I Hit the Powerband 263 Times

Riders should know that there are an assortment of powerbands available, enough so that you are sure to find one to suit.

I read a thread posted on the ThumperTalk forums where a guy asked if anybody had any funny tales to tell about their early days of messing with motorcycles and their lack of understanding things related to motorcycles.
In other words:
What silly shit did you not know about motorcycles because you knew nothing?

I really can't remember any big misconceptions I had along the way, other than making mistakes and learning about how things went the hard way.
One silly think I would often hear from retards my own age back in high school, though, was this thing that everyone called the powerband.

Supposedly, the term "powerband" came to being in the early 1970s in one of the then-in-print dirt bike magazines, or so I read.
What that word means is a description of an engine's power characteristics, basically.
Even a dimwit can begin to understand that an 80cc engine will have a different character from a 600cc engine.
Can we all agree on that one?
Powerband was used when discussion turned to things about that, and was handy when comparing one bike to another.

The dipshit part comes in when numbskulls who knew little about dirt bikes started doing dangerous things like trying to think about them.
Lots of kids I knew would say the same silly thing:
"I was in 5th gear, wide-open, powerband..."

The use of the word powerband was as if it were some kind of thing you could hold in your hand, or as if it were some kind of state of being, or if it were some kind of switch on the handlebar labeled "powerband".
Supposedly, these guys believed it to be when the engine suddenly went crazy, producing a lot more power than it did most of the time, and it was basically implied that you only enter the powerband during times of need.
Running from the local cops because they caught you riding your dirt bike down the street coming back from your friend's house?
Time to hit the powerband and skedaddle.

A bike made for small kids to ride and make riding as harmless as possible were frowned on because they had no powerband.
Lots of douchebags thought you could somehow take a powerband out of a box and install it onto one of these sad bikes.

Today, the legend of the powerband is still alive, and, if anything, is now entered into a kind of mysterious state because lots of the dirt bikes sold these days are 4-stroke bikes, and these engines typically have smoother power characteristics, even when tuned for racing.
These is now a whole generation of dirt bike riders that never rode a 2-stroke motocross bike and never used (for any length of time) a bike that had what was called a lightswitch powerband, where the bike made power over a relatively narrow RPM range.
For these guys, all they have to go on is what they're told and what they read.

Assuming, that is, they have learned how to read.
I know lots of them can't spell and punctuate worth a damn.

Off to jerk,
-John