In what might go down as probably the most devastating blow to aggrieved city bicycling content material since Gersh Kuntzman left Twitter, British broadcaster and aggrieved city bicyclist Jeremy Vine will not be producing his aggrieved bicycling movies:
The rationale? Individuals need him to die:
Jeremy Vine is totally proper that getting “crushed below a truck” is actually a “very actual hazard” to cyclists, which he so successfully illustrated when he deliberately positioned himself in precisely the correct place to get crushed below a truck:
I give Jeremy Vine two weeks earlier than he misses the eye and begins importing movies once more, identical to Gersh Kuntzman introduced to Twitter that he’s “actually not right here very a lot anymore…”
…but nonetheless appears to tweet one thing a minimum of as soon as a day:
This isn’t to indicate that as cyclists we don’t have purpose to be aggrieved or that our lives aren’t topic to the whims of drivers whose heedlessness is exceeded solely by their obliviousness; it’s simply that the extra you hunt down the poor conduct of others the extra probably you’re to search out it, and I definitely know that the extra deeply I immersed myself on the planet of advocacy the extra irritable I turned. And whereas Jeremy Vine’s movies might provoke the fleeting ire of people that hate bicyclists (most of them most likely simply hate bicyclists for the 30 seconds it takes to answer angrily to certainly one of his posts, then they return to not excited about bikes in any respect), I believe what they actually do is provoke a extra lasting and pernicious ire in bicyclists, in that once you trip round with the Vine Mentality you too develop into offended and defensive and trip round in a heightened state of aggrievement akin to psychoactive substance-induced paranoia which does nothing however gas a Vicious Cycle of Aggrievement.
Clearly this doesn’t imply you need to fully ignore all of the stupidity and the recklessness, for the easy purpose that when you do that you just die. Nonetheless, it does imply that the one means you possibly can maintain your love of bicycling in the long run is when you discover ways to deprioritize the stupidity and the recklessness considerably except it threatens you straight. Using round with a digital camera in your head for the categorical goal of documenting all of it is the precise reverse of that, and maybe that is the conclusion Vine has lastly reached.
Anyway, it’s a lot simpler and extra amusing to be aggrieved over issues that make no distinction in anyway, like watching each single discarded technological “innovation” of the final 40 years come again from the lifeless in gravel type:
This time, it’s elastomers:
Although it’s comforting to know I can nonetheless get elastomers for the suspension fork on the Y-Foil:
George was so forward of his time…
Lastly, talking of aggrieved folks, I’ve watched Path Much less Pedaled man’s replace on the Growtac shifters and whereas earlier than I used to be merely skeptical I’m now starting to imagine they could be the most needlessly difficult shifting system ever invented:
They appear to have engineered all of the simplicity and sturdiness fully out of friction shifting, nice job.
