Grand Designs: Hangin' it Out There

As most of you surely know, today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. For many Americans, this means a day off from work or school, and consequently time spent away from the computer monitor. However, for people who reside outside of the United States, or for people who reside in the United States and are employed by racists, it is unfortunately a Monday like any other. This means that you may have commuted to work today, and you may even have used a bicycle to do so.

One of the best things about bicycle commuting is that it can mitigate the displeasure of having to go to work. It's the rare and fortunate person who looks forward to his or her workday, so if you're not one of them you can at least sandwich the misery between two slices of pleasure by riding your bike there. Actually enjoying your commute can infuse an otherwise dreary day with some joy. Riding buses and trains isn't especially enjoyable, which is why we cling to devices like iPods, which serve as little bits of driftwood in a sea of misery. On a bicycle, though, the act of traveling in itself is enjoyable, so you can leave the iPod in your bag--at least until you find yourself in a situation which does not warrant your full attention, such as your job or math class.

Still, some people do love to "curate" their soundscapes at all times and to exist in a constant state of musical accompaniment. For them, there is absolutely no situation in which they can tolerate the absence of music. Like the child who eschews any beverage bereft of sugary additives, the person with an aural sweet tooth cannot imbibe the sounds of the everyday (please forgive the mixed metaphors) without the tincture of a soundtrack. Yes, even a short bicycle ride requires a score, as you can see from this New York Times slideshow which was forwarded to me by a reader recently:

If you've ever seen someone using a device like this you know how unsettling it can be. While enjoying music on external speakers alone in public non-festival settings is in itself relatively benign, it can also indicate a lack of self-awareness that, if allowed to continue unchecked, can eventually drive you to do things like have conversations with your groceries while you're shopping or deliver lengthy sermons on street corners. One day you're just the guy who rides the bike path every weekend listening to Peter Cetera on his handlebar-mounted sound system, and the next you're preaching downtown about the Second Coming of the Lobster God. Certainly there are situations such as concerts or parties in which part of the pleasure of hearing the music is that you're enjoying it with other like-minded individuals. There is also the mostly male impulse to sort of "hump the world" with your musical taste, which is why some people derive pleasure from owning incredibly loud automotive sound systems. However, the handlebar-mounted speaker is neither. It's really just a strange, furtive form of public enjoyment somewhat akin to fondling yourself in public.

This is not to say that anyone with a handlebar-mounted speaker system is a serial public masturbator, nor is it to say that using one is not safer than completely drowning out your senses with a pair of headphones while you're riding. I just mean that it can be a dangerous gateway drug into the strange world of needing strangers to see you enjoying yourself--not in the "I need everybody to see how cool I am" way that "hipsters" do it, but in the "I need the one person sitting next to me on the bus to know I have a Star Wars action figure down my pants" way that, well, some other people do it.

Of course, there are some people who can straddle the worlds of convention and insanity with aplomb, and who dwell in the land of bliss and disregard for social convention that lies between them with dignity. These people are the "lone wolves." There are also the people who are neither conventional, nor insane, nor "lone wolves," but are simply "dorks." Really, all cyclists are "dorks" in the same way that all dogs are mammals or all Catholics are Christians, but every sect has its extremists. The Jews have people who wear stockings and fur hats, and we have people who use these things, also forwarded by a reader:

Furtive enjoyment can be creepy, but exuberant enjoyment is just dorky. Even more dangerous though is the "stealth dork." "Stealth dorkitude" occurs when the exuberance masquerades as ingenuity, and it's most apparent in those stupid concept bikes you'll constantly see posted on various design blogs:


I'm not sure why designers feel as though they must constantly molest the cycling world with their idiotic and useless bike designs, since there are few machines in this world which require less improvement. Apparently, "design" is the art of taking functional objects you know nothing about and completely screwing them up. Most of these bicycles are the equivalent of trying to reinvent the drinking glass. Here's my own new design:
It's called the "kinetic drinking glass," and once it's full you keep swinging your arm around Pete Townshend-style so the liquid stays in there via centrifugal force. I'm still working out how to fill it, but I'm confident I'll come up with something eventually. It will probably involve a carefully-timed pour on the downstroke.

Actually, yet another reader was kind enough to forward me a link to a site containing many of these idiotic concept bikes all assembled in one place--though a few of them are actually practical, such as this one:

No bike stable is complete without a dedicated goat-walking bike, and no actual stable is complete without a goat.

But not all zany designs come from designers outside of the bicycle industry--some of them come from the industry itself. You've probably seen those shorts from SMP by now, of which I was reminded recently by the proprietor of Cycling Inquisition and for which SMP made a delightful cartoon:

You can finally satisfy your physiological needs without the stress caused by undressing. The central channel of the Smp4bike saddle range allowed us to develop an innovative pair of shorts with a zip in the lower part. The zip neither rubs on the saddle nor constricts your private parts: you only realize it’s there in the moment of need ....

In other words, they're split-crotch shorts for women:

As well as for men:

I'm not sure why a man would need to remove his entire jersey and lower his bibs simply to urinate--unless I'm misreading the cartoon and he's not really urinating at all. He does have some suggestive "motion squiggles" around his shoulders, and he is in the woods with a woman. And when two people find themselves in the woods wearing cycling clothing specifically designed to provide easy access to the genitals, it doesn't take an industrial designer to illustrate what happens next:


Hopefully there's appropriate music playing on the handlebar speakers.