(Private collection) Review here.

Never too late to donate: A Pakistani boy from a Karachi slum plays with a disused helmet he found. Via:

"I'm Minkie the motorbike Off for a run, Gathering up speed Can be glorious fun ! For I am a racer And run with a zest, To win all the races -North, South, East and West "

       Via: Geordie Biker

The Wonderful Electric Elephant. Via: Cybernetic Zoo

"(I was) a mobile motorcycle mechanic, specialising in fixing punctures on couriers' bikes around London. The trailer had fifty or sixty inner tubes, a tool box and axle stands etc with half a dozen tyres on top. The bike carried two or three more tyres, a CO2 bottle for tyre inflation, a radio, spare cable and assorted other stuff." Via: Venture Rider

Alfred Jarry ‘The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’

"Barabbas, slated to race, was scratched.

Pilate, the starter, pulling out his clepsydra or water clock, an operation which wet his hands unless he had merely spit on them — Pilate gave the send-off.

Jesus got away to a good start.

In those days, according to the excellent sports commentator St Mathew, it was customary to flagellate the sprinters at the start the way a coachman whips his horses. The whip both stimulates and gives a hygienic massage. Jesus, then, got off in good form, but he had a flat right away. A bed of thorns punctured the whole circumference of his front tyre.

Today in the shop windows of bicycle dealers you see a reproduction of this veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres. But Jesus’s was an ordinary single-tube racing tyre.

The two thieves, obviously in cahoots and therefore ‘thick as thieves’, took the lead.

It is not true that there were any nails. The three objects usually shown in the ads belong to a rapid-change tyre tool called the ‘Jiffy’.

We had better begin by telling about the spills; but before that the machine itself must be described.

The bicycle frame in use today is of relatively recent invention. It appeared around 1890. Previous to that time the body of the machine was constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles. It was generally called the right-angle or cross bicycle. Jesus, after his puncture, climbed the slope on foot, carrying on his shoulder the bike frame, or, if you will, the cross.

Contemporary engravings reproduce this scene from photographs. But it appears that the sport of cycling, as a result of the well-known accident which put a grievous end to the Passion race and which was brought up to date almost on its anniversary by the similar accident of Count Zborowski on the Turbie slope — the sport of cycling was for a time prohibited by state ordinance. That explains why the illustrated magazines, in reproducing this celebrated scene, show bicycles of a rather imaginary design. They confuse the machine’s cross frame with that other cross, the straight handlebar. They represent Jesus with his hands spread on the handlebars, and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce his air resistance.

Note also that the frame or cross was made of wood, just as wheels are to this day.

A few people have insinuated falsely that Jesus’s machine was a draisienne, an unlikely mount for a hill-climbing contest. According to the old cyclophile hagiographers, St. Briget, St. Gregory of Tours, and St. Irene, the cross was equipped with a device which they name suppendaneum. There is no need to be a great scholar to translate this as ‘pedal’.

Lipsius, Justinian, Bosius, and Erycius Puteanus describe another accessory which one still finds, according to Cornelius Curtius in 1643, on Japanese crosses; a protuberance of leather or wood on the shaft which the rider sits astride — manifestly the seat or saddle.

This general description, furthermore, suits the definition of a bicycle current among the Chinese: “A little mule which is led by the ears and urged along by showering it with kicks.”

We shall abridge the story of the race itself, for it has been narrated in detail by specialized works and illustrated by sculpture and painting visible in monuments built to house such art.

There are fourteen turns in the difficult Golgotha course. Jesus took his first spill at the third turn. His mother, who was in the stands, became alarmed.

His excellent trainer, Simon the Cyrenian, who but for the thorn accident would have been riding out in front to cut the wind, carried the machine.

Jesus, though carrying nothing, perspired heavily. It is not certain whether a female spectator wiped his brown, but we know that Veronica, a girl reporter, got a good shot of him with her Kodak.

The second spill came at the seventh turn on some slippery pavement. Jesus went down for the third time at the eleventh turn, skidding on a rail.

The Israelite deminondaines waved their handkerchiefs at the eighth.

The deplorable accident familiar to us all took place at the twelfth turn. Jesus was in a dead heat at the time with the thieves. We know that he continued the race airborne — but that is another story."

Via: MKF Via: I Often Dream of Trains

Via: Mark Gardiner

The Truth About Video Game Motorcycles. Via: kotaku

Inside the life and culture of San Francisco's motorcycle messengers.
Pic via: Joe Pemberton

Via: The International Journal of Motorcycle Studies

James May talks about the perils of over-restoration. Via: The Telegraph

Riding through Antarctica in 1968. Via: The Velobanjogent

Via: Pulp International

"The Ancestor of a bicycle I met in Passau" Via: iwalku2

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The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.

The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. This is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate history version of Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

 Via:

One of the key visual elements in the book with in a book (and often used by the various cover artists of the novel) features a Nazi motorcycle gang called the Black Avengers and their leader Stag Stopa.

The (life-hating halfwits) of the American Nazi Party put the book on its recommended reading list,...despite the obvious satirical intent of the work.  In Spinrad's own words:

"To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable.......Almost everyone got the point..."

"He’d been grooming them for this moment, practicing their escape route on the Big Wheels, since the trees began encroaching." Via: Unhappy Hipsters

"In 1921, James Lansdowne Norton, Founder of Norton Motorcycles, went to South Africa on the advice of his doctor. He was 52 years old, his Rheumatism was crippling him and his, as yet undiagnosed, cancer was killing him.

He decided to visit his brother Harry in Durban and took his beloved 633cc Big Four motorcycle and sidecar with him. Despite his failing health, this incredible man decided to research the "colonial market" by embarking on a motorcycle journey that took him 3000 miles through the heart of South Africa. During this expedition he battled intense heat, torrential rains and 35 swollen rivers. He climbed incredibly steep hills and took his motorcycle to hitherto unreached altitudes. Often he resorted to wrapping a bicycle chain around his rear wheel to get enough grip! On his return to England this epic journey was hailed as the greatest motorcycle endurance test ever made.."

Via:

"A spate of accidents involving mobility scooters may prompt the British House of Commons to debate requiring people who use the vehicles to face strict training and licensing requirements."

Via: Wired

"On the obstacle course at the seventh annual Minsk Olympics here in northern Vietnam, Richard Rastall twisted the throttle on his Soviet-era Minsk motorcycle and gingerly accelerated up a four-foot grass embankment. The bike lurched. Its speedometer fell off.

“It goes with the territory, I suppose,” said Mr. Rastall, a 30-year-old Englishman who lives in Hanoi, fishing in his pockets for duct tape. “But you’ve got to love these bikes, really.”

By James Hookway

Via: ME-RU-MO