Monday Music

This weekend I was thinking back to road trips my wife and I used to take, singing along in the car (in her case well, in my case not so well).  This is one of the songs (and albums) we loved to sing along with as we rolled along down the highway.

Jim Croce, “Lover’s Cross”

It’s the kind of song I wish I’d gotten into before I graduated from college.  My old roommate and I could have made a pretty picture with this one.

Happy birthday to my little brother, who’s 29 today.  Which means that, according to my uncle’s old bandmate who was something of a Gibson connoisseur, my Les Paul is turning 29 this month as well.  And I’ve owned it for 14 of those years.  Scary.

Racers are funny

I was catching up on various winter-testing action on Superbike Planet this morning when I came across this gem of an article.

The American racing series, AMA Superbike, and its support classes were testing tires down at Daytona International Speedway in preparation for the season opener there on March 8th of next year. As the Soup writers pointed out, winter testing generally doesn’t prove squat as far as how the season turns out, but it makes for some interesting benchracing when we’ve got nothing else to do with ourselves. And for most of America, that’s where we are right now. Winterizing the bikes (for those bastards lucky enough to still have them) and waiting for the thaw.

So, as usual, a few guys went fast, everybody said “We can do better but we’ve improved greatly over last year’s bike already,” and a couple of guys crashed.

2005′s wunderkind (and, sadly, 2006 underachiever), Yamaha Superbike jockey Jason DiSalvo, put the rear end off the pavement at high speed and catapulted his bike and his ass into the Florida sky. From the description, he might have been able to get out “I can see Jersey from here!!!” before he came back down. The bike’s fuel tank emptied and “whoomp” thar she blows. It was supposedly an ex-World Superbike machine, the only one American Yamaha had on this side of the pond, and so it was being shared by DiSalvo and his teammate, Eric Bostrom. Uh, not anymore.

Bostrom and his brother Ben were at the airport and could see the plume of smoke over the speedway. Bostrom called the team to see what was burning. The answer they gave him? “Your bike.”

Honda rider Neil Hodgson pulled up to DiSalvo just as he scrambled away from the flames. Hodgson asked if he was okay. Leathers singed and with an injured elbow (diagnosis not available at press time) DiSalvo replied: “That lap could have been a [very fast--ed.] 1:36.”

That’s a motorcycle racer for you.