Knogging a Dead Horse: Product Test Follow-Up

Further to yesterday's post, you may remember that I mentioned I had experienced a one-in-three failure rate with the Knog Frog lights I received. Well, I've since learned from Knog that there was a faulty batch way back in January 2008, and this batch was recalled and rectified. However, there were still some bad Knogs in their sample stock, which found their way to me.

I'd hate to be responsible for promulgating a misapprehension that Knogs are unreliable, especially after the people at Knog so generously helped me customize my "whip" for free. After all, fairness is more important to me than maintaining both my irascibility and my risibility, and a company should not be judged by the samples they keep laying around for freeloading Knog-grubbers such as myself.

Rest assured I have no intention of becoming a serial product-tester or some kind of Zinnian or Huangian product reviewer. However, given the circumstances I did think it was fair to give Knog a chance to redeem themselves. I also want to maintain the good will that exists between me and the companies whose dorky products I ridicule. So I devised a quick test. Here is a pink Knog Frog, which does indeed look very much like something that has been excised from someone's skin and is awaiting biopsy:

First, I held the Knog under a stream of running water in order to simulate the conditions it would encounter on the fenderless seatpost of a fixter's bike. (Fixters hate fenders.):

It held up admirably.

Next, I compared it to a competing light modeled after an animal: the Serfas Guppy Light. (I just happened to have one lying around. Yes, I've already admitted to owning both plastic toe clips and a Serfas Guppy Light, and it's only Tuesday!) While the Knog grips to just about any surface like the malignant growth that it is, the Guppy clings tenaciously to it by means of a flimsy elastic cord. Here's the Knog in a bowl of water, and the Guppy awaiting submersion. Surely the Guppy is fishlike in shape and name only, and surely it will be extinguished when I send it to join the Knog down in Davey Jones's Locker at the bottom of my cereal bowl:

Well, not exactly. It survived the submersion test:

Incidentally, it was also buoyant--kind of like a Cheerio. I had to hold it under the water to properly administer the test.

At this point I realized I had a good old-fashioned product shootout on my hands, so I selected a third contender. I decided to go "old school" for this one, since now that p-fars are hot again people are surely in the market for more "period-correct" forms of illumination. I chose a candle:

Here is the candle mounted on my Empire State Courier. (The Empire State Courier has apparently found a niche in my stable as a product testing bike. I also used it last night to go to the store to buy juice, so I suppose it's also now my "juice bike." This is a nice complement to my Ironic Orange Julius Bike.) Like the Knog, the candle can be mounted just about anywhere, which already gives it an advantage over the Guppy. But would it survive the water test?

Of course not:

So I'm hereby awarding first place in the bike light shootout to the Knog Frog, with the Serfas Guppy and the candle tied for second. (The Guppy may be water- and windproof, but the candle scores major retro points.) You can rest assured that if you buy a Knog Frog you are not only buying a waterproof light that's better than a candle, but you're also going to look like a raging hipster.

In other product news, it appears that the riser bar grip of choice for the fixter set, the Oury, has been demoted from grip to spacer:


This is a sad day indeed for the Oury people. As everbody knows, the further towards the middle of the handlebar a grip migrates the more irrelevant it becomes. This almost certainly presages an irreversible slide towards the dreaded "Stem of Obscurity." After that, the only hope is that the grip will one day become retro and re-emerge on the business end of the bar. (Unless this particular owner is simply deciding how narrow he wants to cut his bars. In that case it's possible the Ourys will prevail after all.)

Incidentally, I noticed in yesterday's comments that some readers are confused by the initials "RTMS," by which I occasionally refer to myself. These of course refer to the days when I was apparently "jumping the shark" (which happened sometime between my second-ever post and today's, depending on who you ask) and decided to change my name to an unpronounceable symbol. That unpronounceable symbol was actor Rip Torn's Mug Shot:

Well, I mention this not only because someone asked, but also because I just learned from a reader that Rip Torn has just pleaded "not guilty" to the very crime for which his mug was shot, which was drunk driving.

As a big fan of Rip Torn, I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt--not with regard to the drunk driving (something tells me Torn can put it away), but with regard to the claim that he was driving a 1994 Subaru with a Christmas tree tied to the top. Surely an actor of Torn's stature and vintage would either engage a fancy automobile and a chauffeur, or else dispatch some sort of assistant or domestic to fetch his yulephernalia for him.

Naturally none of this is to diminish the seriousness of drunk driving, which is a deplorable practice. Furthermore, if Torn is in fact guilty I'm dismayed that he's sullied his image which I'm using without any sort of permission or restitution in order to promote myself. (I suppose I'm tearing a page out of the Performance catalog in that respect.) After all, his poor behavior reflects poorly on me as well.

Speaking of awful drivers, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commissioner wants to mount cameras on cabs to detect reckless driving. As a cyclist who's molested (not sexually) by cabs almost daily I'm all in favor of this. Sure, it may be unnecessary in that everybody already knows taxi drivers are reckless (it's sort of like conducting an investigation to determine whether ice is slippery and cold), but we might as well get it on film anyway. Of course, the drivers themselves are against this, and the head of the Taxi Worker's Alliance says that, "I thought in America the law was you're innocent until proven guilty." Well, this may be true, but we are talking about taxi drivers. I once saw a taxi in a Starbucks on 8th Avenue in Manhattan. Not a taxi driver buying a coffee in Starbucks, but an actual taxi that had been driven into the storefront. Something tells me that it wasn't the Starbucks's fault. And if somehow it was and the Starbucks was jaywalking or something, I'm sure the driver would be very pleased to have a video record of what would otherwise be a very implausible story.

Yes, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which professional cyclists on whom nobody's lives depend are tested weekly for drug use, yet taxi drivers who are capable of killing people both inside and outside of their cabs in an instant decry having video cameras mounted on their cars. So again, I'll go on record as saying I'm in favor of it--at least until a taxi-mounted camera catches me doing something illegal on my bike and I get in trouble for it, at which point I will decide it's unconstitutional and an invasion of my privacy.