When you think of smugness, chances are you think of things like taking your kids to private school in a bakfiets, engaging in bike advocacy, or making bicycle frames out of bamboo. However, the fact is that cycledom hath no smugness like a retired professional bike racer, as evidenced by
this plea from retired Classics star Johan Museeuw:
"I am the first to admit it openly, and perhaps many people will blame me that I break the silence, but it must be: virtually everyone took doping at that time,” he told the Gazet van Antwerpen.
"We must break with the hypocrisy. The only way to come out of that murderous spiral is to break the silence, the silence that continues to haunt us.”Conveniently, now that he's retired Museeuw would like to see the hypocrisy broken, which I'm pretty sure is the exact definition of hypocrisy. I feel the same way about cutting the line when I'm merging onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in a car--it's fine when I do it, but I'll be damned if I'll let anybody do it to me once I've gotten in there. (And that includes that hypocrite David Byrne, should he ever attempt to cut in front of me in the car he claims he doesn't own.) Also, while Museeuw is now quite willing to admit his doping openly, he's still silent with regard to his toupée:
Which evokes George Costanza in that toupée episode of "Seinfeld:"
The only way to come out of that murderous spiral of wearing a bathmat on your head is to break the silence, the silence that continues to haunt us. Free yourself from your fuzzy hair yarmulke, Johan Museeuw, and let your scalp shine in the bright lights of honesty and gradual baldness:
(And
that was two years ago, my head shines much more brightly now.)
Either that, or just shut up about it. Why exactly is it so important to clean up the sport anyway? Is it for the future generations of aspiring riders? If so this is a tremendous mistake, because if anything young people should be actively discouraged from becoming professional cyclists regardless of how clean or dirty the sport may be. We need people who do important stuff like building things and teaching children and helping sick people. We don't need people who ride bikes fast for flooring companies. Trust me, I know a thing or two about useless jobs, and that's because I have one. In fact, if there are three subjects on which I'm an expert, it's balding, being a hypocrite, and contributing nothing to society. Anyway, if any of my seventeen children ever tell me they want to become a professional cyclist I'll rend my garments in despair and do my best to convince them to choose a wiser career path, such as rock drumming or rapping. At least rappers sometimes go on to having movie careers, whereas the best you can hope for as a cyclist is to become
a directeur sportif like Jonathan Vaughters:
Writing openly in the Cyclingnews forum, Vaughters further said that Tom Danielson, Christian Vande Velde and David Zabriskie had doped in the past, bluntly discussed personalities on the team and discussed his standards for hiring riders, all the while relating virtually all of it to doping.Actually, maybe doping's not such a big deal after all. I mean, how much of an advantage could doping be if Tom Danielson was doing it? Maybe it just doesn't work on him. Some people are like that, you know. He's like the guy in college who keeps saying "I don't feel anything" after you all drop acid. Meanwhile, the rest of you are watching a tree doing Monty Python routines. I guess it might also help if he didn't fall off his bike at key moments. Someone needs to invent a drug that keeps riders from falling off their bikes--though I suppose it exists already and is called "glue."
Speaking of useless jobs, I'm thinking of making the move from bike blogger to bike photographer, since apparently
you can get $60 a pop for taking a picture of a valve stem:
A reader forwarded me the above photo knowing that
I'm no stranger to valve stem porn:
So for $55 (that's five dollars less than the competition) I'll send you a custom photograph of a valve stem in the orientation of your choice: 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00, or even 4:20 for the discerning "Wednesday weed" enthusiast. Also, if you act now, I'll throw in a photo of a crooked Schrader valve on a department store Mongoose
for free! Just
click here to order, and soon your home could be full of "art" that makes your visitors wonder what's wrong with you.
So basically, the Monocle requires:
--An iPhone
--A special sack for your iPhone
--An "app" that requires you to input all sorts of information about how long you want the light to be on and how often you want it to blink
--And of course a belt
Because nobody ever rides a bicycle without wearing a belt.
I'm not sure how all of that is simpler than just using any of the roughly nine million blinky lights currently on the market, but at least this way your phone's battery should be sucked dry when you find yourself stranded somewhere late at night.
