gregh  2007-02-10 22:01  gleno  Law_School  vegas   

I'm sitting here in my hotel room at a large hotel on the Strip in Vegas. Whenever I take a moment to consider it, the oddities of Las Vegas gambling institutions make me chuckle. But here I am, taking part in it. My good-sized room has nice furnishings, a limited view of the Strip from the twenty-first floor, and high-speed Internet. Price? Nothing. All comped.

Conveniently, I've done my part to make the system work. I've already lost a sufficient amount to pay for the room. However, I think I've earned enough credits to pay for my buffet dinner and the high-speed Internet.

The memorial service is tomorrow afternoon in Boulder City. They're expecting 200 motorcyclists to show up, plus a smattering of those of us in cars. Gleno has touched many, many people.

In the meantime, today I was supposed to keep my nose to the grindstone. I need to finish my Legal Ethics reading, most of which I did on the plane. After that, I'd like to get my Cyberspace Law reading done. I had hoped to spend today on Westlaw, however. I'm doing my upper-division writing requirement this summersemester [wishful thinking --ed], and after our first meeting with my professor, we changed topics. She handed me an article of hers related to the new topic we decided on, and I've got a bunch of reading about a bunch of law I haven't really looked into at all. That's not bad. It's just work that had to be done.

But it's not work that got done today. It turned out to be harder to get stuff done here than I expected.

gregh  2007-02-08 21:10  gleno  Motorcycling   

Collision with minivan kills motorcyclist:

A 45-year-old Boulder City man was killed just after 9 p.m. Tuesday when the motorcycle he was driving collided with a minivan on American Pacific Drive, just west of Gibson Road, Henderson police said.

The man was identified as Glen Earl McIntosh by the Clark County coroner's office.

As long as it's motorcyclists being killed when their rights of way are violated, it's apparently okay as far as the law is concerned. The story's the same, time and time again. This time, it was a friend of mine. And it makes me mad.

Glen McIntosh, "Gleno" to those of us on BMWSportTouring.com, will be missed. His gruff exterior tended to hide his heart of gold, in large part because he did so many of his good deeds behind the scenes. An auto mechanic by trade, it was always my impression he loved letting people underestimate him. He was sharp as a tack, and challenging him in a game of wisecracking or playful insults was a task that could only lead to failure.

"Hey, Haverkamp! When are you gonna get a haircut?"

Those are the words of Gleno's that are stuck in my head. I'd just arrived in Torrey, Utah, and this was my first greeting. Sure, my hair was fast approaching my shoulders and I hadn't shaved in months. Gleno's voice was the welcoming voice. A booming, dominating voice, that could just as easily carry humor or disgust or words of great concern.

When I had mechanical problems at Death Valley in January 2006, many people rallied to help, but Gleno was one of the first. He offered to ride home, grab his truck and trailer, return to Vegas to drop my bike at a dealer, and then come back. That would have put an end to his weekend gathering, but he was ready to help. And he meant it.

Lots of people are going to miss Glen McIntosh. I'm one of them.

Various shots of Gleno in his elements.