Sock It To Me: Filling In the Blanks

I enjoy cartoons. This is why I always make sure to compose an entry for the New Yorker's weekly cartoon caption contest. For example, here's what I've come up with for this week's installment:
I don't actually send them in, and even though this one would almost certainly win, the sense of self-satisfaction I get from the act of composition is ample reward. I may be many things, but I'm no sandbagger.

In any case, given the nature of my hobby, you can imagine how pleased I was to find my blog referenced in a recent "Yehuda Moon & The Kickstand Cyclery" cartoon:

Of course, the best part of receiving an Internet mention is the barrage of negative comments that inevitably ensue, and in this respect the Yehuda mention did not disappoint. While an Internet "nube" might cringe, as a seasoned blog "curator" I know that there's no surer sign of online success than a bunch of commenters talking about how much you suck. However, that doesn't mean I'm not open to some constructive criticism. For example, one commenter was apparently dismayed by my foul language:

Widsith

My problem with his blog is the language he often uses. I can see only so many examples of foul language before my distaste for it overwhelms any pleasure I might otherwise take in whatever I'm reading. Recently I read an interview with him about the book he wrote, and even in the interview he couldn't keep his language clean, which just reminded me of why I don't read his blog.

Yesterday, 11:40:27

Frankly, this comment inspired me. Unfortunately, instead of inspiring me to clean up my act, it instead inspired me to find the filthiest reference I could, and while I didn't have all day I think I did pretty well under the circumstances. Here's what I came up with:

I'm sure commenter "Widsith" will be disgusted with me instead of with the staggering 164 people who gave the "Hot Karl" act a "thumbs up" on Urban Dictionary, which as far as I'm concerned exemplifies much of what's wrong with our society.

Also, I don't know where "Widsith" has been, but the Yehuda Moon cartoon can get pretty "blue" too. Just click to enlarge:

Even I couldn't bring myself to reproduce that last panel. Frankly, the cartoonist should be ashamed of himself.

My other favorite kind of negative comment is when someone tells a rambling story about how "over" my blog they are:

SDMSS

Bike Snob NYC sits in my RSS reader. I used to let 2 or 3 collect before trying to slog through them. Then 5 or 6... 12 or 13...

Eventually the tally would go up to 25 or so before I would mark them as read without bothering to read them. I just checked, my Bike Snob feed unreads are are now at 14. Time to remove that feed.

Yesterday, 16:01:01

That was a truly "epic" story of RSS feed "curation"--sort of like listening to an elderly person describe cleaning out the fridge. "First I took out the cottage cheese. Then I checked the expiration date. It had expired six months ago. So I threw it in the trash. Next I opened up the crisper. Uh-oh, celery was wilted. Threw that in the trash. After that I moved on to the egg tray..."

Clearly SDMSS leads a wildly exciting life.

Speaking of thrilling stories, I was visiting Urban Velo recently, where I learned that a new "poetic murder mystery" called "Verse" has dropped, and it's all about a "young bike messenger poet" who discovers a lost manuscript. Needless to say, I eagerly checked out the first episode, which I highly recommend you do not do, since the nearly 10 minutes it will take would be much better spent cleaning out your fridge or deleting your unread RSS feed subscriptions:



Instead, I'm more than happy to do your dirty work for you by summarizing it, which is just the sort of selfless act the people who read Yehuda Moon fail to appreciate. (I like to think of it as taking a "Hot Karl" for the team.) Anyway, first we meet our protagonist, a hopelessly out-of-style bike messenger on a mountain bike of all things who nevertheless executes a nearly flawless salmon-to-schluff transition:

Next, he goes upstairs to drop off his package, where he finds the recipient not only completely bald but also thoroughly dead:

(Filmmaker may have tipped his hand too soon, that mole looks highly suspicious and possibly cancerous.)

This he takes as an opportunity to engage in what people in the entertainment industry often refer to as "acting:"

(Method acting: "When I get freaked out my scalp itches.")

After which he calls 911 and actually says, "Yes, hi, 911?," as though he's calling a friend's house, or like he's tried to call 911 in the past and been told, "No, sorry, wrong number--this is 912."

Then, he examines the package, which has suddenly become...mysterious:

So mysterious that it compels him to ride around and "act" more:

(Method acting: "I purse my lips tightly and look askance when I contemplate recent events.")

