Allstate Motorcycle Insurance – Loud pipes are all the safety equipment you need.

Featured prominently in the February 2012 American Motorcyclist is a full page ad for Allstate Insurance that depicts one of the worst characterizations of motorcycle safety I’ve ever seen in the magazine.

Before I get to their ad, first a little history on Allstate and their support of the motorcycling community. According to the October 2001 issue of American Motorcyclist, Allstate was one of the insurance companies that was blacklisting certain high performance motorcycles because apparently they were terribly unsafe. The list of motorcycles they blacklisted showed they had no clue about motorcycles, and even if the concept of not insuring certain motorcycles because they were “unsafe” was valid, they missed the mark when they targeted certain motorcycles.

For example, they banned every motorcycle made by Moto Guzzi, and Ducati. Were they racist against Italians or what? Sure Ducati has a reputation of making some great sportbikes, but they also make adventure bikes and sport touring bikes. Those two classifications generally get good insurance rates, because it’s an older, more experienced, and safer group of riders that own them. I’d also venture to say from my observation over the years that adventure riders and sport touring riders are the ones you’ll most likely find wearing all the gear, all the time.

And that brings me to the ad in this month’s magazine. For a company that has a huge financial stake in promoting safe motorcycling to send out this image is not only bad business for them, but it sends out an entirely wrong message to the public. They’re basically telling motorcyclists that you don’t need to do anything to protect yourself, because when you crash, we’ll be there to pick up the pieces.

So just like when I was a kid and I played “Find what’s wrong with this picture”, I got out my virtual crayons and highlighted the most glaring things that make anyone who is interested in motorcycle safety and presenting a good image for motorcyclists cringe. (click on the ad to see my comments)

Riding Gear

Rider’s have a responsibility to reduce their own risk. Why should my insurance premiums pay for treatment of head injuries, broken bones and road rash that could have been prevented by wearing the proper safety gear?

• Helmet – The rider is wearing what is probably the unsafest legal helmet. While the model of helmet depicted is probably a legal model, it is a small step above the illegal helmets that the Harley crowd favors. It is a huge step down from a full face helmet that has a chin bar that actually protects your face when it meets the pavement or the side door of an SUV.
• Jacket – A leather jacket or a nylon jacket with armor would be preferred to protect against road rash should he have an accident. Armored padding protects bones during a fall.
• Pants – Same story as the jacket. Jeans protect very little.
• Gloves – Why would you not even wear gloves? Aside from giving some relief for vibration (which I’m sure that machine has), after the helmet, they are perhaps the most important and commonly worn protective gear.

Motorcycle Equipment

Let me just say, I think cruisers are a joke in the first place. To hamper performance, comfort, handling, and braking performance so you can look cool is just stupid.

• Ape Hanger Handlebars – There’s a reason they’re illegal in some states and it’s because they have a very bad effect on handling. Of course the whole layout of that bike means any accident avoidance is going to be limited to yelling “Oh, Shit!”.
• Turn Signals – I’ve seen Harley riders with no turn signals on their bikes. Apparently it’s much cooler to take your hands off the handle bars and do those nifty hand signals. Love it when it’s the passengers job to be the signaler.
• Headlight – I’ve been riding for over 30 years and ever since I started it’s been the law that motorcycles must run with daytime headlights. But this guy is saying he’s extra cool, he’s not a safetycrat, he doesn’t need some government official telling him how to protect himself so he went to the trouble to disable his headlight.
• Front Fender – Fenders are required so that tires don’t kick up rocks, or spray you with water. Seeing as this guy is riding with a bare face and bare hands, you’d think maybe he’d want a fender. Also on many bikes the front fender is needed to provide stability to the forks. But being cool is better than having a safe and better handling bike, so let’s remove it.
• Brakes – Other than most dirt bikes and the smallest economy beginner bikes, most bikes built these days have two front disc brakes for better stopping power. Depending on the bike style, 80% to 100% of the stopping power comes from the front brake(s). Maybe he didn’t want to overwhelm the minimal traction that stylish but skinny front tire could provide.
• Loud Pipes – Everyone knows that if you install illegal and obnoxiously loud open pipes on your bike, you don’t need all that other safety equipment. For some unknown reason, loud pipes envelope you like some impervious “Star Trek” field force that protects you from texting teens in SUVs, oily spots on the road, and suicidal birds. The fact that everyone stops what they’re doing and looks at you is just an extra bonus.

