Stealing One Back From Winter II

I stole one from February last year.  This year the weather aligned again and I was able to get a ride in between snow storms.

It was a cold commute in before 8am, about freezing, but clear and sunny.  I took it on the chin knowing that it'd be worth it on the way home.

Coming out of work past 4pm it was about 10°C and windy, but I can go all day in ten degrees.  I took the long way home, 27 kilometres of leafless trees, rivers with cubist banks of ice shoved into  the new mud by our recent floods, and a sky so winter blue that it wriggles before your eyes; all while leaning into fifty kilometre hour gusts of wind.  It was glorious!

I can still operate the bike without a thought, but I missed all sorts of apexes.  I'm rusty with neglect.

Note the snow pile in the middle of the road....

The smug I-stole-one-from-winter face

Icy verge

Vanmageddon: It must be February

It's getting to be that time of year again - months of snow bound Ragnarok motorbike hibernation are making me twitchy.  I like winter generally, it offers a very different and sometimes beautiful view of the world, but when motorcycling has become your go-to stress reliever, being out of the saddle for months is a source of pressure.  If you look at the seasonal leanings of this blog, you'll see winter generally leads to yearning.

This time around the fixation is on the Mercedes Metris Van.  I've previously looked at Ford Transits from a Guy Martin point of view, and other small van options for moving bikes to where I can use them.  The Metris has the benefit of being as efficient as the little vans but can swallow the Tiger with room to spare.  The other little vans would required a tight squeeze if it'd fit at all.


Another benefit of the Metris is that you can customize it to your needs and it'll still go everywhere a normal vehicle will.  It's also surprisingly competitive in price to the Ford and Dodge/Fiat options.  So, what would I do with the only Mercedes I've ever been interested in buying?

Last year at pretty much this exact same time I was mapping out waterfalls in Virginia.  The drive down to Roanoke is about 11 hours.  With the Tiger in the back I'd have left right after work and been in Roanoke by midnight.  After a good sleep and breakfast and I'd be out all weekend making use of those lovely temperatures while chasing spring powered waterfalls across the Appalachians.  After a good ride Sunday I'd have a big dinner then head back into the frozen wastelands of the north getting in after mid-night, but I'd have the Monday of the long weekend to get back on it again.

All told that'd be about 2000kms in the van and another six hundred or so miles riding in the spring blooming mountains.  If I could convince the family to come along, they could crash in the hotel or jump on the back and come along.

I've been reading Guy Martin's autobiography and his van powered wandering to motorcycling events all over the UK and Europe seem entirely doable, if you only have that van.  He seems to be able to fit an improbably amount into a very limited amount of time simply by getting himself there and then getting himself home again.

It's a good read that trips right along.  I enjoyed the narrative flow of the follow up book When You Dead You Dead more (I read it first), but you quickly fall into Guy-speak and feel like you're sitting in a pub with him hearing the tale.  If you like motorcycles and racing it's brilliant.  If you just like a good story well told, it'll do that too.

Pinterest A.I. Points Out Some Annoying Associations With Motorcycling

I'm a visual animal to begin with, and Pinterest feeds my first language directly without any words; I'm usually a fan.  As my collection of pins grow the feed starts to show things that the Pinterest A.I. thinks I'll be interested in.  That impartial comparison revealed a number of interesting and not particularly flattering connections to motorcycles.

Apparently a large number of people who make motorcycle themed boards on Pinterest don't think too much of women.  They either enjoy taking shots at their biological functions or treating them like sex toys.  This gets tiresome quickly when you post nothing like this on your boards.

How overt sexism possibly has anything to do with motorcycles is beyond me, other than the fact that a lot of people who profess to love motorbikes also evidently have strongly held beliefs about the inferiority of women and like to post disparaging images to support and publicize that belief.

The A.I. isn't judging, it's just matching up evident associations between what I would have described as diverse, unrelated interests.  But there is a calculable statistical connection between people who post pictures about motorcycles and people who like to advertise the fact that they are a sexist asshole.  If there wasn't the maths wouldn't have put that crap in my feed.  I find it all a bit embarrassing.

When you tell Pinterest you're not a fan of these suggestions it begins to tune them out.  It's taken the better part of a week of continual weeding to clean out my feed, which makes me sad.  The clingyness of this statistical connection suggests it's a strong one, which leads to the question: are the majority of motorcycle riders sexist?  If they are then I guess Pinterest's AI should keep doing what it's doing, but I hope my actions are making that AI a bit better at connecting interests.

Not everyone who is into bikes is a mouth breathing jerk.

