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    TOUR OF ALPS 2009 

        A leisurely tour for a change, not a there and back AFAP. 2/3 weeks with Antony, an old friend on a newish Kawasaki Versys and me on my trusty 12 yr old SZR round the Alps and back camping and rooming. I did prep the bike honest but in retrospect I didn’t do a very good job so it’s no thanks to me that she didn’t miss a beat again.
So Friday evening, July 17th we set off for Hull in shite weather.
The ‘all you can eat’ buffet on the boat was welcome, especially for a very large guy who had 3 mains, 2 slabs of chocolate cakes and god knows what else besides.
Rotterdam and south. Same shite weather which made the 300 miles to the first stop a slog. Antony got a wet crutch and my boots were, if anything, leaking- outwards. A lonely hotel deep in the woods run by a rather choice grandmother. It’s my age. Good food, which will later become a theme for this trip. We dry. We set out again in the rain then dry. In the middle of a plain, having taken our wet gear off, we get caught in a downpour, the only protection being a field of 6’ corn. I suggest it’s better the second row in and we pretend the corn is sheltering us for half an hour then head out in the 60mph hair drier to get dry again. We’re well short of our second night stop so cast around for rooms in Ellingen, apparently a famous baroque town. A far too posh for us place has rooms so we give in to paying the extra. 

GoogleMe.

Hi Dave, thank you for using GoogleMe; we hope you enjoy it. We have 3,776 data points for you since 2009 so our conclusions will average 89.3% accuracy. Firstly congratulations on your recent wedding anniversary and hope your new rotavator is proving useful. As a keen motorcyclist the 2019 MotoGP season is shaping up well but your Yamaha motorcycle seems to be problematic. As spares are becoming rare we suggest you invest in a newer one. See here for local dealers. We note your daughter, Emily, has purchased legal highs, (via ebay) which may indicate a drugs problem, and has lesbian tendencies. (64%) It may be worth raising the subject. See here for local therapists. Your son Donald has accepted a job in Brighton (via LinkedIn) so he may be moving away soon. We’re sorry to say your marital relationship shows signs of jeopardy. (Twitter) We cannot comment on your wife’s situation for privacy reasons but you should address the problem. Finally you are not as good a person as you think you are. Your interest in internet porn has become excessive and casts doubt on your love life. That’s understandable as your wife is size 20 and has chubby features but hours of TV football doesn’t help plus your obsession with getting that old bike working. A lot of work to do there. See here for local counsellors. Your IQ is 5% below average and your credit score 20% so take extra care with your finances. You have a borderline ADHD personality disorder (71%) and you too have latent homosexual tendencies. (43%) Your general situation will be affected by global warming; expect wetter springs and hotter summers, and the value of the pound is likely to fall by 10% after exiting the EU. Expect water to be increasingly scarce. We hope you enjoyed our findings. Remember you can get regular updates via our voice bot available in these stores. Have a nice day.

9/11 Gov-Splaining.

After 9/11 I looked for the truth. Over the subsequent years it’s appeared. It was impossible for the terrorist rookie ‘pilots’ to fly a passenger plane on the trajectories they took. It’s also impossible a passenger plane could actually do it. It’s impossible passengers could have used cell phones at the altitude they were flying and it’s impossible a building could collapse due to fire alone. The official ‘truth’ is riddled with these and more impossibilities. There’s a constant clear dividing line between officials who gave testimony to corroborate the official line and the bewildered others who gave the evidence of their own eyes and experience. Architects, scientists, pilots and firemen have all given proof of the above. Others say something so big, so public could never be kept secret, which is true, but the truth has come out and it’s no longer a secret. And lets not forget 2,731 people died. Whoever coined the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ salvaged this hopeless case; just two words that undermine any inconvenient naysayer. But it’s become clear there was a huge conspiracy within the US government and other actors. Imagine a petri dish and the introduction of a single bacteria. It infects and spreads through the nutrient agar. It grows and though we can’t see what’s happening it becomes visible. An idea is conceived and infects other actors. A plan is formed. It fits requirements, solves problems. People are either pragmatically unscrupulous or pressured to come around. Soon it achieves a momentum too big to be stopped. Those involved coalesce in great fear of the truth escaping and use their power to stop it. Known weak actors are called in to substantiate the bacterial untruth. Only immune cells stubbornly hold out. Outside the petri dish life goes on. And the key players? Who knows. Possibly NORAD, MOSAD, Larry Silverstein, the owner of the Twin Towers who turned two obsolete buildings into a huge insurance payout and/or higher. Maybe there was a mistake and the twin Towers were supposed to fall after everyone had got out. Or maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist who refuses to believe in the impossible.

SZR660 Low Fuel Light Light Fix.

