A Tip of the Helmet: Taintless in 2010

This morning, I tentatively crept out of my hidey-hole and found that the holidays were indeed finally over. The Christmas trees have been cast out to the curb, the menorahs extinguished, the nog imbibed, and the hangovers remedied. All that is left now is to embark upon the upcoming year like a mountain biker confronts a long stretch of technical singletrack: excited yet frightened, over-equipped, poorly groomed, and sufficiently stoned.

Despite having recently decried the notion of New Year's resolutions, the truth is that beneath the topsoil of my sarcasm lies an an aquifer of sincerity, and I do in fact aspire to improve myself each year and to one day become a person without taint. (I mean "without taint" in the "uncontaminated" sense, not in the "lacking a grundle" sense.) This is difficult, for the world is full of taint, and we must first learn to recognize it so that we may keep it from seeping into our aquifers and poisoning our inner waters. It is important to remember that even the most seemingly benign wellsprings can be tainted with misinformation. Take, for example, "Bicycling" magazine.

As I alluded to earlier, I spent the latter part of the holidays in deep seclusion--though not so deep that I didn't have access to a well-known pharmacy chain, where I found myself one evening shopping for the sorts of mildly embarrassing items one obtains in a drug store. Passing the magazine rack, I noticed the January/February issue of "Bicycling," so I stopped to confirm that they're actually printing my column. (They constantly assure me they are, but I remain skeptical.) It occurred to me as I leafed through the magazine that I was already about to purchase an armful of embarrassing items so I might as well purchase "Bicycling" too. (I like to think that cashiers at well-known pharmacy chains don't discriminate between, say, fungal infection sufferers and fungal infection sufferers who read "Bicycling" magazine.) Indeed, the cashier appeared only slightly nonplussed (though that might be because I insisted she triple-bag the magazine to guard against translucency), and I left the store with some change in my pocket and my dignity only mildly fractured.

The next morning, I found myself in the bathroom (thanks in part to some of the embarrassing items I'd purchased the night before), where I was pleased to have the new reading material. However, my pleasure turned to concern when I flipped open the magazine and saw this advertisement on the inside of the front cover:

The gentleman riding the Serotta (or "Dental Chair" as I prefer to call Serottas) is of course Chris Carmichael, the Deepak Chopra of cycling coaches. I did "Look Closer at Chris Charmichael" as the ad bade me to do, and the first thing I noticed was his helmet strap, which hung beneath his chin like a rooster's wattle:It should go without saying that this is not the proper way to wear a helmet--unless you prefer to let it hang from your neck between your shoulder blades in the manner of a cowboy:
Still, I decided to forgive "Bicycling" for this error. Certainly as a contributor I'm biased, but the fact is that there is a difference between an advertisement and editorial content, and this was the former. If Nissan places an advertisement featuring Chris Carmichael wearing an improperly adjusted helmet, or Chris Carmichael himself runs an ad with his company's URL misspelled and a phantom rider's wheel visible between another rider's legs, it's not really "Bicycling's" responsibility to point out those errors. Even so, I was still dismayed to find this Jamis ad just a few pages later:


While it's certainly good to see a celebrity of Joachim Phoenix's stature riding a bicycle, it's a shame that he's wearing his helmet at such a jaunty angle:


Like many forms of headwear, a helmet has a job to do. A sombrero protects you from the sun; a beer hat feeds you beer; a beer sombrero protects you from the sun and feeds you beer; and a helmet protects your head from impact. However, your helmet can only do its job if it is worn correctly, and in this case the entire frontal portion of Phoenix's cranium is exposed, thus transforming the helmet from a form of headwear with an actual job to do into a form of headwear with a merely symbolic job to do. Really, you can wear symbolic headwear any way you like, since it's only the act of wearing it that's important. For example, you can wear a yarmulke (or kippah, or crêpe de la tête) way back on your head, because it doesn't really do anything--it just appeases "God" with its presence:


Similarly, if you're a fashion victim you can wear a fedorah way back on your head, since it's not really doing anything except broadcasting your victimhood to the world (as are your driving gloves, which you wear to not drive the car you don't have):


Symbolic headwear doesn't only have to be worn jauntily on the back of the head, either. It can also be worn forward over the eyes to convey douchiness:

But a helmet actually does something, so it should be worn properly--which means it should stay below the hairline. Fortunately, I did eventually find an ad in "Bicycling" featuring a properly-worn helmet:

As a pro cyclist, Levi Leipheimer knows how to wear a helmet. By the way, you don't need to have a hairline to determine whether you're wearing your helmet properly. Leipheimer doesn't have a hairline either, so he aligns it with the top of his ears instead:


Untainted, and not a hair out of place.