Author: Aaron Weber

None of you care about this, but… MOTO LUST

BMW F800S: Drool.

The graceful upper fairing. The cafe-racer posture. The sheer arrogance of making a sportbike engine in a weird size (800cc, 2cyl, 83 hp — for reference I’m riding a 650 2cyl that puts out about 70) that defies apples-to-apples comparison. The out-of-reach list price, made even worse by the exchange rate. The totally insane stunting. (See also the 2008 Triumph Street Triple, which is a comparatively tiny 675 cc but a 3-cylinder, 97 hp hooligan beast).

Oh god. It comes in yellow.

Why did I not notice this bike before? This is what I want mine to look like. Only, the BMW is pretty angular. I’d rather have something more rounded.

OK, OK, I can resist this.

Obviously the solution for my bike lust is going to be expensive.

The first thing to do is a full tune-up on my SV650, possibly before putting it away for the winter. It’s been jerky when I hold the throttle steady and I don’t know if that’s due to a loose cable or a clogged line or a dirty carb or what. It’s not the “surging” other people describe because it’s totally steady at idle and is fine when accelerating or decelerating. I only notice this behavior when trying to hold to a steady, relatively slow pace. It’s as though it’s racing forward, then engine-braking back to the intended speed.

Then, I’d like to get the front suspension to be a little stiffer. Apparently you can switch out the fork oil relatively cheaply. Or of course replace the front forks, but that gets expensive, and you don’t get that back when you resell it.

I’d like to switch from the noisy boy-racer exhaust back to a stock exhaust. If I’m doing any expensive work on the carbs, that would be done at the same time (since exhaust changes usually require carb changes; no point in fixing the carbs, then replacing the exhaust and having to redo the carbs again too).

Appearance-wise, I wonder what can be done about the tail. Could it be flattened out to look more old-fashioned? Probably, but probably not easy, and not good for the resale value.

Should I switch the comfortable handlebars out for racier clip-ons? Probably not. Less comfortable: people with the racy SV650S often switch the clip-ons for my version’s handlebars.

Obviously I’m going to need some of those flash bar-end mirrors. That’s the cheapest, quickest, step.

(Does anyone out there have any good ideas?)

The Ongoing Exploits Of Snarky McSnarkerson

DexterfountainFrom co-worker Joel Brown’s review of Bionic Woman: “This is moody, broody stuff, and I don’t just mean because Isaiah Washington begins a multi-episode appearance next week. (We kid because we love! But not in a homosexual way!)”

From my Friday night TV recs: “Moonlight: Debut. This “Angel” knockoff just might be the best new broadcast-network drama on Friday nights. I’m pretty sure it’s the only new broadcast-network drama on Friday nights. Anyway, watch it if you have a thing for vampire detectives.”

Seriously, there’s nothing good on TV on Friday nights. Anyone with anything better to do is out doing it, so the Friday night audience is more or less captive.

Also I continued a crusade against replacing actors with robots, and insinuated that a number of famous people are totally gay.

You know, I try to make the world a little better every day, so I also explained to my readers how to spot a particularly fancy suit.

That’s me. Saving the world, one worst-dressed-list and near-libelous insinuation at a time.

I Love Weird Meat

I’ve been buying various meats at the farmer’s market this summer: local organic natural beef from River Rock, that kind of thing. The farmers invariably have a bunch of coolers filled with ice packs and frozen packages of various items, set up in the shade, and the quality is absolutely fantastic. Really delicious meat.

Of course, being farmers who have the whole animal to sell, they have some odd bits as well as the usual steaks and ground beef and pork chops and sausage. And of course, being me, I always want to add one of the odd cuts because it sounds like a culinary adventure. And of course, being human, we eat the normal stuff first and then look in the freezer and find it full of less-common or harder-to-cook cuts.

Start with the five or ten pounds of short ribs and brisket and so forth, which just need long, slow braising. They’re great for cold weather, so we’ll hold off til then, but at least I know how to cook those things.

Then I get some weird things that don’t make a lot of sense, but which I just had to have at that moment. Like the six pounds of beef marrow bones, which you can’t really use for stock (not enough meat on them). You can really only do two things with them: roast them and serve them with toast and a very small knife (scoop out the gooey insides), or feed them to a dog. On the plus side, they were very cheap. I have no idea how to cook them, but I’ll learn, I guess. At least I have enough to try several times.

Same with the hog jowls (aka “pork cheeks”) I got this weekend. I snapped them up mostly because I remember Mario Batali using them and calling them guanciale. Well, when I got home I found out the difference: to get guanciale you have to be willing to hang your raw, salted jowls in a basement for six weeks, because it’s cured hog jowls. Basically, guanciale is to jowls as bacon is to pork belly. And all the other pork-cheek and hog-jowl recipes I can find are basically variations on using the jowls as a kind of bacon, and on them already being cured and/or smoked.

And my basement is just too damp to cure meat.

And I’m scared.

Right now, I’m thinking confit, but I’m kind of scared of that, too.

Did I say I was looking for food adventure?

One Day, I Want To Write Like This

NYT reviews “Good Luck Chuck”: “… a must-see for young men with a subscription to Maxim but no access to the Internet….” “Chuck gets a lot of action, but then — after a long, split-screen montage of his priapic exertions — he starts to feel empty and used. Me too. But if the logic of “Good Luck Chuck” holds, the next movie I see should be a masterpiece.”

Dooooom

Kafkaesque really is the only way to describe it: “Hello and welcome to the United States. Your visa has been revoked. We cannot tell you why. Goodbye!” Or for that matter, Welcome to K-Mart. You may not leave. You have committed a crime. Unlawful detention anyone? I’d make fun of her for shopping at K-Mart, but seriously: what is the world coming to when everyone is nothing more than a suspect, guilty until proven innocent? Also, I read today that pirates are causing trouble. Not the joke kind and not the software kind, mind you. I mean real pirates with automatic weapons.

Oh hey, children do neat stuff: