Welcome to Friday Fudge. If it’s weird, funny, or strange motorcycle news, or it just plain won’t fit anywhere else on the site – you’ll find it here.
Making the jump
Let’s face it – the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape that Steve McQueen (actually, stunt rider Bud Ekins) pulls off is one of the most famous two-wheeled moments in cinema. It’s so famous that Ed Gold, a photographer from the U.K., has decided to pay tribute to it.
How will Gold pay tribute to the famous stunt? Has he painstakingly built a vintage Triumph to match the bike used in the film? Nope, he’s going to instead be jumping on a Triumph Scrambler 900 – which he seems to think is pretty much the same thing as a TT Special 650. What’s a bunch of weight, and fuel injection, between friends, anyway?
And where does Gold plan to re-create the jump? Apparently, he’s hoping to run across a friendly farmer along the German-Austrian border, who will let him build a replica section of fence for the event. We’re really wondering how he plans to find such an individual – it’s not as if there are listings for genial agricultural types in the Yellow Pages – and asking someone if you can run a string of barbed wire across their back 40 is never a great way to make friends. This all sounds pretty silly, but when you find out that Gold lives in a yurt … well, it seems to be what you’d expect from him.
Story Source: BBC
A Night at the Museum
Of course, Triumph Motorcycles are good for much more than ridiculous fence-jumping antics. Check out the anti-social drifting action in this YouTube clip from Triumph North America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GG8fgmz3LQ
Breakin’ Makin’ the law
Motorcycle riders in Switzerland are hard-core.
How hard-core are they? Well, we don’t know if they like Iron Butt or Numb Bum rallies, or if the country has a lot of year-round psychos who rip around the Alps in the winter. But, they’re hard-core enough to try to get politicians to guarantee motorcycle riding as a constitutional right.
You heard that right. When you think of government constitutions, you think of clauses about language rights, or freedom of speech or association, but a bunch of Swiss politicos have gotten together with motorcycle groups to talk about guaranteeing the right to ride.
They plan to do this by changing the constitution’s wording to encourage motorcycle use, as an efficient form of transportation. They’re also working on changing laws on traffic signals, to avoid traffic jams due to unsynchronized green lights. All this sounds good, but we’re really curious to see what they’ll do about loud pipe laws …
Story source: Bikes in the Fast Lane
Mean streets
The Swiss don’t have the only government concerned with efficiency. Consider, for instance, the town of Boston. Boston has a problem – its streets have a lot of potholes, and city workers don’t know where they all are, or how severe they are.
Thankfully, clever minds have worked out a solution to the problem. Programmers have figured out a way to use the accelerometers in smartphones to gauge the situation at street level – drive over a bump, and the app they’ve developed will send the information along to city workers, who can then decide whether or not to drive to the area and stand around, leaning on their shovels while pretending to be busy.
The app can supposedly distinguish between different bumps, such as manhole covers or potholes, but the real question is what happens when you pull a massive wheelie on your bike? The feedback on the accelerometer could be so intense, you could end up constantly being followed by a city works truck.
Story source: Wired
Not-so-straight talk
Let’s face it – a lot can go wrong in a motorcycle accident. You just have to read the headlines to learn that much. But when you think about crash-related injuries, you usually picture road rash or broken limbs – you don’t expect the victim to start speaking in another language.
According to Singapore media, that’s exactly what’s happened to a 17-year-old female motorcycle crash victim in Malaysia. After being involved in a two-wheeled crack-up, the girl woke up in hospital with an extreme case of foreign accent syndrome. She’s not just talking with a different accent – she’s speaking in different languages.
Although her native tongue is Malay, the victim apparently switches her speech between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Indonesian now – her brain decides each night what language she’ll speak for the day, and for the day’s duration, she speaks in whichever language it chooses. Apparently, she’s been exposed to the languages before through foreign-language soap operas, but hasn’t been trained to speak them.
We’ll admit, this does sound pretty far-fetched, but we read it on the Internet – so it must be true.
Story source: Global Post
Re: Steve McQueen jump – Bud Ekins did the actual jump, Mr. McQueen wasn’t allowed to by the film’s insurance people. Also, it wasn’t real barbed wire, just elastics strung with ribbon to look like the real thing.