When the AI isn't battering you with overt sexism, it's hammering you with what appears to be insecure man syndrome. Apparently the women hating angry men are also very insecure and like to post images and words that I can best describe as mad-bragging.  I've never gotten the chest beating "I'm a tough guy" talk.  Anyone who spends a lot of time telling you how tough they are probably isn't.

Evidently there is mathematical evidence that many people who like motorcycles also have a tendency to hate women and nurse giant insecurity complexes; or perhaps they are just the loudest ones.

What got me wondering about this was a sudden increase in the bimbo on a cruiser/angry man images in my feed.  What really pushed me over the top was an overt reference to Trumpist conservatism that verged on white supremacist.  I was so shocked by the pin that I removed it immediately.  I'd be embarrassed to be associated with an image like that.  Afterwards I was noticing a proliferation of other biker nonsense and started screen grabbing it as it happened.  I wish I'd kept the first one as it makes the later ones look tame by comparison.  It makes me wonder just how poisonous and nasty some people's feeds could become.  You could make the argument that it's what they want to see, but if were Pinterest I wouldn't feel good about spreading that kind of negativity.

If you look at my Motorcycle Media page, you won't find any bikinis or angry biker threats, yet Pinterest clearly sees a statistical connection between those subjects and what I'm into.  Any women in my pages are conspicuous in that they are riders, not adornments, and are clothed as such.

From that Motorcycle Media board.
WTF Pinterest? I'm starting to think
the AI is going full HAL.

From a technical perspective I wonder if Pinterest are looking just at keywords or whether they have something smarter going on with image recognition.  Considering it's Pinterest I'd hope it's the later, yet they seem intent on trying to hook me up to the angry-white-guy-biker vibe, which I've never shown any interest in.  Perhaps these are teething pains as Pinterest seems to be exploring AI quite aggressively.

I've bumped into North American biker culture before, and it usually hasn't been all that much fun.  It seems particularly comfortable with a view of masculinity that seems pretty antiquated.  These archaic misogynists appear determined to cling to their 20th (19th?) Century ideas.  This doesn't bother me that much because they're on the wrong side of history, I just wish Pinterest wasn't so intent on slapping me in the face with them.

Dangerous Dakar

I know hyperbole sells papers, especially in the infamously hyperbolic British press, but with Dakar winners whining about how hard it is, the whole thing looks to be on the verge of imploding.  With all of this negative noise around it, it's only a matter of time before some enterprising probably American lawyer attempts to shut the whole race down with a liability lawsuit.  I''m hoping the cavalier French organization running the Dakar are suitably prepared to deal with that.  It would be a crying shame to see the Dakar ended by such mediocrity.

These headlines popped up on Lyndon Posskitt's Instragram feed.  In typical Lyndon fashion he was simply thankful for the attention, you'd be hard pressed to find a nicer guy.  That the headlines are so turned up to eleven as to be practically hysterical isn't anything new.  When unprepared playboy racer Mark Thatcher got lost in the Sahara during the 1982 Paris to Dakar rally the British press lost their minds.  Rather than wonder why a spoiled rich kid who had forgotten about the race until the week before it began and then managed to navigate his driver almost two hundred kilometres off piste before crashing was in the mess he was in, they questioned this weird, dangerous foreign event.  Even the level headed BBC can't help but describe it as a mental illness.

From  a more factual point of view, this Dakar had a 55% finishing rate.  I don't know about the toughest Dakar in years, this year's event had a better finishing rate than 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2015 (all years the race ran in South America).

In the almost thirty years the Dakar ran in Africa, only five times did half or more of the competitors cross the finish line.  It took until the 1990s to get over half of the starters to the finish for the first time.

Tacking on to the end of Red Bull's graph there, in 2015 there was a 51% finishing rate.  2016 was a 62% finishing rate and 2017 came in at an all time high 72%.  Perhaps the issue is that the race has been catering to the results orientated professional rally teams more and more.  With their money and vested interests trying to control the race and maximize participation and therefore advertising revenue, there is moneyed pressure to turn the Dakar into a glorified two week world rally stage.  The quick professionals are the biggest complainers.  If you're looking for proof, those inflationary finishing percentages tell a tale.  Or perhaps it's because in 2018 everybody thinks they deserve a medal for showing up.

If anything this year's Dakar looked like the desert races of old with sand, dunes and savage navigation.  What you're seeing here is Dakar sporting director Marc Coma's course design getting better and better.  If anyone could take the Dakar back to its roots, it's the guy who was worried about navigation losing its importance in the first place.  

You can take all the press hyperbole fed by professional speed-racer whining with a grain of salt.  The Dakar is in good hands and it will remain what it is: the toughest motorsport event in the world.