At this point, our protagonist is faced with a moral dilemma: Does he violate bike messenger ethics and open the mysterous package? Or does he simply turn it over to the authorities, forget about it, and finish eating his panini?

The answer is an emphatic "both." (Waste panini not, want panini not.) By the way, by this time I noticed the cloyingly folksy Lilith Fair music in the background was describing what was happening--"Open it, open it now," the singer warbled--and from that moment forward as hard as I tried I could not tune it out.

Anyway, it turns out that the envelope contains a manuscript, and once home our protagonist retires to the comfort of his shoe pile in order to read it with his lips moving:

(La-Z-Boys are "out;" shoe piles are "in.")

Realizing that he's on to something, he puts on his best shirt and executes a suicidally salmon-tastic left turn off of 4th Avenue and directly into oncoming traffic on the way to the Strand bookstore:

Where he meets his love interest:

Cunningly, he fools her with the old "I'm going to have you look up something on the computer while I ogle your cleavage" technique:

This is a tried-and-true bookstore staple almost as common the old " 'Hot Karl' in the travel book aisle" approach--which is why you should always avoid the travel book aisle at the Strand, no matter how badly you think you need a used "Lonely Planet" travel guide containing hopelessly outdated information about Katmandu.

Soon they get to talking, during which she explains to him that she's working on an MFA in poetry at Columbia University, which means that once the Strand fires her for flirting with the customers she will remain unemployed for the rest of her days:

Having secured himself a date, he consults a popular search engine for some vital information:

Which prompts him to send an email to Old Man Exposition, who reads that email out loud to us from the comfort of his own shoe pile:

Then he meets his love interest's lecherous professor, played by an actor who wakes up every morning cursing the fates because Paul Giamatti "made it" and he didn't:

The professor then recites for our protagonist a poem about "shants," which he acts like he's listening to with profound interest:

Here the first episode ends, but rest assured it will be continued:

At which point we will presumably learn whether or not our protagonist actually manages to get "laid," as well as whether or not the mole killed the bald man, or if we're just leaping to conclusions because the mole has hair growing out of it and our society always assumes the guy with the beard is the villain.

Maybe the killer was Colonel Mustard, in the travel book aisle, with the tube sock.

Working on Our Night Moves: I Don't Need Society

Every so often, an artist comes along who changes his or her respective medium forever. In painting, Pablo Picasso showed the world that you could charge millions of dollars for pictures of colorful cubes that sort of look like stuff. In music, Charlie Parker invented "bebop," thereby creating the "Hipster 1.0." And in modern dance, Pee-Wee Herman's "Tequila" had a greater transformative impact on the artform than the work of Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshinkov, Bill T. Jones, and Alvin Ailey combined.

Now, the relatively new artform of the fixed-gear video has had its own cubism/bebop/"Tequila" moment, for a reader recently alerted me to "The Masked Night Rider" and it's abundantly clear to me that the world of not coasting in tight pants will never be the same again:



The phrase "game changer" gets bandied about a bit too cavalierly these days, but if any film ever warranted its use this is it. In fact, "game changer" is an understatement, as this takes a quiet game of golf and changes it into some sort of intergalactic LSD space hockey, only the players are society and the puck is your mind. Like most truly great art, it will probably be years before the masses are "hip" to its greatness, and in the meantime it will only be appreciated by a discerning few. Also, like all great cinema, "The Masked Night Rider" is rife with symbolism. Indeed, to address this film's significance within the confines of a single blog post is to do the artist a grave disservice, but pending completion of my dissertation on this magnum faux-pus it will have to suffice.

"The Masked Night Rider" opens with a close-up shot of the protagonist:

You don't have to have gone to a top-notch liberal arts school [read: young adult sleep-away camp] like Bard College to know that any time you see a skinny white person with long hair and a beard, he's supposed to be Jesus. Here, our Jesus is sobbing, most likely because he bears the suffering of all humankind, or possibly because he is afflicted with a severe case of beard lice.

