years, but on average most begin look fairly used-up after about 12-15 years of ‘typical wear’. For those ’typical wear’ scenarios we see come through our repair department, we know the Cordura 500 provides effective crash abrasion-resistance for approximately 12-15 years. We know this from examining many crashed garments which have been sent to us for repairs. Obviously the newer the garment the better, crash-wise, but for ’typical-wear’ garments the protective performance difference between 'brand new' and '10 years old' seems pretty negligible. If you visit our facility, you can see this yourself by looking at a display of about fifteen crash-damaged suits hanging on the wall. These days we occasionally receive very old garments which show much more age and wear than ’typical wear’. Our repair expert (a co-worker with years of experience) evaluates all of them. If the fabric feels too worn-out based on overall experience, our expert will tag the garment as ‘unsuitable for protection’ before sending it back to the customer. We may still repair a broken zipper (or whatever) even if it no longer meets our protective-function requirements. I’ve forgotten precisely what the ‘unsuitable for protection' tag reads, but it’s something like (paraphrasing): “This garment no longer meets our minimum requirements for rain and crash protection.” In summary, we don’t know the exact life of the fabric without first inserting all of the above qualifiers. Separately, there also is a rider-psychology aspect to this: ‘Fonzie’ (of TV’s ‘Happy Days’), famously imbued his old worn leather jacket with a kind of special quality protecting him from harm in some kind of magical way. Many riders do this to some extent. It’s natural. Riding produces happy-chemicals in one’s brain, and some of this happiness-feeling is transferred to a rider’s favorite gear and also to their bike. All motion activities produce this happiness effect, which is why skis, bicycles, surfboards and the like are usually also extra-special to their users. Similarly, most very small children (including me when I was very young, and Linus Van Pelt from the ‘Peanuts’ cartoon strip) imbue a favorite blanket or something with a similar kind of special magical value in exactly this way. So, when we see a twenty-year-old well-worn suit, which is all faded and floppy and looks like it’s ready to fall apart, it probably is. After its zipper (or whatever) is fixed it is tagged as no-longer meeting our functional requirements and shipped. When the customer receives it back, it’s out of our control. -- Mr. Subjective 4-2021

Item the first: Thanks to COVID I recently enjoyed about the nerdiest YouTube video ever -- an 18-minute presentation about why Timex wrist watches are considered neither valuable nor collectable by watch experts. You would think such arcana would be boring, especially to people with only the mildest interest in watches. Like me. And you’d be right. But in addition to motorcycles and riding, I am also interested in the relationship between culture and technology, and this Timex watch video is all about that. Since it has nothing to do with motorcycles directly, I sort of hesitate to recommend it, but because so many are more-or-less locked down, and since wristwatches are, like motorcycles, examples of a mechanically engineered technology, here it is. Warning. It’s boring and nerdy. Prepare to be geeked out: Spoiler and executive summary – The reason Timex watches are not collectable isn’t because they are inexpensive and common. Lots of people happily collect things which are neither rare nor valuable. Collecting, sorting and categorizing things is partly human nature. No, these watches are not being collected (according to this video’s narrator) because they were never intended to be repaired or rebuilt after the inside mechanism wears out. They were made to keep pretty good time until they died and then you were supposed to go out buy another one. Yet lots of other avidly collected products are exactly like that. Vintage Levi’s denim pants are collectably valuable. Old worn out hand tools are collectable. View an episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (or any of television’s syndicated riffs on this formula) and you’ll see plenty of other examples. It’s unbelievable what kinds of things have a collectable value. The reason this Timex wristwatch video is part of a motorcycle blog is because it caused me to think about old motorcycles, and my irrational emotional attachments to my own stuff. Especially to things which embody mechanical and digital technologies. For example, I’ve always written, read and surfed the internet using a notebook computer. I get between four and six years of use from these machines and after they become worn and obsolete, I replace them. But there are now five of these old notebook computers stacked on a bookshelf here going back to one from 1992. Hard to believe the first one cost $2,300 and featured a gigantic 33mb of memory, while the notebook purchased six months ago, and which I’m typing this on right now, cost almost the exact same amount in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and it has 2TB of memory. I never loved these computers, so why did I keep them? It can be difficult to understand why some no-longer-made bikes are so well thought of, and others (like old Timex watches) are not. The difference doesn’t seem to correlate with any objective machine-itself thing. Racing accomplishments? Sales popularity? Aesthetic beauty? Sometimes a bike which was successful by more than one of these measures still becomes forgotten. Compare the wonderful and historically important Honda Cub and Vespa scooter with the equally brilliant ‘Bee’. All three were created to be small