Too Much Fred for One Head

Sorry I'm late, I was doing the mountain biking:

Suckers.

Anyway, further to yesterday's post about how Clif is selling an energy food remarkably similar to baby food and that Freds might as well just eat actual baby food because it's cheaper (whew!), not just any pedantic asshole but THE Pendantic Asshole weighed in (so to speak) with the following:

THE Pedantic Asshole said...

Did not a single one of you pedantic assholes alert Snob to the fact that he got the Gu pricing totally wrong? In both, the cost should be price/calorie, not price/volume or weight. In this case, the Gu costs 1.6 cents Mercan and the baby food is at 2.4 cents (also Mercan). 

You could pay next to nothing for a bag of sawdust, but that's not going to give you what you need to get on the KOM tables.

September 28, 2016 at 5:37 AM

This is a very good point.  Furthermore, I take any allegation of fraud seriously.  Me and Dave Brailsford:

("See this?  It's called 'marginal gains.'  No TUE required.")

So let's take a closer look at THE Pedantic Asshole's math.  As for as the cents-per-calorie price on the Clif, for a 140-calorie pouch priced at $2.37 I get 1.69 cents, which I'd round up to 1.7 cents.

Now onto the baby food.  The pouch I happened to use as an example yesterday contained a mere 70 calories, which does come to over 2 cents a calorie as THE Pedantic Asshole correctly points out.  However, baby food is all over the place, both literally (take a look at any given baby, they've got that crap all over them half the time) and calorically speaking.  Consider this bag of Plum Organics checkpea & tomato with beef, and I just threw up in my mouth while typing that:

This will cost you $1.99 from Buy Buy Baby (and no, I'm not getting kickbacks from Buy Buy Baby, they just come up high in the results when you use a popular search engine so they make a convenient reference), but it's got 110 calories in it:

That comes to 1.8 cents per gram, which is a bit more than the Clif, but inconsequentially so.  Indeed, for simplicity's sake, you might as well just round up and say both the Clif and the Plum Organics go for about 2 cents a calorie.

Furthermore, just as some baby food has more calories, some Clif stuff has less.  I happened to pick a flavor with 140 calories per bag, but the banana mango coconut (oh god I just barfed again) has just 100 calories:

See?

Though in fairness it is a bit cheaper, but still in line with an equivalent baby food.

So yes, in light of THE Pedantic Asshole, I do acknowledge that as far as calories go you are not paying a premium for Fred baby food over regular baby food, but I also maintain that Fred baby food is still pretty much exactly baby food and you might as well just use all this crap interchangeably.

If it's priced like baby food, puréed like baby food, and packaged in a squeezable pouch for an end user who lacks motor skills, then guess what?

That shit's baby food, baby.

And most important of all, STOP LEAVING YOUR ENERGY FOOD PACKETS ALL OVER THE PLACE.  Really, all this baby food craze means is you're going to see even more trash left behind after your local Gran Fondo.

Moving on, the Guardian asks, "Will car drivers ever learn to share the road with bikes?"

And while obviously the answer is a resounding "Not in a zillion years," I'm still flattered to have been quoted in the article:

The New York blogger and author Eben Weiss says the city’s new bike lanes legitimised cycling, telling people “this is something you can be doing, and should be doing.”

“It’s an important symbol to see a bike lane or a sign with a picture of a bike – it means something,” he says. “I started seeing lots more cyclists. And pick any street where they have built an actual protected bike lane. If you’re just walking down that street, it makes a huge difference when cars aren’t encroaching on every inch of the space. You can see around the corner when you’re trying to cross the street.”

By the way, I should clarify that the bike sign I'm referring to is this one:

Though I'm sure the advocacy community will take my quote to mean I'm a proponent of sharrows (in the bike advocacy world sharrows are almost as bad as swastikas) and punish me accordingly.  Fortunately, the harshest penalty bike advocates mete out to heretics is revoking your Park Slope Food Co-op membership, but since I'm not a member in the first place that means I pretty much have smugness immunity.

Lastly, speaking of Gran Fondos, a reader just sent me this:


"One of the best parts of cycling is all the new gear that comes out," explains Levi, which now marks the third time I've thrown up whilst "curating" today's post.  Then he adds, "I recently came across a product that totally changed my view on how to handle sweat:"

Wait, don't tell me!  Was it a fan hat?  It's a fan hat, isn't it?  Please tell me it's a fan hat:

(A fan hat.)

No, apparently it's that weird green unibrow on his head:

Which to be honest I barely even noticed, since I just figured it was some sort of monitoring device he's got to wear whenever he leaves the house as per the terms of the UCI Reasoned Decision.

Either that, or it's how he calls the Mother Ship to take him back to Planet Boring after the ride:

Or else it's what fans wave in the air during Letle Viride concerts:

Anyway, it should be fun watching Freds crash while they attempt to peel and stick their sweat-channeling unibrows mid-ride:

Look for lots of these things on the side of the road along with all those baby food packets.