In order to alleviate this suffering (or painful beard lice-induced itching), Jesus turns to the pipe:

The filmmakers are deliberately ambiguous about what Jesus is smoking here. Is it marijuana? PCP? Crack? Some sort of homeopathic beard lice remedy that involves smoking dead beard lice? In any case, we don't know, and we don't need to know, for the pipe represents the moment of doubt on the cross when Jesus cried, "My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"

It is at this moment that the film turns the Judeo-Christian ethos on its ear, for instead of embracing his fate our Jesus rejects it. Instead, he dons a mask, thereby paradoxically revealing himself to be the Anti-Christ:

The Anti-Christ then whips out his iPod and cues up some shitty music:

He is all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse astride a "fixie" steed, and he engages in a pretend gunfight with a hypocritical "society," embodied by the twinkly lights of a distant city:

Immediately afterwards, he masturbates on a tree, which is a commentary on the cultural stereotype of the tree-hugging (or in this case tree-copulating) cyclist:

Then he has a "hipster" slapfight with a bunch of other hipsters, including Jack White from the White Stripes:

These "hipsters" also represent society, against which he rebels relentlessly but from which he is ultimately and tragically unable to totally disengage. This final message may be the key to the film's greatness--unwilling to pander to its audience, it is unafraid to confront the crushing power of conformity and a society so tenacious that even our "fixies" cannot free us from it.

Or, if you prefer, the guy in the mask is "tripping balls" at this point, and he's hallucinating having a fight with his beard lice.

Meanwhile, speaking of scathing commentary, a commenter on yesterday's post did not appreciate my treatment of Australia:

Samuel said...

bit too rough on australia for my liking. at least they have genuine political choice including at least one socially progressive party, unlike two-party state USA

October 19, 2010 4:46 AM

I thought it was clear that I wasn't making fun of Australia's government so much as I was making fun of my own ignorance concerning Australia's government--of which, not having gone to a fine institution of higher education such as Bard College, I am totally ignorant. In any case, I apologize to Samuel as well as to the good people of Australia, and in particular to their prime minister, Mick Dundee:

As well as his lovely First Lady, Yahoo Serious:

I understand that when those naked hot-tubbing shots of Ms. Serious surfaced it was the biggest political scandal to hit Australia since Peter Garrett finally admitted that whole rash of bed burnings was actually a hoax.

Also, in that very same post I suggested that an artfully-"curated" Australian cockpit may have been a kangaroo-shooer, and an Australian confirms that this is entirely possible, since the cockpit in question looks not unlike an acutal product called the "ShuRoo:"

Apparently, if you're Australian and you don't have a ShuRoo, you hate your family:

Would you do anything to protect your family?

Why take the chance of potential injury to your family or being stranded with a damaged vehicle? ShuRoo has been helping protect motorists from wildlife hits since 1986. The unique signal emitted by ShuRoo cannot be heard by humans, but to wildlife it’s as loud as a police siren. By taking advantage of their high frequency danger alert system in this way, ShuRoo warns animals of your approach and helps prevent a collision that could potentially harm you, your passengers and your vehicle. Not only does ShuRoo protect you and your family, it also protects our wildlife.

As for those ultra-high frequency siren-like sounds emitted by the ShuRoo, you can sample them here.

If you heard any of that, you may be a kangaroo, and if you actually liked it you're probably smoking the psychedelic beard lice.

But kangaroos aren't the only danger Australians must confront on a regular basis. They must also contend with entire schools of "bike salmon," as shown in this "alleycat" video which was forwarded to me by another reader:



It's remarkable how charmingly archaic this video looks after the avant garde brilliance that is "The Masked Night Rider." Just some of its quainter elements include the ultra-narrow bars despite the wide streets and apparent lack of traffic:

The checkpoint attendant with the popped collar;

Gratuitous and pointless "salmoning:"

And, of course, showing off your skidding technique the moment a camera is pointed at you:

(Triple "douche-clamation" point.)

All of this is flimsily tied together by the score, which consists of the dated, prefab major label rebellion of Rage Against The Machine. Clearly, a truly "vintage" soundtrack like this would have been far more appropriate.

