The leather jacket arrived yesterday, and I immediately gave it a motorcycle tryout. Just a short ride, a couple of miles, but I'm pretty pleased with it.
Its Amazon description advertises: "With a water-resistant exterior and micro-mesh thermal lining, stay cool when it’s hot and cozy when it’s not."
That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not completely false.
The temperature outside was about 90 degrees fahrenheit when I put the jacket on. with the zipper maybe 1/3 of the way down, I remained reasonably cool while in motion on the motorcycle. When not in motion for more than a minute or two, or with the thing zipped up fully, I pretty much roasted. It's at least tolerable while riding in hot weather, and I expect it will do a great job of keeping me warmer in cold weather as well.
The jacket's materials and construction seemed quite good for the price. The stitches look and feel solid. The leather didn't have any obvious blemishes and felt like it was of fairly nice quality. Not that I'm an expert on that kind of thing, but it just feels pretty darn solid as a clothing item.
The elbow, shoulder, and back armor weren't annoying. I could tell they were there, but they didn't interfere with my motion and they weren't uncomfortable. As to their quality, well, I didn't crash the bike to find out about that.
BONUS: Multiple inside pockets, including one with a little picture of a phone on it and a velcro closure. So now I can quit messing around trying to find a phone holder that will fit both the bike and the phone. I think the pocket may even be large enough to fit a little power bank in with the phone. Or I guess I could get a longer USB cable to run in through the jacket. That's only really a big deal on long trips anyway. Unless I need navigation assistance, the phone won't be draining its battery much while I'm riding.
Having the jacket makes me want to get that cap Marlon Brando wears in The Wild One. Not for riding -- I'm all about helmets -- but for a proper answering appearance when people ask me what I'm rebelling against.
The dock workers picked, politically, a great time to go on strike. They could reasonably expect that Joe Biden wouldn't further damage what the Democratic Party has left of the organized labor vote by invoking the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, aka Taft-Hartley, and order them back to work -- and that he'd sense the opportunity to get back some of that organized labor vote by refusing to.
The port operators were going to have to reckon with contract difficulties and either make concessions or see a strike sooner or later. Better to get at least temporarily through that in a way that gave Biden a boost before the election, because they knew Trump's whackjob tariff/trade proposals would tank their business. Not that Biden's been any better than Trump 1.0 was on the subject, but Trump 2.0 sounds a lot worse.
I'm not saying the short strike / quick resolution was a pre-planned conspiracy, but I do suspect both sides had quick communications from Biden's people pointing out that the more quickly the thing was resolved, and with the least amount of overt government intervention, the less likely a terrible November outcome for both sides.
A drawn-out strike would have given the Trumpists a month to thunder about how terrible it is that we rely so much on imports, etc., and the GOP's more actively anti-union wing a pretext to whine about how we need a "strong" president who would just conscript those mean ol' workers and force them back on the job (Trump plays "pro-labor" from a protectionist angle, but the larger party not as much).
To the extent the strike gets continuing media play, I expect Democrats to emphasize that the short-term economic panic was just a little preview -- a tiny taste -- of what four more years of Trump would look like, if he got what he says he wants.
