This evening after reading about it on a forum I took a ride out to the town of Oyster Bay to check out the car cruise night that they hold. I knew a bunch of folks from a forum I lurk on would be floating around and I thought if I ran in to them, great, it would be nice to meet some new riders. But, I left the house completely expecting to not be able to coordinate meeting strangers in a crowd, which is exactly what happened.

So as I wandered around on my own looking at the cool wares, I had a few people make contact with me by saying things like, 'Hey, Triumph!' (I had my Triumph jacket on) and smiling at me, or 'Heh. Hey! Where's your bike?' Then of course there are the sideways glances, the pointing and of course my personal favorite, the head to toe looks at my apparently Martian riding gear. All of the things I feel overly sensitive about when I'm out by myself were completely covered.

There was one curious encounter in particular that stands out in my mind. It took place as I was shuffling along with the crowd. Off to my right and slightly behind me stood a group of young men in their early 20s. I could feeeeeel them looking at me. When I glanced their way, they would look away. I'd then turn away and could feel them looking at me again. As I glanced back and they'd turn away again. Then interestingly enough I saw one of them say to the others, 'That's her,' as he looked directly into my eyes and then looked back to his friends.

It was like they saw Bigfoot or something. Extra! Extra! Yeti descends on Oyster Bay car night!

I don’t know what 'that's her' meant. Is my picture up on a men’s room wall, up in the post office, was I on local news as a wanted criminal? It all felt really weird. I still feel weird now. It felt like they were making fun of me or something. I hate that. The worst part of it being that in my awkwardness I couldn't bring myself to speak to those guys to find out what they meant. So now I'm left tormented, wondering what that was all about.

Maybe I should've shot them with my Duc's laser beams.

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All of the day’s chores had been put to bed here at the Fuzzmop household, where we’d settled in to the quiet moments of the evening. I sat down at my computer and began flipping through pages and blogs, seeing what was going on in the world. Kenny sauntered over next to me, put his arm around me and looked in to the glow of my monitor beside me. When I glanced up at him, I could see that he was kind of making eyes at me. I smiled and said,

   'Do you want to see the coolest thing ever?'

     'Sure. What is it?' he said.

Usually when I ask an open ended question like that, there is a slight hesitation in his voice that to the acute listener might sound like fear. I don’t know whether I caught him off guard or if he was completely distracted by the clear intent he was harboring in his ‘hey, hey, hey its sexytime eyes,’ but he didn’t waver and almost sounded like he was excited to find out what it was.  My guess is he thought I’d saved a link to something delicious and wonderful to get him all riled up.

With that I scrolled down through my list of bookmarks and pulled up what could only be described as maximum awesomeness. Behold:

The pimped out megaphone helmet. Yes, that right, that's what I said. 

Mega.
Phone.
Helmet.

Have there ever been three words that belonged together more? No. Exactly!

“That’s retarded,” Kenny deadpanned as he began to walk away from me.

“What?!? What are you talking about? That’s so awesome!” I said.

From down the hall I heard,

“Don’t think you can ride around singing. And… acting like a fool with that thing on.  Someone is going to shoot you.”

Bravo, megaphone helmet idea person. You, my friend are a visionary. A true artist.

• Instructables.com – pimped-out megaphone helmet

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... I Learnt onna Innernets.

I love reading Instructables.com. People do some pretty clever thing there. Of course I peruse anything that has a motorcycle tag slapped on it. I saw this tutorial today and thought it deserved a hi-five.

Crashing sucks. Buying new plastic sucks. This was an interesting response to a repair. I've been an advocate of using giant band-aid type stickers for plastic rash, so these stitches are a-ok in my book.

PennyTech: Plastic Surgery - Click to Read

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