Friday Fudge

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.

Bike bid

Last summer, we told you Pope Francis was selling a Harley-Davidson that was given to him by the MoCo. Now, that sale has taken place, at Bonham’s auction house. How much do you reckon the hog took in?

If you guessed 241,500 euros, you’d be correct. What is the pope doing with all that cash? Rumours say he plans to buy a new Moto Guzzi, which is the bike he really wanted, and spend the rest on a really tricked-out van. Actually, he’s going to give the money to a homeless hostel and soup kitchen, and if he needs to go for a ride, he’ll just borrow a BMW from one of the Swiss Guard.

The Laffable Devils

A couple years ago, we told you about a new show on Discovery called Devils Ride, which purported to show the wild and dangerous lifestyle of a biker gang called the Laffing Devils. Sounds like an edgy, reality TV-based version of Sons of Anarchy, right?

Of course, the show turned out to have all the realism of a Punch and Judy puppet show, with real bikers around the interwebz saying the whole thing was a fake, that the gang was a made-up entity filled with actors, and their street brawls had all the authenticity of the criminal activity in Amish Mafia – which is to say, not much.

Still, it seems someone is watching the show, as the third season kicked off this week, complete with a storyline focusing on a rivalry with another gang in the area (also allegedly fake). Apparently, SOA got too heavy for some TV viewers, so they’ve turn to SOA Lite? At least in the Discovery series, you can be pretty sure they won’t be showing footage of people being burned alive. And if they did, it’d probably be a stuntman in a Nomex suit.

See the bone-chilling, violent, lifestyle of the Laffing Devils in the trailer below.

Gassing up

Is Communism that bad? It depends who you ask. The millions of Ukrainians killed by Stalin between the World Wars probably wouldn’t approve, but Chinese motoryclists might.

You see, we’re just past the start of the Chinese Lunar New Year, when millions of immigrants ride their motorcycles home for holiday festivities. Forget your ideas of taking a jaunt on a sport tourer; these riders are out on the highways on rickety underpowered single-cylindered machines. Think Lifan GY-5, not BMW ST1300, with plastic shopping bags as luggage.

The government is sympathetic to their plight, though. In some areas, the state-run PetroChina stations are actually giving away free gas to travelers, to help them make their destinations. 

Of course, more cynical readers might point out that in a state that allowed more free enterprise, plenty of those motorcyclists could afford to buy their own gas. Here at CMG, we don’t really care which side of the political spectrum the Chinese government sits on – we’re just excited that we’ve finally found a country we can afford to tour in.

Source: Shanghai Daily

Skyrocketing sales

A couple weeks ago in Friday Fudge, we told you about the president of France, who apparently likes to be chauffeured to his love trysts on the back of a scooter.

There’s been an unexpected twist to the story. No, his mistress isn’t pregnant. It turns out the prez is quite a helmet salesman, as the skid lid he wore to hide his identity has now sold out in France. We’re not quite sure why – it’s kind of a lame souvenir, and also obviously ineffective at disguising one’s identity when sneaking out for hanky panky.

It must be comforting for Hollande, though. Now he knows that if this whole political thing doesn’t work out for him, he has a promising career as a motorcycle gear salesman.

Source: ConnexionFrance

Grab and go

Sometimes, you see an opportunity too good to resist, and you have to take it. That’s what a 42-year-old homeless man in the UK felt like, anyway, when he saw a bike parked with the keys. Seizing the opportunity, he took off, throwing care to the wind and joyriding around town, even lending the machine to a friend for a rip.

But here’s the thing about being homeless – you don’t exactly have a garage to hide your stolen property in, and that’s the predicament this crim found himself in.  A few hours later, he had to abandon the machine and return to his pedestrian lifestyle, whereupon he was quickly nabbed by the coppers, sent to court, then off to prison.

His lawyer’s excuse for his behaviour? She told the judge “My client was born in Scotland but has been all over – he is a man of the road.” Editor ‘Arris has taken note of this new entry in case law – he figures as a Yorkshireman who’s traveled broadly, he should get similar leniency next time he’s got to cough up cash for a ticket.

Source: Cambridge News

Getting tough

The homeless bike bandit should be glad he didn’t pull his crime in Brazil. Motorcyclists down there take crime very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that there’s a new vigilante group cruising the streets of Rio de Janeiro calling themselves after the Boondock Saints. Their modus operandi, it seems, is to locate a crook, give him a solid thumping and chain him to a lamppost for the cops to collect.

Now for some of you, that might sound a bit harsh. But hey, it could be worse – the crooks are better off chained to a lamppost than they are meeting the fate of these Brazilian bad guys we saw earlier this year.

Source: Mirror