From: curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Bike peeves
Date: 14 Oct 1992 22:25:51 GMT
Organization: CS Dept. Snakepit - Do Not Feed.
NNTP-Posting-Host: cobra.cs.berkeley.edu

In article <ldoj5dINNnrj@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM> geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller) writes:
>
>I've noticed an interesting phenomenon.  The lycra-fetishists in my area
>gravitate toward expensive touring bikes, the kind known as "ten speeds"
>back in the Seventies when that was the most gears any bike had.  These
>people, with their designer lycra shorts and their silly little helmets
>with dentist's mirrors on them seldom look like they're having a good
>time when they ride: they pedal determinedly along, their faces fixed in 
>grim, dour expressions.

I resemble this remark.

>The mountain bike people, in marked contrast, not only dress differently
>-- in cutoffs and T-shirts, or maybe *no* shirts -- but they actually smile
>and look like they're enjoying themselves.  This has a lot to do with the
>fact that the tend to be regukar folks rather than PC weenies who are on
>edge because they're just itching to get into a confrontation with an
>eve-ill automobile driver.

Bah.  Mountain bikes are for weenies.

This is not the expression of some arbitrary and infantile prejudice of
mine, but a scientifically proven fact.

The Mountain Bike, you see, is the perfect '90s example of a
Consumer Trend Run Amuck.  About ten years ago, some mentally
disadvantaged folks in the High Parts (tm) decided that, for
whatever ungodly reason, they'd like to be able to climb
mountains on a bicycle.  

At this point they should have turned to Curtis's Lifestyle
Consulting (tm), which would have cheerily informed them that a
bicycle is about as useful on a mountain climb as it is when
trying to swim the English Channel, and that if they were
interested in deballasting their overinflated wallets on
Useless, Vaguely-Manly Junk, they'd do better to invent, say,
the graphite-composite piton.

But no man shall stand between a fool and the destination of
his money.  They wanted Mountain Bikes.  And they got "Mountain
Bikes."  Which are, as promised, as useless as tits on a boar
hog if you're actually interested in climbing mountains, but
do ok at going up and down low, rocky hills with lots of stumps
on.

Fine, I say.  Leave to them the wages of their sin.  But no.
The virus began to spread.  It seemed that, in order to make a
"Mountain Bike," you had to make lots of sturdy and scratch-
proof parts.  Now the people who do these things, not being
entirely devoid of neurons, decided that the best way to do
this was to cover everything with a thin layer of matte-black
plastic.  Which cracks off after a year or so, but draws the
Yuppie White Trash, the only tribe arguably as clueless as the
aforementioned Manly-Crowd, and possessed of similarly
overinflated wallets, like Flies on Shit.

So flash forward to 1992.  Every callow freshman girl from
Santa Barbara in the entire city of Berkeley (the last census
reported 15,000) has one of this accursed things, a going-away
present from her fondly Yuppie daddy.  So does every steroid-
chested Raider-jacket loose-jeans Air-Jordans B-boy, because
none of the aforementioned golden girls would know how to lock
a bicycle if their Clairol supply depended on it.

And _none_ of them would know a goddamn mountain if they fell
off it.

This, folks, is a peeve.

Future space will be reserved for the pressing issue of Lycra,
and why grown men with grown jobs feel the need to appear in
public looking like a cross between a Castro streetwalker and
Jon Bon Jovi.

c