Thought I'd put this up on here for those that knew an old Monkey by the name of Dave Pearson, or Sir Crashalot as he was known on the old monkey site.
His ex partner Spud has put up on facebook that he has now departed from this world and will be missed by plenty that knew him.
I had a good few laughs with him over a few years and it's such a shame to lose someone at a young age.

R.I.P Crashalot

So now that Christmas is out of the way and I'm beginning to firm up my racing calendar for marshalling, I'm looking at getting a bigger bike for the warmer months to commute to race meetings on (I don't think the 125 will cope with the 400mile round trip to Cadwell).

Originally I was going to repair my dad's old bike and use that, however, following some investigations on it the amount of damage done to it has left it uneconomical for much more than a project bike, not ideal when looking for something to use within a few months! So I thought I'd ask you lot what you'd recommend as a bike (model, make, etc.) for commuting to work and the occasional long distance ride to a circuit and back (and maybe even a biking holiday over in the foreign lands of the EU possibly)?

Second thing I thought I'd ask is advice on buying second hand bikes. Not being in this game for very long I'm not 100% sure of what to check or look for when buying from say Auto Trader, and Google is only helpful if you understand it. Again, thought I'd ask you lot as you lot have what Google doesn't - personal experiences.

So if anyone has any good advice to impart, it'd be very much appreciated

Happy Birthday Paul, hope your weekend is very alcohol fueled. All the best mate  :D

Happy Burpday matey

Love him, hate him or just see him as an eccentric buffoon you cant get away from him. This link/ article popped up on my phone news feed and made some interesting reading ...

Quote:Trump’s Falsehoods


We won’t get into Trump’s controversial policy positions; it’s not a fact-checker’s role to offer opinions on whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea for the federal government to bar Muslims from entering the United States or to kill the families of terrorists, for example. What we focus on here are some of the many cases where he’s just wrong on the facts.

We start with his Nov. 21 claim to have watched on television as “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Multiple news organizations and the New Jersey attorney general’s office searched for evidence of public celebrations at the time of 9/11 and found none.
“Never happened,” former state Attorney General John J. Farmer, a Republican appointee who later served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission,wrote in response to Trump.
In a tweet, Trump demanded an apology, citing as evidence one news story about an alleged incident that was unattributed, unverified and not televised. One of the reporters on that story said he visited the “Jersey City building and neighborhood where the celebrations were purported to have happened,” but he could “never verify that report.”
And Trump’s false claim about “thousands and thousands” of Muslims is just part of a pattern of inflammatory claims with little or no basis in fact.

Here are some more — and it’s not an exhaustive list.

§ Trump boasted that he “predicted Osama bin Laden.” Nope. The book Trump published in 2000 mentioned bin Laden once, and predicted nothing about bin Laden’s future plans.

§ Trump “heard” that Obama is “thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away.” If so, he misheard. What Obama reportedly considered was requiring large-volume private gun dealers to conduct background checks, not confiscating firearms from those who own them.

§ Trump said he “heard” the Obama administration plans to accept 200,000 Syrian refugees — even upping that wildly inaccurate number to 250,000 in another speech.Nope and nope. The number is about 10,000.

§ Trump said he got to know Putin “very well” while the two were on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”Nope. The two men were interviewed separately, in different countries thousands of miles apart.

§ Trump claimed his campaign is “100 percent” self-funded. Nope. At the time, more than 50 percent of his campaign’s funds had come from outside contributors.

§ Trump said his tax plan is revenue neutral. Nope. The pro-business Tax Foundationestimated the Trump plan would reduce revenues to the Treasury by more than $10 trillion over 10 years, even assuming his plan would create economic growth.

§ Trump told the story of a 2-year old who got autism a week after the child got a vaccine. But there’s no evidence of such a link. The study that claimed to have found a link between vaccines and autism has been exposed as an “elaborate fraud.” It was retracted five years ago by the journal that published it, and the author was stripped of his license to practice medicine in Britain.

§ Trump said Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy. It does.

§ Trump claimed credit for getting Ford Motor Co. to move a plant from Mexico to Ohio.Ford says that’s baloney; it made the decision years before Trump even announced his run for president.

§ Trump denied that he ever called female adversaries some of these things: “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” He used all of those terms.

§ Trump said in June “there are no jobs” to be had, when official statistics were showing 5.4 million job openings — the most in 15 years.

§ Trump claimed economic growth in the U.S. has “never” been below zero — until the third quarter of 2015. “Who ever heard of this?” he asked. Except it’s not unheard of. Economic growth has been below zero 42 times since 1946.
 

Quote:Donald Trump traveled an old-fashioned route to fortune.
As he explained when he announced his bid for the 2016 Republican nomination for president:
“I made it the old-fashioned way. It’s real estate. You know, it’s real estate.”

