I’ve now reviewed the protection from Sea Otter from quite a lot of media retailers and have come to the conclusion that gravel bikes are mind-numbingly boring:
This one’s purple! This one’s titanium! This one has a freaking Bilco door within the downtube!
And sure, I needed to conduct an Web seek for “basement door exterior identify” to provide you with “Bilco door:”
I suppose Bilco is the Dumpster of…exterior basement door thingies, I nonetheless don’t know what the generic identify is.
However wait, this simply in, right here’s one painted like a Bridgestone,!
A reader was variety sufficient to remind me of this, and it’s a part of a protracted and boring custom of portray new gravel bikes like previous bikes:
Although as a retrogrouch I’m deeply offended when bikes with disc brakes and suspension and carbon are painted like traditional bikes. It’s cultural appropriation!
Transferring on, even the New York Instances has seen that Bentonville has change into Bike City USA:
I’m sufficiently old to recollect when that distinction belonged to Portland:
However now when individuals consider Portland they principally consider riots and vagrants, and so Bentonville has taken over roughly fully:
There’s a lesson there someplace, and it seems to be that, a minimum of on the subject of biking, progressive governance simply can’t compete with a household that has gazillions of {dollars} and actually likes bikes. The identical was briefly true of New York Metropolis, which made its largest strides in the direction of turning into a bona-fide bike city below the administration of gazillionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg:
Not that Bloomberg appreciated using bikes, however he did like the thought of bikes, or a minimum of the thought of different individuals using bikes who weren’t him–although perhaps if he had really appreciated using bikes perhaps it might be enjoyable like it’s in Bentonville, whereas right here it principally appears like individuals who don’t really experience are continually experimenting with bizarre bike lane configurations, like an condominium dweller with an infinite finances who’s continually ordering stuff from Wayfair:
There are in all probability 1000’s of acres of overgrown trash-strewn parkland in New York Metropolis that might simply be remodeled into bike trails and dozens of locations to construct new velodromes for Star Monitor, if solely we had an ultra-rich autocratic mayor who was additionally a bicycle owner and decided to rework the town into his personal private playground.
However hey, we’re getting new bike lane visitors indicators:
These will probably be at eye stage so individuals will not need to lookup to be able to ignore them.
I can’t think about how lengthy that photographer will need to have stood there to be able to get a shot of somebody stopping for a type of lights.
Talking of being vigilant, hold an eye fixed out for “Whiteboy,’ who stole a bunch of porn after which rode away on a bicycle:
Ah, the irony of utilizing a getaway car on your smut heist that doesn’t require any type of registration, solely to be recognized by the self-importance plate tattooed in your head…
