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 title” to provide you with “Bilco door:”
I assume Bilco is the Dumpster of…outdoors basement door thingies, I nonetheless don’t know what the generic title is.
However wait, this simply in, right here’s one painted like a Bridgestone,!
A reader was form 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!
Shifting on, even the New York Instances has seen that Bentonville has turn out to be 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 utterly:
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 changing 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 at the very least 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 looks like individuals who don’t really trip are always experimenting with bizarre bike lane configurations, like an residence dweller with a limiteless funds who’s always ordering stuff from Wayfair:
There are in all probability 1000’s 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 rework town into his personal private playground.
However hey, we’re getting new bike lane visitors indicators:
These might be at eye stage so individuals will not should lookup with a purpose to ignore them.
I can’t think about how lengthy that photographer should have stood there with a purpose to get a shot of somebody stopping for a kind of lights.
Talking of being vigilant, preserve 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 vainness plate tattooed in your head…