NOBODY PROTECTS RIDERS BETTER THAN ALLSTATE

What a piece of crock! They don’t want me riding a bike that has massive acceleration to get out of someone’s way, a bike that has quick handling to swerve out of harm’s way, or just not get me in trouble in the first place, and they don’t want me riding a motorcycle that has brakes strong enough to jolt your eyeballs out of their sockets, but they’re totally fine with the image in this ad? I’m sorry, but I won’t be doing business with Allstate. Ever!

He Finally Figured It Out

Trevor, our part time cat, first showed up at our house in the fall of 2002. We call him our part time cat because he’ll show up religiously every day for a few days, and then we won’t see him for 3-4 days at a time.

He mostly comes by for food and drink, although he is a really good snuggler when he finally settles down. He eats like no other cat I’ve ever seen, yet where he puts all that food we’ve never figured out. He’s the only cat we’ve ever had who hasn’t turned into an overweight lump of fur. He’ll clean out the food bowl and then start looking around for any dishes to clean, and he’s great for cleaning up the food the other cats spill on the floor.

His drinking is legendary. I’ve never seen a cat that loved milk as much as this one. He gets so excited about milk that he does a little “Milk Dance” when ever he gets a hint that milk will be served shortly. Whether it’s hearing the fridge open, or seeing me get a bowl out of the cupboard for my morning cereal, he’ll be right at my heels doing his dance.

This love of milk must have been responsible for what finally pushed him over the edge. For nine years now we’ve been trying to get Trevor to come into the house through the cat door. He has the going out part down just fine. In fact when he gets scared (which is often) he manages to fly through the door without a second thought. But no matter how much we cajoled him, bribed him with food, or pushed him through it, he just has never been comfortable with the thought of entering the house though this convenient contraption called the cat door.

You see, Trevor’s never been the brightest cat. In fact he’s picked up the nickname of Captain Slow (with a nod to Top Gear) because sometimes he moves like molasses, taking forever to do things like getting up on the couch. I think he’s always afraid that Meg is lurking around, just ready to beat the crap out of him. He’s kind of a wuss that way.

Every once in awhile, Lori or I will see Trevor in the house and not being the one who let him in, have asked the other just to confirm, “Did you let Trevor in?”

For nine years the answer has always been yes.

Until today. This morning I was getting my usual bowl of cereal ready when Trevor came running into the kitchen. I didn’t realize he was in the house and at the time Lori was taking her shower, so I didn’t think she could have let him in. When she got out I asked her, and for once the answer was a remarkable, “No”!

So finally, after nine years, it appears that Trevor has finally figured out that the door swings both ways. Hopefully he’ll use it more often, especially during the winter.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but apparently, the same doesn’t hold true for cats.

In My Own Backyard

It’s often true that people don’t discover their nearby attractions until relatives or friends visit from out of town and they become the tour guide. People travel all over seeking out the new and interesting, when sometimes the best places are in their own backyard.

Today I realized that literally, one of the best places is in my backyard.

Williams Creek, a small tributary to the Salt River, runs through the back portion of our yard. Our property extends a bit on the other side of the creek, but for all intents and purposes, the creek defines the back border of our property.

The creek has also become one of the features of our yard that has me hating our property at times. Because the Salt River is no longer a real river, Williams Creek often floods our property and each time it does, it brings in a new crop of weeds and deposits another layer of silt across our yard.

Willows line the banks of the creek, and below the prodigious branches of the willows grows an increasing tangle of berry vines, stinging nettle and horsetails. I used to be able to mow much of the backyard, but with everything that’s gone on the last few years the willows and brambles took over.

