ChuckDoherty.com

I am just back from the Great Western Motorcycle Adventure, and need to get some rest before I do much else.  However, I did upload a pile of photos from the trip (all as yet unlabled) to my picassa web album:

My Photo Gallery

Have a look around.

Let’s be honest;  Asian women are the worst drivers on Earth.   It’s not a subjective observation, it is simply the way things are.  The Sun is 93 million miles from the Earth, cheetahs are the fastest land animal, and Asian women are terrible drivers. Basic facts.

I just returned from a quick trip to and from New Jersey on the motorcycle, and can make this claim with a great deal of conviction after almost meeting my maker several times at the hands of an Asian woman piloting an SUV.

Secondly, (and are you listening to me McDonalds?), if you offer drinks in two sizes, one of them (the bigger one) is large, and the other is considered small.  Saying “we don’t have small, we only have large and medium” makes no sense, so stop it right now.  You cannot have a medium  (look the word up) unless you have at least three sizes anyway, but that’s another matter.  

It does not matter if YOU choose to name your two size offerings ”Flapjack” and “Tuesday”, because the larger of the two is still “large”, and the smaller is still “small.”

One week to go before the big trip.  I have all of my motorcycle and camping gear spread out on a folding table in my dining room, and I am getting closer to the final selection as to what will come along and what I will leave behind.  As the lovely Nurse N. reminds me; “They have stores out there, you know” so I am sure that I could stop in a WalMart along the way if I discovered I need an additional pair of socks.

The route is taking shape as well, with the plan now calling for travel on RT 6 across the northern part of Pennsylvania after a highway-based blast from here to Scranton early on the morning of the 12th.  I hope to make it to the western part of PA that evening, find a non-haunted motel for the night, and set sail for Mishawaka Indiana on Monday morning where I plan to visit with a good friend from my yute who I have not seen in well over 20 years.  If he has not aged every bit as much as I have, I will be inconsolable.

On Tuesday, I am heading to Cedar Rapids Iowa to meet my friend Joe, who owes me a night out.

After that, I am off to Sioux Falls for one night and (hopefully) dinner with another friend, then across the enormous state of South Dakota to Deadwood early the next morning where Nurse N. and I are slated to rondesvous and kick off the “fun riding” portion of the trip.   I am sure that more motorcycle riding will be high on my must-do list by then.

Stay tuned.

I rode up to the Americade motorcycle rally in Lake George New York for the first two days of the week-long event. The folks from the local riders’ group that put this together go early in the week, before it gets too crowded and crazy.

Unlike Sturgis, Laconia, Daytona and other “bike” events, Americade is much less Harley-centric and geared more toward touring motorcycles and the folks who ride them, including many trikes, trailers, and sidecar rigs. But that does not mean that the event was biker-free.  There was no shortage of geniuses sporting straight-pipe bikes and riding down the street like a kid with baseball cards clothes-pinned to their spokes.  I have to admit feeling a delightful wave of Schadenfreude when one overly loud rider astride a Japanese Harley clone was followed into the motel parking lot by a cop who wrote him up for excessive noise.  Apparently excessive assholeness is not in itself a ticketable offense.

The heart of the event is a huge market / trade-show at which vendors of all stripes hawk their wares. If there is something that can be attached to a motorcycle, it was for sale there along with the ubiquitous Sham-Wow, magnetic bracelet, and beef jerky vendors that seem to be at every event, no matter the theme.  I was a bit disappointed that many of the vendors were selling at their regular retail prices instead of offering the expected show special, so there was no real point in buying products that I could get later on and not have to schlep home.

On the way back, Nurse N and I stopped in at the French Hollow Alpaca Farm in Cambridge NY where I learned: a) alpacas are among the sweetest, cutest things on earth, and b) I am alergic to alpacas.  We also enjoyed a coffee and a delicious muffin (probably hemp-based) at a twee coffee shop in downtown Cambridge that looked like a retirement home for Hobbits on the inside. It was run by the just-too-friendly members of a local commune.

I am putting together plans for a marathon motorcycle journey in July, from here in Rhode Island to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. The plan is to meet up with the lovely Nurse N who keeps one of her bikes on the west coast, and will be flying there to pick up hew bike and head east as I leave here to cruise west.  From there, the two of us plan to do some cruising around the western third of the country until leaving both of our bikes in or near Seattle and flying back. 

Come October, when the weather in the Southwest is still hot enough to bake but not quite broil, we plan to fly back once again to get the bikes and move them somewhere further south for the winter, perhaps to Austin TX.

Of course, work could always raise its ugly head and put the kibosh on any part of this, but as long as the economy conspires to keep me idle I may as well make the most of it.

I am back in the good old US of A, and writing this from the kitchen of a lovely suite at The Meritage Resort in Napa, California.  My friend Bill did some business with the resort a while back and was able to arrange for the normally pricey suite at an amazingly low rate.    The resort is beautiful, as is the surrounding area, and – aside from home, but that comes Monday – I could not think of a place I would rather be right now.

Last night, Tom, Bill and I went to a wonderful restaurant for Martinis, and converted the visit into dinner as well. The meal was astonishing, the wine Bill chose was great, and the Martinis did their magic well. Afterward we went to a nearby wine bar where, if I recall, everything was very blurry.

