This guy bought an "Orange Country Chopper" including a custom trailer, for $10,000. It turned out not to be what it appeared to be.
I saw this "Bikes and Beards" channel on YouTube where the guy famously resuscitated what is probably the world's largest motorcycle, the Roadog. If you are a car or motorcycle nut, you've heard of this bike and it was pretty awesome that he got it running again and actually rode it. So months later, YouTube suggests another one of his videos, this time about an "Orange Country Chopper" bike that was valued at $140,000 and supposedly had a 300HP supercharged high-compression (oxymoron there!) engine. He paid ten grand for it, including the trailer, a model of the "Miss Geico" boat and a neat Swiss watch.
I wrote about Choppers before - they are basically all-show and no-go bikes. You aren't going to take one cross-country (comfortably, at least) or carve up the turns with the rice-racers and BMW set. You certainly aren't going off-road with one. They look cool and that's about it - they can be a nightmare to ride, with bizarre steering geometry, wide turning radius, lack of basic comfort (fenders, lights, and even brakes, in some instances). But they look cool and that's the point.
The Beard guy knows a lot about bikes (far more than me!) and one comment that resonated with me was that the "Orange Country Chopper" series devolved from building customer bikes to building bikes for large corporations to use as promotional displays. The bike he bought was a later one, built for the Geico offshore boat racing team (hence the model boat as part of the display). As he put it, these episodes turned into half-hour or hour-long advertisements for the corporate sponsor. Maybe $140,000 is a lot of money for a motorcycle, it is dirt cheap compared to the cost of a half-hour of prime-time television advertising.
So the bike never really worked. It was never "dialed in" although some of the workmanship was pretty decent. Most supercharged or turbo-supercharged IC engines have lowered compression (to avoid blowing the cylinder heads off) so it was weird that it had a high-compression engine coupled to a blower. On the dyno, it topped out at 140HP, a far cry from 300 (still a lot of horses for a bike!) and $140,000 is now $10,000 - for an expensive paperweight.
I wrote before about the Chopper show. The first few episodes, like the Hot Rod show, were interesting to me, as they had more technical information and video of the actual construction. But the ratings of that stuff stank, I guess, so they went with "feuds 'n fights" which is the staple of "reality" Tee-Vee, with the centerpiece being a long-standing "feud" between the father and son on the show. As others have amply demonstrated, you can film hours of people and then edit it together to make it seem like they hate each other. It is about as fake as the motorcycles they were building.
It doesn't have to be that way.
As the Bikes and Beards channel illustrates, you can edit together some real content, including technical content, without scaring off an audience. It doesn't have to be about hostility between the on-screen characters or made-up drama. Another channel (who is friends with the Beard guy) that follows this philosophy is Matt''s Off-Road Recovery. They aren't afraid to show details of the work they do on their recovery vehicles, or the techniques they use to yank broken Jeeps and "Razors" out of the wilderness. Yes, sometimes he uses clickbait-y titles, but never any angst in the shop or people throwing wrenches at each other. In fact, they are all super-nice to each other, which in this day and age, makes me wonder when the other shoe will drop. I keep fearing they will out themselves as conservative Mormons or worse yet, MAGA-heads. So far, they have smartly kept both religion and politics out of their videos.
Sadly, reality television dominates the airwaves. The shows are cheap to make and wildly popular. The made-up dramas are just like soap operas for the evening audiences. And speaking of which, this sort of thing can trace its roots to nighttime "soaps" like "Falcon Crest" and "Dallas." Who shot JR? I never cared and still don't. Again, it gets down to that "fan" thing, where people drown out the deafening silence (or boredom) in their own lives by tuning into someone else's drama. It is like listening to the neighbor's next door fighting. I guess it is human nature - we all want to hear about drama and strife.
But as I noted in a recent posting, maybe this is an unhealthy and unprofitable thing for the individual. Maybe it leads to depression and learned helplessness. Maybe it affects our own bottom line as we care more about people on television than we do about our own lives and the lives of our loved ones. Or are we supposed to be throwing wrenches at the latter as well?
An interesting thought, given how many folks seem to like to stir up drama in their own lives and try to insert it into the lives of others. You know that person at work who does this - comes into your office or cubicle and wants to bend your ear with the latest office gossip, or worse yet, wants you to choose sides on some stupid office politics. It is best to just give folks like that the "elevator walk"* and get back to work. Sadly, it seems some companies are populated solely with employees who are drama queens.
There is literally no profit in it. Watching people being antagonistic to one another ends up training you to be antagonistic. It is like the friend you have (and we all have one like that!) who watched way too many "sitcoms" where insult humor is the order of the day. It is literally exhausting to be around such people as they insult you with snide "funny" remarks over and over again. Who wants to live like that?
Not me!
* The "elevator walk" was illustrated effectively in the under-rated but highly educational film, About Schmidt which was based in part on my own family (just kidding). If you want to get an annoying person out of your office, you just say, "Oh, Gee, look at the time, I have to go to a meeting! Let me walk you to the elevator!" - and send them on their way. You might even ride with them and get off at a different floor. It gets rid of a person who is annoying you, without (hopefully) pissing them off and making you the target of their office politics machinations.