Two weeks ago a large willow fell over during a light summer rain, and so I’ve been sawing and hacking my way through the mess it caused. This afternoon I made it to the old wire fence that runs the length of the property in the back. It had always annoyed me because you can’t weed whack along a wire fence. So I spent most of the day clearing the brush off of the fence and started pulling the wire and stakes.

This opened a path to the creek, something we hadn’t had in quite some time. Being an unusually warm day in Ferndale, I was ready to quit my yard work at that point. Lori had been busy in the front yard pulling horsetails and I knew she’d be ready to quit soon too.

We had talked about setting up our foldable settee and sitting out in the back yard since it was such a nice treat to have a real summer day in Ferndale. But I had an even better idea.

I took our settee down to the creek bed, which required getting out the extension ladder as the banks are pretty steep now from all the erosion. Then I got a couple glasses of lemonade and put them in the cup holders of the chair.

Lori loved my surprise. We spent about an hour and a half just sitting with our toes in the cool water, enjoying the slight breeze that made its way through the trees. There were little birds and tiny water bugs to entertain us, and we dreamed of finding gold in “our” creek.

I had brought her iPhone down with us to take pictures, and while we were down there enjoying the splendor of our own backyard Lori suggested we could listen to some music on her phone. I decided to try Pandora, and it struck me as very odd to be sitting in the middle of a creek and still be connected to the Internet. I pulled up a George Winston station which seemed very appropriate for the locale. The third song that played was a track by David Lanz which was so nice we ended up purchasing the album on iTunes.

At that point I was starting to lose the feeling in my feet from the cool water, so we ventured back to the house to listen to the rest of the album on the stereo.

During the 90 minutes we spent sitting in our creek, I fell in love with our house again. So often it is just a source of endless chores, and we never take the time to just sit and enjoy it. But looking at the scenery in our creek, I realized that people drive long distances to enjoy scenery like this. We’re very lucky to have this little paradise in our own backyard.

Next week I’m going to try and find time to smell the roses we’re growing.

Comments

Today is one of those days where I’m pining for the Internet we had back in 1995. When I first found out about the World Wide Web it was a welcoming homey place. A place where you felt safe because it was just people sharing their knowledge.

Back then I never came across people trying to get your bank account numbers, black hat SEO wasn’t a problem, and I got a lot more work done.

These days I spend a lot of time worrying. I notice something funny going on and it requires research just to figure out whether it’s something I really need to be worried about or not.

This morning I received the bill from Hurricane Electric who is one of the hosting companies I use for my clients. I had slightly gone over my bandwidth limit and so there was an extra charge. Since I hadn’t added any big new clients lately (dang!) I became suspicious that maybe my server had been co-opted for some nefarious purpose. So instead of doing any meaningful work, I spent my morning on the phone, and looking at log files. Anyone who has viewed raw log files knows there are more pleasant ways to spend your morning.

Then all morning I started getting comments to moderate for this blog. Rather unusual because normally I’m lucky if I receive 1 comment a month here, so 6 in one morning caught my attention. They were all from different parts of the world, and all with different comments. Ok, that I get, comment spam. Usually done to promote some web site. Only these didn’t list any web site URLs, either in the web site field or in the text.

They all did have some weird misspellings, and were generic comments that had nothing really to do with what I wrote about. So yeah they’re spam, but what’s their motive, their agenda?

The only thing I can think of is that WordPress has a setting where once you approve a comment by someone, further posts from that person can be automatically approved. I don’t use that setting, but the spammer has no way of knowing. So they submit a rather innocuous first post hoping it’ll get approved, sure to be followed up by their real spam later.

The misspellings are random, I think to make it harder to Google a phrase to see if it is a common generated comment.

Doesn’t matter to me. I treat all comments that don’t mention what the post is about as spam. So if you want to spam my comment field, you’re going to at least have to read what I wrote. And you’re going to have to write a comment that relates to the post. I feel that’s only fair.

Now stop wasting my time. I’m trying to earn a living here.