Indeed, so far-reaching is the "shock of the new" caused by "The Masked Night Rider" that other member of the "fixerati" clearly feel threatened. For example, Stelvio/SUV motorpace guy has, in a clear act of desperation, released "behind the scenes" photos to make his own production seem more impressive:

Apparently you need a wardrobe department and access to a motor pool in order to use a fixed-gear bicycle, and among the "fixerati" taking simple ride is now more logistically difficult than helping somebody move. It's sort of hard to blame them, though, since people seem increasingly compelled to complicate even the simplest ride. Consider quarterback Tom Brady, who another reader informs me has been taken to task for not wearing a helmet while taking a leisurely bike ride with his wife and son:

Sure, wearing a helmet is a good idea, but something tells me that with little Jack on the scooter dictating the pace at the front of the peloton and a supermodel bringing up the rear that things aren't all that likely to get out of hand. Unless Jack's been watching too many Australian alleycat videos, I think his father's knit hat should offer more than enough protection for this ride, and it's sort of sad that Brady is getting a hard time for riding a bike with his son while his fellow football players are getting pulled over drunk in their Land Rovers. Thanks to society, we now live in a country in which it's considered crazy to get anywhere near a bicycle without donning body armor. I'm surprised he's not getting crap for riding without a ShuRoo as well.

No wonder "The Masked Night Rider" is so upset.

Hands Off: From "Do Me" to "Do It For Me"

Ever since Monday's post, I've been receiving criticism which basically amounts to, "What's so wrong with having a really expensive bicycle and not knowing how to change the inner tube?". The answer to this question is, of course, "Nothing at all." After all, this is America--Canada's star-spangled goatee--and dadgummit, it's our Lobster-given right to buy ourselves expensive toys and suck at playing with them. No, I'm not so much troubled by people who are baffled by their own crotch-candy as I am by what this portends for our culture as a whole.

Over the years, we've become increasingly tolerant of many things, and for the most part this is good. Revealing swimming costumes, nudity on television, borderline pornographic advertisements for underpants--pretty much all the nudity-related stuff is a boon for our society. However, we've also become tolerant of things that are not so good, and these things include obesity, prescription drug use, letting our pets take over the house, paying professional "dog whisperers" lots of money to teach us how to seize control of our houses back from our pets, the music of Billy Joel being played in public places, and just Generally Not Knowing How To Do Stuff. And it's that last item--Generally Not Knowing How To Do Stuff--that is exemplified by the person on the $10,000 bike who cannot fix a flat.

"So what?," you may ask. "This is America--Canada's red, white, and blue udder--and I don't have to know how to do anything I don't feel like doing." This is true. For example, I have no idea how to express a cat's anal glands, I have no intention of learning, and no self-important cat blogger is going to tell me otherwise. Furthermore, the guy I encountered on the road seemed to be having a lovely day despite his inability to fix his flat, whereas I, a person who can fix a flat with relative ease, was the person who was vexed. Is this because the clueless allow their problems to become the problems of others, or is it simply that I was the one with the problem to begin with, in that I'm too judgmental? Maybe neither, or maybe both. Plus, it's not like he made me express his cat's anal glands for him. But I still maintain that our laissez-faire attitude towards being laissez-faire has far-reaching implications.

For example, recently I was reading an article The New Yorker (in the bathroom of course, and I'm pleased to say I can now go to the bathroom all by myself) about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg and Facebook are now the subject of a feature film called "The Social Network," which was written by Aaron Sorkin. As it happens, Sorkin knew next to nothing about Zuckerberg or Facebook when embarking on the project, and here's what he had to say in the article:

Sorkin said that creating Zuckerberg's character was a challenge. He added that the college students were "the youngest people I've ever written about." Sorkin, who is forty-nine, says that he knew very little about social networking, and he professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media. "I've heard of Facebook, in the same way I've heard of a carburetor," he told me. "But if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn't know how to find it."

First of all, unless Sorkin drives a '75 Dodge Dart his car almost certainly does not have a carburetor; it has a fuel injector. Still, I can forgive Sorkin for not knowing this, since his movie is not about cars; it's about Facebook. However, apparently Sorkin didn't know anything about that either, nor did he know anything about Zuckerberg--and what little he did know, he didn't like. "Creating Zuckerberg's character was a challenge," he explains. Of course, this would probably have been less of a challenge if he knew anything about his subject. Shouldn't you have to know a little about something before you write a movie about it? I'm not sure how fair it is to take somebody who never sought to be a public figure to begin with, basically pull their character out of your ass, place it on a pedestal of ignorance, and cement it into the popular consciousness. It short-changes the audience, the subject, and indeed everybody--except Sorkin, whose scripting fees will doubtless keep him in luxury vehicles of whose mechanical workings he can afford to be blissfully unaware.

