It’s Dirtbag Season – Bike Snob NYC

I don’t know about where you live, but here a large portion of the sun disappeared yesterday afternoon. It was scary! Incredibly there was nothing about it anywhere on the Internet, and all anybody was talking about was the “Eclipse,” which I recall was yet another mixed-material bicycle from the Aughts:

[From here.]

I had completely forgotten about the Eclipse until, well, the eclipse. But now that I’m riding a plastic-metal hybrid myself I keep seeing bikes like it everywhere:

And you know the bike industry was overly obsessed with inserting crabon tubes into metal bike frames when even Jamis was doing it:

This also sounds like a bold claim…

…ntil you think about it for a few seconds and realize “near-telepathic” means exactly the same thing as “completely not telepathic.” Like, you’re either telepathic or your not. Then they outdo themselves just a few words later with the exquisitely meaningless phrase “almost before.” Almost before! This is like saying “The magician was astonishing! He was near-telepathic, telling me what card I’d withdrawn from the deck almost before I showed it to him!” But how can you be mad at Jamis, really? it’s like holding a grudge against Mr. Rogers. Plus, they were still offering a steel hardtail mountain bike in 2005, which is nothing short of astonishing:

In fact they still offer one:

I may call this the Normcore Bike:

But it doesn’t get more normcore than Jamis–except perhaps Raleigh, and one day the two companies should battle to the death to determine who gets to wear the Crown of Adequacy forever:

As for me, shortly before the sun nearly vanished from the sky I rode a bicycle made entirely from metal:

I don’t like to say I’m “busy.” For one thing, giving off the appearance of being busy is tacky and undignified, and one should always endeavor to exude an attitude of leisure at all times. For another, compared to people who are actually important, I’m not busy at all–though for all you know I could just be pretending not to be busy in order to exude an attitude of leisure. Either way, we’re getting into that delightful time of year when it’s not too hot and it’s not too cold, so when I’m “busy” and I want to squeeze in a quick ride I can just hop on a road bike in whatever I happen to be wearing at the moment:

Though I did take an extra second or two to put on some bike-specific gloves:

And some bike-specific shoes:

Despite remaining philosophically against toe clips I have to admit I’ve become quite fond of them with the Avocet bowling shoes:

The shoes are comfortable and walkable, and yet they engage the pedal enough that there’s some actual retention involved–not that you actually need that retention, strictly speaking, but despite having embraced flat pedals for much of my riding I still like the feel of being either clipped in or tethered when riding a racing bike. Plus, the shoes don’t engage the pedals so much that you’ll fall over if you’re not able to loosen the strap in time, and the bike remains perfectly rideable even if I’m just wearing regular sneakers, which is something you can’t say for clipless pedals.

In short, it’s the ideal dirtbag road setup.

Of course the walkable semi-cleated toeclip-oriented shoe has been completely forgotten by the cycling world, and with good reason, so in order to learn more about the ones I’m using I must turn to old catalogs in order to properly date them. So far I’ve been unable to do so, and this is the closest entry I’ve found, in the 1985 catalog:

Also noteworthy that year was the introduction of the FasGrip tire, complete with the famous “Jobst Brandt leaning” photo:

The handling of that tire was almost telepathic.