By the way, when I plugged the phrase "light monocle" into a popular search engine, the first image it turned up was this:
Which is part of
a feature called "Twelve Astonishing Steampunk Monocles." This in turn immediately made me think of a photograph of Alexandre Vinokourov, which was sent to me by another reader:
Vino very badly needs an Astonishing Steampunk Monocle to complement his Olympic gold medal and his Giant Kazakh Hat of Distinction and transform him into a full-on supervillain. Then he can star as the bad guy in the next
Cipollini Bond movie, which will be called either "GoldTaint" or "OctoScranus."
Also, another potential supervillain who could use an Astonishing Steampunk Monocle are the mayors of Toronto, those Robs Fords:
Just imagine him wearing an Astonishing Steampunk Monocle. Even as it is he's well on the way to supervillainy, and with that Kubrickian stare I can't tell if he's dreaming of running down a cyclist or of devouring one of those
12-foot party subs. (Or, for the Canadians, one of those 3.65760 meter party subs.) Or maybe he's just dreaming about being made completely of butter so that he can eat himself:
("I can't believe it's not literate.")
The above photo was taken by yet another reader, and clearly butter is the perfect medium in which to render those Robs Fords, since this exquisite sculpture manages to evoke both Winston Churchill and Jabba the Hutt.
In any case, if you're a Torontoite (or Torontoan or Torontwat or Tarantula or whatever the correct demonym is) chafing under the reign of those Robs Fords (despite the fact that those Robs Fords are buttery soft), you can always move to Chicago and join the Fox River Fixies, forwarded by still yet another reader:
Date: 2012-09-01, 4:12PM CDT
Fox River Fixies is now recruiting new members to be part of an elite fixed gear club that hauls ass down Fox River trails. You must have a fixed gear bike, no single speeds and no brakes. There will be a one time membership fee of $30 which will include a Fox River Fixies T-shirt.
Thanks,
Bryan
That's silly. Everyone knows that you can haul a lot more asses with a bakfiets than you can with a fixie.
What you should not do, however, is move to Brooklyn, which has become sickeningly precious and twee:
Date: 2012-09-04, 9:11PM EDT
I walk the streets of our fine neighborhoods and every day I am totally floored by the very fine manhood that is out there. Maybe it's hormone surges that are keeping my eyes wandering but I would like to give a big shout out to all the hot dads, youngish hipster dudes, guys with dogs, guys on bikes, guys drinking beer, guys walking down the street, pushing ridiculously expensive strollers, sitting in open windows, swimming/working out at the Y, drinking fair trade coffee, waiting for the F train and just living -- you are such an amazing and welcome embellishment to this already great neighborhood and I cannot stop appreciating you.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for being fit, young or not, fashionable, good looking, friendly and well-groomed eye candy. I don't want to objectify you because so many of you seem intellectual, even if you're not actually but, I love seeing your taut skin or scruffy beards, when you stand there stroking/scratching your tight stomach (the muscular V makes me swoon) with your unironic t-shirt slightly hiked up while you chat, straddling your fixed gear bike. I have to stop myself from reaching out to touch you sometimes.
And, to those few of you who actually look me in the face and smile when you catch me checking you out -- extra special thanks for looking past the wedding ring, the kid, the dog, the bag full of crap, the harried look, the signs of having worshipped the sun unwisely in my youth and the jiggly arms/thighs/gut. You make me feel like a goddess! Oh how I wish one of you would speak to me one day to say something more meaningful than "Caramel Machiado for ______." Take the chance and say hello. You never know.
It's exactly the people described above who have transformed Brooklyn into an impossibly expensive place to live, and I only wish they'd pack up their "good spondee" and their fair trade coffee and their fixie bikes and move back to San Francisco.
And they can take their "Patti Smith shit" with them too:
Asian bicyclist w/Patti Smith shit - m4w - 49 (Manhattan Bridge)Date: 2012-09-06, 5:58AM EDT
On Monday Sept. 3, you were waiting for the light to change on Jay Street under the Manhattan Bridge. I arrived on my bike behind you and was dazzled by your beauty. Trying to think of something to say before the light changed, I noticed your t-shirt. "Is that Patti Smith?" I asked. You smiled and said yes. Then the light changed, and off you went, west on Sands St, while I (alas) was going south on Jay.
Well, I'm a Patti Smith fan and a bicyclist... We have two things in common.
Will you please be in touch? I'd be so happy to hear from you....Smith. Shit. Now that's good spondee.
