Brains, bikes and bodies

Motorsport journalist Chris Dabbs spends many of his web hours surfing sites that defend motorists from over-zealous policing. But he still has time to check out developments in cannabis drugs, the US election and the odd sexual carnival

A big-brained web guru once told me that the more precise your interest, the better the web is at delivering the answer.

Well, apart from my sad obsession with P51D Mustangs and the Battle of Britain (I know, I know), the web has helped me out in the real world with a couple of sites dedicated to helping the beleaguered road-user.

If you are unlucky enough to fall foul of a speed camera, www.pepipoo.com is a brilliant resource for information on how to challenge those pesky tickets.

It has a really active forum full of more of those big brains.

You can also pop over to www.speedaholics.com for the guerrilla end of the anti-speed camera movement.

Run by the mysterious Captain Gatso, who gained notoriety for despatching several cameras, the site is a tad more responsible these days with a mission to see more traffic cops on our roads and to stop “the government treating motorists like their favourite whipping boy”.

To get up to speed on any four-wheeler stuff that the mainstream media glosses over, www.petrolheads.com is well worth a look. If you want an irreverent peek at motorworld and all the hype and spin put out by the car industry, then sniffpetrol.com, which is put together by a producer from Top Gear magazine, will bring a smile to your face – if you can live with the barrack-room humour.

For my sins, I do some work on www.motorcyclenews.com. It’s a big site with something for everyone into bikes and especially bikesport and the reporters are really well-connected in the MotoGP and World Superbike paddocks.

At the end of the day, you can’t beat having guys talking face-to-face to turn the gossip that the web is so good at into accurate news.

With a spinal injury to deal with for 15 years, I long ago found that cannabis lessens the pain and spasm, but self-medicating via a criminal network is not for me.

However, I came across www.gwpharm.com, the site for the company that has developed the cannabis-based drug Sativex. After a visit to my sympathetic doctor, my regular prescription now contains Sativex, which has really helped my day-to-day living (although I’ve put a few pounds on with chocolate frenzies).

I’m wary of the blogo­sphere and its thousands of self-absorbed accounts but with all the events over the Pond in election year, http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com delivers a thoughtful and libertarian view from the US that is a healthy antidote to some of our liberal media’s output.

Still with my libertarian hat on (and not much else), I’d like to point you towards www.nightofthesenses.com which promotes a sexual carnival, where open-minded folk come together from around the globe to celebrate sexual diversity and raise money for Outsiders, www.outsiders.org.uk, a self-help group for people with physical and social disabilities. See you there!