Of course, maybe none of this matters, and it's possible the movie will be good anyway. After all, Shakespeare was probably not an expert on Danish politics, but he was a good writer, and so "Hamlet" turned out OK. This may be the case here too, and maybe when it comes to popular entertainment just knowing how to write is enough. At the same time, though, when power and cluelessness combine the results can be lame or disastrous, depending on who and what is involved. This certainly happens quite often here in America--or, if you prefer, Mexico's faux-hawk--where if you're successful enough people will let you do pretty much anything. There's simply a point at which we all end up paying for the whims of the clueless, whether it's in the form of stupid laws, crappy movies, idiotic products, or just dumb articles about the "bike culture" by people who haven't ridden since elementary school.

Of course, this isn't always the case. Consider hip-hop impresario Kanye West, who, as a reader informs me, makes "awesome decisions in bike stores!!!"

Unfortunately, Twitter's 140-character limit precludes West from sharing exactly what his latest awesome decision was, and so we have no way of knowing if it was about bikes, or if it was just an awesome decision about something else that he happened to make while browsing a bike store. For example, he could have decided to buy a brake for one of his fixed-gears, which would be awesome, or he could have decided to invent a pair of glasses that can reheat food just by looking at it, which would also be awesome. Either way, everybody wins--unless you're in the microwave business.

Actually, I suspect that West may have purchased a Rivendell or similar fop chariot, since gratuitous lugs and the canvas-and-buckles trappings of retro-grouchery would better complement his personal aesthetic. This might or might not be awesome, depending on your feelings about stem height. But what would not be awesome would be deciding to buy this "bike shelf," which a number of readers have forwarded to me:


It can hold your "fixie" and your pretentious library of eight books:

If I were to visit somebody's house and they had made something like this themselves, I'd probably think, "Huh, that's clever." However, we live in the era of Generally Not Knowing How To Do Stuff, which is why this summer day camp woodworking project sells for $300 in "Walnut" and $275 in "Ash." Of course, no overpriced shelf is complete without a backstory, and here it is:

After visiting friends in both New York and San Francisco, furniture maker Chris Brigham realized that there was very little effort going towards proper bike management and maintenance coast to coast.

Apparently, just because Chris Brigham's friends in New York and San Francisco don't practice "proper bike management" (whatever that is), he has concluded that, as a nation, we are woefully bereft of bike storage methods--this despite the fact that the Performance catalog alone features a bewildering array of hooks, hangers, and poles that will allow you to hang a bicycle at pretty much every conceivable angle and from every conceivable surface, whether it's your living room wall or the trunk of your minivan. (Minivans are also known as "charity ride team cars.") Or, for the "minimalist," you can even walk into the Container Store and buy a bike hook for less than that stupid MASH pencil case.

Still, in terms of functionality for your dollar, this is still a better deal than that $275 pretentious hitchin' post from way back in 2008:
In the world of pretentious bike management, that was definitely the "OG."

But the era of Generally Not Knowing How To Do Stuff isn't all bad, since it also saves you from the effort of thinking for yourself. For example, I don't even have to know how to feed myself anymore. Instead, I can visit VeloNews, where they'll tell me exactly what I should be eating, right down to the very morsel:

165-lb. male cyclocross racer

Meal Plan for 90 minutes of high-intensity training
Late afternoon training

Daily: 3,300 calories: 520 g carbohydrate, 130 g protein, 77 g fat


Breakfast
Oatmeal, cooked, 1 cup
Wheat germ, 3 Tbsp.
Orange juice, 8 ounces
Raisins, 2 Tbsp.
Banana, 1 small
Yogurt, plain, 8 ounces

Snack
Apple, 1 medium
Almonds, 24

Lunch
Turkey, 4 ounces
Low fat cheese, 1 ounce
Whole grain bread, 2 slices
Pasta salad, 1 cup
Vegetable salad, 1 cup

