BSNYC Friday Ham Radio Enthusiast Hour!

Hey!  Remember how I said I'll be master-of-ceremonying this bikey thing in Williamsburg next week? Well I will and it's going to be so awesome, you should totally come!  It's going to be exactly like an episode of "Girls," only more bikey, and I won't get naked as much as the "Girls" girl does.  In the meantime, here's a video about one of the builders:


Handcrafted presented by Jack Daniel's... by TheLMagazine
you'll see hard-hitting news.

One lucky person will win that bike, and if you slip me a large-denomination bill (Euro or Canadian, no US$ please) I'll see if I can arrange it so that it's you.  Just to warn you though, I am going to get so girl drink drunk at this thing--obviously not on straight Jack Daniel's because eeew, but I'm definitely going to have at least five "Sex On My Faces."  Or is it "Sexes On My Face?"  I want to be grammatically correct before throwing them all up the following morning.

In other news, there is considerable hand-wringing in the cycling press about how to make the sport interesting to Americans again now that Lancey Pants is gone:

Americans are keyed to tune into series, little vignettes that each have the structure of a stage play: start, middle, and finish. And we decided somehow that the very best way to showcase our sport was to show them every minute, regardless of whether anything is happening or not. It was different when we had rock star Lance Armstrong with the celebrity few other sports had, who was articulate, brash, charismatic, and doing uber-confident “superman” feats. He was our spectacle and we enjoyed extraordinary attention during those fertile years. He even dated a real rock star with a no. 1 song. There were no boundaries to his media and mass appeal.


So, with Armstrong towing us along, we gathered some fans from the fringe. But he was the center of attention and there was a compelling reason for them to endure the hours of non-activity just to track this can’t-look-away athlete in progress. The crash on Luz Ardiden. The Beloki-field incident near Gap. It was Jesse Owens times a thousand — Lance defeated the dusty Euros at their own game. He embodied the new America: strong, broad-shouldered, aggressive, and confident. Compelling. Americans love a great story.


So what's the answer?  Possibly less live race coverage and more pre-packaged post-race programming:

Packaged: Not live, where the story is told by the outcome, extrapolating the best of the best material that matters from the inside-out, expanding our dramatic revelations beyond just the road, and exploiting our real-world racing dramas that are rarely seen. All this carefully bound and presented into a freshly baked genre for us: reality sports drama TV. Cycling is made for just this treatment!

Right, whatever.  Let's face it: the sport is finished in this country, and the sooner everybody acknowledges there's no way to jump-start the American public into giving a crap about professional cycling again the better.  Sure, we're a nation of idiots, but we're not so stupid that some creative editing is going to trick football and baseball fans into staying in their well-worn sofa ass grooves to watch bike racing too. As the op-ed points out, the "U.S. carries more cycling hours than any country in the world," so finally dropping all this coverage will free up precious airtime for more culturally relevant sporting fare such as rodeo riding and Babe Winkelman blasting the fuck out of animals, and the handful of American Freds who do actually want to watch this stuff can just see it on the Internet or at the Rapha café.

Or else they can read about it on some stupid bike blog, as the case may be.

And now, I'm pleased to present you with a quiz.  As always, study the item, think, and click on your answer.  If you're right then HOLY FUCKING SHIT!, and if you're wrong you'll see the last chance we have to make cycling interesting to Americans.

Thanks very much for reading, ride safe, and may Lob bless you and anoint you in sticky green roe.


--Wildcat Rock Machine

1) Number four on the list of 30 reasons to take up cycling is that it helps you make number two.

--True
--False
'

2) Behold!  It's the:

--Helmet of Justice
--Helment of Righteousness
--Hairnet of Smugness
--Hardhat of Despair

3) This iPhone case is made using:

--Carbon fiber
--Crabon fiber
--Cabron fiber
--"Cuting edge crab-on fire canstruction"

4) "Cat 3 Comics" is like "Yehuda Moon" for Freds.

--True
--False

5) "Yehuda Moon" is like cartoon porn for retrogrouches.

--True
--False

(Fixie conversions: the pegging your pants of the aughts.)

6) Fixed-gear conversions are out; __________ conversions are in.

--Cyclocross
--650b
--Folding
--Prosthesis

(Having perfected the bicycle with the above, designers are now looking towards other configurations.)

7) Bicycles are out; ______________________ are in.

--Unicycles
--Quadcycles
--Chain-driven Segways
--Recumbent stunt tricycles

***Special Automotive Industry Marketing-Themed Bonus Question***

("Don't look at me, I don't even own one.")

In an effort to capture what they see as the "hipster" market, auto makers are now equipping cars with:

--Folding bikes
--Fixies
--In-dash turntables
--Old-timey shaving kits