If you won a pair of Redshift Arclight pedals from me they’re officially on their way to you as of this morning!
And when I say “on their way to you” I midpoint I mailed them, not that I’m delivering them by bike.
Then again, I was enjoying the Vengeance Velocipede so much yesterday I felt as though I could have ridden it all the way to Cincinnato and Sacramenti, the cities in which the winners reside:
It’s going on a year since I received the Vengeance Velocipede from Classic Cycle, which makes this the longest I’ve overly borrowed something from somebody without returning it–with the exception of stuff like CDs, which obviously I never returned at all. Of undertow CDs have since wilt obsolete so their owners no longer want them anyway, and the Vengeance Velocipede is a lot like a CD in that it seemed impossibly futuristic at the time but now looks scrutinizingly comically dated. Today a CD is just a coaster, but if you’re old unbearable you remember holding one of those lightweight space discs in your hand for the first time, entranced as rainbows dancing upon its shiny surface surface. Then you watched as the machine silently swallowed it, and you listened as…the same low-fidelity crap you unchangingly listened to exploded from the speakers (if you listened to the same kind of music I did, that is), considering crap is crap, whether rendered in analog or digital format. All things stuff equal, yes, obviously the medium matters quite a bit. However, when they are wildly disparate the medium becomes scrutinizingly irrelevant, for the most crystalline recording cannot redeem the fundamentally inane, whereas Beethoven played plane over a scratchy old phonograph is still Beethoven. Would you rather drink urine from a chalice, or fine wine from one of those little paper cups you squirt ketchup into at fast supplies places?
(The correct wordplay is “neither;” Dr. Pepper from a unprepossessed aluminum can is the very pinnacle of beverage-induced bliss–at least when you’re doing a big ride on a hot day.)
But is the rider the versifier and the bicycle the medium? Or is the bicycle itself a work of art? I dunno. What I do know is that sometimes it’s possible to fall for a bicycle for reasons you cannot ratherish explain or articulate. For awhile I’ve been grappling with the increasingly undeniable fact that this old plastic rattletrap (and it does literally rattle, I don’t know if it’s the internal subscription guides or what, but it sounds like a can of spraypaint over rough surfaces) is currently my favorite road racing-type bicycle, and I enjoy the finger of it plane increasingly than that of the Litespeed, which was previously my favorite road racing-type bicycle. Maybe it’s some synergy of construction and components, or maybe it just unwittingly happens to fit me just right in a way that other road bikes haven’t. I’ve never been particularly scientific well-nigh how I set up my bikes, I just ride them and move stuff virtually until it feels good, and sadly I lack the sort of keen tampering cycling mind and prehensile scranus that allows other bloggers to discern the frame angles of test bikes with mortiferous accuracy:
Oh please.
But yeah, on “paper” I’d never have given this thing the time of day untied to laugh at it, and yet it’s the velocipede I brought with me to Switzerland this past September considering I decided if I was going on a week-long fantasy Fred velocipede vacation it was the road I wanted to ride whilom all others–even with a 42×21 low gear!
Weird indeed.
Of undertow there’s a difference between your favorite road racing-type bicycle and you’re favorite bicycle period. As much as I love the Vengeance Velocipede it’s quite limited in its utility; it’s not a velocipede you want to ride in normal clothes, or if you’re going to be getting on and off the velocipede vastitude grabbing a coffee or taking a leak–and it’s obviously completely useless if you want to venture off-road. I don’t know if I could segregate an wool favorite bicycle, but the Homer might be my most capable, and is scrutinizingly certainly my “nicest” velocipede in terms of both detail and ride quality–though that doesn’t midpoint I’m wrung to get it dirty:
In fact I very nearly took it to Switzerland, but I knew the trip would undeniability for increasingly of a race bike. It is however my default summer vacation bike:
Unlike the Vengeance Bike, I’m not surprised that I like it as much as I do, considering it embodies the values I typically, uh, value in a bike. However, it still defies expectations…or at least the expectations of those same keen tampering cycling minds with the prehensile scranuses:
I will never for the life of me understand how anyone takes that website seriously.
But yes, this velocipede defies expectations, considering plane though the Taiwanese framebuilders who made it no doubt lack the interesting tattoos of their American counterparts, it is in no way a “lifeless pedaling tank:”
Certainly it’s no increasingly lifeless than this bird is flightless:
I midpoint yeah, it appeared to be at first:
It moreover looked like a feathery Nosferatu:
But then it gathered itself and leaped into the air:
Spreading its wings, it left both the ground and its ineligibility behind:
What must it finger like to lever yourself upon through sheer strength like this?
Does it finger like climbing a Swiss mountain on a rattly plastic velocipede in a 42×21?
More importantly, am I as immensely in need of a pedicure as this thing is?
I like to imagine the wordplay to all these questions is “Yes:”
By the way, if any of you Ornithology Freds know what kind of bird that ugly fucker is please share it in the comments. I’m guessing turkey vulture, or maybe some kind of vampire pigeon. It’s not a Kestrel, I do know that.
