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Take the highway…

I made my first real journey on the interstate highway system. I’d made a few experimental rides, just to get used to the handling at speed.

I was going home from a friends house on Sunday night (Monday morning, really), and I didn’t feel like navigating back roads in the dark. So I took I-95, I-91, and 9 to get home from West Haven.

Not bad, really. The bike handles well at speeds up to 80 mph (which I got to entirely unintentionally, by the way). The grooved pavement on the concrete sections of route 9 make the bike dance around at anything much over 55 or so, so I went considerably slower than I would in the car.

A standard leather jacket, in a word, sucks. The cuffs of the jacket kept popping out of the gauntlets on the gloves, causing a cold wind to blow up my sleeves. The zipper is entirely useless at keeping cold air out, as it has no flap covering it.

I had to pull off the highway several times to adjust equipment. At least I learned how to deal with rumble strips (answer: glide over them without actually turning - no problem).

A standard backpack is problematic at speed, the air gets underneath it and messes with your aerodynamics, and makes you feel like you are about to get yanked off the bike. I’ll be looking for a pack that has a waist strap to go along with the standard shoulder straps.

And I now know why serious long-distance riders wear leather chaps. Having the cold (65 or so degrees) air hitting your legs at 60-80 mph makes your legs seriously cold. The fronts of my legs were so cold that I had to wear my sweatpants to bed to warm the legs back up. It seems that tucking my legs up against the motor only helped to take the edge off.

I can say that I am no longer afraid of travelling on a highway, but it is still not my preferred method of travel on the bike.

Why journalists must be held accountable

Matt Cooper and Judith Miller are going to jail, as they should.

“But how can you say that - they are protecting the First Amendment!”

Wrong. I am protecting the rule of law. No man can stand above the law, and nobody should appreciate that more than the mainstream media.

What has essentially happened here, is the same people bleating over how Cooper and Miller should be lionized for not revelaing the sources of the “leak” of Valerie Plame are the same ones who want investigations, convictions, impeachments, and/or imprisonment for whomever the leaker is.

Problem is there are three people who know who the leaker are, and they aren’t talking. How is anyone supposed to get to the truth if the only people that KNOW the truth are deliberately obscuring it.

What we see here is that Cooper and Miller are willing to go to prison NOT to protect anonymous sources, but to defend the liberal agenda of destroying the president. I suspect that the leaker is NOT in the administration at all, because if it was, there is no way the media would keep it quiet. As long as the left can keep the identity of the leaker hidden, they can put forth all kinds of conspiracy theories about it being Rove, or Cheney, etc.

I suspect the truth is far more disgusting, and it is someone either in the CIA (looking to sabotage yet another president), or Joseph Wilson (of getting Rove “frog-marched out of the White House” fame).

There is simply no reasonable justification for the administration to “out” Plame.