Watershed Moment: The Truth is Out There

Greetings, and welcome to ShedSnobNYC, Brooklyn, NY's fourth-most popular blog about sheds and shed culture. Today's post will concern the ongoing debate as to whether chicken coops are technically sheds, and if they should be allowed to take part in Critical Shed Mass gatherings. (Fifth Wednesday of every month--be there!) First, though, a word from our new sponsor, the Mizone Delicious Beverage Manufacturing Concern:

I was actually alerted to the above commercial by a fellow Twittererer and Blogular Curatorator, and in it you may have noticed that the fellow with the underpants on his head is riding a fixed-gear freestyle bicycle equipped with a capacious pair of panniers:

Years ago, when the denizens of hipsterism began taking to fixed-gear bicycles en masse, many speculated as to what would come next once this notoriously fickle demographic tired of them. Would it be cyclocross bikes? Vintage road bikes? Recumbent unicycles? Well, few pundits at the time guessed that touring bikes would be the new fixie, but as I saw (and wish to Lob I could un-see) at Don Walker's Handmade Don Walker Show, this appears to be the case. This would also explain why, as evidenced in this commercial, panniers may be the new messenger bag. In any event, it's only a matter of time before Rivendell "drops" a bar-spinnable Quickbeam and the worlds of hipsterism and retrogrouchery collide in an explosion of cheap beer, wool socks, and beard hair.

Speaking of retrogrouchery, in Tuesday's post I mistakenly referred to this as a cyclocross bike:

Subsequently, a number of people who know more about bikes than I do were either kind or pedantic enough to point out that they are almost certainly centerpull mounts and not cantilever mounts--not that it matters, because whatever they are I plan to Dremel them off when I turn this into a sweet "fixie" conversion.

In the world of cycling, a "retrogrouch" is anybody who knows more than you, while a "Fred" is anybody who knows less.

Speaking of Freds, I wonder if their monthly newsletter "Bicycling" magazine (to which I contribute when the Spirit of Fredliness moves me) will cover the advent of the new "hipster touring" craze, though the staff may be too busy rubbing "embro" into each other:

You don't know shame until you've taken part in a "Bicycling" magazine office embrocation party. If you're lucky, you'll only ever experience the sensation in artistic short films. Also, psycho-sexual implications of the Fred-tastic "embro party" aside, I'm not sure it's a smart idea to go rubbing mysterious creams and lotions into yourself (or your co-workers) all will-nilly like that. Who knows what sort of deranged home chemists are whipping up questionable batches of embrocation in their bathtubs or toilet bowls and then sending them to "Bicycling" with dreams of fame and glory? Really, it seems only a notch less dangerous than drinking prison hooch. Don't they at least test that stuff on monkeys or domestic pros first?

(Yes, my helper monkey, Vito, did test questionable embrocations in his youth, but you do whatever you have to do when you're paying your own way through Bard College.)

Speaking of helper monkeys, you may recall that my ironic intern, Spencer Madsen actually resurfaced. Furthermore, he also promised a follow-up report of sorts on the infamous Mongoose Cachet track-like bicycle. Well, I'm pleased to report that this has not yet happened:

Nevertheless, like a Cat 4 road cyclist with a power meter, I remain eternally and delusionally hopeful.

On the other hand, pro cyclists actually need power meters. People also accuse them of using other less ethical performance-enhancing methods, such as drugs--or, in the case of Fabian Cancellara, tiny little motors. Now, they've gone beyond the motor and are saying he's using some kind of magic bearings:

When I first saw the above headline about the team saying Cancellara's bike is clean, I thought it just meant that they washed it, which hardly seemed newsworthy--though I can easily imagine Team LAY-uh-PURD sending out a press release because they'd just hosed down his Trek. However, this wasn't the case:

La Derniere Heure's story suggested Cancellara might have used the system of ball bearings offering gains of up to 2.5 seconds per kilometer since 2007.

Uh, wrong. Like, everybody knows that cyclists have had access to secret alien nanotechnology ever since the Roswell incident:


Clearly, Cancellara has been employing this extraterrestrial technology to great effect, along with a special ultra-viscous lubricant developed by the DuPont corporation especially for Mario Cipollini, who until then was copulating with such frequency and intensity that he had been forced to resort to 30 weight motor oil:

By the way, if you noticed that the alien and Cipollini bear a striking resemblance to one another, this is not a coincidence.

Anyway, ever since then this lubricant has been the "life's blood" of the peloton, and Cancellara and others have been smuggling it from race to race by storing it in their hair:

Paul Kimmage might have picked up on all this years ago if he hadn't been so busy rooting around in Lance Armstrong's trash.

In other news, a Tweeterer recently informed me that residents of Portland (the smugness capital of what realtors are now calling "Canada adjacent") are making their city better by donating money yoga to the poor:


Street Yoga, a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Ore., aims to help people struggling with homelessness, poverty, abuse, addiction and trauma by providing them with yoga classes and lessons in mindful breathing and compassionate communication.

This is great news. Now they can be homeless and limber.

Speaking of yoga, "57 Things" guy is a noted practitioner of the discipline of bending yourself (presumably mastering auto-fellatio would obviate his need for a mate, making him a perfect minimalist), and the above story inspired me to visit his website. Unfortunately though, most of his content is now subscriber-based, a very 1990s "Internet 1.0." business model that worked for pretty much nobody. I guess this makes sense though--as they say, "information wants to be free," so if follows that misinformation wants you to pay for it. He will let you read his bio, though:

Ev Bogue is a cybernetic yogi supporting mindfulness at the edge of human evolution.

I wonder how long it will be before he's forced to get a job and become a cybernetic barista at Starbucks supporting mindfulness by misspelling your name on a latte.

As for me, I prefer to let the Disembodied Hand of Fate guide me haplessly through life, and indeed I recently spotted a disembodied hand emanating from a Mercedes:

As you can imagine, I made sure not to be behind this vehicle when it got up to speed:


I'm not sure why he's not using straps of some kind, though perhaps he's a minimalist.

Lastly, the time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork is well on track to become the cycling icon of the 21st century. Not only has a reader spotted him in a Mexican restaurant:

But this Mexican restaruant is in Australia of all places, so surely his appearance there is a sign of the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, another reader informs me he's also appearing on TVs, kind like Jesus appears in tortillas:

I think he may actually be Fabian Cancellara.