Thursday, March 30, 2017

All the News That's Fit to Print, and All the Blogging That's Fit to Bin

Hey, look at that, I got an "And Finally..." in the Times!


The Daily Bike Forecast, which began in January and posts on weekday mornings by 5 a.m., shares information like bridge and path conditions; travel advisories; clothing-musts based on the weather; and Citi Bike updates from across the five boroughs.

Today's entry is especially indispensable, since not only does it include the lowdown on an NYPD ticket sting, but it also blows the lid off the correlation between hating bike lanes and having an insatiable appetite for human testicles.

Now that's hard-hitting news you can ewes.

Congratulations to me.  And TransAlt, of course, who will never recover from their association with me.

Oh, and the Times mention is even getting great comments:

So there you go.

In other news, a blogger over at Jalopnik attempted to make fun of that dumb $39,000 Bugatti bicycle:

This sort of thing should be like shooting fish in a cliché, and the bike is undeniably moronic, but still the author managed to miss the mark:

Boats and yachts I get, because you could theoretically include the car’s engine to power the thing. This is a bicycle. A fucking “special urban” bicycle WHICH! I might add, is not even intended to be used on public roads, reads the website. Well, then, what the fuck good is it?

Firstly, what does the lack of a motor have to do with anything? She mentions boats, but I'm pretty sure you could pay a fuckload of money for a sailboat.  Guaranteed some Wind Fred is tearing it up out there on a crazily expensive America's Cup replica even as I type this.

Secondly, making stupid bikes is just what car companies do.  Remember BMW's hybrid for example?


You know, the one with beefy disc brakes that weighed as much as a baby?


It's not just car companies, either.  Putting out an overpriced bike with their name on it is pretty much de rigueur for all luxury brands:


(This one's actually pretty sensible...but not at $11,000)

Not only do they get some instant press, but a few high-net worth individuals for whom decimal places are totally meaningless might see one on display while on a shopping spree and buy one, and the rest of us get to laugh.

Most importantly, why is the Bugatti bike and dumber than, say, a Bugatti Chiron, which costs three million dollars?


It has 1500hp and a top speed of 261mph, which no billionaire douchebag could possibly attain and live.  In that respect I suppose it's a subversive machine designed to kill off the global elite one by one.

Anyway, none of this would even be noteworthy if the car blogger didn't finish up her wet noodle smackdown with this nugget:

Wait, what?

"Laugh at your tiny genitals," "Put paprika in your chamois cream," "Smash it to pieces while you're chipping golf balls at the servants..."  Any of these would have been not only acceptable but at least marginally more clever.  But this kind of crap coming from a car blogger?
All else aside, I wanted to know what kind of car a blogger at Jalopnik might hit a cyclist with, as I was pretty sure it wasn't a $3 million supercar.  It didn't take me long to find out:


Regarding the headline, I do (or at least the bank does) and it isn't, I promise--and I don't even have to deal with alternate-side parking, let alone keep my car in a garage:

I live in Brooklyn now, just across the water from New York City’s densest traffic. My annual garage fee is what some Americans would call a year’s worth of rent. The garage is down the street, but I need to call at least one day in advance if I want my car. That really takes the spontaneity out of a drive.

Sounds great.  So what is this car?

I daily a 2002 Mercedes-Benz C32 AMG, and, charmingly, this is the car that got me into cars when I was a kid. You know, the weird C-Class AMG. The one with the supercharged 349 horsepower V6 instead of a V8.

Wait, you "daily" it?  Not if you have to call a day in advance to use it you don't. At best you every-other-daily it.

So how is all of this possibly worth it?  Well, I guess it helps when your father gave you the car:

This little sedan used to belong to my dad and we had great talks about what made it special, why he chose this over the E46 BMW M3. I grew up watching him. I watched him park in the spots as far away from the grocery carts as possible. I watched him go on Sunday morning drives when nobody else was awake. I watched him wash it in the dead of night in the garage after the state issued water regulations in the face of a drought.

Ah yes, a hand-me-down Mercedes.  It all makes sense now.  Not only does it explain how a blogger can justify the expense of garaging a car in the most transit-rich city in the country, but it also explains the joke about hitting people, since finding that sort of thing funny is usually born of a sense of entitlement.  Not that I think she would actually go hitting people with her Mercedes (I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here), but you can be damn sure that she's emanating contempt in your direction from the safety of her hand-me-down luxury car and nodding her head approvingly at every anti-bike tabloid screed.

Anyway, naturally a Twitter discussion about this shitty joke ensued, which predictably prompted the editor-in-chief of Jalopnik to accuse the over-sensitive cyclists of not understanding their sophisticated humor sensibility:
Putz.

Hey, I know it's tough to make the monthly payments on that Kia Sportage, but maybe squeeze a few more bucks out of the budget to hire some slightly better writers.

As for the Bugatti, rest assured a request is pending:


I'll let you know as soon as I receive it.



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