Pre-ride snack
Yogurt, 8 ounces
Granola, ½ cup (one-half)
Peach, 1 medium

Immediately before ride
Gel, 1 packet

During ride
Sports drink: 32 ounces per hour
3 Carbohydrate blocks at 45 minutes

Recovery snack
Energy bar, 1medium sized
Sports drink, 20 ounces

Dinner
Salmon, 6 ounces
Wild rice, 1.5 cups
Steamed asparagus, 1 cup
Olive oil, 1 tbsp.
Berries, 1 cup

A 140-lb cyclocross racer could reduce this menu to 2,700 calories by:

reducing the breakfast juice from 8 ounces to 4 ounces
eliminating the pasta salad at lunch
reducing the granola at the afternoon snack from one-half to one- fourth of a cup
Reducing the salmon dinner portion from 6 ounces to 4 ounces
Reducing the wild rice portion from 1.5 cups to two-thirds of a cup
Consuming 24 ounces of a sports drink per hour.

This menus is intended as a general outline. Calorie, carbohydrate, protein, and fat requirements are individual to each cyclocross racer based on their current body weight and that day’s training.

I will admit though that I was puzzled by the "snack" section, which raises more questions than it answers. In particular, it calls for a "medium apple." But what if I can't find a medium apple? And just what is a medium apple anyway? What if I buy an apple that's too large or too small because my sense of apple perspective is skewed? Also, what kind of apple are we talking about? McIntosh? Granny Smith??? Crab?!? And what if I don't want to race cyclocross? What if I want to ride up the Stelvio on a "fixie" and skip-stop my way down it? What kind of apple should I be snacking on then?

I guess I'll just go back to eating Ho Hos and sobbing.

Good News for the Poor: You Can Afford to Have Nothing!

Like many people, when I discover something new and exciting I tend to immerse myself in it, almost to the exclusion of everything else. For example, when I discovered the bold and color-coordinated world of fixed-gear freestyling I spent hours and hours practicing barspinzzz in parking lots, under elevated expressways, and on municipal property. Also, I just found out that George Michael was in this underground industrial band back in the 80s, and since then I haven't listened to anything else. Similarly, now that my eyes have been opened to The New Minimalism (not all the way opened, mind you; we minimalists tend to go half-lidded through life) I simply can't get enough of it. I'm now convinced that adopting a fashionably minimalist lifestyle is the key to enlightenment, and fortunately for me, there's paradoxically tons of minimalism out there.

By the way, minimalists should not be confused with "Manimalists," which are of course obsessive fans of the TV show "Manimal:"

Anyway,, my newly-adopted minimalist siblings have been criticized for, among other things, really just being a bunch of rich people with a penchant for Apple products. This couldn't be further from the truth. Consider this post from minimalist blog "mnmlist," which explains that "minimalism isn't just for the affluent:"

First of all, if you didn't figure it out from the above, if you're not "middle class or above" I regret to inform you that, yes, you're poor. This means that, even if you've been living happily and getting along fine despite occupying that income bracket just below what some sociologists and economists variously and somewhat arbitrarily call the "middle class," then you are now poor and should begin acting accordingly. An essential tenet of minimalism is having an overly simplistic worldview, so for the convenience of all minimalists if you're poor please turn to a life of crime and pack your government-subsidized home with lots of unnecessary crap immediately.

If you're still not sure of your class, here's a quick checklist you can use to see if you indeed fit the minimalist definition of "poor:"

1) You own a computer marketed by a company other than Apple;

2) You own a cellular telephone marketed by a company other than Apple;

3) You don't feel the need to turn what you do with your disposable income into a philosophy because you don't have any disposable income;

4) You live someplace other than New York City or San Francisco.

In any case, once you've started acting like the poor person you are, you can then begin to redeem yourself and experience the joys of minimalism by following these simple instructions:

Eliminating unnecessary possessions also means you’ll need a smaller home, which will save on rent and heating/cooling. Buying fewer things means less debt. Spending time with loved ones or doing things you love means you spend less. All of these things are good whether you’re wealthy or not.

It’s true that the poor are often thought of as not having the luxury of even thinking about simplifying, or minimalism. They’re too worried about putting food on the table, or where the rent is coming from, or how to avoid creditors until the next paycheck. And there’s a lot of truth in that. But it doesn’t have to be true: anyone can pause, breathe, and decide to live differently.

