Category Motorcycle

• Whirlwind

  SOME HOLIDAYS ARE ABOUT taking one's ease. Some holidays aren't, and I have just had one of the latter. To go and see the 2025 Women's Ashes I decided to travel the hard way to the MCG from Sydney, all in all 2,495km in a scenic loop, on a motorbike a bit too small for touring. Why? Why not?

  Posted 4 February 2025 · Author Liam Hogan

• Delivery

  MY OFFICE IS IN Newtown in Sydney, so I get to see the ingenuity and suffering of delivery riders on every variety of two-wheeled vehicle. It goes without saying that the work is among the worst paid, most dangerous, and most unpleasant, ways to make a living. What I’ve become interested in lately though is the sheer badness of the actual electric bikes, scooters, and motorbikes the riders use, because they’re bad in specific ways. Look closely and you’ll see cable ties holding them together, bald tyres, evidence of collisions, dropped bikes, wires exposed, just every variation of jerry-rigged cheap fix. They’re cheap bikes, flogged all day, and given exactly, and only, the amount of repair and maintenance needed to keep them running.

  Posted 14 December 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Six Vehicle Ferries

  ‘THE SEVEN BRIDGES OF Königsberg’, as well-educated readers of this blog will know, is a famously unsolveable problem in mathematics and the basis of graph theory. It’s not possible to design a walk over the seven bridges (as they were in the 18thC) in such a way as to cross each one only once. It’s lucky I’d never heard of the problem before I spent a wonderful Saturday making a round trip of the six vehicle ferries of Greater Sydney, challenging myself to see if I could cross them all without ever retracing my path. Four ferries cross the Hawkesbury River, one crosses Berowra Creek, and the other crosses the Parramatta River.

  Posted 3 September 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Pizza Stone

  SOME MEALS ARE CONVENTIONAL, tracing a predictable curve from an ingredient list to a final shape-form as described by a precise and accurate recipe. They’re the meals Jeremy Bentham would eat, or maybe as a sped-up Taylorism could be applied to gastronomy. Other meals aren’t like that at all, and refuse to conform to your little boxes made of ticky-tacky. They follow their own rules, man.

  Posted 8 April 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Mt White Paddlepop

  IF YOU WANT TO HAVE a discussion about automobility, the way we live in our urban environment, the nature of the State and sustainability, I recommend not trying to do it on a platform like twitter, where big pointy-headed words like that tend to chew up your character limit. You end up trying to make your points like builders shouting at each other into crackly CB radios, in separate noisy corridors, in a building being demolished. This—old fashioned, finite but relatively unconstrained—blog entry arises from just such an exercise in ill communication.

  

  Posted 7 September 2011 · Author Liam Hogan