The Kitchenaid Bank

This afternoon I finally got around to tackling the biggest project on my honey-do list. I had to. I was running out of clothes to wear.

For the last few months our clothes dryer has been making an increasingly loud squealing noise that didn’t go well with our quiet living in the country lifestyle. At first it only did it with large loads so Lori simply started doing smaller loads. That’s the beauty of being an intelligent creature, you adapt.

But then it got to the point where the dryer was bitching about having to dry more than one sock at a time. This got to be impractical. I kept putting off looking at it because I’ve been busy painting and working on the fence, fixing the truck’s bumper, doing a valve job on the KLR650 and a host of other things around the house. I thought about just calling a repairman, but that’s such a sissy way out. I at least wanted to have a crack at it and see just how far I could get in over my head before calling for professional help. Besides, just a few days ago I was staring at the inside of the motor of my KLR. If that doesn’t make you do the Mr. Tool Time grunt, then it’s time to just get rid of your tools. All of them.

So this afternoon I decided to take a look at our 10 year old Kitchenaid. First I pulled the back panel off. That was easy. Only problem was that it doesn’t get you anywhere. There had to be another way in, only I couldn’t find any other external screws to take off.

A quick Google of “Kitchenaid Superba Dryer Troubleshooting” got me the info I needed. (When you pronounce it super-ba, it sounds like a really dumb name for anything except possibly a loud sheep.) A couple of screws come out in the lint screen, and then the whole top just flips up like the hood of a car. Except the Kitchenaid engineers aren’t kind enough to provide the little pole to keep it propped up and it’s connected by way too many wires to easily disconnect it and get it out of your way.

But once you get that off then you can also remove a couple more screws that allow you to remove the front panel. And that’s when I got a big surprise. I never realized that our dryer had become our piggy bank. A large pile of coins spilled out on the floor, and after counting it all up, I was $20.62 richer. Enough for a night out at the movies.

With the front off, you can then disconnect the drum belt and lift the drum out. Underneath the drum I found my target, two drum rollers that needed some oil. I then put everything back together and it works and there are no screws left over. So not only did I not have to pay for a repairman, or wait for him to show up, I also have a pocketful of change to go have fun with.

While I had it all apart, I searched carefully, but all those missing socks were nowhere to be found. That part is still a mystery.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

One of the problems of having a camera that you can tuck just about anywhere, is that it can get tucked just about anywhere. So for a couple of months I’ve been without my take it with me camera, my little Pentax Optio. But it recently resurfaced at the bottom of a bag of stuff I brought back from the studio, and with it, a few long forgotten pictures. So here’s a brief recap of progress on the house.

I started off the summer finishing the top of the fence. The Cecille Brunner roses we transplanted are doing great and the one over the gate even bloomed, providing a nicely scented welcome to our front yard. I can’t wait until we get the whole front covered in roses.

After finishing the top of the fence it was time to start working on pickets. I figure I need over 300 pickets. Here’s the first batch that I finished cutting, waiting to get painted.

I’ll be glad to get those up on the fence so people can finally see what the whole thing is going to look like. But that project got interupted by the fair, and now it’s into prime painting season so they’re on hold for awhile since I can paint them indoors. Can’t waste the precious fall weather on indoor projects.

After last fall’s heat gun incident, I needed to find a safer way to strip the paint on the exterior. After reading lots of reviews online, I finally decided to try out a Paint Shaver Pro. It arrived last week and I got to try it out for the first time yesterday. Right away I love it. In one afternoon I stripped the rest of the south side of the house. With the heat gun it would have taken me about a week or more. Plus I didn’t have to call the fire department, which is a huge bonus. It does scar the wood a bit, but most of the marks will sand out, and it’s a lot easier sanding the bare wood than it is sanding through layers and layers of paint.