Say what you will about minimalists, but if it wasn't for them who would tell the poor people of the world that they should live in smaller homes and buy fewer things? And can you believe that some poor people don't even think about how they can simplify their lives? What's with that anyway? The poor are so self-involved! Consider the people who live in these houses in Africa:

Do they really need all that thatching? Isn't it a bit excessive? They should really consider more minimalist roofing options. Why can't those three families just become minimalists, stop wasting thatching, and start sharing a single home like this?

Not only is it minimalist, but it's also "green," so those poor people can finally start helping us to "save the Earth."

Or what about these people in the Amazon?

(Is this boat really necessary?)

I bet that big house is cluttered with nets, blow guns, and bows and arrows. Can't they just downsize to something more elegant and "sustainable," give all their hunting equipment away on Craigslist, and consolidate by buying the new Apple iSpear? Seriously, if they can only count up to five then why do they need so much stuff?

If only poor people would put more thought into their lifestyle, the world would be a better and more minimalist place. Meanwhile, while poor people are frittering their lives away by working to feed themselves and their families, minimalists are reaching levels of self-denial that would amaze even the most devout yogi. Believe it or not, some of them aren't even buying iPads:

Just think about that while you're slurping thin gruel in your straw hovel.

Of course, a key component of minimalism is the bicycle, and almost all minimalists either own one or plan to own one. However, don't confuse this with actually riding the bicycle, for in the minimalist universe bicycle ownership is less about riding the bicycle and more about bragging about not using a car. Consider the author of the "mnmlist" blog, who recently moved to San Francisco and went "car-free:"

We’ve gone car-free, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s almost impossible to do on Guam, for many reasons, though we did manage to go car-lite while we were there. Today, we walk and take transit everywhere, and it’s easy. We plan to get bikes soon.

Like Manhattan, San Francisco is one of those places where in many ways it's actually more difficult to own a car than not to own one. In this sense, bragging about being "car-free" in San Francisco is kind of like bragging about being "goose down parka-free" in Miami. Meanwhile, the "mnmlist" couldn't be "car-free" in Guam (instead opting to be "car-lite," which I guess means he didn't drive to the bathroom), which is a tropical island of only 209 square miles:

Even the most feeble "fixter" could probably cover the entire island on an IRO in a couple of days. You'd think in the interest of minimalism he could have at least traded his car for a scooter.

Meanwhile, as it happens, a number of readers have informed me that the BBC ran an article about minimalism yesterday:

The article profiles minimalists like Kelly Sutton:

By now, the "minimalist" pattern should be familiar: a person who lives in a trendy neighborhood with thousands of dollars of designer electronics renounces a bunch of stuff nobody uses anymore anyway. He also has a website, on which he says it's impossible to own nothing, even though it's entirely possible:

Then he lists his many possessions and reveals that he's getting rid of everything that's not expensive, trendy, or both:

He has sold his Fuji track bike and accessories, though, which could indicate that either his minimalism is about to reach the next level of austerity--or, more likely, he's about to buy a Mini Cooper. You'll notice he's also sold all the books about sex and marriage, having finally come to terms with the fact that he'll never get "laid" again.

Meanwhile, the other guy in the article is a professional couch-surfer:

"Back in the day," this form of minimalism used to be known as "freeloading." He's also only just realizing things about records that the rest of the world figured out in like 1986:

"Things like records snap and wear down over time. It's upsetting."

Though it is worth noting that records tend to last quite a lot longer when you have a home instead of a backpack.

Speaking of minimalism, I recently took delivery of a non-minimalist bicycle for testing:

It is an Electra Ticino 8D, and here is what it looks like when it is assembled:

I will share with you my impressions of this bicycle once I've spent some time with it, but my first ride was a "comfy" one, and I felt like an utter dandy despite my slovenly attire:

In the meantime, should you see me "palping" this genteel bicycle about town, please feel free to greet me in the traditional "minimalist" manner:

(Minimalists greet each other by holding aloft their iPhones.)

One thing I will say about the Ticino is that it provides for a rather upright riding position--though not quite as upright as an ElliptiGO, as photographed by "Daddo One:"

I wish the minimalists would move on to these and leave bicycles alone.