Mice and Men

 

The Blue Groove’s take on Harley-Davidson’s illustrated men, according to Andrew G., was “hilarious. Yet nicely underplayed, too. You can’t write like that for a commercial magazine.” James H. suspected an art critic would call the pictures “American Primitive,” and was offended by the “unnatural” portrayal of the horses’ hooves. “And yes,” James confessed, “I know my OCD is showing.”

 

Age of Electric

 

Our ode to the joys and sorrows of the wiring diagram touched a nerve. Bruce G. confessed his efforts with things electrical “devolve into eternal brinksmanship with the elements.” “I know just enough about electricity,” wrote John W., “to make me dangerous with wire strippers and a multimeter. I’ve never entirely understood wiring diagrams. I think they’re in owner’s manuals to scare us into dealerships.”

 

Darwin B. faced peculiar gremlins with his Ducati GT1000. “My headlight would go off during acceleration and come back on while braking.” Rather than brake continuously (especially so at night), Darwin traced the problem to an errant wire in the headlight housing, which, despite no sign of physical trauma, had failed. “Electrical fixes are usually “easy,” he writes, but “detection—that’s the challenge.”

 

On the eve of a trip, David T’s Triumph Trophy illuminated its oil pressure light. “Not inclined to have the dealership perform exploratory surgery at $125 an hour, I turned to YouTube to divine the procedure for the removal and replacement of the sensor. Step 1: remove the fairing in its entirety. Step 2: remove fuel tank. Step 3: remove the entire induction system. Step 4: fuck this. Step 5: ride 3,000 kilometres with the warning light aglow and have a perfect trip with ideal weather.”

 

In an attempt to thwart potential electrical issues while resuscitating an old (and cheap) CB350, Kevin T. removed the fully-functioning wiring harness and made his own. “I was so successful, that not only did I eliminate potential problems down the road,” writes Kevin, “but I eliminated electricity from the machine in its entirety. I replaced a perfectly functioning component with a mess of wiring that didn’t work and that looked, according to my girlfriend, like ‘a pot of spaghetti’ had been dumped on the engine.”

 

He Blinded Me with Science

 

Frank H. has been thinking—a lot—about the “invisible forces we deal with unconsciously when we ride. The gyroscopic effect of the wheels that resists deviation (and keeps us upright), the centrifugal force in cornering which we compensate for instinctively (because the inner ear thinks gravity has moved to the outside of the corner), force vectors that generate stoppies on braking and wheelies on accelerating (because force is applied at a vector to the plane of movement), and, finally, there is the air which resists our efforts with increasing force with additional speed. Where’s the sweet spot? My Yamaha FZ-07, it turns out.”

 

Riposte

 

Dave M. claims The Blue Groove is “worth waiting for. It reminds me of what’s missing in other publications—truth, unfiltered.” Paolo V. wrote “what is written here cannot be found elsewhere,” and Wayne S. claims that what makes The Blue Groove “unique” is “irreverence combined with recognition of that which is important, and the articulation of the challenges of ‘being’ bordering on Heidegger’s Dasein,” which is, I think, a hundred-dollar way of saying that to get to your destination, it’s necessary to both mind the curve ahead and remember where you’re going in the first place.