Moxie: Who Needs It?

On Tuesday I ran a number of cycling-related websites through the Genderanalyzer, which yielded some interesting if not entirely accurate results. Of the sites analyzed, the most masculine by a huge margin was Lance Armstrong's Twitter, at 93%. Well, I recently discovered that another cycling-related site is sitting right on Armstrong's wheel in the masculinity department, coming in at a resounding 89%:

I'm not sure what kind of e-pheromones Son of Zone Baby is exuding to elicit such a positive result (besides the fact it has "Son" in the title of course), but if you're looking to read something that will put some hair on your chest, go check it out.

Meanwhile, the blog you're currently reading is holding fast at 52% female, which while not entirely accurate is at least consistent. I for one value consistency over accuracy, which it so happens is the same rationale used by many devotees of friction-shifting. Besides, regardless of whether you're running/rocking male or female reproductive organs, when it comes to being successful the real determining factor is moxie. And like this blog, moxie is gender-neutral. Take this messenger-versus-model race, forwarded to me by a reader:


There's a long tradition of pointless, apples-and-oranges, mismatched exhibition races in our culture. Jesse Owens raced against a horse, Mario Cipollini raced against a horse (though rumors he subsequently bedded it are unsubstantiated), the TV show "Top Gear" pitted a Ford Mustang against a horse, and even I raced against a Smart (but only because no horses were available, probably because the ASPCA got wind of the Mario Cipollini incident). However, I was immediately skeptical about this particular mismatched exhibition race when I heard the messenger, Al Busano, claim that he delivers over a thousand packages a week.

This is a bold claim to say the least. Even if Busano works ten hours a day, seven days a week, he'd need to deliver over 140 packages a day in order to meet that number. That's 14 packages an hour, or roughly one package every four minutes. Either: 1) Busano is omnipresent; 2) Busano delivers mostly interoffice correspondence; or 3) Busano is inflating his number. In any case, even if he is rounding up by a factor of ten, he should have no trouble beating a fashion model on a skateboard, right?

...even if her "secret weapon" is apparently the ability to employ her legs in conjunction with her labia while riding a skateboard, and even if she's wearing the notoriously arresting Sue Ellen Mishky blazer-with-a-bra-for-a-top combo that made Kramer crash his car into a pole in that "Seinfeld" episode:
Well, if you were pulling for the mendacious messenger to defeat the skateboarding model rocking a prehensile vagina, I'm sorry to say you were disappointed. Personally, I suspect the contest was rigged, and that the people at Style.com somehow stacked the odds in favor of the model. If they'd really wanted a close race, they'd have made her race against Mario Cipollini, though had they done that there's a good chance the competitors never would have gotten on their respective forms of wheeled conveyance and the video would have taken a decidedly pornographic turn. Or else, they could have used one of the female messengers from this recent New York Times article. My personal choice would have been German emigree Carmen Burkhart, described in the article as "a slight, tight-bodied 43-year-old who smokes and drinks only hot coffee for hydration, even in the summer:"

(Carmen Burkhart: weltschmerz in motion)

In a match-up like that, the smart money would clearly be on the wiry dehydrated nicotine-and-caffeine-addled Teuton over the ditz on the skateboard. Not only that, but the video would have been way more entertaining to watch.

But competing in phony races isn't the only thing that takes moxie. It also takes moxie to maintain your bicycle's drivetrain. And since moxie seems to be a non-renewable resource in our culture, the Great Trek Bicycle Making Company is finally bringing to the mass market a drivetrain that requires no moxie whatsoever in order to maintain:

The carbon fiber belt drive bicycle drivetrain is nothing new--we've already seen it from Spot--but Trek is wisely marketing it to the commuter rather than the racer (though Travis Brown has been running and/or rocking one too). While I've been critical of Trek in the past, I have to say that I'm not only in favor of the belt drive commuter bicycle, but moreover I feel as though Trek is doing me a personal favor with it. I've voiced my irritation over the fact that so many commuters are unable to lubricate their drivetrains before, so a bicycle that will run quietly without lubrication is nothing less than a godsend to me. I can only hope that the lubricant-impaired take to this system en masse and I never get stuck behind another squeaky, rusty, non-shifting drivetrain ever again. After all, Trek's fellow Wisconsinites Harley Davidson have already successfully shown the world that when convenience and low maintenance are more important than performance a belt drive is the way to go. (They've also convinced an entire generation of dentists and lawyers to ride around on overpriced flatulent motorcycles while wearing leather chaps, but that's something else.) And the rest of us don't even have to give up our chains--apart from the metaphorical chains that bind us to our irritating noisy-biked cousins, that is.

Not only that, but while killing off the noisy chain the Great Trek Bicycle Making Company may have unwittingly dealt the coup de grâce to the already-withering colored deep-V trend as well, since the new belt-drive District comes with high-profile rims of orange:

No way colored deep-Vs can survive this with their street cred intact. I never thought I'd say this, but thank you, Trek. Thank you.