So Fa So Good: The Quest For the Perfect Bike

Firstly, I recently noticed something freaky.  Look at this:

Then look at this:

Then look at this:

And then just forget about the cat because it has nothing to do with anything, sometimes I just lose my train of thought.

Anyway, whatever happens, Levi Leipheimer can take solace in the fact that he'll always be able to find work in TV adaptations of epic fantasy novels.  As for the cat, please reserve your obscene pussy diver references for the comments section or the wall of the bathroom stall in which you're currently sitting.

Secondly, Bradley Wiggins has been hit by a car:

The good news is that, according to Team Sky, Wiggins is expected to "make a full and speedy recovery."  Here's what happened:

The witness, Yasmin Smith, an attendant at the garage, told the BBC: “I was in the office and I heard a screeching of tyres and a bang.

Presumably this was followed by a stream of invectives, including multiple uses of the word "cunt" as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and even as an adverb, which is something you don't often hear.  ("That happened cuntingly," for example.)  And if the cunning linguistics weren't shocking enough, then there was the realization of who had been hit:

Ms Smith was said to be devastated when she was informed by police who it was she had hit.

Prior to that, she didn't really give a shit.

By the way, as it happens, the crash coincides with the publication of Wiggins's autobiography:

Wiggins has not ridden since the world championships in September after a year in which he became the first Briton to win the Tour and followed that with Olympic gold in London. His recent focus has been on writing his autobiography. The book is published today.

That's a pretty clever publicity stunt.  I'm going to try that when my next book, "1,000 Mouth-Watering Ham Recipes" is published.  (I'm thinking I could get hit by a pig while I'm out for a ride.)  Still, I'm not sure he needed to go through all that trouble, since I'd buy the Wiggins book based on the packaging alone:

Most celebrities engage the services of a co-author, and as you can tell from the byline Wiggins is no exception.  In any case, I hope he's up and riding again soon.

Meanwhile, this is shaping up to be a bad week for pro cyclists and crashes, because cyclocross racer Sven Vanthourenhout was also recently injured in a "dog collision:"

He didn't just roll over someone's Bichon Frisé, either.  He actually hit an entire freaking team of huskies:

"In that forest there is a 'cross course that cyclo-cross racers use. When I turned out of a lane there someone was coming with some huskies in the opposite direction. It happened so fast that I rode right into the dogs," he told Sporza. Following the accident he posted a photo of himself on Twitter showing he had broken the fork on his bike in half.

Evidently he trains in Winterfell.  (Yes, I started watching "Game of Thrones," once I start rooting around in the On Demand cable I'm like a dog in the trash and there's no stopping me.)  Of course I'm also wishing Sven Vanthourenhout well, but the crabon lining in all of this is that we get to see some sweet broken fork porn!

Nobody likes to see a fellow cyclist get hurt, but at the same time every cyclist loves looking at broken fork porn.  Once you know the rider hasn't been seriously hurt it gives you the same feeling you get from popping bubble wrap.  It's also especially satisfying for retrogrouches, since if the fork is crabon they get to tout the repairability of their own steel forks and talk about the time they were able to fix theirs with a Bic lighter and a paperclip after getting hit by a dogsled team.

Speaking of crabon forks, it gives me great pleasure to formally introduce the FABIKE, which has one:



Like Old Man Budnitz and pretty much every other aspiring bicycle mogul, FABIKE guy follows a familiar template.  First, he establishes a tangential ancestral connection to cycling which is supposed to prove it's in his DNA--and in FABIKE guy's case, this means that he had a relative who was an old-timey Fred:

(Does that jersey say what I think it says?)

Next, the would-be mogul tells us how he shopped high and low for the perfect bicycle, only to be disappointed at every turn:

("I don't like the color and the tires smell terrible!")

Then, finally, there's the revelation that nobody in the world can make a bicycle worthy of him, and that  if you want something done wrong you have to do it yourself:

("Dammit, the future of bicycle retail rests on my shoulders")

Enter the FABIKE, which can be a fixie or a road bike or a city bike:

Just like about a million other bikes that have hit the market since the Great Fixie Explosion of 2005, or about a zillion other bikes that hit the market before the Great Vertical Dropout Explosion of the end of the 20th century.

Here it is:

The secret to the FABIKE is what the inventor calls the "never-seen-before innovative sliding dropouts:"

"Did he just claim he invented the sliding dropout?" I asked myself incredulously as I "rewound" the video and played it again.  Yes he did--though to his credit he seems to have designed some of the strength and reliability out of them too.

Here's the FABIKE in motion, filmed from one of those fiber-optic "urethra cams:"

Ouch.

And here's the FABIKE being portaged by a young woman:

I wonder if he used the "urethra cam" for that too.  If he did it would explain the angle of the shot.

By the way, in addition to inventing the convertible road frame and the sliding dropout, FABIKE guy also invented the singlespeed freehub:

The BB30 crankset:

The Paul brake lever:

And the bullhorn handlebar:

Or at least he told someone else to invent them while enjoying a glass of wine:

Unfortunately, there are two problems with the FABIKE.  Firstly, while you can use it as a fixie or a road bike or a city bike, you can only ride it in a sweatsuit:

Also, there's the name, which really isn't good:

Yes, a rose by any other name blahblahblah, but we're talking about bicycle branding here, and this logo poses a major problem.  See, when you look at the logo above, the mind's impulse is to insert the missing consonant at the end of "FA," and exactly which one it inserts depends on how emotionally immature you are.  Sure, there's the obvious one, so let's just get it out of the way for all the frat boys out there.  FAG Bike.  Ha, ha, ha.  But the real rewards come when you probe deeper (stop it now!) and use some other letters, because then you get to "FAT Bike," and "FAQ Bike," and "FAP Bike" (my personal favorite), and the list goes on.  (FAN Bike?  FAX bike?  It never ends!)

Even the full name, "Flexibly-Adjustable," doesn't work, because, you know, boners and dildos.

Hey, look, what do you want from me?  Somebody needs to point this stuff out.

Anyway, I say all he needs to do is change the name to something less awkward, like maybe "The Craboner," and he's got a real winner on his hands.

Lastly, a reader informs me he might have discovered the time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork Bret's cousin:

Here's a closer look:

Though to my mind it's merely some photographer's pale imitation of the original:

It's nothing without the soul patch and the motion lines.