Dmitry

How did you pack for those trips? It's at least a 2200 mile round-trip, I imagine. Did you stay in motels, or camped? What did you carry with you as far as tools and supplies?

That is quite a lot of miles for a motorcycle, isn't it? I take it's been reliable, then. I do see a good number of older HD and BMW motorcycles with very high mileage on FB Marketplace. Also Goldwings. Those three makers specifically seems to last. Also see many dual sport and adventure motorcycles with low miles on the clock. People just want to get rid of them, probably were impulse buys. I have been putting around the neighboring towns (it's pretty dense here in Southern Mass and RI; one town flows into another. There's a place a few miles away, where borders of four towns come to a confluence at basically one intersection. Here's my Honda Trail, resting. Tomatoes at this farm stand are fantastic - juicy, fragrant, imperfect in appearance, cracked, scarred...as they should be. I take a large slice of an artisanal sourdough bread, this ugly tomato, burrata, olive oil, a bit of coarse sea salt, I got myself a good lunch. We are saving the seeds to plant in our little garden next year.

Beautiful machine! What your is it and how many miles have you ridden?

A man I knew when I lived in NYC about twenty years ago rode a mountain bicycle everywhere in the City. He wore a kind of exercise weights on his wrists, basically some lead bars sewn into wristlets and velcroed; he used them to bust side-mirrors off cars that tried to run him into parked cars onto the curbs.

Let's see some photos of it!

So I just bought my second motorcycle (if you consider Honda Ruckus one). It's a 2023 Honda CT 125 with only 650 miles on it. Also known as the Honda Trail. I just love it. Top speed clocked by moi at a blood-curdling 56 mph on a straightaway. Took it through some mountain bike trails here in town....far out. That thing can huff and puff just through about anything with 190 lbs of me on it. Got stuck in the sand up to the chain, got off, pulled the rear end out, didn't throw my back doing it...a big plus already. Took me a little bit to figure out the semi-automatic 4-speed transmission...no clutch. The fellow who sold me the Trail also threw in the hitch motorcycle carrier. I'll be exploring the back roads before the bad weather kicks in here in Southern New England....hopefully it'll be a long Fall.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/796137344670947/ Can’t make it this year, but will 100% be there in 2026. Please take and share some photos!

A formerly prolific poster here, Cali, lived in Altadena. I've been trying to get a hold of him, without success. He had a lovely mid-century home, which I hope is still there.

My unbalanced take on the OJC cd is that some songs just weren’t right for her, like the St.Louis Woman or the hapless Trout song. Sounds like She was at her best in a more personal, despondent setting. I think she was excellent in a torch song genre, perhaps Broadway. Alternatively, That she was with the major swing to bop orchestras, Woody Herman’s and Charlie Ventura’s (any recordings extant?) indicates that she was more multi-faceted than I am giving her credit for.

A follow-up: Lavazza decaf was very good, yet not always available locally, so I replaced it with the ol’ Bustelo decaf. Surprisingly fragrant, Suits me well on early mornings, and doesn’t make me jumpy.

Listening to her OJC Limited Edition Series cd, backed by two all-star bands, lead by George Russell and Gil Evan’s. She was pitch-perfect. She could’ve made it big. Anything known of her after this 1957 recording? Did she just fall out of the scene, like so many others, or did she continue to sing locally? I think she was Chicago-based.

Just ordered this Lavazza Dek Filtro, medium roast. The Amazon bots love it.

A heretic question: what decaf coffee do you recommend? I would use it in the Bialetti. We really don't need that nice coffee/espresso maker; just for the two of us the Bialetti does well. We also take it camping. Those light to medium roast Lavazza beans that we brew in the Bialetti are just too powerful for me: I get jumpy and freak out. Would like to try a decaf that tastes like coffee. It's not as much about the energy for me, as for the experience and taste.

Don't forget that this price includes a full night of bar-hopping with Van, and if you get lucky, perhaps even a drunken fight at the local VFW! ...Charcuterie board is extra.

Jimmy's living large!

I was thinking more like a chair yoga flyer from a community center.

What a sad, unimaginative cover art…

In Paris, where else?!

That’s actually a not so bad interpretation of an old Soviet “anecdote” (what you call “a joke” in English). Except I think you could cut it drastically, and make it funnier. I would do it like this: A scene in a Soviet art museum. Painting of a haystack, with two sets of feet sticking out of it. The museum docent says to the group of workers:”Here we see comrade Stalin and comrade Krupskaya in Siberian exile, discussing the works of Lenin. It’s titled “Lenin in Paris”. An inquisitive proletarian opines:”But I don’t see comrade Lenin.” The docent replies, patiently:”Lenin is in Paris.”

I had a caffeine rush yesterday night, so I bought my first Dunkin Donuts macchiato. It cost $4.10. I had to dissolve the sugar with a plastic straw (no stirrers there), and more importantly, it tasted like stronzo.

A brilliant record.

One other observation about Italy and coffee: very few encounters with people drinking the beverage on the street from plastic or paper cups; the only instances were in Florence, a major city. One could spot an American from afar: men AND women wearing shorts; tasteless tattoos, baseball hats, worn even inside restaurants. And Oakley sunglasses.

When I was 20 or 21, I saw him at the JFK airport. I was amazed how tall he was; purpusefully, I came close enough to see that the top of my head wasn’t even at his armpit height. I was 6’ then.

My wife and in-laws are French press drinkers. We must’ve had to buy three or 4 of them over time; the glass is very thin and it’s only a matter of time when it cracks. porcy62, as you undoubtedly remember, Greeks and Romans wouldn’t drink undiluted wine. I recently read Euripides’s Alcestis, and one of the characters complains that Heracles was a boor: he drank undiluted wine, the savage! I imagine what we call wine and what they drank was probably quite different. I can’t imagine liking coffee without sugar, but I know a few people that do just that. Love espresso or macchiato with a nice lump of cane sugar!