Power Shifts – Bike Snob NYC

Well I’m back.

As is usually the case on our winter vacation, I did absolutely no bicycling and instead rode only gas-burning convenances with throttles–or turned my elder son loose on gas-burning conveyances with throttles:

One of these days I’ll bring a bike with me, but it’s not really worth it for a short family vacation, and I suppose it’s probably good for me to abstain from bicycling for a few days at least once a year, if only to prove to myself that I can do it.

I did return to the bike more or less immediately upon my return. On Saturday the weather was fair so I rode the Faggin:

And on Sunday it was frigid so I rode the Jones:

Having inventoried my bikes I’ve concluded that I’ve pruned the Bonsai tree that is my velocipedal holdings with Miyagi-like expertise:

[Are we still allowed to reference Mr. Miyagi? Probably not.]

Sure, I guess I still have more bikes than I absolutely need, but I no longer have too many, and having attained a state of perfect symmetry that can only mean another bike will arrive at any moment.

Speaking of the Jones, and cultural insensitivity, I’ve long been an outspoken critic of suspension bicycles. This has mostly earned me the ire of cyclists and online pundits, who generally say it’s because I’m stupid, or I don’t ride hard enough, or both. Yet oddly when the desert hipsters on a certain other bike blog embrace rigid bikes they’re great heroes who are striking a blow against “white supremacy in the mountain biking space:”

I guess I really am stupid. Here I was criticizing suspension bikes on the basis that they’re proprietary, time-consuming and expensive to maintain, prone to obsolescence, and ultimately wasteful. I can’t believe I never hit on the angle that suspension is racist. Meanwhile, the desert hipster blog didn’t stop there, and shortly afterwards posted a review of an electronic hub that replaces your front derailleur or something:

No doubt you’ve heard of it, as the pros have already been messing with it. It’s called the Classified Powershift, no doubt because it’s shifting power back to the indigenous people on whose land this bike bro is shredding:

It’s a real bargain, too:

Huh, there was a good five or ten minutes there when the all-terrain bicycle drivetrain had become cheap and simple whilst also offering pretty much all the gear ratios you could possibly need:

So much for that.

Fuck it, I’m getting a triple.