Category: Scooters

Latrine duty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
A samurai in a latrine; outside, his three attendants hold their noses. Colored woodcut by Hokusai, 1834. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Thanks to one and all for standing guard outside my little shithouse this week.

I was called to jury duty again, and this time they actually required me to do something other than show up and wish I were elsewhere, running or riding a bike.

The judge sprung us Thursday afternoon, and though yesterday was my last official day in the three-week-long jury-selection barrel, I knew I would not get hauled in again. So I went for a leisurely 5K run. Today I’ll ride a bike.

And sometime later I will have some thoughts about my four days as a juror. Though Roy Blount Jr. beat me to a few of them in his essay “I Always Plead Guilty,” from the collection “What Men Don’t Tell Women.”

Especially when he wrote: “Fucking up also comes from doing things that deep down inside you know better than.”

Assault by battery

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Guess which one starts?

Today was grocery day. I was armed with a rather extensive shopping list, my last trip having been a short one to the Wholeazon Amafoods to collect a few delicacies for our 30th anniversary dinner.

That list got edited more than somewhat when I slid behind the wheel of the Fearsome Furster, turned the key, and … bupkis.

Not a slow crank. Nary a whir, click, or grind. Fuck-all, is what. Dead silence.

The trusty Wald basket shifts easily from bike to scooter. I use toe straps to cinch it down.

Like the rest of us, ol’ Sue Baroo has been enjoying some extended downtime in the Year of the Plague. She gets out about every two weeks for a grocery run.

But our last voyage was just a week ago, so I can only assume I managed to trigger some pain-in-the-ass interior light that failed to catch my eye. The battery is fairly new. Newer than the car, anyway.

But plenty of things are. This beast dates back to the last dipshit fool we had in the White House.

“Well, hell,” sez I. “What else we got in this garage here?”

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s Bike Month. I should’ve manned up and turned one of the touring bikes into a grocery cart. It’s not as though we lack for racks and sacks around here.

But I took the easy way out. Pulled the Wald basket off the Soma Double Cross, strapped it to the rear rack on the Vespa, and putt-putted over to the Sprouts with a messenger bag slung over one shoulder.

The lack of cargo capacity means no buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. But we all have our crosses to bear, amirite?

‘Revel in your time.’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

Having more fun than you. Especially if you work in the bike biz.
Photo “shared” from Revel

Ho boy. “Like biking without the work.” Thanks so much, Revel.

I’ll just put the bicycle industry over here, shall I? Next to the buggy whips, Linotypes and rotary-dial phones?

Anybody seen any journalism on what we do with the batteries in all this lovely “green” e-shit when they fail, as batteries do? Can they be recycled? Do they wind up down in WIPP? Or do we just launch them into space?

Battery up

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

El Diablo Rojo rides again!

One of the neighbors was chortling about never seeing me riding the Vespa, so I dropped in a new battery (yeah, it’d been a while) and after a bit of reluctant huffing and puffing from the caged, carbureted beastie we’ve been buzzing around the ’burbs again, just ’cause we can.

But it turns out that as per usual I’m behind the curve, out of fashion, so 15 minutes ago.

All the Kool Kidz are rocking the electric motorcycles and scooters these days.

The only part I got right was the battery. ¡Que triste es la vida Vespa!