Greetings Denizenry and Wannabes, On Labour Day weekend 1993 the 0th annual DoD Ottawa Assault was held in Ottawa, Ontario and Aylmer, Quebec. A good crowd of Denizens were in attendance and all the usual sorts of things took place. I won't do a complete summary of all events; rather, I'll just list who was there and a few anecdotes about each. Apologies in advance to those whose names I spell incorrectly or forget, or to other attendees whom I've forgotten completely! Mike "Beav" ("Bev") Beavington (V65 Sabre, "Velociraptor") Mike and his wife were our hosts for the weekend. Mike is an amiable sort who can't seem to decide for sure how to pronounce either his surname or his nickname. He was recently released from prison where the "Bev" nickname was particularly favoured. As a special treat for the neighbours, Mike swapped the loud competition muffler on to the Hindle pipe on his bike. Mike narrowly escaped injury when drywall he was installing in his garage attacked him prior to the event. Fortunately, no drywall fell while we were there, or Mike would have faced a fate worse than death after the Denizens crawled out from under the wreckage of their bikes. Mike makes a great blueberry pancake. Carrie "Bookin'" Gallo Mike's wife. A gracious hostess, not intimidated for long by a loud group of Denizens swarming the house. She quickly caught on and was able to reduce the gang to laughter with the utterance of a single word: "bookin'". We weren't sure how well she handled the clamour though, since she was prone to prolonged disappearances. This may have been to escape the cacophony, or (as we suspect) she may have repeatedly got lost in the gigantic sprawling house she and Mike built. Big thank yous to Carrie and Mike for hosting the event! Keith "Seldane" Hanlan (K75S) Keith was a co-host who planned the Saturday ride through the Gatineau hills and surrounding countryside in Quebec. Desbide being pragdiggly unable to breade from allergies the whole weegend, Keef showed us how fast and smoodly one can propel a bike droo dwisty bumpy roads covered in gravel and slow traffig. Nobody was bookin' as fast as Keith. Anne Soucy Keith's wife. Knew better than to mingle with a bunch of crazed Denizens for the Saturday evening party, she appeared on Sunday for brunch. Dave "red and fast" Dal Farra (GPz750) Dave was another full tilt rider who wouldn't let double yellow lines and oncoming traffic prevent passing. He's doing audio research at BNR into how to stop his GPz (with Yosh pipe?) and the Hindle pipe on Mike's Sabre from making so much noise. Did his best to keep bookin' along right behind Keith. Admires any bike as long as it is red and fast. Dan "is she fourteen yet?" Bullock (Hawk GT) Dan was our long-distance champ, riding up from New Joisy with a load of corn on the cob and a bag full of IBM OS/2 key fobs or something. The corn was well received. The IBM stuff wasn't :-) Not long into the Saturday ride, Dan demonstrated an advanced technological feature of his Hawk: a quick release front brake caliper. Unfortunately, the Hawk was in motion at the time of the caliper's removal from the fork. Fortunately, this did not result in a crash. Unfortunately, the bolts were somewhere in the ditch a ways back. Fortunately, the other Denizens took a mere eight or nine hours at the side of the road to figure out who was going to go ahead and who would stay and help Dan get his bike back to Mike's. When not watching his bike self-disassemble along the highway, Dan's main concern was whether or not the cute French girls at the service stations were older than 14. Dan seemed very enamoured with the female RCMP officer who posed for photos with us during our conquest of Parliament Hill, so we had to tell him that she was under 14 to keep him from hopping up on the horse with her. Glenn Bruneau (750 Katana) bruneau@bnr.ca While I'd never met Glenn before, I'm led to understand that he lived up to his reputations of (a) dropping his bike (well, almost, but not quite), and (b) not quite being on schedule. Glenn was often seen still in his shorts and bare feet while the rest of the gang was saddled up and ready to ride. Glenn insists that he missed the Saturday ride because of having to go into town for some money to buy gas, not because he was late getting away from Mike's house with the rest of us. Keith noticed Glenn's absence (although how he did this while several miles ahead at high speed I can't figure out) and went back to get him while Mike led the tour for a while. Norm "It's not a collection" Young (NS400R) Norm's toughest challenge in life is deciding which bike to take to any given event. It's surprising he has time to ride at all in between doing regular maintenance on his collection -- oh, sorry, it's not a collection -- of NS400R, ST1100, CBX 6 cylinder, CB1100F, and Triumph Bonneville. Probably winner of the most-gawked-at, most-test-ridden bike award, Norm was another very fast rider despite the NSR's not working quite right above 7000 rpm yet. Norm's easy to find: the blue colour of his Aerostitch coordinates nicely with the blue clouds of two-stroke exhaust trailing behind him. Jack Tavares (BMW, I forget the model, not a K) Jack cannot be summed up in one nickname. Jack was the only guy I would have been able to identify immediately without knowing anything about him. One look says "this guy is a Jack Tavares". I don't know why. Jack admitted to being very bad at French. The only words he could say well were "Kaybek", "quatorze", and "surete!". Jack had extreme cognitive difficulty with the concept of a two-stroke three cylinder V engine in Norm's NSR. While the squidly types drooled over it, Jack shook his head in complete confusion, exclaiming "a V *three*? A triple V? Shouldn't that make it a W?" and so on over and over. However, guess who was the last of the long line of test pilots to take the NSR for a spin? Methinks he doth protest too much. Jacquie Tavares (Suzuki Savage) The only person who could dish