I don’t know why I don’t ride at night more. The silouette of my bars and headlight against the lit up road and the glow of my instument panel under a star filled sky is relaxing. It is the same road I ride every day but the traffic is nonexistant and the cagers that are out at 1 in the morning are a little less cagey (although a lot more likely to be drunk).

I guess it is national tell-a-friend-about-blogs week and as stated in a previous post about Ride to Work Day, I think these designations are a little silly. But in this case I will go along with it, mainly so I can shamelessly plug my blog as well as my faviorite blogs. Some are about motorcycles, some are not, but I get a great amount of knowledge, entertainment, and general time wasting from each. So here are a few blogs I read and why I read them:

So tell your friends about blogging, especially your motorcycle friends. Of course don’t forget to mention the aggregator where you can find more motorcycle bloggers than you can imagine. And if you don’t have a blog yet . . . Why not? You can set them up for free and other than a few minutes of your time it is pretty easy to maintain.

I was listening to CarTalk this weekend and a woman called in about the amount of time is OK to leave bird poop on the car paint. This subject hit close to home for me since I park my bike under a tree and because this morning I went out and saw three direct hits on my tank.

The car talk guys basically said that you should clean it off once you have a chance. If you have to worry about it every 5 minutes then you are too obsessed with your car. As bikers we have a little more attachment to our vehicles. Unless you ride a rat bike, we all care about looks about as much as the functionality of the bike. A blemish on our motorcycle is a blemish on our image. Nobody wants to ride an ugly bike. So we usually pamper our motorcycles a little more than most car owners.

A few months ago I let a big turd (could be squirrel or bird) sit on my bike for about 4 days. It bothered me the whole time but I was so busy that a good washing was out of the question. Once I eventually washed it off and then waxed it I could still see the inconsitancies in my clearcoat where the impact was. I don’t know much about the chemistry of avian defacation but I guess it eats away at the paint. On a single color paint it is harder to see where the poop eats away at the paint but on a custom paint job you can see it easier as the light shines differently off of the different colors. Luckily after another wash and wax or two I couldn’t tell it was ever there.