Cycling: Where the Elite Meet Defeat

Today is the holiday known as "Valentime's Day." Valentime's Day started way back in 1977 when St. Valentime performed the Miracle of the Immaculate Contraception, in which a night of unprotected partner-swapping debauchery at storied swingers' club Plato's Retreat resulted in no unwanted pregnancies whatsoever. Ever since then, people who are having sexual relations with each other observe Valentime's Day by exchanging tokens of affection and by ordering from prix fixe menus in restaurants as they sit awkwardly next to other couple doing the exact same thing and try desperately to ignore the disconcerting sensation that they're merely going though the motions.

Of course, if you're the spouse, life partner, or significant other of a "roadie," Valentime's Day is to you what Thanksgiving is for turkeys--a nightmarish day of profound disappointment. This is because roadies observe Valentime's Day by realizing that morning they forgot all about it and presenting their partners with hastily-wrapped and half-empty containers of pomegranate berry Cytomax. Their spurned partners then spend the evening sobbing in front of the TV and drowning the pain in pomegranate berry Cytomax-tinis while the roadies do the obligatory interval sessions that leave them too exhausted for coitus.

Speaking of roadies and their significant others, one reader informs me that charismatic professional bicycling sprinter Mark "The Man Missile" Cavendish has acquired his very own girlfriend and everything:



Not only that, but this reader has also forwarded me a link to a decidedly unsafe-for-work (unless you work in the fields of pornography or cosmetic surgery) website that features various pictures of Cavendish's girlfriend presenting her breasts in different and interesting ways:

As you can see from the above screen shot, this website taxed my LarryKingifier Censor-O-Matic 2000 SL Bosom-and-Genital-Obfuscation Machine to its very limits. Personally, I think it's a shame that the simple breast is such a loaded (so to speak) body part in our culture that it is socially unacceptable to display them without placing the visages of decrepit talk show hosts over them. I mean, we were all weaned on them after all (breasts in general, not Peta Todd's specifically--presumably Cavendish is the only one being weaned on those at the moment.) Then again, if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns, and if bare breasts are legalized then Peta Todd might be out of a job, for it's that very taboo that allows Peta Todd to make an entire career out of creative breast presentation. She does have an impressive repertoire too, including but not limited to:

--"Here's my breast between my knees;"

--"Here are my breasts while I search for loose change in the sofa;"

--"Here are my breasts 'accidentally' spilling out of my top;"

--"Here's another lady looking at my breasts;"

--"Here are my breasts as well as the breasts of two of my friends, making for a whopping six breasts!"

In any case, I'd hate to reduce somebody as complex and nuanced as Mark Cavendish to a stereotype, but at the same time I think it's probably fair to say that he's what is colloquially known as a "breast man."

Indeed, perhaps the only symbol more potent, loaded, and titillating in our culture than the female breast is the bicycle lane. In both cases, some people find the sign of them arousing, others find them offensive, and still others think children and old people should not be exposed to them:

I'm not exactly sure why this is, though maybe they see them as a choking hazard. (I would argue that if you choke on either a bike lane or a breast then you're probably using it wrong).

As it happens, the Daily News of all newspapers recently published an editorial about bike lanes that, to me at least, was actually rather sensible:

Even though the guy who wrote it, "No Impact Man" author Colin Beavan, is a lunatic who spent a prolonged period of time without using toilet paper.

Anyway, Beavan's argument can be summed up thusly: "Bike lane make city nice." Unfortunately though, many New Yorkers are very resistant to the notion of bicycle lanes, since somehow they've gotten the idea that cyclists are "elitist:"

JohnE
10:38 AM
Feb 13, 2011

Hyperbolic drivel! Haven't seen any cyclists using their bike lanes in the past several weeks despite the fortunes spent catering to the elitist cyclists, too cold maybe? Not too long ago I was decked by a wingnut on a bike as I stepped from a store with some packages. The elitist class riding their bikes are no more responsible than the working class trying to get to work on pothole scarred streets and highways that have now become the norm. We seem to have money for more bike lanes but may have to lay off uniformed employees that we all depend. Incomprehensible!

Yes, I too am sick of all those elitist cyclists with their artisanal custom bikes and their designer bags:

(Negligible Smugness Quotient Guy, photographed by a reader.)

Many years from now, in a far-off future in which a Frenchman has won the Tour de France and breasts are no longer taboo, humanity will marvel that there was once an age in which a mode of transportation as inexpensive and accessible as the bicycle was considered "elitist," and that working people stood opposed to accommodating it it in favor making sure the streets remain the exclusive domain of machines like this. Of course, given the willingness people have displayed throughout human history to pave the streets for their own oppressors, it's unlikely this future will ever come to pass (to say nothing of a Frenchman winning the Tour de France, which is positively laughable), but anything's possible.

In the meantime, I've been racking by brain trying to figure out just why it is that people in New York City think bicycles are "elitist," and for the life of me I simply can't get to the bottom of it:


By the way, did you know that David Byrne doesn't have a car? It's true, he doesn't. He does get driven in cars from time to time, but that's different. Also, David Byrne wrote this in his book, "Bicycle Diaries::

"But the interior of the country, with access only to USA Today and Fox News for their information, well, they are still trembling with fear that Saddam or Osama bin Laden is going to come and steal their SUVs."

I know, right? You know, sometimes I too like to put on a matching plaid shorts-and-shirts combo and muse about how stupid the people who don't live in cosmopolitan cities are. What's wrong with all those people who use trucks in order to earn a living from farming and livestock anyway? The same goes for all those foolish people who move to the suburbs for trite things like "good schools," "quiet," and "more space for their families." They really ought to get with the program, move to the city, buy lofts, and start doing something useful like scoring television shows. Maybe then the entire country will be one giant uninterrupted gentrified urban neighborhood and from coast to coast it will finally resemble the whitewashed version of Williamsburg, Brooklyn for which we all pine. (I call this hipstertopian view of the future "Manifest Douchery.") Nobody will miss the farmers, and nobody will go hungry--our "urban homesteaders" will grow more than enough food for us all in their rooftop gardens, and there will be plenty of expensive restaurants serving the farm-to-table localvore cuisine we can all afford from our giant paychecks.

If this makes me an "elitist," then let them eat organic cake.

Speaking of smugness and the "smugness quotient," the very same person who sent me the photo of Negligible Smugness Quotient Guy also sent me a photo of a cyclist on a "fixie" portaging another "fixie:"

Frankly, I don't know how using one "fixie" to portage another "fixie" affects the Smugness Quotient, though my impulse is that it's like dividing zero by zero and as such his SQ is "undefined." The case could be different though if he was riding a bicycle with a Turbospoke bicycle exhaust system, as forwarded to me by a number of readers:

The Turbospoke is basically just a card with a megaphone attached, and I'm thinking of installing one on my road bike because it would probably sound like this when I "climb:"

Obviously though it would sound like a buzzsaw if you were as fast as Mark Cavendish, or even the time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork, whom another reader has spotted, this time promoting the "Ride for Sight" in South Africa:


He is rapidly becoming the universal symbol for "charity ride."