Predictably a Blog RSS

I just ran across an online ad featuring a motorcycle being used as a prop to help romance and sell what appeared to be hipster laundry soap packets with many different scented options. Curious, I went to the company’s website...

It's not the comfort as much as it is the contrast. On Jun 27, 2024, at 12:07 PM, Wiley Davis wrote: “I have two R3 suits...not sure that makes me a "great" customer, but I do love them. In fact, as...

And Buying a Powerball Ticket. Good luck or bad luck supposedly comes in threes so I’m today buying a Powerball ticket for the first (or possibly second?) time in my life. I’m feeling lucky because this week Minnesota unexpectedly became...

An Email to A Co-Worker I’m not sure how we might use this photo, but I think it is funny.  I’m not sure why it appeals to me so much.  Maybe partly because it violates the PC stuff about never...

Long before internet commerce was mainstream, we enjoyed making and mailing print catalogs. Our idea was to present motorcycling, and Aerostich products, and related items, in ways that were not only accurate but also inspiring. We wanted to tell stories...

A Year-End Collection of Assorted Drivel “Riding makes every trip a bit of an adventure.” - Mr. Subjective Several years ago a couple of my co-workers encouraged me to start writing an Aerostich blog. This was about when we did...

On December 8th of this year (2023), a week or so after the release of the Tesla Cybertruck, Road & Track magazine’s Victoria Scott wrote a wonderful short essay that included this: “…our vehicles reflect (widespread cultural) anxieties. More than...

Or, "I sure with it would stop raining." The ancient Greeks had a useful story about a guy named Sisyphus, who forever strained pushing a large heavy ball up an inclined plane.  In our time, the famous (but little-known in...

Here’s a short-ish story about my old motard-modified Honda XR650L. I bought this bike new in 1994, intentionally planning to make it a motard. That year there was only one factory-made motard available, the very first generation KTM Duke. A...

Step One: Create a terrific product which answers a question almost nobody is asking. Something entirely new which meets a need few people are interested in meeting...

It just hit me again last night and this morning, and it keeps coming back. Essays, news, emails. Story after story, year after year. Real-time life experiences. This so-called generational ‘divide’. The young digitally-fluent generations don’t understand how to navigate...

A fair number of our customers agree about one looking like a dork/Road Grimed Astronaut if riding for transportation and utility, vs. when riding primarily for sport and recreation. These two different-but-related applications have at least this in common: they both...

The First Ride... Photo: Daimler Reitwagen. Wladyslaw, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons. November of 1885, 17-year-old Paul Daimler went for a motorcycle ride on the first ICE engine motorcycle, the Daimler Reitwagen (built by his father, Gottlieb...

VerschlimmbessernGerman verb, loose translation: To make something worse by trying to improve it. Long a favorite word of mine, thought I've never known exactly how to pronounce it or use it in any actual conversation. Two forms, verb and noun...

Two high-mile riders meet: Brook Dain (left) and Paul Pelland at the Aerostich store and factory in June 2022. Brook Dain and Paul Pelland. Click to view full size image. What do these guys have in common? Both Brook and...

After experiencing three days of sweltering 98º highs during the BMW Motorcyle Owners Of America’s National Rally in Springfield Missouri, I headed homeward riding up state route sixty-five. First stop, lunch in Sedalia. Temp still 98-99º. Sticky hot. By Iowa...

A famous old saying goes: “Nothing clarifies the mind like standing before a firing squad.” The last couple of years have been like that for more than a few of us. Hopefully we’re now on the far side of a...

Last year an elderly friend emailed to inform me he’d decided to finally stop riding. A few months later he emailed me again about how he was missing it more than he’d anticipated and now was looking for one of...

If you commute every day or nearly every day, in all kinds of atrocious weather, this is for you. For those riders who are Road Grimed Astronauts and use their bikes for daily transportation, errands and last but not least, who commute...

...or like a sociopath? Almost nothing one can do during course of their ordinary daily life is as socially ostracizing as when one gets bundled up to ride somewhere for utility transportation through cold or crappy weather. You’ll receive the...

Thanks to the internet, a far-away and never-met long-time motorcycle friend (Paolo, who lives in Turkey and operates this interesting motorcycle, philosophy and culture website) recently emailed me an amusing short essay about the misleading environmentalism of electric power-in-general. A...