While Trump did have a big head start — his father, Fred, was a multimillionaire New York real estate developer — there’s no doubt The Donald has created a fortune of his own. But if he’d stopped working 30 years ago, he could have done much better.
All he had to do was shift away from real estate and park his money in the same place that you can: an unmanaged stock index fund.

The background

To compare Trump’s performance to that of an unmanaged index fund, we need to know two things: his beginning net worth and his current net worth.

There’s considerable debate about Trump’s net worth. It’s estimated at $4.1 billion in the latest “Forbes 400” list, which puts him in the No. 133 spot of the richest folks in America. However, in July, he issued a press release announcing his net worth at $10 billion.

Fine. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his net worth is $10 billion.

Now we need to establish his net worth at some point in the past.
Trump was on the Forbes 400 in 1982, when the magazine published its first annual list of America’s wealthiest denizens.
That year, Forbes said Trump’s fortune was “estimated at over $200 million,” but also acknowledged that Trump claimed it was “$500 million,” according to Timothy L. O’Brien’s book “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”

Again, let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume he was worth $500 million in 1982.

The math

Imagine Trump had retired in 1982, sold his real estate holdings and invested his $500 million in the S&P 500 — that is, 500 stocks representing the American stock market.

From 1982 through the end of 2014, the S&P 500 index had an annualized return, including reinvested dividends, of 11.86 percent, according to MoneyChimp’s S&P 500 Compound Annual Growth Rate calculator.

Per this calculator, every dollar invested in January 1982 would have been worth $40 by December of 2014. That means Trump’s initial $500 million would have grown to $20 billion. That’s twice what Trump says he’s worth today.

And this Whopper wants to be President of the USA.   

Happy new year folk's, hope you all have a great 2016.
Any new year resolutions? 
Mine is to stay positive no matter what! (Let's see how long that lasts)

Hope everyone has a great few days, eat way too much and drink until you make no sense at all.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS 

On the behest of my local bike shop (High Peak Cycles) I did a review on the Mio Bike GPS unit a few weeks ago and posted it on here. It was well received and the bike shop asked me if I'd do some more reviews. I said yes and decided the best way was to do a blog. 

And so http://www.theangrybiker.co.uk was born. 

Initially I was reviewing things I'd demo'd and bought or items I 'had' to replace. So the reviews were pretty much positive due to the fact they were bikes and kit I'd kept. That altered with the latest test item (a bike cleaner) which was shit, so I explained that (and why) after using it. 

Anyhow - One of my reviews which I posted on twitter has been used by an online magazine. It's nothing special, but the bike shop are very happy about it (as it gets their name 'out there' for nothing) and I'm pleased too as the site only went live last week once I'd got a few reviews added to it. 

They online mag used my 'Mondraker Dune RR' review ...




The bike shop are now talking about pushing their reps to get samples for me to test and review.   Fingers crossed this comes off as it will be good for them and could be very nice for me too. 

Hi peeps.......just a quick msg to say...'we is back'......yes another jaunt has concluded.  This time just under 4 weeks in south of Spain near Malaga.  Out of season so pretty quiet but temperatures are still Ok....average around 20 degrees daytime and 15 at night time.  Nice apartment and hire car for the period...managed a few outings to various 'Sierras' and other touristy places....Granada, Al Hambra palace/castle thingy etc... but as it's out of season things are much nicer 'cause there's less assholes(  )around to spoil the experience.

Oh and check this place out....El Caminito del Rey    been there, seen it, gave it a real good once over.....walked it?...no feckin way it's "scary"....LOL.  Might do it next time though if family living nearby talk me into it.

Anyway I've got some catching up to do so all for now....Oh and I trust you guys visit to the mountain bike place in welsh Wales went off well...( you nutters.....hehe)

As most know I passed the module 1 bike test last week. What I didn't give away was that I'd already got a test date for the module 2. Wanted to keep it quiet to keep the pressure off as I did with my car test. But I had it today. In Swindon at 10:24ish (why do test centres give such silly times?) this morning. It was a nice clear morning, sun was out, not too much breeze and traffic was light on the test route.

But I have now done it, I passed the module 2 test and have been given a piece of paper to prove it while my licence is sent off to the DVLA to be upgraded to an unrestricted A licence.

I've been around bikes for a long time with the racing world and what not and been a part of Throttlemonkey since 2008 (through the racing initially but stayed for the shite JJ and Kingy sprout intelligent conversations that occur round here, but I've never really been a biker without the licence. So I ask you now, can I call myself a biker yet?

Now to fix up the bike waiting for me (Kwak, unsure of model at the moment as it's my dad's bike that's been in his garage for a good few years, all I know about it is that I needed the unrestricted licence to ride it, so it's 650cc or more). Just in time for winter to set in