Passes & Canyons Blog

OK, Examiner finally did it. After eight years, first as the Denver Motorcycle Examiner and then as the National Motorcycle Examiner, I have written about riding motorcycles for Examiner.com but that association has ended. They’ve ticked me off for the last time.

Just so you’ll know, Examiner.com is a crowd-sourced website for news and features and whatever else you might want to write on just about any topic. Headquartered in Denver, in the very beginning they went looking for writers and they found me. I don’t even remember any more but I was approximately the 179th writer, or “Examiner,” they signed up. There have since been tens of thousands of Examiners that have come and gone, and “gone” applies to the vast majority of that number.

It was slow in the beginning, and the pay was chickenfeed, but things grew and the money started getting to be pretty darn good. Good enough that when I left a regular job at First Data Corporation I told Judy I was not going to look for another one, I was going to be the National Motorcycle Examiner full-time.

After awhile they started “adjusting” the pay scheme. Frequently. And every time they made an adjustment it meant exactly one thing: the writers were going to make less money. But I stuck with it. I developed other freelance markets and they became my primary income so the Examiner income was just supplemental to that, and every dollar was welcome.

Then they really made me angry. They wanted to improve the quality of the writing on their site, and I’ll be the first to say it needed improving. Far too many of the Examiners were people who had no clue about spelling, grammar, punctuation, or how to craft a sentence to make sense. So they set up reviewers to look at your work and grade you on how good you did. The problem was, the people they hired were not exactly English majors; they were just whatever low-paid people they could bring on who they gave a list of so-called grammatical rules to judge by. Many of the people who needed to improve resented getting low grades and they left. I would consider that a good thing. But they also used their rules to grade my writing and they were totally off base.

It is said that a beginner needs to learn the rules of whatever trade they’re engaging in. A master knows the rules but then deliberately breaks them for a very specific purpose. That’s what makes them a master. Pardon my immodesty but I consider myself a master. I have earned my living as a writer for more 40 years and I’ve done very nicely, thank you. To have some kid tell me my work was unacceptable because I violated some of these so-called rules was too much for me. I cut back to the absolute minimum they require for you to continue to get paid for the page-views your stuff gets. Like about once a month, versus the three times a week I had been putting up.

That little bout of quality control soon faded but now, more than two years later, they have brought it back with a vengeance, and this time your piece gets reviewed before it gets published. And sometimes even after. Having been around so long, the technology they used when the site was new has changed and my early stuff is in technology that is not compatible with what is currently used. So they recently unpublished the first six months or so of my stuff. I have been selectively going through and republishing articles that have continued relevance, and labeling them as such.

Imagine my surprise to find that one of these “redo” pieces I recently put up again has been unpublished. And while the note on why left matters totally unclear, it appears part of the reason was that “it had already been unpublished” so what scam are you trying to pull putting something back up that has been deemed unfit?

Last straw. There is no National Motorcycle Examiner any more. I’m through with those fools. But for those of you who are interested, I did put up one final “Only a biker knows” piece with one more batch of 20 biker quotes. They have all come from this blog but the one immediately below will never join the others on Examiner.

Meanwhile, I just checked and they have not allowed that last 20 quotes to be published because:

Newsworthy
This article is not newsworthy. (Duh! I never claimed it was.)
Note from the reviewer:
This article is too fragmented. Please refrain from using more than 3 one-sentence paragraphs whenever possible. (OK, it’s a bulleted list. What do you expect?)

Can you see why I’m through with Examiner?

Biker Quote for Today

Merely rolling a bike out in anticipation of a ride feels liberating. — Clement Salvadori

There’s a lot of talk these days about what really is or is not a motorcycle. Most of this talk centers around the proliferation of three-wheeled “bikes” that many riders would argue are not motorcycles at all. In addition to the conversions, where someone has taken an actual two-wheeled motorcycle and added a third wheel, these primarily include the Can-Am Spyder and the very new Polaris Slingshot.

Of course the big issue is really in what safety organizations classify as motorcycles because the data they collect are used to establish various legal requirements and if three-wheeler stats influence overall motorcycle stats that does a disservice to everyone. They really need a new vehicle classification and that seems to be in the works, though how soon we’ll see something like that in use is anyone’s guess.

With that too-long lead-in, I want to mention a three-wheeler that I don’t think anyone would call a motorcycle (though I could be wrong about that, state classifications being what they are). This is the Morgan 3 Wheeler.

If you’re like me, you’ve never even heard of this vehicle. But at the place we stayed two nights in Gunnison on this last OFMC trip there were three guys also staying there, one on a Harley, one on one of the new Honda Valkyries, and one in (key word: in) a Morgan 3 Wheeler. They were using Gunnison as their base and taking day rides. And man, was that Morgan an interesting hybrid.

For starters, that is a motorcycle engine sitting right up front. It’s a 1989cc S&S v-twin. Beyond that, though, it looks like an old style Indy race car from the 1930s, except it only has one wheel in the rear. It’s very light and has a lot of power and is supposed to be a lot of fun to drive. But it is emphatically not a motorcycle.

Speaking of the Slingshot, by the way, we saw a couple of those on this trip as well. Because you sit in them, very much like a dune buggy, I would have a hard time considering them motorcycles either. But we did note that, because it’s just body, chassis, and engine, there is no storage space, so those folks had their bags bungeed on the back just like we do on motorcycles.

I welcome this proliferation of new designs. Now it’s up to the regulators to move into the current century and figure out a legitimate way to classify them.

Biker Quote for Today

Nothing like trikes and even less like three-wheeled automobiles, sidecars accentuate the balance and ineffable grace of a single-tracker in approximately the manner and degree that crutches improve the performance of steeplechasers. — Jack Lewis

Anyone who travels on their motorcycle knows you inevitably end up meeting and talking with a lot of people, primarily about motorcycles. This last OFMC trip was no different with the exception that an awful lot of that talk focused on just one bike: the new Indian Roadmaster that Dennis was riding.

Some people–like me–buy a motorcycle and hang onto it. If you buy a new one you’re adding to the stable, not replacing bikes. Others–like Dennis–get new bikes every year or two and never have more than one bike at a time. A couple years ago Dennis got a new Harley and I figured this was a bike he would keep for longer than most. Wrong.

Awhile back we all got an email with a photo attached: Dennis with his new Indian.

Dennis had recently received a small inheritance and he decided to go whole hog and get this bike. What sold him on it was the seat height. He’s pretty short so it has been amusing to see him on his tip-toes on his old Gold Wing and the last two Harleys he has had. The seat height on the Indian is only 26 inches. How totally amazing to see him straddling the bike with his feet planted flat on the ground, and even a little bend in his knees. Yes, he’s very happy with it.

This trip was the first time any of us got to see this new bike. And everywhere we went, this was the bike people were asking us about. It was almost comical. Inevitably, someone would be surveying the bunch of bikes, commenting on how nice they all looked, and then they would focus in on one particular bike. The same one every time.

“How does that Indian ride?” would be the question, or something like that.

“Hey Dennis, someone’s asking about your bike,” became a common call.

And Dennis was always more than pleased to tell them all about it.

He does figure that this is the bike he will hold onto for a long time. Indians are too expensive for him to just be buying a new one every couple years. And where else will he find a big cruiser like this with a seat that low?

I really think Harley and the others are missing the boat. If Indian can make a bike with a 26-inch seat height, why can’t others? There are plenty of other short guys out there, and a world full of women even shorter. Maybe this will finally get some wheels turning in some corporate minds.

Biker Quote for Today

Owning a motorcycle is not a matter of life or death. It’s much more important than that.