A photo-captioning contest…

I can't make this stuff up, folks!

I spotted this on a couple of other motorcycle sites (www.motorcycleinsight.com, they picked it up from www.visordown.com, and they picked it up from E-Bay).   Yep, it turns out this old Vespa was actually offered for sale on E-Bay.

In looking at the above photo for the last several minutes, it seems like there’s a joke in there somewhere, but the thing is real.  I looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out these bikes were manufactured in France by a licensed Vespa manufacturer from 1956 to 1959.  The gun is a US-made M20 recoilless rifle. 

Ah, the recoilless rifle…that brings back memories.  They’re called “recoilless” because when the thing fires, a significant portion of the propellant gases escape out the back of the weapon, and the forward thrust of the rearward-escaping gases exactly counteracts the weapon’s recoil.  

I fired a modern 105mm recoilless rifle when I was in the US Army, and folks, it was the loudest thing I ever heard in my life.  Terrifyingly loud, actually.  And those rearward-escaping gases, well, they’re  deadly…a recoilless rifle will do you in if you’re directly behind it as surely as it will if you’re in front of it.   These are scary weapons, to be sure.  But on a scooter?  Wow.  I had never heard of this before.

Hey, we’ll have a contest for the best caption for the above photo…and the winner gets a free California Scooter T-shirt!   Just shoot your proposed captions in as comments to the blog, or email them to me at jberk@californiascooterco.com!