I’ve now reviewed the protection from Sea Otter from a wide range 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 outdoors identify” to provide you with “Bilco door:”
I suppose Bilco is the Dumpster of…outdoors 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sufficient to remind me of this, and it’s a part of a protracted and boring custom of portray new gravel bikes like outdated bikes:
Although as a retrogrouch I’m deeply offended when bikes with disc brakes and suspension and carbon are painted like basic bikes. It’s cultural appropriation!
Transferring on, even the New York Instances has seen that Bentonville has grow to be Bike City USA:
I’m sufficiently old to recollect when that distinction belonged to Portland:
However now when individuals consider Portland they largely consider riots and vagrants, and so Bentonville has taken over kind of fully:
There’s a lesson there someplace, and it seems to be that, at the very least with regards to 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 direction of turning into a bona-fide bike city below the administration of gazillionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg:
Not that Bloomberg favored using bikes, however he did like the thought of bikes, or at the very least the thought of different individuals using bikes who weren’t him–although possibly if he had truly favored using bikes possibly it will be enjoyable like it’s in Bentonville, whereas right here it largely looks like individuals who don’t truly journey are consistently experimenting with bizarre bike lane configurations, like an house dweller with a vast price range who’s consistently ordering stuff from Wayfair:
There are most likely hundreds of acres of overgrown trash-strewn parkland in New York Metropolis that would simply be reworked 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 remodel town into his personal private playground.
However hey, we’re getting new bike lane site visitors indicators:
These can be at eye degree so individuals will not should lookup with a purpose to ignore them.
I can’t think about how lengthy that photographer will need to have stood there with a purpose to get a shot of somebody stopping for a kind of lights.
Talking of being vigilant, hold a watch out for “Whiteboy,’ who stole a bunch of porn after which rode away on a bicycle:
Ah, the irony of utilizing a getaway car to your smut heist that doesn’t require any type of registration, solely to be recognized by the self-importance plate tattooed in your head…
