You Can't Spell "Propaganda" Without "Pagan" or "Panda." Think About It.

Further to yesterday's very brief post, here's what happened to Steve Tilford:

According to an entry on Tilford’s blog, posted by his friend Vincent Davis, Tilford was eastbound on I-70, heading back to Davis’ home in Denver, when the van he was driving plowed into and through a semi-trailer that had overturned and was blocking the highway. Davis, who was a passenger in the van, reported the two were injured but OK after the accident. According to a report in the Salt Lake Tribune, a second semi-trailer crashed into the wreckage as Tilford stood outside his van, killing him shortly after midnight Wednesday morning. The driver of the second semi-trailer, Stanley Williams of Grand Junction, also died of his injuries.

Holy shit.

And when a cyclist is killed, people react the only way they know how, which is of course by telling everyone to wear helmets:

And again:

Presumably they just ejaculated these stupid comments before taking the time to actually find out what happened, though I suppose it's also possible that they're advocates for driving helmets:

Either way, responding to tragedy with "Wear a helmet" is one of the few things you can say that's even dumber than "thoughts and prayers."  It's a damn good thing the obituaries don't allow reader comments, because you can only imagine what a shitshow that would become:

At this point you've got to acknowledge that our society is sick from helmets, the EPS foam having apparently leached some toxic chemical into our brains.  Indeed, our only hope is to launch an anti-helmet propaganda campaign, and I'm going to start by blaming helmets for injuries, whether warranted or unwarranted.  Consider Taylor Phinney, who won't start Paris-Roubaix due to a concussion he sustained in the Tour of Flanders, and who credits his helmet for saving him:

And there went De Ronde. 😔 Thank you @pocsports, my brain lives to fight another day. #RVV pic.twitter.com/tWD7TyjIGG

— Taylor Phinney (@taylorphinney) April 2, 2017

Sure, that's one way to look at it, but another way is that he hit his head because he was wearing a helmet and that it's in fact responsible for the concussion:

Hey, your body does a lot of physics as you fall, and adding a big block of foam throws all those calculations off.  I mean really, look at how much extra head they've got with those things on, especially in the back where his cracked:

Sadly I can't watch the actual video of the crash here in Canada's dirty chamois, but if anyone wants to do a JFK-esqu analysis please feel free.

And if any eccentric billionaires out there want to fund my global "Bicycle Helmets Kill" campaign please contact me through my attorney:

(My attorney with retired cyclist Mario Cipollini)

Speaking of safety gear and pro cyclists, they may be rolling with disc rotor covers soon:

The CPA opposed disc brakes on safety grounds, both because of potential cutting power and the creation of a peloton with mixed stopping power. Disc brakes have become a major point of contention between the various stakeholders, with some riders expressing concern about the danger they pose in the peloton. Injuries that have been attributed to disc rotors by some have heightened the tension.

The CPA conducted a survey on the topic in November of 2016 that showed that 42 per cent of riders would only welcome disc brakes if certain conditions were met, among them, the use of protective covers.

Please, please, PLEASE let the pros start riding with these big ugly plastic rotor covers on their bikes:

The only thing that would make me happier is if the UCI made pie plates and reflectors mandatory as well.

Here's to knee pads and elbow pads by 2030.  [Takes sip of alcoholic beverage.]  They're going to need them when stuff keeps getting caught in those giant rotor covers.

Moving on to less prosaic matters, here's a racket for ya:

The dream deliverer's workday begins somewhere between 2 and 3 AM. He rises, gets dressed in bike gear (including a headlamp for the darkness), and begins traveling to his subscribers' homes to make a delivery before dawn. The dream they will receive, printed on a card left at their step, has been custom-written for them by the deliverer the day before, lacing the waking landscape with something inexplicable and uncanny. After 25 to 40 miles of travel, the deliverer returns to his workshop and begins work on the next day's batch. On Sundays, every subscriber has the same dream.

Okay, two questions:

Firstly, #whatmeteryourunning?

Not to be a Verse Fred or anything, but is he running free verse for the weight savings?  Or is he a retrogrouch and using iambic pentameter, which is of course the lugged steel frame of poetry?

Secondly, how much does he charge?

Current subscriptions are available at $60 for a month by mail inside the states and $85 internationally; meanwhile, his "nightmare" package costs $3.75 more, because "whereas writing dreams is very open and improvisatory and expansive, writing nightmares for me is very closed and narrow. I usually dread writing the nightmares every day." In June, he'll return to his hometown of Denver, where local delivery by bike for the month runs $45. 

Wow.

"I often feel like a douche writing these mostly whimsical pieces every day," he says of his pursuit, amid the national climate, "but I try to remind myself that the spirit of the project is to create this intimate relationship with the subscribers and that these forms of intimacy exist parallel to the horrors of the political scumocracy."

Huh.  I also feel like a douche writing these whimsical pieces every day, so I suppose we have that in common.

Though he is a bit more whimsical than me:

"I can write something like, 'Then your mother walks in holding a rusted rake,' and I can trust that regardless of what kind of relationship the subscriber has with their mother they have or had a mother," he says. "And then the subscriber hopefully imbues the moment with some kind of intimate interpretation. I guess that's a basic trick of most writing, to leave enough space for the reader to make the thing feel important."

"Your mother walks in holding a rusted rake" sounds like a great joke setup.  Presumably the punchline would be "Well, I couldn't find any trombones."  Alas, I don't know how he'd get there, and I'm not spending the $45 to find out.

In the meantime, I'm going to start a poetry-by-bike service myself, but I'm only going to work in limerick, which is the fixed-gear of poetry:

There once was a Fred from Uranus
Who used chamois cream on his scranus
Reached for Assos from bed
But grabbed embro instead
And the pain that he felt was quite heinous

That one's for free, because it sucked.