The Future is Meh, the Apocalypse is Nigh: Tempting Fate

We are living in trying times. The economic crisis is forcing people to part with their Cervelos; our athletic heroes are letting us down; and, perhaps worst of all, cats are eating processed cheese slices. Really, it's enough to make you feel crappy and distressed. And fortunately, thanks to the dual miracles of Craigslist and the can-do entrepreneurial spirit that made America great (and then ran it into the ground), you can now get a crappy and distressed saddle to match your wilting spirit:

SADDLE (crappy & distressed) FREE installation - $9 (West Village)
Reply to: see below
Date: 2009-02-02, 11:25AM EST

If you've had an expensive $ 30, $ 40, $ 50 +++ saddle pilfered
and need a cheap & not so alluring replacement, I have a couple
of crappy saddles salvaged from old wrecks.

An unattractive saddle is better than no saddle at all --- or keep
it as a back-up --- hey ya never know !!!

For those too traumatized about their bad experience or paranoid
about losing another one, I'll take the trouble to chain it to the
frame --- for an extra $ 5. But the basic installation is FREE.
Most bike shops can chain it down for you --- usually the same
charge, 5 bucks.

BASIC SADDLE PRICE: $ 9 FIRM with free install

West Village location
Call JOE (212) 242-[deleted] 10 AM -- midnite
Kindly leave message if not home. Thanks.

"An unattractive saddle is better than no saddle at all." While there may be some riders with strange proclivities who feel otherwise, I think most of us will agree that truer words were never spoken. Consequently, it's comforting to know there's an individual who will not only soothe those "traumatized about their bad experience" (and really, what's more traumatizing than riding without a saddle?), but who is also available from 10:00am to midnight (!) to help ease your pain. In a time of great uncertainty, we can at least rest assured that there's a man named Joe in the West Village who is sitting by his phone every single day for fourteen hours straight just waiting for a call from some hapless saddle theft victim (or seatpost penetration victim).

Still, times are so bad that some people are seeking to soothe the pain of today with the balm of nostalgia. This cyclist, for example, is finding inspiration in the optimism of yesteryear:



"This is my first fixed gear bike, custom built by Vanguard Designs here in town. I told them I wanted a bike that was futuristic, but as if someone had designed it in 1983 thinking about the future."

Yes, while some people have more pedestrian requirements when they're purchasing a bicycle, such as "I need something I can ride to school," or, "I like red," this person's first priority was that his bicycle be ironically retro-futurist. Unfortunately for him, Vanguard Designs failed to pull it off. Rarely has a bicycle missed its mark as spectacularly as this.

First of all, nobody in 1983 could have imagined that the people of the future would ride bicycle saddles with taintal cutouts. Second of all, in order to think like a person would have in 1983, we have to understand 1983. This was a much simpler time, when many of the modern conveniences we take for granted today didn't even exist. The internet, grunge, synthetic underwear, hydrofoils, monotheism--none of these had been invented by 1983. And if you're wondering what cycling looked like in 1983, it looked like this:



I found this photograph using a popular search engine (the search engine was invented in 1992, shortly after the internal combustion engine), and as you can see it's actually sepia-toned, since color photography didn't exist yet either and people had to sepia-tone things to amuse themselves. However, Tony Randall did exist, and I'm reasonably certain that he's the person in the photo just ahead of Sideshow Bob:

But while 1983 was a prosaic, bland, sepia-toned time, the people of 1983 did have very vivid imaginations. As such, it's highly unlikely that someone in 1983 dreaming of a bike of the future would come up with something as dull as the Fixedgeargallery bike. I mean, moustache bars and time trial brake levers? They would have done much better than that. The movie "ET" had just been released the year before (Tony Randall's "Odd Couple" co-star Jack Klugman played the role of the alien to critical acclaim), and by 1983 it was widely considered a given that aliens would be living among us in the near future. So naturally, any future bike designed in 1983 would have included an alien basket:



Didn't Vanguard Designs do any research? Even Sideshow Bob's bike has an alien basket!

Moreover, while the people of 1983 didn't have grunge, or monotheism, or neckties, or hot and cold running water, or long division, they did have crabon fiber. After all, crabon fiber is a naturally-occuring substance, and by the 80s people were pulling tons of the stuff from the great crabon fiber mines of Dover, New Hampshire. Granted, it wasn't used widely like it is today, as you can see from this Race Face crabon fiber crank:



But certainly any futuristic space-aged concept bicycle would have somehow incorporated it. Forget lugged steel--a 1983 future bike would probably have looked more like this:



Furthermore, in 1983 the upright bicycle was widely regarded as being on the verge of obsolescence. Experts in the industry even went so far as to compare them to p-fars. Also, the barbers who diagnosed medical problems and performed bloodlettings believed that upright bicycles caused dropsy. So back then, the so-called "smart money" was on the recumbent, and if Vanguard Designs had really done their homework the Fixedgeargallery poster would be riding this:



Now that's a hell of a lot more ironically retro-futurist than a pair of blue hubs.

But there's one thing the simple folk of 1983 would never have imagined, and that is that one day derailleurs would fall out of favor and fixed-gears and singlespeeds would rule the Earth. Nonetheless, this has come to pass, and we now find ourselves trackstanding on the brink of the Fixed Gear Apocalypse. And horribly, a reader has informed me that in Swindon, England, there dwells a "Singlespeed Antichrist":

The foolhardiness with which this Alex Morton taunts the Alpaca is deplorable, and he's clearly cruising for a smiting. 96 speeds is four times as infuriating as a triple crank with an 8-speed cassette, and 4.363636363636363 times as infuriating as a double crank paired with a Campagnolo 11-speed cassette. (Even if he can rub the coveted 11-58 straight block.) Sure, he may be able to ride at speeds in excess of 53 miles per hour (though I'm guessing those are English miles per hour, which means he's only going like 20 American miles per hour), but it's still inexcusable. Even more horrifying, he doesn't even hold the gear record:

Immediately after reading about this, I realized I had to research Swindon, since it is evidently going to be the scene of the Fixed-Gear Armageddon. So I shut down my computer, headed to the library, went straight to a computer, and visited Wikipedia. There I learned that not only does "Swindon" mean "Pig Hill," but also that it is famous for its roundabouts and is also the home of the New Wave band XTC.

That last fact shook me to my core, for a closer inspection revealed that Alex Morton's 96-speed mostrosity is actually a Giant XTC:

And, as any astute theologian knows, arguably XTC's most popular song was the agnostic anthem "Dear God":

Clearly, evil forces are at work in Swindon, and it would seem that they have been working to cause anger on high and speed the End of Days since at least 1986.

I only hope someone--or some thing--can save us.