Smugness by the Bakfietsful: Through a Park Smugly

The month?  March.  The weather?  Beautiful.  The questions?  Douchetorical.  (A rhetorical question is when you pose a question without expecting a reply, whereas a douchetorical question is one that you immediately answer yourself.)  And of course a premature springjaculation from Mother Nature means only one thing:

Time to load up the Smugness Flotilla and hit the park.

I did not actually take the above photo yesterday, I took it a few weeks ago.  If I had taken it yesterday, you'd see much sunnier skies, as well as lots and lots of people all agog over the warmth and drunk with pollen and rolling around in the grass like dogs on that stinky patch in the yard.  I too was roaming around in a stupid state of bliss, and therefore could not be bothered with mundane business like shooting cargo bike porn.  Plus, I didn't even have the smuggest flotilla in the park, for right nearby were some people who had one of these pulpits on wheels:

They may have won that round, but just wait until next spring, when I will officially have the smuggest and most artisanal bike in Brooklyn.  I don't want to give too much away, but I will divulge that I've hired an undisclosed framebuilder to "curate" me a bakfiets built around this exquisite clawfoot bathtub:

(My new bakfiets will scream "Brownstone Brooklyn!" while also whispering "douche.")

Sure, the cast iron and porcelain construction results in a pretty heavy tub, but the extra weight should be offset by the all-bamboo frame.

Speaking of New York City's parks, over in Central Park a reader has discovered that the answer to the following question:

"Is there a skateboarding equivalent of a Fred?"

Is an emphatic "Yes."  That's right, amazingly there is such a thing as Fredboarding:

And via the same reader comes this sick Fredboarding "edit:"



 I only hope the US government doesn't learn about this, because Fredboarding looks even more demeaning than waterboarding, and it's only a matter of time before they start making people do this at Guantanamo Bay.

Anyway, it was a lovely afternoon, but there's one thing that would have made it even lovelier.  See, where I enter the park there's a big traffic circle that is a vortex of motor vehicles coming to and from the nearby expressway.  It's a lot like watching rusty diarrhea water go down the drain of a clawfoot tub, only it's accompanied by constant honking.  Until a few years ago, you used to have to join this deadly clusterfuck if you wanted to enter the park on your bike, but now there's a neat little network of bike lanes that allows you to skirt all the car traffic entirely.  Foolishly I thought the new bike lanes were great, and every few weeks or so when I saw yet another car crash in the traffic circle I'd be thankful that I no longer had to fight through that on a bike.  However, after listening to the "vehicular cycling" advocates I realize I'd actually be a lot better off if they'd remove the bike lanes so my kid and I could just "take the lane" with all those rage-addled drivers in the throes of rush hour.  As for their alarming propensity for driving into one another, I'm sure it's nothing a wrist mirror couldn't fix.

By the way, smug people love Dutch smugness porn like this:



So I wanted to find the vehicular cycling equivalent, but all I could find was this:

 

Looks great.  Maybe some day we'll finally adopt the Bangladeshi model and be rid of those damn bike lanes once and for all.  Or, maybe we should just stop riding vehicularly and start riding militaristically:

I don't know the story behind this photo and neither did the reader who sent it to me, but I'm guessing he didn't get that thing from Nashbar.

In any case, despite my enjoyment of the weather I soon found myself cursing it.  This is because every winter--even during mild winters like this one was--I hatch a brilliant scheme to escape Brooklyn once and for all.  (One year I even decided to tunnel my way to freedom, and I got as far as the Belt Parkway before the MTA bought my tunnel from me in order to transform it into a new subway line, which of course guarantees that it will remain unused for all eternity.)  However, as soon as the spring arrives I become complacent.  The bike lanes and the pleasant outdoor spaces lull me into a false sense of security, then the summer comes and the heat starts baking my brain, and before I know it the winter returns and I haven't even finished building the hang glider I was going to use to soar away to safety, or I haven't finished bagging all the coconuts I was going to float away on like in the final scene of the movie "Papillon," and I'm stuck here for yet another year.

As for where I'd go were I to one day succeed in my plan, does it really matter?  Whether it's Queensland or Queens, or Amsterdam, Netherlands or Amsterdam, New York, it's all the same just as long as I leave Brooklyn.  This is because Brooklyn is heading in a very dangerous direction culturally, and if I don't get out soon one more year will become five more years, and five will become ten, and before I know it I'll be riding around on a vintage artisanal bathtub bakfiets picking up feed for my chickens and goats at the organic livestock food coop where we hold six-hour meetings about whether or not we should be carrying Israeli poultry grit.

I only hope my Nonplussed Male Models of Cycling 2012 Calendar sells a lot of copies.  Speaking of which, you may recall the Hipster Skinsuit Model:



Well, in browsing his other auctions I was pleased to note that not only is he an accomplished disembodied hand model (or in this case, disemhanded finger model):

($29?  Leave it to Specialized to engineer a proprietary top cap.)

But he also offers vagina bumper stickers:

(The "e" in "Veg" is a typo.)

Which would go great with these notoriously elusive Shimano "clit pedals," spotted by Klaus of Cycling Inquisition:

The reason these are so rare is that Shimano relocated the clit to the shoe soon after:


I'm not sure why this was, though perhaps people were experiencing problems achieving release.