Frenchy's Rant

Back in May I went on a day-long, death-defying adventure in Colorado with my friend Mike. The whole story can be found here. Here is the Reader’s Digest version; we took Mike’s old Jeep out in the woods and pretty much destroyed it. Along the way, we met some guys driving these really cool rock crawler buggies, which I couldn’t help but shoot pictures of.

Ben,the guy driving the rock crawler in the above picture asked me if I could shoot some pictures of his truck, especially the tires, as he was trying to get a sponsorship from Pitbull Tires. Hey, why not? The only thing I asked Ben for in return was a ride in his rock crawler, which he was all too happy to provide.

I sent the pictures to Ben, then pretty much forgot all about it.

Yesterday, Ben emailed me, and lo and behold, one of the pictures I took of his truck made it into a magazine ad! Right there on page 65 of the September issue of Petersen’s 4 Wheel and Offroad magazine was my picture of Ben’s rock crawler!

Yes, the picture is a bit small, but it’s definitely my picture. The girl in pink, who I did not take a picture of agrees.

The original shot:

I’m happy to see a picture I took in a magazine, it’s pretty cool. I’ll be even happier if Ben got some free tires out of the deal, because this will mean I ‘ll be able to get another ride, and maybe even DRIVE that awesome rock crawler next time I make it to Denver.

Here are a few pictures of Ben racing the Number 36 Rock Buggy, affectionately known as The Raisin:

Maybe next year I’ll go to one of the races and shoot some pictures like these….

SEOUL, South Korea – Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world’s first successful commercial canine cloning service.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney’s dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world’s first cloned dog in 2005.

“It’s a miracle!” McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers for which she paid $50,000.

“Yes, I know you! You know me, too!” McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.

Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee’s team has since cloned more than 20 canines.

But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.

“RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone,” the company said in a statement.

McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.

The Korean scientists brought the dog’s frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.

Lee’s team have identified the puppies as Booger’s genuine clones, and his university’s forensic medicine team is currently conducting reconfirmation tests.

McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size. The incident resulted in her left hand being severely injured, and also damaged her leg nerves and stomach. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.

McKinney said Booger acted as more than just a canine companion as she recuperated from the attack.

Her dog pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out. He opened her house door with his teeth and helped her take off her shoes and socks, even though she never trained him to do so.

“The most unusual thing about Booger was that he has a unique ability to reason,” she said. “He seems to understand I couldn’t use my hands.”

McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will receive just a third of that sum from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.

Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.

After the WWE shows in Washington DC and Hershey, the second part of my epic ride began. Fiona planned to fly to Baltimore and join me on a three day meander down to Knoxville, but her flight didn’t arrive until later that night. I had some time to kill. Looking at my map, I realized that Hershey is pretty close to York, which is the home of Harley Davidson’s Vehicle Operations plant. Suddenly, I had a pretty good idea how to kill some of that time.

I’d ride my Yamaha sport bike to the HOG factory. Naturally.

Is this a faux pas?

My friend Pat accompanied me, but not on my bike. He drove a rental car, though this sidecar rig would’ve worked just as well.

This is definitely a faux pas.

After taking the Vehicle Operations plant tour – which I highly recommend – and watching the workers of The Motor Company assemble big touring Harley Davidsons, I walked out to the motorcycle parking lot and was shocked to find Rain Cloud Follows hadn’t been kicked over. Surprising, considering I parked my Japanese sport tourer in the middle of about fifty of York’s finest examples of American motorcycle workmanship. I had more time to kill, so I decided to head over to Gettysburg for a National Park Passport stamp.

I saw this on the road heading to Gettysburg. The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 is considered the turning point of the Civil War. General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army might not have been stopped in Gettysburg if they had a few of these babies in the arsenal.

The rain clouds found me and Rain Cloud Follows once again, and I endured some incredibly hard, driving, pelting, stinging, painful, awful rain. Slowed by the weather but undeterred, I headed over to my friend John’s house to hang out and ride ATV’s with him and his son Dane.

Later that night I picked up Fiona at the airport, and we rode to the hotel, located in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area. We enjoyed Fell’s Point, a row of trendy pubs and restaurants. In fact we enjoyed it far too late into night, but since we didn’t have a long ride ahead the next day, it was OK. It felt good to stay out late and enjoy fine adult beverages. It felt better to sleep in the next morning. Richmond, 142 miles away, was that night’s destination.

Why Richmond? It was the closest city with a movie theater playing Long Way Down, the adventure film featuring Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman riding their BMW motorcycle from Scotland to Capetown. It felt somehow right to have ridden down from Baltimore to see the movie. We joined a theater full of motorcyclists and enjoyed the movie very much.

Richmond Theater Parking Lot

The next morning we rode the excellent, curvy and scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, one of my favorite roads. On my first long motorcycle trip, way back in 1873 I rode the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was nice to be back on this fantastic road once again .

I love this sign. Every time I pass it, it cracks me up. The funniest thing? The curve isn’t sudden, or all that bad.Actually, now that i think about it, the funniest thing is nobody has shot this sign full of bullet holes.

We stopped at a little restaurant for lunch, and had a pretty weird experience. First, the waitress came to our table, stared at Fiona and said, “You look just like my cousin.” Then she just stood there and stared and stared at Fiona, for so long it seemed she was waiting for Fiona to admit she actually was her cousin or something. When that didn’t happen, the waitress kept standing and staring for an uncomfortably long time before taking our order.

