I've Just Been Handed An Urgent And Horrifying News Story...

Further to Friday's post about winter bikes, for off-season road riding that's not quite sloppy enough to warrant full wheelbrows, I've been riding the Tresca, shown here in the exact spot where I fell headlong into my own urine back in 2009:

How many bike bloggers have as rich and storied a history as me?

Not too many.

By the way, you'll be pleased to know that this time around I relieved myself without falling down, of which I am very proud.

Anyway, the Tresca is ideal for this time of year, mostly because its silver and black color scheme disappears into the melancholy winter backdrop almost completely:

Also, you may remember two things about the Tresca:

1) It is a prototype with an incorrectly placed brake bridge, resulting in MetroCard-thin rear tire clearance;

B) I exploded the rear tire recently after riding over something sharp in Yonkers.

Well, I've since replaced the severed tire with a 25mm Continental Gatorskin I found in my tire pile.  (Anyone who's been riding for more than a few years has both a tire pile and a punctured inner tube pile.)  Not only was this frugal inasmuch as I didn't have to pay for a new tire, but I actually made money since I finally got the dollar back that I used to boot the old one.  Now that's how you monetize a bike blog.  Also, even though the destroyed tire was also a Continental, and also ostensibly 25mm wide, the Gatorskin turned out to be quite a bit narrower, which upgraded the clearance from one (1) MetroCard to two (2) Discover cards:

Yeah, it's still pretty tight, but now I don't actually hear grit hitting the brake bridge when I ride through puddles.

So you can put that problem in the "solved" folder, and then drag and drop that file right in the trash because you probably didn't care anyway.

Moving on, there's been a bit of bike world blowback regarding a recent story in which a pair of bro-bags set a cross-country Cannonball Run record in a douched-out Mercedes.  I first heard about it from Peter Flax's Twitter:

I would like someone to explain to me why people who self-promote averaging 103mph on a cross-country drive, and brag about using sophisticated tech to avoid police detection, should not go to prison. https://t.co/kXSskzvJcZ

— Peter Flax (@Pflax1) December 6, 2019

Then Joe Lindsey wrote about it in Bicyling:

It’s a stunningly selfish disregard for public safety. https://t.co/Uh0UxiyFx5

— Bicycling Magazine (@BicyclingMag) December 7, 2019

His point being, basically, this:

While I do agree with both of them in spirit I can't quite manage to get worked up about this stunt or the fact that people think it's cool--and not just because I used to love the 1981 movie of the same name:

I haven't seen it since I was like 10 years old, and can only imagine that in 2019 it's completely awful in every way.

No, the reason I can't get worked up over it is that I don't actually think a couple of car freaks driving across the country as fast as possible is "everything that's wrong with the car culture."  On the contrary, I think the millions of inattentive people who make short trips in giant SUVs on a daily basis are everything that's wrong with car culture.  Or, to put it more succinctly, here's everything that's wrong with car culture:

Just a quiet Sunday afternoon riding north of the Dallas area when an F-250 swirvs around us and slams on its brakes. @Pflax1 @philgaimon @CadenceCyclery pic.twitter.com/py4cld5c6Z

— Gary Derheim (@DerheimMgdSvcs) December 9, 2019

Basically, "car culture" is a heady melange of grotesque entitlement and complete and utter obliviousness.  For all the douche-tastic hijinx of the Cannonball Run stunt, at least it requires some degree of focus and precludes squandering a bunch of time on tormenting cyclists.  Again, I'm not disagreeing with either Peter Flax or Joe Lindsey exactly, but I just think it doesn't make sense to frame the Cannonball Run as an indictment of car culture in the same way it doesn't make sense to use Lucas Brunelle to frame your argument against cyclists:


Sure, I can't stand the antics of Lucas Brunelle, who to me is not so much an athlete or a daredevil as he is a purveyor of vehicular cycling porn.  At the same time, his brand of niche douchery is fairly self-contained--well, most of the time, anyway--and, ultimately, meaningless.  Similarly, if you're a cyclist, it's probably not people driving around in WRXes with "shocker" decals who are causing you consternation.  If anything, whatever your chosen stunt vehicle, at least identifying as an "outlaw" precludes the sort of entitlement the woman in the pickup feels, since you can't really feel like you "own the road" when your whole schtick is basically that you're stealing it.

So yeah, I'm not worried about the drivers making a Cannonball Run once a year so much as I'm worried about the ones making the school run on a daily basis.

Finally, with the holidays right around the corner, here's a gratuitous reminder that a tool roll makes a great gift:

There, I just finished your holiday shopping for you.