A Good Conscience Is A Continual Wednesday.

When you're a parent, you have to answer a lot of questions.  Sometimes they're profound questions, like "What is God?"  Or, sometimes they're mundane questions, like "Where do hot dogs come from?"

As it happens, the answer to both of these questions is the same, and it's as follows:

"Lips and assholes."

Still, it's not the kind of thing you want to lay on a kid, at least not until he or she is old enough to quell the resulting angst with drink.

Of course, the kinder answer is they're both processed items that most of us are generally willing consume without questioning them too much, but that's too complex for most young minds, so usually I just turn the music up and pretend not to hear.

Speaking of hot dogs and kids, on New Year's Day we piled into THE CAR THAT WE OWN and DROVE to the beach (because the sun setting over a frigid ocean is a perfect metaphor for the year ahead), and the first thing I noticed upon stepping onto the sand were these forlorn frozen weiners:

Most likely they'd been sitting there forgotten and un-barbecued since Labor Day, but I like to think it was a visit from God.

Of course, for many of us, when confronted with the meaninglessness of life our first instinct is to cling desperately to a fellow human being so that we may at least hurtle into the void together, and if you're a gigantic Fred you'll figure out a way to do so via Strava:

Depending on your cynicism level, this is either adorable or annoying as hell. With help from route-mapping tools like Strava, cyclists are spelling out proposals to their significant others. Finally, a bike-based proposal that gets around the fact that there’s really nowhere to hide a ring box in full-body spandex.

I'm actually not all that cynical when it comes to people loving each other, but I am extremely cynical when it comes to Strava so therefore I find this annoying as fuck.  Additionally, I'm shocked and disappointed that someone writing in San Francisco of all places can't think of a decent place to hide a wedding ring when you're wearing form-fitting clothing, because I can think of at least one, or possibly even two (i.e. the "cigar ring method"), though the first would have made his saddle time that much more uncomfortable, and if this person can actually pull off the second then there's a very good chance his girlfriend won't want to marry him.

Anyway, these were all non-issues, because in this case Fred got his Wilma:

Though he was running a really big risk there, because the last reply you want after a Strava proposal is one like this:

In which case your final Strava upload looks something like this:

(Oh, loosen up for chrissakes.  Suicide is hilarious!  And it's twice as funny if you take a couple cats with you.)

By the way, I strongly suspect these Strava proposals are simply viral marketing by the company itself in order to draw attention away from the fact that their product turns you into a gigantic dork, and that using it is far more likely to result in divorce than marriage.  To wit:

My wife accuses me of being in a state of denial about my addiction to Strava, the website and app that lets you analyse your cycling (and running) performance.

She might have a point.

At first I thought I could handle it. Uploading the data from my GPS device to the website after each ride was straightforward enough. Soon I had pages of information about my mileage, average speeds, elevation gained and even calories burned. I took innocent delight in beating my previous best times on certain routes.

First you're obsessing about how many calories you burned on your ride (everybody knows the only caloric metric that really matters is how many donuts you stuff in your face afterwards), and next thing you know you have an unhealthy obsession with the comings and goings of a guy named Bob Pugh:

My nemesis is a rider called Bob Pugh. We now “follow” each other and regularly give each other “kudos” – Strava’s equivalent of Facebook’s “Like” button – for our respective efforts, but I’m secretly looking for clues as to whether he will be going out riding the next day or not. Bob only goes out two or three times a week, but each ride is at least 100 miles long, so he regularly overtakes me in the standings, despite the fact I may have been out five or six times already that week.

And together they engage in a coy sort of "gamesmanship" that is only marginally related to cycling:

He’s definitely not averse to a bit of gamesmanship, once stating he would be “doing some painting and decorating for the next few days”. I jumped at the chance to gain some ground on him, only for him to sneak in another couple of epic rides and nudge me out of the top three yet again.

By the way, creepily, Strava will reveal all sorts of information about other people if you're willing pay for it:

The next step will be to learn a bit more about Bob, Leapfrog, et al. It would be useful to know if we are in the same age/weight range. Their photographs are inconclusive, and it will probably mark me down as a deranged stalker if I ask them directly how old and heavy they are. I might have to consider signing up to Strava’s premium service for £40 a year so that I can access this personal information.

So in other words, once you sign up for the "premium service," Strava goes from being a "performance analytics tool" and simply becomes a dating site--and, for only £80 a year, it will also send him an alert whenever Bob Pugh's wife leaves the house so the two of them can play "Leapfrog" together.

Oh, Strava, you homewrecker...

In other news, someone "tweeted" this at me, and I think it completely fails to make its point:


Nobody's going to give you any more space on the road just because you look like a typical SUV owner.  If anything, the only things drivers even remotely yield to are guns and babies, so if anybody figures out how to make a suit out either of those things--or, better yet, both of them--then let me know.

(When handling a gun and a baby at the same time be sure to keep your finger off the trigger and the barrel pointed slightly away from the baby.)

Lastly, the only people who ask more questions than children are cyclists, and a reader now informs me the latest question cyclists are obsessing over is whether gravel or pavement is harder on your wheels:

(Next up: Which weighs more, a pound of steel or a pound of crabon?)

Whereas you should always humor an inquisitive child, it's perfectly acceptable to tell a cyclist who asks a silly question to shut up--though unfortunately we have Lennard Zinn who humors these people anyway and tells them unintentionally hilarious stories about Mad Fiber wheels:

...in all of my years of riding cyclocross, I can think of only two wheels I’ve ruined, and never in a race. One was snagging the rear derailleur on a spoke, but that failure mode was unique to Mad Fiber due to the way the spokes flex outward under side load and would not have happened with a wire-spoked wheel in identical conditions. I did the same thing to another Mad Fiber rear wheel on the road bike on pavement as well.

Wow, so for thousands of dollars Mad Fiber was selling a wheelset that was basically a Dreamcatcher but for derailleurs?  No wonder they went out of business--though needless to say until now he was touting their incredible stiffness:

Before I go into the details of why the $2,600 Mad Fiber wheelset is so different from others, you should know that the pair weighs 1,080 grams (!) and is very stiff. Being so thin and flat everywhere, they are probably quite aerodynamic as well.

I rode the Mad Fiber wheels on the first day of Interbike’s Outdoor Demo and was very impressed with their stiffness when sprinting hard, as well as their steering precision and low weight. The braking, with the supplied cork brake pads, was quite effective, and the superlight quick releases work nicely.

They'd have been better off using hot dogs for spokes.