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I used a hair dryer the other day to take the Arai sticker off the forehead of my helmet — mostly to see if it could be done. It actually worked really well. Kate’s dad Snuffy Smith does this to his Shoei helmets all the time so that he can put a Triumph sticker up…

I start a karate class at the YMCA tomorrow night. It’s been, um, seven years since I did martial arts regularly, so I’m trying to remember what it’s like.

Amtrak Feminamque Cano The epic revealed in the ordinary is a common theme of literature, especially popular literature. Probably my favorite writer in this vein is Booth Tarkington, whose Penrod books were (I think) some of the first to write children as fully realized characters, with motives and problems all their own — not simply…

My friend Alejandro Rubio has returned to the Raytheon station in Antarctica for another season of work. Having some experience with small boarding schools, outdoor leadership training, and island environments, I can imagine that the atmosphere down there is part cubicle farm, part Jack London, and part Sweet Valley High pressure cooker. Alejandro, who is…

My friend Kieran Downes has released his new CD. Until recently, Kieran was the back of the head featured in my webcam, but he left [My employer] last week to pursue a PhD in weapons of mass destruction at MIT. Seriously. He did. He comes closer than anyone else I know to the Buckaroo Banzai…

Youth on the E train from Cortlandt street to Penn Station is much, much different. I sat, mesmerized, on the bench yesterday afternoon as three high-school kids in immaculate, head-to-toe basketball uniforms twisted their fingers into configurations that I’ve never seen before. And I watched a lot of Zoom! as a kid. The teenager on…

The fall semester has started at West Chester University, and Youth is walking the streets of the town. Youth is holding hands with her new boyfriend in the bagel shop, telling him in a loud voice about the older man she dated over the summer. Youth is sprawled across a shabby sofa on fraternity house…

About the Iron Butt Rally The Iron Butt Motorcycle Rally is an eleven-day, eleven THOUSAND mile endurance ride. That’s a thousand miles a day, on average. That might not be so daunting on a car, but on a bike it’s grueling. Think of this — if you want to get just four hours of sleep…

We’re back from our bike trip to Maine and back again. It was a great, great trip. We started from West Chester, defeated mechanical trouble, and rode north to Kingston, NY, where we diverted to Mohonk to sit out the Great Blackout of 2003 wearing tuxedos and sipping iced drinks. When the blackout fizzled the…

When life imitates Infocom While on the first leg of our motorcycle trip from Philly to Maine last week, Bob’s bike developed a leaky gasket that required some teflon tape to fix. We stopped in rural Pennsylvania, and suddenly everything around me took on a familiar text-adventure tone: Country Junction, near the fireworks stand You…