Awkward Exchanges: Class Conflict

Further to yesterday's post, in which I apologized for being wrong about crabonity of those $300 Mavic wheels with the $1,500 coating on them, a reader pointed out that I was wrong about something else:

Anonymous said...

I hate to call you out on being wrong again, but the US Dollar is currently stronger than the Canadian. I guess that you will have to ask for forgiveness. . . again.

October 4, 2011 12:01 AM

"What!?!," I exclaimed, spraying cognac all over my monitor. (I wasn't actually drinking cognac, mind you--I just keep a spray bottle full of the stuff near my computer and give the monitor a little "spritzing" whenever I read something surprising.) Sure enough, after consulting "the Internet," I confirmed that the United States of American Dollar™ is indeed currently more mighty than the United Provinces of Canadian Back Bacon Slice or whatever it is they're using for money up there these days. And it's not just a little more mighty, either. It's almost six pennies more mighty:

This means that, in order to be a full-blown Canadian millionaire, you only need US$945,433.32!

Needless to say, my next call was to my accountant, who confirmed that, yes, I'm only 945,000 American dollars (or, as they're currently being rebranded due to the poor state of the economy, "USA Fun Tickets") away from Canadian millionairehood. Dropping the phone, I slipped into a reverie. A wardrobe full of plaid suits, satellite TV (including all the dirty channels), a late-model Hyundai in the driveway...and best of all, I'd get free healthcare for when my Tim Hortons diet finally catches up with me!

Speaking of materialism and avarice, you've probably heard by now that a computer company named after a fruit that keeps the doctor away is about to release a new iteration of its popular "smarting phone." Now, if I know my fellow Americans--and I think I do--this means that it won't be long before the number of people waiting outside the Apple store in SoHo is at least twice the size of the Occupy Wall Street protest down in Liberty Park. In fact, I suspect a good number of the protesters will simply drag their soggy mattresses uptown and switch causes. Really, Apple should just save everyone the trouble and hold their press conference down at the protests.

Also, there's no word yet as to whether bicycles will be involved, but many readers have informed me that rival company Samsung has harnessed the awesome marketing power of the boring urban-themed bicycle to flog its own iPad-like device:

If this is for real, it has to be the most pathetically lazy fixie "collabo" to date. Really, it's barely a notch above attaching the thing with hose clamps. Then again, maybe I'm just out of it and the "half-assed collabo kludge" is the hot new trend in viral marketing. Either way, I'm looking forward to the next lackluster tablet tie-in bike, which will probably consist of a used SE Draft photographed in the general vicinity of a Motorola XOOM. What kind of idiot carries a tablet under their top tube anyway? As far as I can tell, there's only one practical application for that sort of "portaging:"

Sure, you can't see it while you're riding, but it's good to know she's there.

Anyway, given stupid advertising exercises like this, one could be excused for thinking that everyone who rides a bike is a well-to-do consumer with a fat wallet full of USA Fun Tickets. However, the truth is that's not the case--at least according to this informative pie, which was forwarded to me by a reader:

So wait, you mean cycling for transport isn't the exclusive domain of wealthy white liberal urbanites? I wonder why more people don't realize that:

(There's something David Byrne doesn't own. Can you guess what it is?)

Furthermore, the site with the informative pie also had a link to an article. This was harder to understand than the pie because there were lots of words in it, but it basically says that you can ride a bike in the United States and be a normal person at the same time:

This despite the commonly-held stereotype:

One strand of the highly adaptive Homo pedalis can be identified by telltale markings: a single leg of skinny jeans rolled up, a plaid shirt unbuttoned to alleviate perspiration and a clumsy retro helmet.

I was right with him until the part about the "clumsy retro helmet." What is a clumsy retro helmet anyway? Something like this, perhaps?

I suppose that would render a cyclist fairly clumsy. Oh, those silly urban cyclists with their retro helmets and their trendy bikes:

Anyway, if all sorts of people from all different walks of life are indeed riding bicycles as the delicious pie and the accompanying article both claim, then that can only mean one thing: class war, baby! Sure, maybe not full-blown French Revolution-style class war complete with frilly cuffs and decapitations, but at least the modern kind wherein office workers and food-delivery people are forced to interact with each other outside of a food-delivery context, as in this installment of "The Ethicist" to which I was alerted by a reader:

Frankly, I'm not sure what I would have done in that situation, though I do think they should change the name of this column from "The Ethicist" to the "Passive Aggressivist." The revolution may or may not be televised, but it will almost definitely involve lots of awkward social interactions.