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| 1975 Yamaha XS650 |
IAman reports:
In the mid 1970’s my dad helped me buy a motorcycle, a 1975 Yamaha 650. A great motorcycle, I spent years exploring USA on that bike.
Dad enjoyed hearing of my adventures, and came out to visit me several times to visit me at my outposts. He hedged his bets with a term life insurance policy on me. I haven't thought about that till recently, till hearing about the Russian wives and parents encouraging their boys to fight in Ukraine, the possible payoff a death benefit in way of cash or “coffin car”. Recently I heard of the ham-ass terrorist’s justifying their murderous assault on Israel with being rewarded a apartment and $10,000, and historically the PA paying terrorist prisoners.
Backing out of the weeds, back onto the motorcycle.
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| Craig Vetter and Windjammer Fairing |
Having that Yamaha, I became aware of a motorcycle fairing designed, built and sold by Craig Vetter, a genius motorcycle designer. Windjammer 3 was a black and gold fairing, just like my bike.
That name Craig Vetter lodged in my brain for the next 48 years, I suppose because it was an unusual name somehow associated with my beloved bike?What I couldn't figure out was the connection between this guy's motorcycle design genius and what I thought was his exploring the human genome. ???
See, I kept hearing about a Craig Ve?ter in California making inroads in the research of the human genome, so much so that he was being rewarded billions of $ for his contributions to human medicine science.
This week I wikipedia’d Craig Vetter and found he has been kept busy with motorcycles, not having anything to do with the genome.
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| Craig Venter, famous geneticist with some of his favorite motorcycles and sports cars. (John Gastaldi) |
That would be Craig VeNter. Another and completely different person. One of the most influential people in the contemporary world. Who knew? I didn’t. I thought he made motorcycle fairings. Nope, Venter’s forte is genome science.
Other interesting Venter factoids are:
Wikipedia pages:
Other interesting Venter factoids are:
- C student
- Drafted into Vietnam conflict, his CO status routed him to be a Navy corpsman triage-ing mortally wounded Marine boys.
- This depressed him to the point of attempting suicide by swimming miles into the China sea.
- Returning from Nam, he attended community college and followed his developing interest in biochemistry, 1969.
Wikipedia pages:
Being drafted saved him, as a C high school student the guidance consular would be telling his parents unless he had a rare connection for an apprenticeship to push him into a garbage collector, truck driver, or janitor job.
ReplyDeleteThat way they could get back to guiding and counseling the honor roll students into prestigious colleges in order to bring honor and glory to the high school (read job security).