Well, the fat lady has sung and my phase of the project is over.  Tomorrow morning I plan to do a bit of last minute shopping and head to the airport to board a flight to San Francisco. When I arrive there I will meet with my longtime friend Bill Anderson and the two of us will drive an hour north to Napa where we will meet Tom Mainelli, another longtime friend, for a weekend of wine drinking and general carring-on.  Think Sideways without the helmet beating.  Hopefully.

This trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportuinity, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to visit here.  Everyone we dealt with has been wonderfully hospitible and generous, and went out of their way to make us feel welcome.

If there was one overall impression I will take away from this trip, it would have to be that we should all learn how to say “Do you want fries with that?” in Chinese, if we don’t watch our step.  The Chinese are hard working, smart, industrious, and above all, plentiful.  That which they do not acomplish with quality they more than make up for in quantity.  And make no mistake about it, this country is on the move.  In another 20 years, China will be the dominant player in the world economy.  Sure, they will make some egregious mis-steps along the way, but there is plenty of roon for Mulligans when you have 1.4 billion people. 

More tomorrow.

This trip is almost over.  This is the last day in the office, although there is plenty more work that I wish I had time to accomplish while here.  It remains to see if I am going to come back here in a few weeks, but it is likely.

Tomorrow afternoon at four PM I board a plane and go back in time, arriving in San Fransisco five hours before I left.

I am perplexed why the citizens of China, a country with more high-rise buildings than I have seen anywhere, lack the most basic instincts in elevator operation.

Whenever an elevator door opens, those on the outiside start piling in with no regard whatsoever to those on the inside who are trying to file out. People basically walk straight toward one another, bumping and fumbling, even though pausing for a few seconds to allow people to exit would speed up the process for everyone. It is as though the entire concept of waiting a moment is lost upon them, even if there are clear benefits to doing so.

Once inside, elevator riders typically select their floor and immediately start jabbing at the door-close button as though each push will add a bit more speed to the elevator’s motion.

If the US and China are ever forced to duke it out, our most viable line of defense may prove to be equipment made by Otis.

For the most part, Beijing is as cosmopolitan a city as any in the west, but there are a few oddities that make you realize you are no longer in Kansas. Without belaboring the obvious, here are a few of the lesser ones.

Internet access is generally pretty open, except for some sites which are blocked altogether (including any deemed “indecent”, a wide brush indeed) and others such as CNN, which has just a few articles blocked.  I don’t know what exactly caused them to be censored since I can’t see them, but I can say tell you that the official kibosh was on CNN’s Political Ticker Blog today.  Some weeks ago, the New York Times website was blocked completely for a few days, then appeared again with no explanation given.

You often see young security guards and soldiers standing watch over what looks like an empty building or field, stationed there for hours on end in their long green coats. With 1.4 billion people, there is certainly enough available manpower to handle these assignments. 

Cartoon images of Chinese people, drawn by Chinese people, do not look Chinese at all. Not even slightly.

I am used to clothing being sized differently outside of the US, but here the sizing is WAY off from what you would expect.  Case in point; I bought some “XL” underwear (the gray ones, below) but these Barbie-shorts are unwearable by anyone with any meat on their bones. As you can see, they are significantly smaller than the mediums of a similar style (striped) that I purchased in London over the summer. 

It would be a different matter if I were comparing a pair of “generous fit” shorts from a WalMart in the American Midwest to a pair of the same size here, but this was case of comparing the local XL to European Medium, which runs small to begin with. Perhaps one could infer there is some sort of below-the-waist overcompensation taking place here, but I am not suggesting that at all.  I’m just sayin’… 

There is no shortage at all of native English speakers in this town, yet there is a curious opposition on the part of the Chinese to proofread anything they print in English, even large and expensive signs.   I am currently looking at the business card of the “Carry on Present Watch Business” that proudly proclaims;

Wholesale to retail every variety high inside low Tile quartz clock. Machinery voluntarily watch,  fashonable jewelery watch, electuon watch.

People hawk up phelm with impunity, and often expell it with little regard to where it’s going.  This morning, an old man waiting for the elevator at the hotel summoned up a prize-winning lung oyster and plopped it into a sand-filled ashtray.  A day earlier in the lobby I heard what sounded like a dumptruck driving down a gravel road and looked up to see the source; the throat-clearing efforts of a thirty-something business woman dresssed in a suit and otherwise looking quite executive.  She at least had the ladylike decorum to deposit her output into a paper napkin rather than hurl it directly against the piano.  Nose-picking abounds.  

Washrooms almost never provide hot water. Except for those at the hotel or in very upscale restaurants, hand-washing takes place in ice-cold water.  In many cases there is no soap either.  Paper towels?  You’re kidding, right? And as I mentioned before, just about every bathroom, including those at the hotel, has a sewer smell.

As part of a small buffet, the company cafeteria offers two varieties of soup each day. These are served in five-gallon orange Home Depot-style buckets placed on the floor.  It is self-service: you use long-handled ladels to reach in to reach in and scoop out what you want.  Because no one here drinks any beverage with their meal, not even water, the soup is the closest thing to a liquid you see consumed at lunch.