utility-oriented personal mobility products at about the same time. And all three are recognized as truly great designs, but only two are well remembered today. Again, why? The virtue or divinity of any particular motorcycle (and many other engineered artifacts) may lie partly in the intentions of the engineers and designers who created it. If the device was intended to be ‘forever’ in some functional way so it’s user could in theory employ it for the rest of their life should they stubbornly choose to, maybe that is an important intangible ingredient. I’m thinking not just motorcycles and wristwatches, but also about Stonehenge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Consider a now-ancient BSA 441 Victor motorcycle, known by old guys world-wide as the ‘Victim’. Light, spare, elemental and pretty -- but what a piece of crap to own, ride and maintain. Yet just like the Honda Cub and Vespa, they’ve became beloved and iconic. These three very different bikes are easy on the eyes and straightforward enough in design and engineering so almost any rider can see (and in their minds eye, accurately imagine) how to take them completely apart and then more-or-less completely reassemble them using little more than a few simple hand tools. My own vehicular example of this kind of quasi-timeless ingenuity is an old 4x4 car. I purchased it brand new forty-seven short years ago and still enjoy looking at, driving, maintaining and fixing it. But dang if I can explain why. (With benefit of age, wisdom and hindsight maybe I was subconsciously thinking of it as a brutalist rebuke and an aesthetic critique of the popular pimped-out overly chromed cars coming out of Detroit at that time?) Before I’d driven it 100 miles, I knew it was crap, but this did not stop me from falling in love with it and driving, repairing and maintaining it as my (very slow) ‘daily-driver’ whenever I was not going to be riding or walking somewhere. Funny thing is, it’s now gone over 105,000 miles and with the further benefit of hindsight my stubborn commitment to it probably is partially due as much to its flaws as its virtues. Today this no-longer-produced model (after a run of more than sixty years…) has strangely become an aspirational and iconic fashion accessory for millennial hipsters, though not because it represents a brutalist rejection of mass-produced cars-in-general, but because it visually looks relatively timeless in sort of doomsday-prepper way. And just for the record, most motorcycles also provide this same sort of brutalist rebuke of the universality of automobiles, if one chooses to overly intellectualize about them. Which brings this back to old Timex wristwatches. The only thing my high-tech modern motorcycle and low-tech old 4x4 car have in common is how both can be nearly infinitely rebuilt. Whenever the makers of our machines attempt to create something which potentially could (with care) have a life-long relationship with its user, they achieve a special kind of immortality. Just like Stonehenge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Mona Lisa, and even an ordinary 10,000-year-old flint knapped knife blade. Those Timex people were not going for that, while the crappy old 4x4 car, the wonderful Honda Cub and Vespa and lousy BSA 441 people apparently were. One cannot help but fall in love with such vainglorious embodiments of engineering (and artistic) idealism. At this point any half-assed amateur philosopher might continue by making a pretty good argument about how a disposable Timex has more in common with a banana than those great watches admired by wristwatch nerds. Not me. There are too many other things to do. ---------- Item the second: If you can make it past the first five or ten semi-awkward minutes, this thirty-five-minute interview with nerdy engineer/futurist Sandy Monroe is pretty fun. Mr. Monroe first came to my awareness a few years ago when he made some videos promoting his engineering-and-testing-for-hire company. They do stuff like taking apart and analyzing electric cars and their batteries to see how they work. I’m not a subscriber to his channel, though. It’s been a few years since the last time I watched one of his YouTube videos. Until this one, just now. ---------- Item the third: Before writing this blog essay I sent both of these links to about ten friends, the first one by ‘cc’ a few weeks ago and this second one earlier today by ‘bcc’ to nearly the same group. These days many people prefer to not have their email address available to unknown persons, and some of my friends don’t know each other. Nowadays fewer people share links-in-general with their like-minded friends, at least compared to how internet and email cultures were ten or fifteen years ago. This change makes me feel like such a clueless geezer. I don’t know why email forwarding-and-sharing activity changed, but I sense it’s a loss. Decades ago, my mother and her siblings would snail-mail mail each other clippings from newspapers and magazines, and later photocopies of stories they’d read and enjoyed (or found interesting in some way). There would sometimes be a follow-up face-to-face or telephone conversation about the shared story. I remember rolling my eyes when an envelope containing a few clippings from my mother would arrive, but I’d always give her a call and thank her for sending them, and sometimes a clipping-topical conversation would follow. Why has this kind of social practice, which was such a large part of early emails, declined? Too much spam? Facebook? Twitter? Other social media? Social media is probably part of the reason, but regardless, I’m not too excited with the depth of intermediation and content tracking which are an integral element of today's popular social media forms.