Today’s project was to work on the top molding and the window trim. A lot of the window trim needed to be replaced as it was rotted, plus it allows me to prime and reattach the siding behind the trim. Redwood has a way of dissolving nails over a hundred years so it’s good to get everything re-nailed. I’m getting pretty used to finding wacky things done to this house by previous owners, but what I found today made me chuckle. Behind the window trim, insulating the space where the window weights used to hang, was a pair of workman’s coverups. I don’t know the R-Value for used clothing, but it has me wondering did the workman save these for just such a purpose? Or did he just blow out a knee and decide right there to recycle them. If I find a pair of jeans and a shirt in the next window, I’m really going to be wondering.

IROC AF/X Slot Cars

Back in the 70s when I was a teenager, I wanted a slot car track. I finally talked my parents into letting me build a track suspended from the ceiling in the garage. I designed a tri-oval layout that featured three banked turns and a road course inside. It all fit on two pieces of 4×8 that were cut and assembled into a triangular layout.

I had big plans for the track, with thoughts of landscaping it to give it a more realistic feel. Unfortunately, the fact that it was in the garage meant that anytime I wanted to play with it I had to talk my parents into parking both cars in the driveway. This didn’t happen very often, and the track never got used as much as I would have liked. I got far more race time going over to friends houses that had more accessible raceways.

Fast forward 35 years and my landlord at the studio, Rick Phillis got me hooked again on slot cars, racing them Tuesday nights at the fairgrounds on several different 6 lane tracks. After about 30 minutes of practice, Rick would start what he called the IROC races. For those unfamiliar with IROC, it stands for International Race of Champions. It was racing series started in 1974 that pitted the best auto racers from the Indy, F1, Nascar, Trans-Am and Can-AM series against each other in identically prepared cars.

At Rick’s slot car track, the IROC races meant that every racer took turns running the car assigned to each of the six lanes. The combined score of all six runs then determined the winner. Since everybody had the same car when running each lane, everything evened out and it really did show who was the best driver. (Never me)

So after racing all winter I got hooked again and figured setting up a track would be a good thing to keep me occupied while I was recovering from the surgery. Once again the track is above the cars in the garage, but this time there is a floor between them so I don’t have to move any cars. We have a small room above the garage that was just being used for storage so it was the perfect place to set up a track.

Due to the layout of the room I had to design the track in a T shape. Since racing on 6 lane tracks was so much fun, I knew I wanted to go more than the normal 2 lane track. For the size of the room, 4 lanes was a good compromise. Along the back wall is an 14′ straightaway that leads into banked turn. Then a couple of tight hairpins before heading up the hill for the overpass. A steep descent then leads into a series of sweeping turns through the tunnel, followed by one more tight hairpin, and then a wide 180 degree turn that leads back to the straight.

While I was working on the track I decided to take the IROC concept a step further. Why not build 4 identically prepared cars? The first year of the IROC series, they used Porsche RSR race cars with the brand new ‘whale tail’. I had two choices of AF/X bodies to use for building my replicas. There is an ’73 RSR body but it doesn’t have the whale tail. There is also a later RSR body (I think it is ’78) that has a double wing tail. While the ’73 is closer to the IROC, I figured it would be easier to modify the later body to get the right wing shape.

When you have a fixed four lane slot car track it is helpful to have the lanes marked with tape so you can identify which lane you go back on after the inevitable crash. The standard colors for a four lane track are red, white, blue, and yellow. There just happened to be cars in those colors in the IROC series, so those were the colors I chose. I did some research on the web to find the list of colors, drivers, and their assigned numbers. (The numbers went with the drivers, even though they switched cars after each race.) Richard Petty was a given (my boyhood hero) and for the other drivers I picked my favorites from each of the racing series. From Indy I have A.J. Foyt in the red number 8 car, from F1 I have Emmerson Fittapaldi in the white number 1 car, from Trans-Am, Mark Donahue in the yellow number 2 car. The King of course gets the blue car, with the number 10.

To build the cars, I first removed the top wing and then slightly reshaped the lower wing adding the lip in the rear. Then each car was painted the appropriate color. I used some ink jet decals for the the markings. These are a great item, and something I wish I had when I was building models as a kid. They are available with both a white background and a clear background. Since inkjet printers don’t include white ink, if the decal you want to make has white in it you need the white background. I needed both types and fortunately they sell a pack that includes a sampling of both.

So now all four cars are ready to go. The next step for the track is to get the lap timer set up.

Kidnofax, Reneton and Polcical do not heal Polycystic Kidney Disease

Like most people I am baraged with emails on a daily basis claiming I have lost relatives that have left me millions, or I’ve won the lottery or any number of scams that seem so obvious to me it makes wonder why these people persist. Yet there must be enough people who blindly believe everything that is fed to them that even with all the warnings out there, these scammers are still successfully ripping people off.

I’m reminded of this constantly on Model Mayhem, a site I have a portfolio of my photography work on. This web site has a forum and every day some newbie posts an inquiry wondering if an email they received is legit. The post is usually from some naive model who has put their email address in their profile and they get contacted by someone who noticed their profile on Model Mayhem and wants to fly them to London for a major magazine cover shoot. Yeah, right, that’s how major magazines work. They’re going to hire some unknown model with 4 crappy photos on their profile and stick them on the cover. So the dufuses are definately out there.

After my experience with Prestige Camera, I’ve learned to thoroughly research businesses on the web whenever something doesn’t seem right. Not only the business itself but also any sites reviewing the business because Prestige Camera put a lot of effort into creating sham review sites that recommended Prestige Camera as a 5 star rated company. I later discovered the “review” site was a scam after my research revealed all of the sites they listed were in fact the same company, just operating under different names.

Well it seems this approach isn’t unique to Prestige Camera. I recently came across another scam that puts the disgusting practices of Prestige Camera to absolute shame. While Prestige Camera is just after your money, this herbal medicine scam is preying on people who have little hope, probably little money to spare, and may in fact be poisoning the people they fleece.

First a little background. My wife has a genetic disorder that caused two problems. First she started losing her hearing. In the process of trying to find the cause of the hearing loss the doctors discovered she was losing her kidneys due to a hereditary condition known as Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD). There is growing evidence that both the hearing loss and the kidney disease are caused by the same DNA mutation. Fortunately her hearing loss was solved by bilateral cochlear implants, and as I write this, we are less than two weeks away from her transplant surgery. I am lucky enough to be a great match for her and I am the donor.

Hearing about our situation, a friend who works at a healing center and is a firm believer in the power of herbal healing, sent me a link to a product called Kidnofax. I visited the web site, and there were enough warning bells in their claims that I decided to see if there were any independent reviews of their product.

That lead me to a web site pkdhelp.com that listed three remedies. pkdhelp.com was registered by Towards Natural Health, shortly after the other domains, also through GoDaddy. This site just seemed too much like the review site I encounted with Prestige Camera, so I decided to look up the domain registrations for the three companies listed. While they were all registered by different companies in different countries, they all share some common factors. The first thing that really stuck out was that all three domains were registered May 11, 2009 with GoDaddy.com. Three different companies, in different countries selling competing products just happened to register their domains with the same company on the exact same day. That was enough for me right there to resolve any doubts I had as to the authenticity of their products. They also all use CCNow as their payment gateway. While CCNow isn’t a scam company itself, it is a useful tool for people who want to receive money and remain anonymous. It also makes it hard to get your money back once you realize you’ve been scammed.

So I emailed my friend back saying that the quick research I did seemed to indicate that Kidnofax was a scam. His response was that I was being brainwashed by the medical industry. Since this person was making recommendations to people’s health I was determined to show him some more proof. Since we’re trying to stay healthy before the transplant surgery, we didn’t have Thanksgiving with anyone. So I had all day to research and what I uncovered was truly disturbing.

Much of what I suspected was confirmed by One Sick Mother (OSM). In her exstensive blog, she has been posting about this huge network of herbal scams that Kidnofax is just a small part of. Not only has she done a tremendous amount of research and documented it well, her writing is very entertaining and so I spent the whole morning reading various articles on her web site.

Without duplicating what she has written about, I will provide a summary, and then you can view the More Info links below as a starting point.

