Motorcycles

Motorcycles and their riders.  There are few subjects which divide opinion more strongly in a population, yet few have thought about what motorcycles are or where they came from.  You can discover your own predjudices with the following test:

One of the two men pictured is a lawyer; happily married for twenty years; and owns his $500,000 house.  The other just got his licence; has no job; and is banging your daughter.  But who would you rather live beside?  The answer is: neither, of course!  These people are crazy!  They both ride motorcycles!  Duh!

As in so many other things, America can claim to be the birthplace of the motorcycle.  Not without an argument from other, lesser nations, sure; but we have these guys on our side:

Any further objections?  No?  Right, then: the earliest motorcycle on record was a fascinating device that promised to not only give you third degree burns all over your lower body if you fell over, but had the added bonus of broiling your 'nads if you didn't.  That's right, it used that modern-day (for 1868) miracle, steam!

Who knows what inventor Sylvester Roper was thinking when he invented his motorized "safety bicycle" based (we kid you not) on the "bone crusher" bicycle frame, but you can't tell us it wasn't inspired by whoever the 19th century version of Mistress Matisse was (if you don't know, just Google "Cock Ball Torture" and see what happens)!

And things pretty much went downhill from there.

Even without the skin graft potential of boiling water, let's face it: motorcyclists deliberately sit astride "a series of controlled rapid burns", which we all know is what-you-tell-your-mom-speak for "explosions".  Things going boom, over and over, between our legs.  And we like it.

But that wasn't enough for a lot of folks.  They had to add an element of danger to their already insane hobby by seeing just how quickly they could die, and motorcycle racing was born.  The stupidest of which was on a track.

Not one of these nice, safe places:

Like those?  Now add six-inch splinters.  That's right: these maniacs would race on wooden boards.  You may have noticed that the people in the previous video - professionals on the best machines in the world who can ride better than the staff of CRACKED can walk - seem to be falling over for no reason at all?  That happens all the time in racing.

Did I mention the board riders had no brakes?  Right - no brakes.  Or helmets.  Or starters, getting pulled by other motorcycles one lap before the start of the race.  But sometimes they did have sidecars, so that's sane.  And spectators wandering about beside, and occasionally on, the track.

But all good (?) things must end, and after three riders and five spectators were killed in one spectacular crash, board track racing was banned.  Other ways to have fun on bikes had to be invented, but it just isn't the same.

Racing itself continues, of course: but people keep surviving the crashes (mostly), so where's the fun in that?

One bonus from racing is that motorcycles can legally take everything they learn on a track and apply it directly to what they sell to the general public.  Which means that when you're sixteen, you can spend $10,000 and get a new car:

or a new bike:

One of these things will get you laid more frequently than the other.

The bike, by the way, has more horsepower than the car and weighs over 2,000 pounds less.  Which makes giving one to a sixteen year old tantamount to setting them up as a Darwin Award Winner.  Unfortunately, he will almost certainly have had sex by then, and may well have reproduced accidentally, denying him that dubious honour.

But wait!  Not everyone who buys a motorcycle buys it to get laid (except for guys)!  Some of them buy them for the ease of maintainance and great fuel economy! *snicker*

Okay, genius, fix this:

That's a seventy year old engine design.  Think it's gotten any easier since then?  That's the same bike that killed off Lawrence of Arabia, by the way; and he was way tougher than you.  Plus there are several cars out there that can rival a motorcycle for fuel economy - especially the way you ride, freak!

No, people who but motorcycles buy them for no practical reason, despite the excuses they use on their parents/wives/parole boards/hippie chicks they want to bang.  Bike parts wear out faster and are more expensive to replace, and a bike can get stolen in the back of a pickup.  This is something unlikely to happen to, say, a Chevy Aveo.

People who buy motorcycles want the image that comes with them, despite constant hassles with The Man.

Riding is iconic, for better or worse; and the images of bikers have been used by lazy movie directors as visual shorthand for everything from freedom-loving hippies to thuggish brutes to sword weilding half vampires to hallucinating SCAers:

But motorcycle gangs have been persecuted minority in North America, despite the best efforts of Steve McQueen to convince us that motorcycles are the best way to escape Nazis.

 Even so, laws came into effect banning loud noise, forcing the wearing of helmets, forbidding the trafficing of narcotics...  These had the desired effect of driving people away from riding, but not completely.

A wonderful law in Quebec may be the best way to drive the scourge of motorcycles from the planet, without directly banning them: last year, from November 15th to April 15th, all motorized vehicles had to have snow tires, yet no tire manufacturer makes snow tires for motorcycles!  Brilliant!

An even better move may be to create a law that makes electric vehicles mandatory.  Given the weight of batteries, no one is likely to come up with a motorcycle that has the performance characteristics of current gasoline powered bikes, right?

 Dang.

So maybe motorcycles will be with us for a bit longer yet.  But now, at least, you can say you are informed about them, and can make a sound, well reasoned decision about whether you should ride a motorcycle.