Transport of Delight

What have you lost that you wish you still had?
Submitted by gunderson bee.

my dignity ;)

Been away wrestling with a lot of personal stuff. Went to the end of my rope, then recoiled, now trying again at a more measured pace.

Also bought a new bike...you can't really see in this picture, that's the peril of trying to be artistic, but she's a BMW GS 1200R, red and black with the gnarliest panniers in the world. Since we got together we've had rain, snow, gales and hail every weekend. Some day soon the weather gods will turn their attention elsewhere....

New Bike!

Today is Blog Action Day!  Take action by posting about the environment in your own way.

Leather can be Green as well as Black.

There's a growing lobby, fuelled as ever by the cyclists (why can't we all just get along?!) arguing that motorcycles are dirty, smelly and polluting, and have no place as a solution to congestion. In making this argument cyclists overlook the fact that the average UK commute is 8.5 miles - now I don't know about you, but I'd say that's a pretty hefty cycle, but a pretty comfortable distance to take a motorcycle. The Transport Select Committee cited these concerns as a reason to look into power limits. Thankfully, the Government's response was robust, pointing out that the figures the Committee cited were very out of date - coincidentally or otherwise, they cited figures from 2002, just before mandatory European standards on pollutants came into force - and painted an unduly pessimistic picture. It's also essential to look at real-world performance of bikes on the road - fair enough, a big bike and a smallish car may, in an ideal world, achieve similar mpg - but in the world in which we live and travel, the car's going to spend a lot longer than the bike stuck in queues and burning that fuel without achieveing forward progress. Meanwhile, the biker, like Chairman Mao's guerilla, has slid like a fish through the behemoths and scarpered over the horizon.

Millions of plankton gave their lives to make a litre of petrol. We owe it to them not to waste it sitting in a queue but to burn it in the most beautful, elegant form of transport devised by humanity.

Do you have a regular workout routine?  What's your favorite form of exercise?

Sitting on the sofa lifting a glass of wine ;)

I'm in the pub. It's in Edinburgh and it comes very close to pub perfection. It's got free wi-fi, it's got a jukebox with hundreds of songs from the early 1990s - currently playing "Nothin' but a Good Time" by Poison - and it serves damn fine beer.

I've got a 5-hour train journey coming up and I have played the few tunes on my iTunes to death over the past week - been travelling since last Wednesday.  I love my "Best of Dylan" and I love my "Best of Lee Mead" but if they were tapes they would be doing that wobbly distorted thing. So I poked around a bit in the iTunes store, thinking, who do I want in my ears for the next 5 hours......yes, ladies and gentlemen - it's going to be Rufus Sewell, and he's going to read The Woodlanders to me, so i will get culture out of the deal too.

Suddenly I can't wait to get to the station ;)

Rufus

Audio:  Show us a song or album you've recently downloaded.

Can't show you as it is in the wrong format, but it's "Hallelujah" by Rufus Wainwright.  I prefer his version to the original by Leonard Cohen mainly because it's such a spare production, and you can focus on the amazing words and voice. Don't know anything else by Mr W so recommendations appreciated...

What are your Major League Baseball playoff predictions?

Baseball, US presidential debates....can we get back to some QOTD that don't assume we all live in the USA?

Show us a gadget that's on your wish list.

31RPMNAG40L._AA280_

Who's the coolest culinary celebrity?

It's got to be the Galloping Gourmet - Graham Kerr.

What is the best beer on planet Earth? 
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.

Boddingtons