Our Oshkosh 2026 group included a couple of people who hadn’t been with us during the 2024 visit to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee.
What was new for 2026? The entrance features just one person, “part of a Black riding community in Florida”:
An upstairs gallery had an exhibit limited to photos of “Black riders in New York”:
What’s interesting about the above centering of the Black experience on Harleys? I don’t remember seeing any Black visitors inside the museum ($26/person; median income for a Black-headed household in Milwaukee is about $37,000/year), but we heard tons of conversations in Spanish.
Photos of some parts of the museum not included in the 2024 post…
Biker chicks in the old days:
From roughly the same era:
Elvis Presley, one of my candidates for Greatest American Ever, purchased a Harley with the income from some of his earliest success:
This might have been the inspiration for New York Times coverage of various European vehicle ramming events: it is the “automobiles” doing the killing.
Example from the NYT:
A rare U.S. Navy shore patrol Harley from WWII:
A 1958 classic:
A 2002 masterpiece:
Overview:
Next stop: Chicago!
Looking forward to your coverage of Chicago, alongside the eventual upcoming post on the Fractal Define 7 Compact (spoiler?)
I will write it up, but the Define 7 Compact is a terrible mismatch with the ASUS motherboard (mechanical interference with getting connectors/cables onto the edges). If you mount the hard drive cage far away from the PSU for cable clearance you can’t slide the lower tray out (i.e., it becomes a PC with just one HDD maximum). I wish that I had gotten an ASUS case and I guess I might eventually “unbuild” the PC and install everything in an ASUS case. The Define cases are truly very quiet, but the non-compact one is absurdly huge and the Define 7 Compact is unusable.
Speaking of cases, I heard an interview last week on The National People’s Radio with the bro who started OtterBox, which makes smart phone cases.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1317-how-i-built-this-with-guy-28457179/episode/advice-line-with-curt-richardson-of-otterbox-339446486
How I Built This is actually a useful, interesting program on NPR about entrepreneurship, not the usual Trump-bashing and DEI crap.
I met some Harley-Davidson engineers when I worked in aerospace. They were touring our engineering and flight test departments. I think Harley was on some engineering improvement kick. I don’t know why they would study us for that. They wore jeans and t-shirts, just like us. (Like noble fat black women, I want to be with people that look like me.) When I did some consulting for Ford in Dearborn, it seemed like everyone was giving me the evil eye for not wearing a tie. I’d love to take a hottie out for a ride in the shore patrol Harley.
My pick for greatest male American would be Arnold Schwarzenegger, easily. Checks a lot of boxes, immigrant, able to blast enemies with a M2 “Ma Deuce” in each arm, cool one-liners, etc. (Jerry Lee Lewis gets some serious points for marrying his 13 year old cousin.) Greatest female would be either Marilyn Monroe or Francis Farmer (close second Joan Crawford).
Needless to say, all the Harley engineers were middle-aged white dudes. I guess they left Ing. Claudine Gay back at the engineering ranch to heroically do the real work.
Which US state has more murders than deaths from car accidents? Answer: Maryland. Go Baltimore!
On the opposite end of the spectrum – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
What’s a good, safe <30k bike Dr. G?
BMW used to make good motorcyles, not sure about anything these days. (No motorcycle is “safe” on I-4.)
Q: “How are Hondas like fat girls?”
A: “They are fun to ride until a friend sees you on one.”
Thanks! Will look into both Honda and BMW. I realized that I would need to take classes for safety as well.
NA: My motorcycle shopping knowledge is limited to one T-shirt (“Better your sister in a whorehouse than your brother on a Honda”). Maybe not quite. A safety-conscious friend picked the Honda Goldwing because it was the only motorcycle made with an airbag (he probably has an airbag vest as well). A quick Google search just now shows the list price of the airbag version to be around $34,000, though, so the new ones don’t fit your $30,000 limit without a dealer discount (which some dealers do seem to be offering). The 2026 Hondas will be discounted as leftovers both by dealers and by Honda later this year or early in 2027.
Piston helicopter pilots should never get anywhere near motorcycles. The throttle direction is opposite and inevitably the result is to overspeed a helicopter while attempting to practice an autorotation or a hover autorotation (the motorcycle riders will add throttle inadvertently during helicopter maneuvers that call for subtracting throttle quickly). (The above-mentioned friend flies a Mooney airplane, not helicopters.)
The Spun’s definition of biker chicks differs from some of us.
> Biker chicks in the old days:
Wait, is the guy on the bike The Spun himself? Cool onsie bathing suit, dude. (The girls are kinda hot, and two of them — Phil, you dog.)
Happy Days, The Lost Episode
In a very special episode of Happy Days, there’s a new “boy” in Milwaukee, WI — Philip Greenspun, “The Spun”, a biker dude visiting the Cunninghams (at Oshkosh on vacation from MIT). The Fonz is planning to jump a tank full of sharks. The Spun wants to best him to get Fonzie’s “girl”, Ashley Pfister, so he plans to jump a tank full of Congolese immigrants. The Fonz lands in the tank on his Indian and is eaten by the sharks. In a shore patrol Harley, Greenspun jumps both the immigrants and the sharks and gets the girl. In the next episode, The Fonz is back alive and no mention is made of Greenspun.
“Heyyyy [thumbs up]!” — The Fonz