it out as much as Jack. She'd have to be, to survive as his wife I guess. Or maybe touring on a 650cc thumper does that to you, or maybe being an ex-army person, or maybe all of the above, I dunno. Hope it didn't rain on the way back to New Hampsha, or there's a Savage up for grabs now. Luc Marcouiller (Ninja 900) Luc est un Denizen qui connait un grand nombre des autres Denizens, par-ce-qu'il a voyage a Californique, et a Europe. C'etait tres gentil de Luc a conduire lentement de temps en temps pour voir que les backmarquers ne manque pas les squiddes (ca veut dire Keith) le samedi matin. Quand c'est necessaire, quand-meme, Luc est presque fou comme les squiddes. Luc aime bien bruler et flamber les gens qui ne peut pas parler francais correctment; alors, Luc, voici ta chance de me flamber! (Ou est mon Nomex?) Ashok Soni (CB250 I think) Gotta give this big guy credit for making the trip up on the small Honda. Despite the tombstone windshield, he looked like he was still taking quite a wind blast when I rode with him for a bit on the ride home. Ashok was the only traveller from Toronto area with enough brains to avoid the torrential rain and horrendous traffic jams that plagued the 401 on Friday. Unlike me. Andy "hit me" K.L. Pang (CB-1) Andy appeared on Saturday evening with his face all bandaged up from being pummeled in karate class. He plans to continue to black belt level before giving it all up for a less abusive sport. Like aikido. Alain Galarneau (GS550 or something like that) Alain is one of those guys who has ridden everything and knows lots of people who know lots of people who have lots of connections and get great deals on stuff and build tons of full-on race bikes and all that. Regaled us with tales of running from the cops at 280 km/h on his GSXR-1100. He was sort of hard to understand at times because his speech was impaired by drooling over Norm's NS400R. Norm must have been eventually convinced by Alain's stories, because Alain got the first demo ride on the NSR, during which he blitzed past the house at 170 km/h in a 50 zone. Give him credit for bringing it back in one piece. Heck, give him credit for just bringing it back! Lise _____ Alain's girlfriend whom he stole from her previous boyfriend after impressing her by crashing his bike with her on the back. Hmmm, didn't Mike and Keith both say they crashed with their now-wives (then-girlfriends) on their first date? I guess if you break her, you have to keep her. Women -- who can figure them out? "Hey, this guy's klutzy enough to crash with me on the back of his bike on our first date. Definite marriage material!" Scott "Baffle Blower" Pace (Suzuki GS850G? (GR650 Tempter previous)) Scott's Suzuki shares a common trait with the aforementioned auto-caliper-ejecting Hawk GT of Dan's -- it ejects parts spontaneously during riding. Rather than calipers, Scott's bike blows baffles out the back of the exhaust. It's hard to see the muffler for all the spot-welds from repaired baffles. Another of Scott's idiosyncracies is his determination to project onto others those feelings he has himself, especially with respect to innocent young female passengers whose boyfriends' bikes are on the verge of collapse from half a dozen or more dangerously neglected maintenance chores. While certain other Denizen(s) merely sought to help her pass the time amicably while waiting for a swarm of other Denizens to resurrect the near-dead bike on her boyfriend's behalf, Scott seems to secretly wish it had been him so he could have gone far beyond this and made the all-important 14-year-old inquiry. Lest I seem too harsh on Scott, let it be said that this idiosyncracy pales in comparison to rumours that certain other unnamed Denizen(s) struck fear into the poor thing's heart by suggesting she have a priest ready for the inevitable crash'n'burn on the ride down the mountain. Such terror infliction! And she didn't even have a tennis ball! Robyn "I wanna VFR" Landers (V45 Sabre) Hey, I resemble that remark! Thought nothing could possibly go wrong after all the bad luck of brutal traffic jams and pouring rain all the way from Waterloo (that's Waterloo, not Toronto!) to Ottawa. Blamed Saturday's less than squidly performance on wobbly handling induced by squared off rear tire. Sounds lame, I know, but Mike will corroborate the squared off tire. Seems to have difficulty dealing with trucks appearing in oncoming lane while leaned over in gravel-strewn frost-heaved narrow blind shaded rise-cresting shoulderless corners at high speed. Luck seemed to be improving when Norm Young described a great route to take home, but, after spending considerable time near or at DoD nominal speed while swooping through smooth clean sweepers and twisties in the early part of the trip, wound up frustrated just before entering the best section of road when the Sabre's transmission decided it liked third gear so much it wanted to stay there permanently. Limped 200 miles home in 3rd gear at 90 km/h and 7500 rpm. Instead of taking off work to fix the bike, is now taking off work to write up this report for your general amusement. There you have it folks, the cast of characters for the DoD Assault on Ottawa. I'll leave it to others to write up the events. It was a fun event, and if you weren't there, you should have been. Thanks again to the perpetrators oops I mean organizers for their planning and hospitality. SPECIAL NOTE OF HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE One day destined to go down in history was the day the Denizens conquered Canada. We proceeded in a denizenly fashion to Parliament Hill, where we lined up all the bikes in a row on the promenade and announced to the world that we hereby declare that we have taken over Canada. Nobody noticed, so we gave it back. ----- Robyn Landers | "Any profit should go to Arnie's `get the rblanders@math.uwaterloo.ca | daemon carved on Mount Rushmore' fund." Denizen 0051, KotV4 | - Marty Albini, DOD0550 VF750S Sabre (his) FZX750 Fazer (hers)