Category: Lifestyle

Owners vs. Riders

Steve at Scooter in the Sticks posted a great observation yesterday about Scooter owners vs. Scooter Riders. I am definitely guilty of being an “owner,” and his use of photography as a metaphor hit home, as i’ve grown more interested in photography, I’ve grown to dislike “photographers,” instead favoring “people who take pictures.” If you’re a “rider,” you’ll love Scooter in the Sticks, it’s very much in the same vein as The Baron in Winter, with mostly personal anecdotes about riding, something you’ll rarely find on 2strokebuzz, ha.

Vespaquest-Vespaway scooter blogs merge

Vespaquest and Vespaway, the two official Vespa blogs, announced today that they’ll join forces effective immediately. Crystal Waters, of Vespaquest, Girlbike, and Scooter Seat Covers fame, will join Neil Barton at Vespaway. Vespaquest’s Justene “Andrew Ridgley” Ademec and Vespaway’s Jonathan “John Oates” Ogilvy apparently lost interest in blogging and/or scooters. Best of luck to Neil and Crystal, who clearly and rightly recognized 2sb as a huge threat and reacted accordingly.

Piaggio & Aprilia sponsor safety classes in Italy

From Motoblog: Piaggio e Aprilia Partner di “Sicuri su due ruote”. It’s in Italian, so I can just make out the gist of it, but apparently Piaggio and Aprilia have invested in safety classes by supplying some scooters. Considering the difficulty of getting into an MSF class, and the expense of private classes, (not to mention the difficulty of targeting the scooter market for advertising) an industry-led initiative would be a fantastic idea here in America, especially since as far as we know, there are no scooter-specific classes or schools here. Does your local shop support a riding safety school, or host their own? They should! Let us know.

Vintage DIY scooter plans

gas-ration-200.jpgFrom the mighty Bill at scoot.net: Vintageprojects.com has free plans for vintage scooters you can build yourself, scanned and PDFified from old copies of Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated, presuming you’re handy and can find all the materials in your workshop. I think i’d rather take my chances on a dodgy $300 Chinese scooter from Pep Boys, but to each his own. Check out the photos, at least.

Chicco Scooter Club

Milena's Chicco VespaBeen meaning to post this for a while… Becky put Milena’s photos up on the Chicco Scooter Club site. In other Chicco news, Milena backed it into the living room door and busted out a turn signal. Her (Indiana!) license plate fell off a week before that. I keep telling her to fix it, but she keeps riding it, when she gets a ticket, I’m totally not paying it.

Scott Smallwood 2SB interview (from 2003)

Scott Smallwood

In honor of Scott Smallwood’s retirement from SuperSonicScooters, we present an interview with Scott, written by David Lucash, that originally ran in 2strokeBuzz on September 19, 2003:

Three weeks or so ago I was killing layover time in the Duty Free shop of the Montreal-Dorval International Airport. While balancing two cartons of Export A’s and giant bars of Toblerone, I spotted a familiar face checking out the bottles of fine liquor. Sure enough, it was Scott Smallwood of Supersonic Scooters of Columbus, Ohio.

He had some time to kill as well, so we made our way to an airport bar for some coffee. Within an hour the coffee turned into vodka tonics and our conversation turned into a question and answer session regarding Scott’s endeavors.
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Smallwood leaves SuperSonicScooters

Smallwood wheelie, WKRP 2003Scott Smallwood announced today that he will leave SuperSonicScooters next week. Smallwood established the Columbus, OH scooter shop in the mid-90s and made it famous on the strength of his Vespa smallframe tuning expertise. Smallwood dominated the MASS scooter racing league on a specials-class Vespa smallframe, before moving on to GP125 motorcycle racing, and is one of scooterdom’s best-loved and most colorful personalities. Scott leaves SSS to work for Trek Bicycles, he was a successful bicycle racer before a knee injury ended his career and started his interest in motorcycles and scooters.

His open letter to scooterists and friends follows:
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The Annoying Thing

annoyingthing1.jpg Imagine hearing a song you’ve never heard before, and falling in love with it, then finding out it’s the very song that you’d been reading hateful internet posts about for more than a year. Oh, how it hurts to be tricked into digging Kelly Clarkson…

In the toy department in the BHV department store in Paris, I came across a goofy little plush gremlin wearing an old-school motorcycle helmet. I picked him up and squeezed him, and was rewarded with a Sean-Stevens-style onomatopædic two-stroke engine sound. I almost died laughing, and listened another dozen times, but I was too cheap to pay €30 for the thing. When I got home, I looked it up on the internet and found it was the “Annoying Thing”, the basis of the “Crazy Frog” Axel-F-ringtone CD that topped the British charts last year. Cy will never let me live this down, but if you remove it from it’s pop-culture context, it’s pretty damn funny.