Guest post by Kyle Allen Motorcycles ridden for everyday transportation was a normal part of my life growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. With high gas prices playing a factor, I have fond memories of both of my parents riding. Dad had a 500 Yamaha with an aftermarket fairing that he’d ride rain or shine to work everyday, and on weekends would let me swing a leg over the passenger seat for a scenic afternoon cruise on the backroads. Mom rode a Honda 125 that was formerly used by the Shriner’s to put on riding agility displays at local parades. She would use it to ride back and forth to her part-time job while us kids were in school, or to pick up a few groceries or run some errands. As a kid, I viewed riding a motorcycle as just a normal part of everyday life. By the time I was old enough to drive, my parents had sold both bikes (I suppose the logistics of shuttling 3 kids around played a part in that decision, but my Mom also said she felt like drivers were not paying attention to riders), and I ended up learning to drive on 4-wheels, but always with a thought about wanting to ride a motorcycle...someday. Someday came when I started working as part of the marketing team here at Aerostich. After some training and practice, I got my motorcycle endorsement in the Spring of 2009. Donning a new Hi-Viz Roadcrafter Classic one piece, I threw my leg over a borrowed 1971 Honda CB350 and never looked back as I established my roots as a dedicated daily rider. In the early Spring of 2010, I was offered a great deal on a lightly used, ’08 Kawasaki Versys, (that fit into the ‘bike budget’ I had been saving for) and logged the first ride of the season on March 11th, continuing to commute nearly every day that year through the end of November. Out of about 165 workdays during that timeframe, commuting on the new bike accounted for 145 of those days (with a few longer day trips and vacation riding days mixed in too). A quick run of the math proved that after the investment in the bike and riding gear, I was saving a fairly significant (to me anyway) amount of money by choosing to ride over driving a car too! With my Aerostich gear and a determined mind-set, 2012 allowed me to ride (at least a few days) every month this year – not always easily, but enjoyable every time – from below zero Duluth, MN temps in January and February to sweltering heat and humidity in July and August. Riding (anywhere), for me, is always the most versatile, practical and economical (not to mention fun), way to get from point A to B. Gas prices were jacked-up most of that year too, creating an even bigger savings. Flash forward another 5 years and I’m still riding the same Kawasaki (have changed the oil annually and put 2 sets of new tires and brake pads on it over the years) and wearing the same (road grimed) Hi-Viz one piece Roadcrafter Classic. The bike and gear have gotten very comfortable after over 7 years of use, not to mention that every mile and every day that I ride further adds to the long-term value of the investment in the motorcycle and riding gear. Every ride continues to save money over driving the car too. Looking at just the gas savings over the last several years, the economic benefits of riding become pretty easily apparent. The fact that riding gets me from A to B more efficiently, allows easier and more readily available parking options and is better on the environment is nice too. But the personal benefits from riding are where the real reward is. Anytime I ride somewhere, I arrive more alert, aware and ready to take on tasks at hand. If you choose to ride more I’m pretty sure that you would find similar results. Save money, feel energized and healthy and have way more fun! Download this post as PDF