This Is Only A Test: Tentative Lanes, Compliant Crabon ~ Dunia Sepeda

On Friday, I incorporated a video I had found on the "YouTube" (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gungle Internet Concern, Ltd.) into a quiz I had painstakingly "curated"--artisanally, I might add, and with my helper monkey Vito's own two paws. However, shortly after posting this quiz, the people who had uploaded the video retracted it, which meant that if you chose the wrong answer on this quiz you saw this:

This was puzzling to me, for it seemed the height of folly to put on a human bicycle-themed puppet show in which one person pretends to ride another person who's holding handlebars and pretending to be a bike, videotape this puppet show, and then upload the video to the "YouTube" (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gargle Internet Enterprises, Ltd., the company who in a few years will also probably be administering the SATs) for public consumption--only to redact it like a politician redacts a racist statement as soon as people actually start watching it.

The unfortunate fact is that These Kids Today don't have the courage of their convictions, like my peers and I did "back in the day." See, back then, if you made a decision then you stuck with it. If you worked for a company, you stayed loyal to it and quietly drank yourself to death while the management squandered your pension. If you got married and disliked your spouse, you didn't run to the nearest lawyer and get a divorce--you stayed married anyway, living the rest of your lives in mutual misery. If you got stabbed, you didn't go crying to some "doctor" and start simpering about how "hurty" it was--you left it in there and you slowly bled to death. You didn't just plug a different URL into the Internet Browser of Life and point your self-delusion to a more attractive "reality."

Unfortunately, this seems to be what's happening here in New York City, for after investing much time, energy, and lime green paint in a bicycle infrastructure, the city seems poised to rip the whole thing out like so much bad wiring at the first opportunity:

“When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing?” Mr. Weiner said to Mr. Bloomberg, as tablemates listened. “I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes.”

That's a shame. Actually, I'd like to have a ribbon-cutting just before I unleash my over-amorous helper monkey Vito on Weiner and he starts violently humping the aspiring mayor's face. Sure, Weiner isn't necessarily going to get elected, but given the way most people seem to feel about bike lanes and cyclists these days I can't imagine any candidate actually expressing any support for them during a campaign. Sure, once all the bike lanes are gone there are plenty of us who will keep riding anyway. After all, we've already spent years as the rats on the subway tracks, dodging and parrying as much larger machines bear down upon us, so it won't be very difficult for us to revert to our survivalist behavior. No, I just feel bad for the regular people with no particular interest in being lifestyle cyclists or becoming part of the "bike culture" who just want to be able to hop on a bike and get stuff done. At any rate, it should be amusing in a few decades when other cities actually have modern streets and people in New York City are still dodging Lincoln Navigators. Even Los Angeles is adding a bunch of bike lanes, for Lob's sake:

If you live in Los Angeles and you're wondering how this whole bicycle network thing is going to play out, expect to be lulled into a false sense of security for a few years before the inevitable backlash comes around and whaps you in the face like Danny MacAskill's rear wheel:

Speaking of whapping off, apparently in the backward and remedial cycling city that is New York, deep inside their primitive dwellings, Homo sapiens are fashioning crude bicycles with their hands:

Apparently, word must have traveled from Portland, the Alexandria of cycling, about the mystical craft known as "framebuilding," and now New Yorkers are aping them by creating vague approximations of these "frames" in an attempt to harness their magical properties. It's kind of cute when you think about it, like when a baby starts imitating you. Here is one Homo sapien studying her own crude rendering with a mixture of confusion and astonishment:

("Seet post go here.")

It's kind of sad when you consider that, by the time some of these people actually start getting a handle on what they're doing, Anthony Weiner will be holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony in which he essentially tells them to go fuck themselves.

Speaking of primitivism, I was watching "the television" recently and noticed the following commercial for some sort of telephone that you can use outside of your house:

In it, there was a person on a bike, who is apparently "you:"

Yes, if you're a cyclist in America, this is "you"--a stylized nerd with a neutered dog, a neutered race bike, and a plastic bucket on your head:

I hope you're pleased to meet yourself, and that you're not too dismayed to learn that, as a road user, people take you slightly more seriously than they do a child "curating" a lemonade stand. (Though they'll make slightly more of an effort not to run over the child.)

This is not to say that I don't enjoy using my bicycle as a toy from time to time myself--indeed, I enjoy few things more than swaddling myself in Lycra and setting out on a road bike, mountain bike, or other canonically acceptable market segment that is not a recumbent, and I put my Primal "Tribal Fire" jersey on one sleeve at a time just like any other Fred. That's why, during the week preceding the Nominally American Hand-Massaged Pretentious Bicycle Show, "Bicycling" magazine (which is sort of "Vanity Fair" for Freds) invited me to join them in their Editors' Choice testing in Austin, Texas.

I'll hold most of my "insights" in abeyance until the results of the testing are announced, but suffice it to say that the week consisted of riding a bunch of nearly identical and more or less completely interchangeable plastic road bicycles around a city that was not New York in February, and that was fine by me. Also, among the testers was not this winsome couple I met outside of a bike shop, who were riding their bicycles from somewhere in Florida to San Francisky, Californy:

I noticed them at first because the gentleman was a fellow Big Dummy owner, but given that he was riding all the way across the country with not one but two (!) dogs in tow he had me out-smugged by an almost incalculably huge margin:

(Surly Big Dummy, outfitted for trans-continental canine "portaging.")

Meanwhile, here was the crew I was rolling with, and I reckon each one of us was outfitted with something like $5,000 in equipment in order to ride for a couple of hours in the vicinity of Austin:

As I stood between the adventurers and the Freds and straddling a crabon fiber bicycle with a bottom bracket junction the size of a vinyl LP, I briefly considered abandoning the "Bicycling" editorial staff and "lighting out" with the couple (not that they invited me, mind you--in fact I'm pretty sure I annoyed them), and in fact may very well have done it if I wouldn't have had to sleep in that box with the dog.

Speaking of dogs, people in Austin are not only mad for the things, but they also use them to guard their bikes:

These are not the travelin' dogs but are in fact different, meaner dogs. Both of them were howling for my blood at this point, and this was as close as I dared to get.

Anyway, not only did we "test" various nearly identical crabon fribé blobs, but we also held a de facto training camp when we motorpaced behind a tractor:

There was also a paparazzo who took our pictures:

Here's the picture he got of me:

But the glamorous world of glossy magazine crabon bike testing isn't all motorpacing and urinating. There's also actual work, and every so often we'd stop and talk about the crabon:

Basically, it would go something like this: "How was your crabon? Did you like that crabon? Can we trade crabon? Which crabon are you riding next? Can I feel your crabon?"

This tended to alienate "Bicycling's" Old Crappy 10-Speed editor, who had nobody with whom to compare notes:

(Spoiler alert: the old crappy 10-speed won, and will be on the cover of the Editors' Choice issue.)