I’m happy to report the singlespeed mountain bike I put collectively for my son final week fits him fairly properly:
Forcing your youngsters to trip bikes outfitted with primitive twentieth century know-how is like making them use a telephone like this as an alternative of a smartphone–which I additionally do, after all:
Certain, they’ll’t obtain apps, however TikTok’s received nothing on Dial-A-Joke.
It’s costing me a fucking fortune although, and each my youngsters have already been suspended from faculty a number of occasions for telling spouse jokes.
Talking of being caught previously, there are too many various sorts of bikes now:
Really, that’s not truthful; a minimum of relating to various kinds of road-oriented bikes, there have been in all probability simply as many then (every time “then” was) as there at the moment are. It’s simply that it was as soon as regular for bikes from completely different builders and corporations to be barely completely different from one another, whereas now each half-degree requires a brand new mannequin title and advertising and marketing class:
I imply in case your using is greater than 50% gravel roads you clearly need the Warroad.
Or perhaps the Warbird.
Or the yet one more Salsa, such because the Cutthroat or the Fargo or the Journeyer or the Marrakesh or the Stormchaser…
(Oops! They de-gendered the Journeyman Journeyer however not the Journeyman 24!)
That’s a lotta gravel/all-road/no matter bikes, isn’t it?
Properly I’m not even completed scrolling down!
And that’s not even counting All-Metropolis, which is similar firm however names their bikes extra irreverently:
(If I ever go on the lam I’m altering my title to House Horse Tiagra.)
Or Surly, which is additionally the identical firm:
Although Surly has lengthy had a singular function in formalizing and legitimizing biking dirtbaggery. On the subject of types of bikes and advertising and marketing niches, mainly the way in which it really works is that this:
- Dirtbags cobble a brand new type of motorbike collectively out of their elements bins for some new dirtbag type of using
- Some framebuilder begins making a devoted body forthem
- Surly makes a prefab body with overly sophisticated dropouts that can settle for each single drivetrain in existence so far
- Each different firm adopts it once they see they’ll promote a dearer model that’s much less versatile
- Specialised steps in, at which level it’s formally over
See:
And naturally the newest in retro-chic, the non-aero, non-endurance, non-gravel highway bike:
What’s going to they consider subsequent?
None of that is to say there’s something flawed with any of those bikes, or these bike corporations, or with corporations providing a number of related fashions, and even with corporations providing a number of related fashions which might be disconcertingly much like the fashions supplied by each different firm. It’s, nonetheless, to say the names are actually solely making issues worse by making them extra complicated. There’s that outdated noticed about what number of phrases the Eskimos have for snow, however do we actually want sixteen completely different names for a sporty bike with respectable tire clearance? I imply positive, within the age of search optimization we’ll by no means, ever escape them, however the hair-splitting nomenclature is meaningless not solely as a result of the bikes are so related, but in addition due to “style drift”–that phenomenon by which a motorbike that was one factor ten years in the past is now one thing else altogether. Think about my singlespeed mountain bike:
Which on paper has far more in widespread with a “flat-bar gravel bike” than with something bought as a mountain bike right this moment:
(Barf.)
In truth, should you have a look at the geometry of that 2011 Specialised 29er it’s received just about the identical body angles as the present Diverge.
However I suppose that’s simply the way in which it really works. The phrase “telephone” used to imply this:
However now it means a hand-held display screen that makes you lazy and silly:
I examine the climate on my telephone as an alternative of searching the window, and if my eyes inform me it’s raining however my telephone tells me it’s not then I aspect with the telephone. (Although which may be much less about telephones and extra concerning the unusual, delusional mindset of being a bicycle owner: “Seems fairly moist however telephone says it’s not raining, I’m headed out for a trip.”)
Anyway, I shouldn’t be important of all these various kinds of redundant bikes, inasmuch as I’ve a number of bikes myself, a lot of that are similar to one another, and in reality I listing a lot of them right here in this interview with Cyclotherapy, in all probability the final individual on the planet fascinated by interviewing me.
Substack!?! Harumph. I keep in mind when that was simply known as weblog…