Happy Thanksgiving

It's that (at the time this pic was taken in the mid-60s) 50-something-year-old beatnik/hippie/freak Vito Paulekas.
Just what is he doing in this pic?
Promoting what he was quite happy to promote:
How to be a hippie-dippie freak show and love it.

Even though the weather for today will be 5 to 10 degrees colder than average, and I can feel some body aches along my sides and lower back (I guess I still have some kind of thing that I'm fighting off), I do plan on going for a Pachaug rock-n'-roll pile ride, today.

The WR-250FY is all set to go (since it was for this past weekend when I decided to skip it), and a mere shot of lube down the clutch cable, fork air bleeding, and tire pressure check is all I'll need to do before loadin' 'er on up into my clammy Ranger.

I wonder if I'll find any other people out there.

Edit:

Went on my Pachaug rock pile ride, as planned, and it was a good ride.
Not fantastic (mainly because I felt a bit cold and rode the bike a bit stiff and cautious because of that chilly feeling I couldn't completely get ride of), but I was able to pull a few decent moves that felt good and went as planned.
No crashes or close calls, and I never even had to use the kickstart lever more than once when I first started the engine at the beginning of the ride, which means I had at least decent coordination and didn't stall the engine at any time.

The lower fork oil level felt good and has so far shown to be worth the while.
The fork got to within about an inch of full travel, which is about where I'd expect it to be considering the size and speed of the bumps and jumps out there on the ol' rock pile loop.
The fork felt like it absorbed the smaller bumps better, kept better traction over those small bumps, and basically worked a bit better for me.

Today's mileage was the shorter version of my loop at 34.4 total miles from start to finish.
Not a bad time. :)

A few days ago, I was reading about the supposed origins of the hippies (as I mentioned a few days ago), starting at a spot around Los Angeles, California in the mid-1960s called Laurel Canyon.
Basically, the gist of what I read (when you boil down the 5 hours worth of reading that's broken down into 17 chapters) was that the hippie movement and the 1960s "classic" rock and roll movement went together, were started-up together, were financed by the same people, were promoted, encouraged, and allowed to happen by the same people, and were meant to brainwash the youth into lowering their moral standards and, basically, into not giving a crap about what was really going on around them, but to instead get involved with this freaky way of living.

"Freaks", by the way, was what these freaks were called before the word "hippie" became popular.

If you want to get a feel for this stuff, Google or YouTube the names Vito Paulekas and Carl (sometimes spelled Karl) Franzoni, who was Vito's sidekick.
You'll be able to read some interesting material about the start-up of this way of life.

My grandfather, who was just two years younger than this freaker Vito, would often tell me his opinion on the freak/hippie movement when I was a kid in the mid-1970s.
Basically, it was totally against any kind of living standards he and others of his generation were taught and lived by, and he felt they all not only were dead wrong about what they were into, but all should get a bath and a haircut and a clean shave, as well as lay-off the pot, LSD, and booze.
Myself, I always felt this way of living was about overriding any natural self-preservation instincts you were naturally born with and indulging in a lot of stuff that would only leave you wide open to manipulation by some other group of people.
In other words, not listening to what your parents taught you and what your conscience was telling you, but, instead, going with the hippie-dippie crowd.

I didn't like them, either.

The funny thing about all of this is that you are led to believe it was some kind of grass-roots counter-culture movement that started from the bottom and went upward as it gained popularity.
I believe, in reality, it was quite the opposite, getting big bucks thrown at it by wealthy and powerful people who wanted (and still want, today) to mould the world into a better place.
Better for them, of course.
This involves, as is demonstrated by the pic above, a heavy duty dose of human psychology, aimed squarely at young people.

Ever consider the possibilities of things like that?

-John