A Tiny Bubble of Comfort
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...
Legalizing Lane Splitting in Minnesota
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...
Riding There Was Worth It
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...
Poetry Corner
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...
Rat Races, Paradoxes, and Other Stuff I Don't Quite Know What Else To Do With
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...
Shiny Stainless Reflections
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...
Rebel With a (Hopeless) Cause
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...
Old-Guy Drivel: My Honda XR650L Story
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...
A Nearly Perfect Business Plan
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...
Waypoints Along the Analog/Digital Divide
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...
The Risks of Riding
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...
A 137 Year Anniversary
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...
Verschlimmbessern
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...
Going the Distance
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...
The Lake Effect
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...
Recalculating...
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...
Adventures in Geezerland
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...
For Commuting Riders...
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...
How to Feel Unwelcomed and Dumb
...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...
Another Electric Vehicle Essay
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...
The Older I Get, The Faster I Wuz...
When I was younger (mid 30’s) I did two sort of endurance rides. Neither was specifically planned to be an endurance ride. I simply wanted (needed?) to see if I could get somewhere which happened to be fairly far away,...