In what might go down as probably the most devastating blow to aggrieved city bicycling content material since Gersh Kuntzman left Twitter, British broadcaster and aggrieved city bicyclist Jeremy Vine will not be producing his aggrieved bicycling movies:
The rationale? Folks need him to die:
Jeremy Vine is totally proper that getting “crushed underneath a truck” is in actual fact a “very actual hazard” to cyclists, which he so successfully illustrated when he deliberately positioned himself in precisely the fitting place to get crushed underneath a truck:
I give Jeremy Vine two weeks earlier than he misses the eye and begins importing movies once more, similar to Gersh Kuntzman introduced to Twitter that he’s “actually not right here very a lot anymore…”
…but nonetheless appears to tweet one thing at the very least as soon as a day:
This isn’t to suggest that as cyclists we don’t have cause to be aggrieved or that our lives aren’t topic to the whims of drivers whose heedlessness is exceeded solely by their obliviousness; it’s simply that the extra you search out the poor conduct of others the extra seemingly you’re to search out it, and I definitely know that the extra deeply I immersed myself on the planet of advocacy the extra irritable I turned. And whereas Jeremy Vine’s movies might provoke the fleeting ire of people that hate bicyclists (most of them in all probability simply hate bicyclists for the 30 seconds it takes to answer angrily to considered one of his posts, then they return to not serious about bikes in any respect), I think what they actually do is provoke a extra lasting and pernicious ire in bicyclists, in that if you journey round with the Vine Mentality you too turn out to be indignant and defensive and journey round in a heightened state of aggrievement akin to psychoactive substance-induced paranoia which does nothing however gas a Vicious Cycle of Aggrievement.
Clearly this doesn’t imply you need to utterly ignore all of the stupidity and the recklessness, for the straightforward cause that should you do that you just die. Nevertheless, it does imply that the one manner you’ll be able to maintain your love of bicycling in the long run is should you discover ways to deprioritize the stupidity and the recklessness considerably except it threatens you instantly. Using round with a digicam in your head for the specific objective of documenting all of it is the precise reverse of that, and maybe that is the conclusion Vine has lastly reached.
Anyway, it’s a lot simpler and extra amusing to be aggrieved over issues that make no distinction in any respect, like watching each single discarded technological “innovation” of the final 40 years come again from the lifeless in gravel type:
This time, it’s elastomers:
Although it’s comforting to know I can nonetheless get elastomers for the suspension fork on the Y-Foil:
George was so forward of his time…
Lastly, talking of aggrieved folks, I’ve watched Path Much less Pedaled man’s replace on the Growtac shifters and whereas earlier than I used to be merely skeptical I’m now starting to imagine they would be the most needlessly sophisticated shifting system ever invented:
They appear to have engineered all of the simplicity and sturdiness utterly out of friction shifting, nice job.