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I. Love. This.

CRAP it is!!!

I had to laugh at this passage from a 1952 road test article in Motor Cycling, a British motorcycle magazine – ‘not one of your pansy “Rapides” or “Black Shadows” but a real quick’un’.

Granted, the Black Lightning was (still is) a wicked fast 998cc beast, but the Rapide and the Black Shadow were nothing to sneeze at.

What I really love is that the date of this article ties in nicely with what is probably the best motorcycle-related song ever written, Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning.

#motorcycles #1952 vincent black lightning #richard thompson #Youtube

neuronerdo

I just finished The Three Musketeers, and this might be the best book I've ever read in my life, mostly because every single character is batshit insane and drunk for 90% of their Big Plot Decisions. Lights up on d'Artagnan: he's new in town and he's already making enemies. He meets his three best friends by scheduling back to back duels with them, under the assumption that he won't have to fight the last two if he dies in the first one. He is twenty years old and has never even heard of a frontal cortex. This is made evident by every word he says. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are supposedly in their 20s-30s, but barely any better. The moment they have any money at all, they siphon it directly into their alcohol budget. They make enemies everywhere they go and get into almost as many duels as d'Artagnan. Also worth mentioning: they see this crazed 20-year-old and choose to devote their lives to him simply because he has good vibes. We've got the cardinal, who seems only tangentially related to any kind of clergyhood. We've got the king, whose main personality trait is that he HATES his wife. We've got the queen, whose main personality trait is cheating on her husband. We've got the Duke of Buckingham, who is (unfortunately) English. We've got the Love of d'Artagnan's Life, aka somebody else's wife but he sucks so he can get cuckolded. And finally, we've got the prototype female manipulator, a character written with such intense feminism AND misogyny that I scarcely know what to say about her except "go off, queen" as well as the occasional "I don't support all women, some of you are stupid." Do yourself a favor and commit 5-12 weeks to reading this book, if for no other reason than the part where d'Artagnan tells a guy "I'll spring you from jail, don't worry, it's all part of the plan!" and then immediately forgets him in prison and flirts with his wife.

thepopculturearchivist

I read the Musketeers last fall to compare it to what proved to be a very loose two-part French adaptation. It's only the second Dumas novel I've read (after a monster unabridged COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO) and I enjoyed both. This one reads like a mock-epic what with the title characters' mooching habits, nicely balanced with Athos's zero-fucks attitude -- Oliver Reed in the Richard Lester films is pretty much note-perfect casting. One of my favorite bits from the novel that I've never seen dramatized is Milady writing to Richelieu that he needs to throw Athos and D'artagnan in prison the first chance he gets, but Porthos is just a harmless idiot and can be left alone.

lifeinthewg

This – “He is twenty years old and has never even heard of a frontal cortex. This is made evident by every word he says” – is my favorite thing I have read in months...

#the three musketeers #alexandre dumas #d'artagnan

retropopcult

Jose Theatre, 1931

San Jose, California

lifeinthewg

Here's a more recent photo (not sure of the date.)

frenchcurious

Yamaha AT1 Enduro 125 1970. - source Bring Trailer.

lifeinthewg

This bike is an interesting retro-mod. They converted a stock AT1 Enduro into a semi-racing bike, replacing the stock electrical system – which included an electric starter (!) – with a magneto ignition, and replacing the 125cc top end with a 175cc Webco performance kit. Still has the stock exhaust, which is limiting, and doesn't have the close-ratio transmission of the AT1M, the factory race-version of the AT1.

dinovelvet

lifeinthewg

You know, miss a decimal point in the calculations for a free-return trajectory and they'd drift off into deepest space, never to return.

“Art” 🙄

Flapper Fanny Says (1925-1940) by Ethel Hays

lifeinthewg

@jadecoded

Flapper Fanny comics that my grandmother cut out of the local paper and pasted into a scrapbook. She liked to color them in, too – or possibly my mother did.

#flapper fanny says