Moto Culture

  1. Poetry Corner

    Poetry Corner
    Long before internet commerce was mainstream, we enjoyed making and mailing print catalogs. Our idea was to present motorcycling, and Aerostich products, and related items, in ways that were not only accurate but also inspiring. We wanted to tell stories about riding which reflected a worldview I privately called ‘Andy’s Planet’. This was a small motorcycle-centric place that in my...
  2. Rat Races, Paradoxes, and Other Stuff I Don’t Quite Know What Else To Do With

    Rat Races, Paradoxes, and Other Stuff I Don’t Quite Know What Else To Do With
    A Year-End Collection of Assorted Drivel “Riding makes every trip a bit of an adventure.” - Mr. Subjective Several years ago a couple of my co-workers encouraged me to start writing an Aerostich blog. This was about when we did the Zero Below Zero project during the winter of 2015-16. Here’s a collection of random topics from the past year...
  3. Shiny Stainless Reflections

    Shiny Stainless Reflections
    On December 8th of this year (2023), a week or so after the release of the Tesla Cybertruck, Road & Track magazine’s Victoria Scott wrote a wonderful short essay that included this: “…our vehicles reflect (widespread cultural) anxieties. More than half of vehicles sold today in America are trucks and SUVs; this fueled a new all-time high for the average weight...
  4. Rebel with a (hopeless) Cause

    Rebel with a (hopeless) Cause
    The ancient Greeks had a useful story about a guy named Sisyphus, who forever strained pushing a large heavy ball up an inclined plane.  In our time, the famous (but little-known in America) long-time (1960s-80s) president and CEO of the Toyota automobile company, Kiichiro Toyoda, lived, wrote, and spoke this Japanese aphorism: “To shoulder a heavy burden down a long...
  5. Old-Guy Drivel: My Honda XR650L Story

    Old-Guy Drivel: My Honda XR650L Story
    Here’s a short-ish story about my old motard-modified Honda XR650L. I bought this bike new in 1994, intentionally planning to make it a motard. That year there was only one factory-made motard available, the very first generation KTM Duke. A friend of mine living in Minneapolis had purchased one and loved it, but within the first few hundred miles the...
  6. A Nearly Perfect Business Plan

    A Nearly Perfect Business Plan
    Step one: Create a terrific product which answers a question almost nobody is asking. Something entirely new which meets a need few people are interested in meeting. It is important the product only appeals to a small number of consumers. Step two: Make the product so durable it wears out very slowly and rarely requires service.   Step three: Make the...
  7. Waypoints Along the Analog/Digital Divide

    Waypoints Along the Analog/Digital Divide
    It just hit me again last night and this morning, and it keeps coming back. Essays, news, emails. Story after story, year after year. Real-time life experiences. This so-called generational ‘divide’. The young digitally-fluent generations don’t understand how to navigate yesterday’s analog realms too well, while the older analog-fluent geezers struggle to handle today's computerized technologies. This is hardly news...
  8. The Risks of Riding

    The Risks of Riding
    A fair number of our customers agree about one looking like a dork/Road Grimed Astronaut if riding for transportation and utility, vs. when riding primarily for sport and recreation. These two different-but-related applications have at least this in common: they both involve a single-track motorized vehicle. In rich countries like America, transportation/utility/commuting riders generally do both kinds of riding, but most...
  9. A 137 Year Anniversary

    A 137 Year Anniversary
    The First Ride… Click to enlarge.Photo: Daimler Reitwagen. Wladyslaw, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons. In November of 1885, 17-year-old Paul Daimler went for a motorcycle ride on the first ICE engine motorcycle, the Daimler Reitwagen (built by his father, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach). The date he made this ride is up for debate with some reporting...
  10. Verschlimmbessern

    Verschlimmbessern
    VerschlimmbessernGerman verb, loose translation: To make something worse by trying to improve it. Long a favorite word of mine, thought I've never known exactly how to pronounce it or use it in any actual conversation. Two forms, verb and noun version, neither of which I know how to say or use. But in our modern world, as we get older...

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