{"id":8209,"date":"2014-04-07T01:00:21","date_gmt":"2014-04-06T15:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bikeme.tv\/?p=8209"},"modified":"2014-04-04T14:10:41","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T04:10:41","slug":"parable-explored","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/parable-explored\/","title":{"rendered":"PARABLE EXPLORED"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a weekend of Art and Beauty. \u201dWe have art,\u201d said Nietzsche \u201cin order not to die of the truth.\u201d No, I don\u2019t know what he meant either. He said it in German, you know. It\u2019s notoriously difficult to translate. In reality, he was probably complaining about how crowded it is here, and drawing people\u2019s attention to the wide open spaces to the east.<\/p>\n

At dinner on Saturday night, I noticed a paper from my daughter\u2019s school on the dining table. Despite her professing to have no religion, they insist on sending her to some kind of generic scriptural instruction class. The paper was a collection of exercises the scriptural instructors gave her.<\/p>\n

\u201cLesson 10.1.1\u201d, it said. \u201cA CALL TO ACTION. Aim: develop your understanding of the difference between friends and enemies through exploring the story of the Good Samaritan.\u201d What vacuous twaddle, I thought. So did she, it appears.<\/p>\n

\"call2action\"<\/p>\n

\u201cYou didn\u2019t hand it in\u201d, I frowned.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to\u201d, she replied. \u201cThey never collect them. You just do them until the time is up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen how do they know if they achieved their aim to develop your understanding of the difference between friends and enemies through exploring the story of the Good Samaritan?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think God tells them\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNice drawings\u201d, I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks Dad\u201d.<\/p>\n

The next day we went to Lindfield, where Bly\u2019s wife was exhibiting in an art show. I thought most of the paintings were pretty damn good. There was an exhibition of poster art there. One of them was an old French poster for Favor brand motorcycles. I took a photo of it. It reminded me that I\u2019d not ridden a motorcycle in some seventeen or eighteen hours.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I had the Suzuki Boulevard M109R Black Edition in the garage at home, so when we got back I took it for a 300km ride. It\u2019s a piece of art in itself. It has that Indian Chief meets Streamline Moderne thing happening. Paradoxically, it is not black, and I think there is a lesson in that for all of us, except perhaps Andrew Bolt.<\/p>\n

\"suzuki-boulevard-m109r-black\"<\/p>\n

It is large and ungainly and stupid, stupid fun. I made it go around corners at speeds in excess of its design parameters, and scraped bits off the footpeg and the heels of my boots.<\/p>\n

When I got home, I made my daughter come down to the garage and see it. She said it looked like Bumblebee.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s Bumblebee?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a Transformer,\u201d she said. \u201cthat turns into a Volkswagen beetle.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never heard of Bumblebee. I looked it up on Google Images.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Suzuki Boulevard looks nothing like Bumblebee.<\/p>\n

I suspect that she was trying to trick me into a game of Punch Buggy so she could brag to her friends about hitting me.<\/p>\n

Hah! Like I’m going to fall for THAT one again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a weekend of Art and Beauty, and the Suzuki Boulevard M109R Black Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":8210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8209"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8296,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8209\/revisions\/8296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}