Rich Mintz  

I hit a thousand miles on the Royal Enfield on Saturday evening, after a long ride out to Jones Beach and back that I’ll write about separately.

More importantly, I demonstrated this weekend that I’m capable of achieving decent gas mileage if I take the bike out on the highway. A tank that was about 3/4 highway miles returned over 63MPG, which is good enough that I’m no longer particularly concerned about my abysmal mileage in the city. That’s a lot of oscillation (from the high 30s to the low 60s), but I guess I have to expect it, given the way I ride in the city.

I put up a couple more helmet-cam videos — a quick ride across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then a crosstown ride through Queens and Brooklyn, from Ridgewood to Bushwick.

If you’re looking for the free JFK motorcycle parking, it’s at the Lefferts Boulevard AirTrain station. Here’s a map showing how to get there from the southbound Van Wyck:

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And here’s a helmet-cam video showing the way:

Free motorcycle parking is provided courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Tell the Port Authority you appreciate it, and tell your friends to use it.

Because the Battery Tunnel video was so popular, here’s a ride through the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

I shot this on a rainy day, and there are droplets on the lens, which create a kind of triply effect, so I don’t mind…

Another helmet-cam video — the ride from Red Hook to Lower Manhattan, via the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Shot with a Drift HD camera.

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Another helmet-cam video, of a ride from north Park Slope to Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shot with a Drift HD camera.

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Helmet-cam video, over the Brooklyn Bridge to Park Slope, Brooklyn, shot on the Drift HD, with a slightly different camera angle than the last one.

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I tweeted about this video earlier this week, but I just watched it again and it was so arresting I had to embed it here.

Gotta go now, I have to go play SimCity…

Just checked out the streaming Amazon Instant Video offerings that are now available to me free as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. There’s some watchable content there, and I was all ready to watch some vintage Doctor Who — but alas, the damn thing runs on Flash, so it’s not iPad-compatible. Advantage: Netflix. (Not to mention that the Netflix content reserve is quite a bit deeper than Amazon’s Prime-eligible content.)

I will say that Amazon’s search-and-browse interface is more lightweight than Netflix’s, which I’ve never particularly liked. But I won’t be canceling my Netflix membership quite yet.

Now it can be told: I’m afraid of deer. Not “run away and hide” afraid — but they make me nervous, and I’d rather not be alone in a field with any. I’ve been mocked for this even by children, but I defend it; deer have hard hooves and they can trip you by accident, and then step on your head in their rush to get away; and then where would you be?

Don’t tell me that I could snap the leg of a deer with a shove of my shoulder, or that deer are just as afraid of me as etc. etc.; those might both be true, but my fear is not of the typical case, but of that extraordinary episode when a deer’s desperate panic combines with my being in just the very place where the laws of physics put a hoof in my ear.

The reason all this can be told is that the Boon Companion found the video below, which vindicates all my fears and more, evidencing as it does not just panic but actual malice on the part of our cervid friends.

Man’s Wife Snatched by a Deer

(Image at top courtesy of Brendan Gaffney, who like most people thinks my fear of deer is ridiculous, and sent it to me in an attempt to torment me, which failed. I’m not afraid of pictures of deer — what kind of namby-pamby do you think I am?!)

If you’ve ever been stopped behind a garbage truck in the Holland Tunnel and wished you could climb up the side and drive out along the ceiling, watch this video.

Fun fact: according to the YouTube comments for this video (which apparently, for some odd reason, don’t only contain adolescent potty humor and sex jokes, as they usually do), this is filmed in the “China Bar Tunnel on Hwy 1 just North of Spuzzum,” British Columbia (which sounds like it was made up by John Cleese, but I digress). That would put it here:

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And now, on to the video: