Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/707505
P110 CN III FRIENDLY FIRE BY STEVE BAUER I remember when I was a kid and I'd get my new issue of Motocross Action, or Popular Cycling, or Dirt Bike magazine and the first thing I did was go to the race stories, to read about my heroes racing at exotic-sounding tracks, at places like Unadilla and Pep- perell and Namur. Hell, to a kid with no driver's license in southern California, Livermore, to too far north, seemed like it was a world away! After that, I would read any feature articles, or interviews with riders that I liked, then I'd check out the bike tests. I kind of always took whatever they had to say with a grain of salt, though, mainly be- cause the guys riding the bikes in the photos were usually over- weight and riding like goons. In my mind, portly editors wearing rugby shirts, with rear-view mir- rors in their visors lacked cred- ibility. More on that later. After snoozing through the bike tests, I would check out the new product releases to see what cool new stuff I didn't need and couldn't afford. Then I would read the "How to swap through the whoop-de-doos like the pros!" riding tips, (which I was already good at); followed by the "How to clean your air filter like the pros!" tech tips, (boring and BS, since I already knew how to pour gas into a bucket, work the rocks out of the foam, rinse again with clean gas, oil the foam, then pour what's left in the bucket down the sewer manhole in front of my house). Sometimes I would check out the gnarly how-to's, such as "How to lay down your shocks like the pros!" and other stuff that you could never do at home—that is, un- less your home was equipped with a heli-arc welder, drill press and full metal shop. Or named Pro-Fab. Factor in that, even to this day, the closest thing to welding that I've ever done is over-tightening and stripping the threads on a bolt. Also, I assume everyone knows that "reading" an article usually meant reading the captions to the pictures and not much else, which is why I figure only about six people will read this. Ha. Because I was a dirt bike junkie and the internet was still 30 years away, I would then start at the beginning of the magazine and read each page, except for maybe the masthead and the one with all the crap about subscriptions. After the table of contents, there was usually a page where the aforementioned fat editor wrote about whatever inane gobbledygook happened to be going through his head that day. From what I recall (and I'm not going to go dig up my old magazines to double- check) they all had a pet name for their monthly rant, (I know, kind of like "Friendly Fire"…but NOT THAT EASY "As I read those columns by those editors over the years, I remember thinking to myself that these people could write about anything they want to write about, and this is the best they could come up with?"