The GOP Agenda

I've been trying to figure out what the Republican party stands for these days. For a while now, it has been clear that those who control the party want to get rid of everything in the New Deal -- Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, etc. Of course, the national media often dismisses those statements as just things politicians say when playing to the nutjob base.

However, watching Congress -- particularly the Tea Party controlled House -- and it is easy to see that they are fully willing to destroy the Nation -- and end up in Hell -- in an effort to secure power.

JOBS
1) They want no improvement in the economy before election day because they feel they can take back the White House if the economy is bad. This isn't a secret strategy, they've come right out and said it.
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," Mitch McConnell told National Journal.
2) Thus they oppose any jobs bill or other measures that might put people back to work.
3) In fact, much of their term has been spent trying to lay off hundreds of thousands of government employees -- which would only make the economy, housing market, consumer spending worse.
4) Their solution to the jobs crisis? Eliminate the minimum wage, cut taxes on corporations and capital gains. They don't care that you'll be shopping at the dollar store, they are all millionaires.
5) Rather than raise taxes on millionaires, they want to raise taxes on the poor -- calling them "freeloaders" and "leaches" for not paying any taxes at all -- because they are below the poverty level!

Not only do they want to take us back to before they New Deal -- they want to take us back to the Great Depression!

Scifri Videos: Boost Your Bike

Stumbled across this very cool little film about a guy who created a flywheel bike. I'm a big fan of storing and using wasted energy. I think it is the other half of efficiency and a cheap and easy way to reduce our energy consumption. Very cool.

Vintage Honda Decals and a Deal!


So I mentioned earlier that I got these great decals from Lord Moon Pie. He has tons of high quality decal work for restoration as well as custom decal for your car/boat or bike.

If you order off his website direct and mention The Retread or my name you'll get a 10 percent discount! Check it out!


Link: Lord Moon Pie http://www.moonpie.co.uk

Sping Ride Around the Valley

Amy and I got out the other day for a ride around the valley. The sun was perfect, the bike was running good and Amy wanted to try out her new jacket and boots. She's very stylish, even if she had her helmet on too high at first. The bike sounds better and is more responsive with the new pipes too.






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Lights, Filters, Decals

Okay, so I got the first layers of paint on and things looked good. This week I installed a new UNI air filter and worked on the electrical system. There were more wires than I knew what to do with, but after trial and error and pouring over the wiring diagrams, I figured it out. And Lo! There was light ... including the park light.

The downside is that all those connectors don't fit inside the headlight bucket. Problem, having all those electrical connections exposed to the elements is asking for trouble. Moreover, it looks like a hillbilly's front yard.

I found the solution in my shop manual. The Rebel 450s addressed this problem with a junction box behind the headlight because the Rebels cruiser-style headlight was too small. I found a couple of junction boxes on ebay pretty cheap and so I've got one on the way. We'll see how it works.

Another eBay find were these cool vintage Honda stickers made by a seller in the UK. Very cool, they were the hold double transfer type so I only had one shot to get them in the right place, but they ended up looking VERY slick. I was thinking they would get lost in that dark blue but the contrast actually makes them stand out more. Clear coat layers are being applied as I write this. I can't wait to get things all put together and get riding.

Meanwhile the rain continues.

Hey Look, It's lights up! It's alive!

Here's the rough assembly a few days ago during a "sun break"
The front fairing looks good, wind screen my need some adjustment
 - the holes don't match up.

St. Patrick's Day and Irish Pride

It's that time of year again. The time when I break out my Irish rugby jersey . 

Last night I read Lindsay W.B. Yeats Irish Folk and Fairy Tales. I tell the kids about Patrick Cooper Hunt, who was born in 1830 in County Mayo and stepped off on the docks in Philadelphia in 1848 leaving a land of famine and finding a land of opportunity.  He found a wife too, of course -- Mary Malone -- another Irish immigrant from the rocky west country. His son married Rose Casey, the daughter of Irish immigrants. 

I tell everyone in earshot how I got to live and work in Ireland after I graduated from college. I tell them about PJ's -- where I used to keep office hours after dinner -- and where you could view the Leprechaun bones for just a punt. I tell them about St. John's Castle in Carlingford and about the old Mint where I used to work. I tell them about climbing Croagh Patrick at sunset and losing the trail on the way down in the dark. Like a guiding angel, an old gent with a flashlight appeared on the sharp rock side of the sacred mountain to lead us safely back to the trail and the warm music of the pub.


 I tell them about the Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley, who once had an audience with the Queen of England. I took a mail boat out across Clew Bay to  to visit her castle one day and spent the night on her little Clare island. 

For though it's a Saint's day to be sure. Yet,  March 17 is really about Irish pride. A chance for all of us who have found prosperity a few generations removed from needle-bone fingers of starvation to look back on the land we've left behind. 

Oh, and there's yer man St. Patrick. If you want to read about himself, Slate magazine had a good scribble here.

She likes it electric

Okay, so I've got the headlight on and most of the nest of wires fits in the headlight bucket, so it really cleans up pretty good. It is a really tight fit, and I have some wires that don't have a home yet, but I've successfully got the headlight and turn signals connected.

That said, two things are apparent:

1) The heavy turn signals have no place to go. They will fit on the headlight bucket, and they look kind of cool, but the stalks they came with ~barely~ fit. I've ordered a lightweight cheapo set from Hong Kong that I can attach to the faring directly. This will also solve another problem I have. I'm eliminating the chrome from this thing, since much of it is pitted and rusted. I'll cover all the chrome parts in a gloss black engine enamel. However, the retro turn signals are just too pretty to paint over. The cheapos will paint just fine and blend in instead of standing out.

2) Things aren't blinking. When I relocated my rear turn signals to the back of the bike, they wouldn't blink. Not sure if they did before, but I know they worked before teardown. So now the question is what has to be connected to get them working. When I hooked up the front turn signals, they lit up just right, but did not blink. So either I have a blinker unit that is shorted out, or all the connections need to be made to get it blinking. I'm not going to over pursue it at this point. My battery will need to be replaced for the new season and it may just be that I'm short of power to work the blinkers.

Meanwhile, the motorcycle is looking pretty good. I tried the faring out with the new bars and headlight and it's is going to look like a cool old BMW going down the road. Much work left to do however, and summer is coming.

Wasted Calories are Sinful

Just read Slate's review of TC Boyle's new book "When the Killing is Done."  It follows the clash of an environmental engineer trying to eliminate invasive species from two islands and her running battle with an animal rights activist. The title comes from the animal rights activist who calls environmental engineers "Nazis" and states "I'll be civil when the killing is done." The Slate writer has a great line:
The killing, needless to say, is never done. Nature is as murderous as human beings, and neither is likely to change.
As an environmental science writer, I used to cover stories of these sorts of conflicts all the time. They also reveal two worldviews -- one scientific and analytical and the other moral without reason or perspective. As we've become increasingly divorced from nature as a people, we have lost our connection with its inherent brutality. The natural world is all about domination, all about killing and eating things. Our romanticism seeks to restore "order" and "harmony" that never existed. Natural systems are always dynamic and amoral. Everything is food for something else. Wasted calories are the only sin.

Lyrics: Coffee Love, Coffee Love

I'm in a fog, I'm half dead
Tractor beam pulls me back to bed
Until I get that first drop in my head

Morning cup of coffee, need you so
Chase away that sandman
Wash away the gloom
Morning cup of coffee how i love you so

Don't like the cream or frothy thing
Just fill it to brim and it'll make me sing
Works better than any alarm bell's ring

Black with sugar and I'm
Good
To 
Go

I'm grumpy cuss with a fuzzy head
Tractor beam pulls me back to bed
until I get that first drop in my head

I can smell it while its brewing
that magic that it will soon be doing
get me through another day
just a few drops away

Morning cup of coffee, I need you so
chase away that sandman
wash away the gloom
Morning cup of coffee how I love you so

Is it need or is it love?
Cus I can't stay away
even for a day
I'm an addict and I'm here to say

Morning cup of coffee, I need you so
chase away that sandman
wash away that gloom
Morning cup of coffee
I can't live
without
you

Forty days of rain

Found this old ball
and here's the glove too.
I don't think they'll ever dry out
Just a few things from my past
drowned in flood
but I ...
I can't let them die

Forty days
and forty nights too
Forty feet high in my mind
Forty years
Forty years and two
God willing, I still have some years left
With you

You can see
the water got this high
highest it has ever been
High water comes
most every year
But we won't see the likes of
this again

Silver light
shines on silt-brown fields
everything is corrupted and dull
little fish
fight for life
attracting a flock of gulls

All we had
was just things you know
and memories, we still have a few
guess we better
start again
Thank God I still have you

Forty years
where'd they go
staring out the window at the
rain rain rain
Forty days Forty nights
Forty years and two
Give me forty years with you.

Forty days of rain
Forty nights
Forty feet high
Forty years
Forty years and two

Motorcycle Graveyard

I remember being a kid with my dad, crawling around junkyards looking for Fiat parts. I miss those open repositories of parts and the treasure hunt adventure of searching through the industrial archeology of the recent past. My dad was an industrial engineer and so he taught me the beauty of the machine.

I wish I could fine a graveyard of old motorcycles that I could crawl through on a wet winter's day, finding that that diamond in the rust. I'm jealous of the folks at Classic Cycles in New York who had an opportunity to access such a graveyard of old motorcycles recently.Here's the story: http://dcclassiccycles.dynamitedave.com/graveyard.html

2011 a repeat of 2008? Ex-oil Exec says get ready for $5 gas

Okay, so when I was convincing my wife that I needed a motorcycle again, one of the reasons I cited was that it would be great to have something that was good on gas for short hops around the valley and maybe even driving to work. I bought my Ford F150 pickup just as gas prices spiked last time. It runs E85, which is cheaper, but that drops the MPGs down to about 13. My old CB400 on the other hand was spec'd at least 45 mpg. It would be much higher if not for the auto tranny.

Now, the ScooterScoop is saying gas prices are slated to go up again. ( 2011 a repeat of 2008? Ex-oil Exec says get ready for $5 gas ) If you didn't notice, gas this Christmas topped $3 a gallon for the first time. Even with the dip in demand of the global economy, they aren't making new oil.