While waiting for our weird waitress to return with our lunch, a scraggly, bearded man with his elderly mother walked in, and he stared at Fiona with a strange look in his eyes the whole way to his table. He continued to stare a hole through her after they sat down. We both were a bit put off by this guy who never took his eye off Fiona, so we wolfed lunch down pretty quickly and left.

Once outside, we noticed the bearded stalker followed us. He stopped at his car, opened the trunk and pulled out a plastic shopping bag. While we returned the favor and stared at him, he proceeded to – I am not making this up – tear off the handle of the bag and floss his teeth with it. I waited for the banjo music to start as Weird Beard stood there flossing and eyeballing us, eyeballing us and flossing. Five long, strange minutes passed this way; then we got on the bike and left.

Fortunately the banjos never started, and Weird Beard the Bag Flosser didn’t follow us.

We continued ambling down the Blue Ridge for about two hundred miles, turning off this excellent road only because the sun began to set.

Fiona had a flight home from Knoxville the following afternoon.We took the advice of a local man and found some fantastic roads that led us to Knoxville.

I stayed with friends and original Faithful Fifteen’rs Jason and Tina that night. Jason and Tina work for the WWE as well, and were perfect and gracious southern hosts. Of course they didn’t know that I’d claimed their home state – now known as Tennessee Island – earlier in the day.

I probably would have had to sleep outside had they known.

The next morning, Jason rolled his shiny Honda VTX1800 out of the garage, and we went for a nice, long tour of the twisty and picturesque backroads of the newly claimed Tennessee Island.

I managed to get a few decent shots of the ride, a lot of lousy shots, and some excellent views of Rain Cloud Follows dashboard.

Before heading back to the house, we stopped at Norris Dam. The dam was completed in March of 1936, constructed at a cost of $36 million. Approximately 2,900 families were relocated from reservoir lands during the construction. Jason told me that the land that is now a lake used to be farmland, until the government decided to build a dam, and told the farmers they better move. There are still entire farmhouses at the bottom, a scuba diver’s paradise.

But there was no time for scuba diving, because my riding buddy Dark Meat Snack (aka Abi) left Orlando on his new Concours early that morning, and we expected him to arrive in Knoxville soon.
Jason and I weren’t in enough of a hurry to meet Abi to take highways, however. There are just too many good side roads in Tennessee.

Abi beat us to the house, finishing 660 miles in a little under twelve hours. That new bike of his is one SWEET ride!!

We’re staying in Knoxville this week to ride more great roads and hide out in a mountain cabin, then heading to Richmond and Norfolk for more WWE fun.

More to follow…

About noon yesterday I got an automated call from my bank’s Fraud Protection Services. The recorded voice, which I half-ignored, warbled on about ‘unusual activity’ on my account.

Normally this might be cause for alarm, but since I’ve been out gallivanting around the country on my motorcycle for the past few weeks, it really wasn’t much of a surprise. My card usually gets shut down at least once on these trips. Here’s why.

When a card gets stolen, often times the scumbag that stole the card will go to a gas station and buy something cheap, like cigarettes or a Coke. This way they can check if the card is still active before buying really expensive stuff with it, and possibly being caught for using a closed/stolen credit card.

Gas stops on a motorcycle also fit this pattern, and are usually flagged as suspicious by the bank. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to have the ATM card shut down on the way to Alaska, but usually with a phone call it can be resolved without too much hassle. And having your bank account drained by some thieving piece of shit is definitely a bigger pain in the ass. All in all, I’d rather have the Fraud People vigilant and be inconvenienced once in a while than have all my money stolen.

So, when I got the automated call from the bank today, I figured the same thing had happened. But when the automatic voice read off the first suspect charge, I was shocked.

‘Suspect charge one. Six hundred eighty nine dollars at Juicy Couture, Boston, MA. If this is a valid charge, press one. If not, or if you aren’t sure, press two.‘

Let me think… Was I in Boston at all today, spend almost seven hundred bucks at Juicy and forget all about it? No. I’m in Tennessee.

The fraudulent charges totaled well over two thousand dollars at such places at Banana Republic, The Limited and of course good ol’ Juicy. Fortunately, my bank understands me and my spending patterns well enough to know that my idea of Juicy Couture is clothes that come from Target, so immediately the alarms went off at the fraud center. Turns out somehow, somebody created a fraudulent credit card with my info on it, I have no idea how that can even be done. But it can. I know this because I still have the ATM card in question with me right now.

Then, this asshole took this fraud card to swanky clothing stores in Boston and swiped it to buy their tacky merchandise. That takes some serious balls. And, today, a day after my card was shut down, someone apparently tried to swipe the bogus card again, this time in a Publix grocery store in Miami.

Bizarre.

I really hope the bank uses security tapes or something and finds out who these assholes are, then send a few legbreakers over to get their money back. Still, it’s an uneasy feeling (and a huge pain in the ass) to realize how easy it is to have your card number stolen, and your money spent on crappy clothes that end up on someone else’s back. Not to mention suddenly bouncing checks because you don’t have all of your own money in the bank, or have an ATM card to access that missing money while on the road. The worst part of all is I seem to have joined an ever growing club of people this kind of thing has happened to, because everyone I told my shocking tale to had an equally shocking (or even worse) tale of their own.

I am all for the death penalty for these assholes that do this kind of shit.