First off, the scams aren’t just related to PKD. Each of the three companies have set up separate web sites for a long list of diseases from Adominal Adhesions to Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia. I guess they’re still working on the diseases for the letters X-Z. For each of the respective companies, the web sites are exactly the same, with the exception of the specific disease that they are targeting. Same ingredient list, same testimonials, same ad copy that mentions how this miracle product was discovered, etc. In fact on some of the sites the search and replace of the disease name missed a few places and the wrong disease is mentioned.

Since the domains were registered on May 11, 2009, I found it very odd that the sites had testimonials from users in several countries dating back to 2007. How did these people find and buy the product as the one email response I received back from them stated that the product is only available from their web site.

If you try to research the companies themselves you’ll find that the satellite sites don’t link back to the corporate sites. I’m sure they’re afraid that people might find the other scam sites if they linked them that way. I was able to find the URL’s for the corporate sites, but they don’t exist. They are either under construction or they’re an empty directory.

I did email a couple of them and got a reponse back for an inquiry about Reneton. As I suspected from reading user’s comments left on OSM, the reply came not from an IP address in New Zealand, but from a possibly forged IP address in Pakistan.

I communicated this information including the links to OSM to my friend and his response was that he would buy the stuff for me, he was so sure of its efficacy. I told him no thanks. Especially since OSM provided an analysis of some of the ingredients that included such nice extras such as rat poison.

Some of the other details that I discovered are listed below in the table. I’ve tried not providing links to the companies themselves because I really don’t want to promote them. So you’ll have to copy and paste the URLs.

The companies supposedly are located in either New Zealand, Australia and Denmark. However Gordon’s uses a private bag which is similar to a post office box, Healing Plants uses a virtual office, and Solutions by Nature uses a post office box. The photos on the sites that supposedly show their corporate headquarters aren’t the real locations, and in the case of Towards Natural Health, they Photoshopped New York’s skyline into something they thought would represent both Scotland and Copenhagen.

So after laying out my findings, was my friend convinced that these companies are a fraud, that there are unscrupulous people in Pakistan willing to grab your money and possibly ruin your health? Nope, he remained convinced of the power of herbal healing because he is convinced that the western medical industry is not the solution. And that is why these scams succeed. Because some people want something to believe in after modern medicine has failed them.

It’s a shame on so many levels that scams like this exist. I believe that some herbs do have some positive effects. I take echinacea at the first signs of a sore throat and sometimes it seems to have prevented an oncoming cold, or at least lessened the severity of it. Other times it had no effects. With over 200 types of the common cold, who’s to say if it’s really effective, just a placebo effect, or effective for some colds but not others. But modern quackery taints the entire alternative medicine industry. Preying on people who are already experiencing the physical, mental and financial stress from terminal diseases by offering them false hope is despicable. Selling them drugs that may include (depending on whether what you receive really is the formula listed on their web sites) compounds that are toxic such as rat poison.

If you see any of these companies advertising on Google you can use this form to complain. There isn’t much else you can do unfortunately except complain to search engines and hope the people that run them have some morals and will remove these sites from their listings. But I don’t even have much hope for that.

Replacing the Del Sol’s Headlights

After Lori’s accident with the deer I needed to replace the right headlight and turn signal. The first step was to remove the front bumper so I could fully assess what was going to be needed.

Not sure how to remove the Del Sol’s bumper, I turned to the Internet and found these instructions. The instructions were pretty good but I have a few comments on them.

First, start with the two bolts underneath the bumper. That way you can be under the car when the bumper is securely attached and you don’t have to worry about it falling down on you. I found that both of the bottom bolts had been partially ground off from making contact with low objects so removing them was a bit tough.

Next take off the two side screws. I found that the inner fender is flexible enough that you can push it out of the way and insert a philips head screwdriver into the cutout that Honda thoughtfully provided. You’ll have to feel around a bit to find the screw but it works.

Finally remove the top screws and you’re all done. It just lifts off from there.

