Harley Davidson Goes Hog Mild to Attract Younger Bikers

Headline in Tuesday's Wall St Journal.  Gist of the article, Harley is thinking about introducing smaller bikes. cause sales of the big Hogs are tapering off. 
  This is nothing new.  We bikers have been saying this for 40 years.  The big 1000 cc Harley's are magnificent machines, any biker would like to own one.  But they are pricey, about the cost of a small car.  And they are too big and heavy to take off road.  Most of us got started on much smaller and cheaper bikes.  My first bike was a mere 120 cc Suzuki, which was a little slow for my tastes.  My 2nd bike was a 250 cc Yamaha which had enough power to scare me, even back when I was young and reckless.  At the time, the Yamaha only set me back $500, where as the big Harley's were going for $5000. 
   Harley should have figured out, maybe 30 years ago, that a small, low cost bike would sell, in fact sell more than the big Hogs were selling.  To make a small bike Harley might have had to give up on their beloved four stroke engines and make some other changes to compete with all the well built rice burners on the market, but they could have managed. 
  I hope Harley isn't too late.

Alternate History. What if Japan had NOT attacked Pearl Harbor in WWII?

Japan had a number of aggressive plans for their neck of the woods.  The US did not approve, and eventually embargoed shipment of oil and scrap metal to Japan.  But with Hitler showing us how dangerous Germany was, and isolationism running wild in America, we were not about to do anything to Japan short of diplomatic nasty grams and  embargoes. Had Japan understood this, they could have proceeded to take over places they wanted, like Dutch East Indies oil fields, and more of China.  We would not have gone to war with Japan over this kind of aggression.
   If Pearl Harbor did not happen, we would not have joined the British in the war against Hitler, even if Hitler had the British on the ropes.  Isolationism would have prevented it.  Churchill's entire plan for beating Germany consisted of getting the Americans to help him out.  Without Pearl Harbor, Churchill would have been severely disappointed.
  What's more, if the Nazi's had done some serious diplomatic work on Japan, they might have been able to talk the Japanese into attacking the Russians in the far east.  If this had gone down in the winter of 1941, when Hitler's army was at the outskirts of Moscow, the Russians might have cracked.  As it was, the Russians brought ten divisions back from Siberia and threw them into the battle to save Moscow.  They would not have been able to do that if the Japanese had attacked in the far east.  And the Japanese had memories of the successful (from Japan's viewpoint) Russo Japanese war of 1905.  And the Japanese were still smarting from a sharp defeat the Russians gave them in 1939.  Japan had tried to seize parts of Siberia.  The Russians sent a large army, with plenty of tanks, aircraft and artillery, under Georgi Zhukov, best Russian general of WWII,  and whipped the Japanese thoroughly at a place called Kalkin Gol.
  Any way you see it, Pearl Harbor in our real history, was a key decisive event.

Plastic straws?

Used to be, straws were paper.  They worked.  They issued straws at the soda fountain with milkshakes, frappes, and root beer floats.  Special treats, not every day drinking.  And they issued straws at lunch in school to sip the milk out of those tiny little paper milk cartons, if you had paid in your milk money that week.   Each classroom had a big box of straws sitting on a shelf.  Don't remember exactly just when plastic replaced paper for straws, must have been sometime in the 1960's
   I don't remember drinking soda (tonic in New England) with straws.  You popped the top off the bottle (canned soda was much later) stuck the bottle in your mouth and drank.  You had to learn the trick of putting your upper lip half way down the mouth of the bottle to let the air in as the soda was sucked out.  Most kids mastered the art by the age of three.  My parents didn't approve of soda, they thought it was bad for kids teeth, so I didn't get to enjoy it all that often. 
   The TV newsies have been doing a lotta talking about plastic straws filling the Pacific ocean with floating plastic.  Despite all the talk, I have trouble believing that plastic straws are a serious issue or yet another environmental hazard.  I'm kinda hazarded out these days. 

Facebook stock tanks today

Has the last few months of bad news, leaks of personal data, censoring of conservative posters, Russian trolls, fake news, and 'bots posting trash, finally caught up with good old Facebook?  Or was it a downer report issued by Facebook itself predicting loss of  customers?  Could it be that Facebook has reached a limit to growth, like every one with Internet access is already on Facebook?
  Anyhow their stock took a header today.  Down 23% by some reckoning.

Seattle is paying $5.2 million a piece for trolley cars.

Damn.  That's a ridiculous amount of money for a trolley car.  You used to be able to buy a brand new diesel bus for $50K. You would think you could buy a trolley car for about that.   What's worse, they are saying that these ultra pricey new trolleys won't fit into the car barns, or even on the tracks.

NPR played the Cohen tape over the air this morning

I could not understand most of what was said on the tape.  Nor could I recognize Trump's fairly distinctive voice.  I'm not saying it is fake news, yet,  but I have my doubts based on what I heard on my FM radio this morning. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cute but dumb

She IS cute.  Too bad she isn't blonde.  If she were, we could call her a dumb blonde.  Which has more bite to it than dumb brunette.
  She was saying that the reason Trump has brought unemployment down so far is that people are holding down two jobs, to make ends meet.   This does not compute.  If we have people filling two jobs, we will have fewer people employed than if we just allowed people to fill one job at a time.  Even a economics and international relations major ought to be able to figure that one out.
   Stay tuned, Alexandria ought to come up with some more amusing whoppers before election season is over.