EPISODE 86 - SCOOTERCAST Scooter Internet Radio [20:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today’s show marks a milestone, my second full year of podcasting and blogging. I owe you a great deal of thanks for encouraging me to continue working at it. Those first couple of  shows sure sound dodgy.

The scooter forums are lighting up in anticipation of the spring riding season. As usual the High Rollers Weekend in Las Vegas is being pimped all over the net. If you haven’t seen the videos and pictures from last year, it definitely looks like one of the years best party rallies. On Saturday night there will be a performance by ska legend Dave Wakeling and The English Beat. For full details of all events, see the High Rollers Weekend website.

I frequently end my day by surfing the net for new scooter blogs. I skip the chinsese scooter sales sites and look for people writing about their interest and scooter passion.

This past week, StumbleUpon took me to a sight dedicated solely to 50cc scooters and mopeds, one of my current obsessions. The site is called 50ccs and is written by a Michigan member of the Moped army, Micheal Edelman. Recent posts have included a rare Lohman diesel moped , a Zundapp, a Bellini and even an electric. Another StumbleUpon discovery of the week is only partly about scooters. Retro Thing is about vintage gadgets and technology written by a team based in Calgary and Chicago. One recent post is all about the resurgence of pinball. For those of you who can’t get to the Pinball Expo or the UK Pinball Show, but you are going to make it to the High Rollers Weekend in Vegas, consider hitting The Pinball Hall of Fame. So there it is a scooter – pinball link. Who knew I could ever make such a connection.

Music for this show is from the Pod safe Music Network and features Vel Omarr. Check out his influences, like Jackie Wilson, Ottis Redding and Sam Cooke.

This is “The Morning Run – Mizuno Ad“, Patrick Barry’s promo for sports company Mizuno was shot on 10 cartridges of 200T Vision 2 negative film stock with a Canon 1014E camera. Go to www.bluellamastudios.com for more on Patrick’s work. I happened upon this while looking into a post on scooters and retro-technology. What makes this fascinating is that this and a whole world of 8 mm camera fanatics are out there making beautiful clips, while the rest of us (me included) are fiddling around with little flip video cameras. Check out onsuper8.org where “The technology of yesterday becomes the artform of today”

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 EPISODE 85 - SCOOTERCAST Scooter Internet Radio: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some of you know that my politics lean a bit left. At one point in my life I think my family might have worried that I was part of the weather underground. Over the years I have morphed into a passionate community organizer. This was a good week. It started with an old fashion rally at the State capital that drew more than 500 people. Later that same say, people with all kind of disabilities flooded the committee hearing and demanded a voice in determining state budget cuts. Watching it all I thought to myself, this is the right thing to do.

After all the excitement and several long days, it was good to get back home and be able to retreat to the garage. I spent most of the day Friday, fashioning a new ignition coil, but even with the extra work I get no spark. This is another caution, before you take on restoring a piece of forty year old junk, triple check the availability of parts. I figure that I have two options, I either wait and hope that a new stator emerges from some dusty shelf or I go see if Dave the mechanic can construction some form of hybrid solution.

I have been noticing a number of scooter blogs that have started up in the past year and then have gone silent. So what happened? I think I know. I get focused on other things and all of a sudden it has been a week since I have posted. The other thing I rediscover is that bloggin and pod casting is work. You have to be disciplined, organized yourself and set a schedule or it just doesn’t happen. On January 29th I will have finished two years of blogging and pod casting. Come to think of it, thats a lot of talking (writing).

Webpicks

• Copart is a leading online remarketer of vehicles including scooters and motorcycles, selling more than 1 million vehicles per year.

• A very popular scooter post this week had to do with a Portuguese craftsman Carlos Alberto who hand built a beautiful wooden Vespa

• Scooter Rats Garage is an incompete site with potential and Vespa Guide is a resource for scooter mechanics

Music for this show is from the Podsafe Music Network and features The Plastic Soul Band

It is not unusual to see police in Italy riding motorcycles and scooters. Apparently this is becoming more true here in the U.S. and other parts of the world as documented at the aptly named “police scooters” website. I was also glad to see that it looks like New Orleans Vespa got a bit of the action down in the big easy.