With the bumper off I found some of the plastic bits that broke off of the lights. I was hoping to just replace the lens and glue everything else back together but Honda doesn’t sell the lens separately. You have to buy the whole assembly, and the headlight assembly is $270. The mounting bracket was another $60 dollars, and the turn signal assembly was another $190. So over $500 just to fix the two lights.

At that price I thought about searching the local salvage yard but they didn’t have any in stock. The guy I talked to though suggested just replacing both the left and right lights with after market units.

So back to the Internet and I found these replacement lights that combine the headlight, the turn signal and the mounting bracket into one unit. Total cost with shipping and tax was just under $200.

They installed just as advertised. They’re actually a lot easier to work with than the OEM units. The Honda assemblies seem a bit over engineered.

The right side took some work getting it to fit only because the car’s frame had been bent from the impact. I also had to bend the frame for the driving light back to something that more closely approximated the original configuration.

Everything went back together pretty smoothly, and then it was off for a drive to Kragen to get replacement bulbs for some of them that got damaged. On the drive back I realized that I should have bought amber bulbs for the turn signals. After getting home and taking a look at the lights, I realized that in order to change the turn signal bulbs I’m going to have to go through the whole bumper removal process again. A design flaw in the integrated units, but for the price difference I’m willing to do the extra work.

Maybe some day when we have more money I’ll repair or replace the hood and get it repainted. But for now at least it’s back on the road and if I can sell the driver side units on Ebay for half of the OEM price, I’ll be $50 ahead.

Strike Two

When I got home from the fire department drill last night the garage door for the Del Sol was open, which I thought was kind of odd. When I got into the house, Lori told me why. She had hit a deer on her way home on Hwy 211. She seemed shaken but she was totally ok.

After seeing my last experience with a deer strike where it totaled the car, I was fearing the worst. Especially since just last week in a budget cutting move I had decided to drop the collision and comprehensive on the Del Sol.

So I was quite amazed when I got a look at the car. The damage is minimal. The headlight is broken, but still works, the turn signal light is broken but still works, the driving light got pushed back and for some reason doesn’t work, and the hood is a bit buckled but that may resolve itself when I get the headlight back where it’s supposed to be. I guess there are some advantages to driving a low slung sports car. The contact point would have been with the deer’s legs rather than its body. Lori was also very lucky in that she caught the tail end of the deer as it was crossing in front of her from left to right.

In over 30 years of driving, Lori has been the safest driver I know. She’s never had an accident, nor has she even received a ticket. (oh wait, there was that little touch and go in our extremely narrow garage in South San Francisco) But she has been unfortunate to cross paths with deer twice.

The first incident came during our honeymoon, and any of you who have known us for a while have probably heard the honeymoon story. It’s a long story, filled with all kinds of disasters, from a skiing accident that left blood stains in the snow, to setting her bathrobe on fire. But the deer portion of the story is that we went out to dinner for her birthday and on the way home I let her drive the ’69 El Camino that we had just recently bought. Honeymooning on a motorcycle in the middle of the winter wasn’t an option.

So on the way home out jumps Bambi and before she even has much of a chance to react, there’s an impact. Bambi jumps back up and disappears into the woods. Lori pulls over and wants to go rescue the injured Bambi, bless her animal loving heart. But it’s pitch black outside, and we’re in a wooded hilly section and for all I know, it could be a 100 ft. drop off the side of the road. So I had to hang onto her to keep her from going over the edge.

Then a bunch of other disasters happen and finally we decide to cut the honeymoon short and we head home. More disaster ensues. We get home exhausted and I call my mom to let her know we’re back. She wants us to come over and open our wedding presents. We are not the happy couple at this point and so it takes some sweet talking from mom before we finally acquiesce.

One of the first presents Lori opens is a little brass paper weight in the shape of a fawn. She breaks down in tears, leaving everyone else but me with a puzzled expression on their face.

So last night I asked her if maybe she was ready to give venison another try. The next deer that decides to make a dessert out of her Taboo roses, better have a good escape plan.