In all the years I’ve been writing this blog the most read post has always been ‘SZR660 headlight Modification.’ I’ve no idea why. At 97 views it’s more than double the number of that bike on UK roads. Maybe it’s the code name of a secret US missile, which would account for the 4,700 page views from Russia. Maybe it was the blog where I included all the words I could think of that might spike anti-terrorist interest. Anyway the wire broke to my new SZR660 low fuel light. Thanks bike shop! I took it apart. Simple enough, a float on a brass tube, but how did that switch the light on? Much head scratching later I remembered reed switches. They switch when close to a magnet so the float must have a magnet in it and the 2.7mm ID tube a reed switch inside, so when the float sinks its magnet sits around the reed switch and bingo. Fine but how do I get the old one out? In another dimension it would be just pull it out but in our particular physics that was impossible. Much ingenuity later including a lathe, a 2.6mm rod, RS Components and a gas flame I reassembled it with a new reed switch and an unbroken wire. In short it was a pig. If anyone’s interested I can give an in depth explanation. So now I can sit back and see how many reads this post gets. By the way an SZR660 is a Yamaha single cylinder sports bike that’s a 20 year old gem that nobody bought. 

The Funny Side of Doomed.

Teresa May’s plea for MPs to ‘hold their nerve’ as part of our negotiating stance with the EU seems a noble call for heroism, a period of silence with guns at the ready. At the eleventh hour we will achieve victory, you know like what we did in WWll, or some western staring the Sundance Kid. I mean there’s no way they’ll think we’d be actually stupid enough to leap off this cliff into that raging torrent and survive the rapids and the inevitable hundred foot waterfall: and live to tell the tale. Is there? Hard to say. I mean I’m not hearing Barnier rallying the 27 with ‘lets just wait till the last minute to give in.’ He just keeps saying ‘no’, which is rather like the two hundred Mexican soldiers on the landward side of the cliff; and, more importantly, without the problem of a cliff behind them. But it is true they really do want us to stay members of the EU. So basically this has nothing to do with the Mexican soldiers, it’s the ‘I will if you will’ negotiation between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or in this case the two Conservative factions, the Others and the Rich Bastards. Now I think I’m right in saying screen writers will type anything so long as it’s a good story with a romantic interest and a happy ending, so surviving a cliff dive, raging torrents and a hundred foot waterfall with nothing worse than damp clothing is a fictional necessity but a barely credible reality. So either Barnier, not known for his sense of humour, says ‘Only joking you guys’ or it’s time to strap on water wings and a hard hat. Basically Teresa you can’t give the game away and expect to win.

American Binary.

Beginning in the 30’s with Edward Bernays creating the public relations industry America has a long history of triggering our unconscious to the tunes of whatever that industry is paid to produce. That change from satisfying demand to creating it transformed the public’s choices to what ‘we choose you to want.’ The cart overtook the horse. When Betty Crocker cake mixes weren’t selling Bernays suggested adding an egg would make mothers feel good. They took the egg powder out and Betty became a success. When cigarettes weren’t selling to women he branded them as ‘torches of freedom.’ The power to manipulate emotional triggers has given immense power to the advertising industry. That’s well documented but are we now suffering from an unintended consequence? When one formulated a decision prior to this change it had some intellectual depth; it required thinking about. Post this change has triggering our unconscious to be the decision maker made decisions far easier to make? Has advertising, in its unconscious tinkering, created an era of facile decision making based on easy unconscious responses. There are degrees but that’s the direction. So question: Has advertising’s use or abuse of our unconscious created a nation of lazy emotionally led thinkers? It’s an important question. It can only lead to bad decisions, bad outcomes and bitter divisions. Brexit and Trump are merely symptoms of this much deeper malaise. True it wasn’t perfect before, far from it. Germans didn’t want Hitler’s war but he sold it to them. So another question: How can we create a social structure that puts important decisions in the hands of those best capable to make them? It’s painfully obvious our current government, however committed, industrious and intelligent they are, are too deeply disconnected in their political bubble to be our ‘best capable.’

Fictional Conversation Regarding 5G.

Did you hear what happened at the Super Bowl? /No/ Well you know 5G? Oh no you’re not into that techy stuff, well 5G is the super new mobile phone standard, like there was 2G, 3G and 4G and soon there’ll be 5G, and it’ll be faster and better and shit so it can control everything like turn your TV on when you’re not at home  right/ OK/ Well because it’s more power and really short wavelength doctors been saying it causes cancer and brain damage and diabetes, which seems really strange, but anyway so they decided to test it out at Super Bowl OK?/ OK/  So there’s like 70,000 people in Atlanta with this 5G stuff and it all goes great till the half time show/ OK/ Well apparently the Mercedes Bowl in Atlanta is, well bowl shaped you know, and there’s lots of metal in it and these really short, I think they’re called electro magnotic or something waves get bent off metal so inside a bowl they can get focused yeh right/ OK. What like in one spot?/ Yeh absolutely, and where is that likely to be? yep you’ve guessed it, in the centre of the pitch and what’s in the centre of the pitch? well the stage dummy, and what do all the people do during the show? right, they video it for back home. I don’t see why when they’re probably watching it on TV anyway, but hey that’s what they did/ And?/ They fried Michael Buble/ What?!/ Right in the middle of ‘Haven’t met you yet’/ No/ To a crisp/ Jesus/ True/ And that was the 5G?/ Yep. So they’re pulling the plug on 5G and 2,3 and 4 as well so we’ll all be back in the dark ages………../That’s terrible. And all because of Michael Buble?/ Well yes I suppose in a way/ Well I won’t be buying anymore of his records that’s for sure!/ ‘Course you’re bloody not you stupid dip. He’s a crisp now and crisps can’t sing can they?!/ Oh no.