Category: Celebrities

Mark Knopfler: Mod or not?

From Matt: “Who knew Mark Knopfler was a Mod?”

Well, pre-mod, maybe. From the ex-Dire-Straits guitarist’s bio:

The artwork for “Kill To Get Crimson” evokes one of the periods in Knopfler’s own palette for the album. “For the cover, I’ve chosen a picture painted in 1958, it has a West Indian girl who wants to buy a red scooter,â€? he continues. “This is pre-mod, and the L-plate hasn’t changed to this day. I’ve got a red scooter, and it’s amazing, it looks pretty much exactly the same. That time was very interesting from the point of view of a musician, a kid at that time.

I seem to remember seeing him lumped in with Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie as an “ex-Mod” somewhere, but can’t find any reference now as to if he actually ran with the Mod crowd as a teenager, and if so, what his old friends have to say about the entire decade he spent wearing a terrycloth headband.

Daggit, Muff!

I prefer my Battlestar Galactica as a vague, distant memory involving Lorne Greene and some second-rate action figures, but if you’re into the new version, apparently these chicks posing on these Vespas are what the kids call “hot.” Also, it is awesome that whenever someone posts a photo of attractive celebrity women on a scooter forum, someone starts digging into how unauthentic the bike is. We rule.

News particles, February 10, 2007

More news from the past week:

  • Kymco Canada is teaming up with Motoress to attract more Canadian women to scootering. Both parties seem to think the way to attract women to scootering is to glam it up, which is their prerogative, but that tack seems a little superficial and patronizing to me.
  • A few stories covering Italy’s soccer ban cited the famous May, 2001 incident where Atalanta supporters snuck a Lambretta into the San Siro and dropped it off the balcony onto AC Milan fans. Yeah, that’s not very good security.
  • Scooter backlash and vandalism is out of control at the University of Florida, scooterists blame the lack of scooter-specific parking.
  • Speaking of Florida and smashed scooters, even Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy aren’t safe, their bike was smashed up while they ate (and copiously made out) in a Miami restaurant.

The Chicago Cycle World International Motorcycle Show is this weekend, stories and photos coming soon.

Cheer up, Peter Reid…

This one’s for M5, complaining about the recent lack of football news on 2sb: Sunderland’s 19-year-old goalkeeper, Ben Alnwick, hit a teenage girl on a Piaggio scooter with his Range Rover yesterday morning. Alnwick was questioned and released, the girl went to the hospital on a stretcher. Amazingly, among the witnesses was Graham Poll, who presented the scooterist with a yellow card for her blatant dive.

007 clogs Vespa searches

Actress Eva Green plays a character named “Vesper Lynd” in the new 007 flick, already misspelled “Vespa” by several news agencies. Not since Spaceballs was released on DVD have I randomly deleted “Vespa” Google News alerts without reading them first. Isn’t “Eva Green” sort of a better name for a Bond chick anyway? Ironically, Ursula Andress, who played Vesper Lynd in the original Casino Royale, posed with a Vespa 90 for a Vespa Calendar in the Sixties.

News Briefs

  • A one-cm-long Vespa will be certified as Vietnam’s smallest scooter in Ho Chi Minh City today. Presumably, it has yellow kickstand boots.
  • Reese Witherspoon’s film Penelope, featuring Christina Ricci with a pig snout and Witherspoon as a scooter messenger, debuted in Toronto this weekend.
  • Arkansas pastor Bryan Fink, sick of $85 fill-ups for his minivan, switches to a scooter, racking up 1200 miles since May.
  • Another boilerplate “scooters are great” story from Windham, Maine.
  • Another Providence Journal Javaspeed story. (Doesn’t it seem like there have been several others this year?)
  • Hindustan Times reports LML workers have started a sit-in at a Labour commisioner’s office. (Story was later removed)