The older I get the more I realize how little I know. This is especially true when it comes to bikes and cycling. In fact, most of what I know I’ve learned from the comments section of my own blog.
For instance, yesterday I mentioned that road rage incident, and I had no idea the bunnyhopper was none other than the U23 Criterium National Champion:
Moreover, I had no idea there was even still such a thing as criteriums. I thought the last gasp of criterium racing as a discipline was the fixed-gear crit, a short-lived craze that ended much like this video:
From there on in it was gravel gravel gravel, and that was that. But I suppose criterium racing must still be a thing, even though almost nobody’s even interested in it anymore. Kind of like canned tuna:
Or this blog.
Oh, and speaking of road rage…:
Why is there not a mandatory waiting period and an Automated Mental Health Background Check for anyone purchasing a German luxury automobile?
Anyway, at first this story sounds like your garden variety road rage incident:
Vernon shouted that the bicyclist “don’t live on that street” and they had “no reason to tell her to slow down.” The male bicyclist indicated he was going to obtain the license plate number of the Mercedes, prompting Vernon to pull into a driveway, re-enter the roadway and accelerate backward toward the pair. The bicyclists scuttled into another driveway to avoid being hit. The bicyclists filled out sworn statements for the police.
But it soon takes an unexpected turn:
When an officer showed up at Vernon’s house and tried to place her in handcuffs, she tried to flee into her house. The officer attempted to grab her hand, but she hit a wall and fell to the ground. She continued to try to pull away from the officer. She told him she needed to use the restroom and “soiled her pants.”
She left skid marks at both the scene of the confrontation and the scene of the arrest.
Something else I didn’t know until I read my own comments section was that Jan Heine, the EF Hutton of bicycle tires (that’s a reference for the canned tuna-eating generation), says TPU tubes are the fastest:
Though if you’re not sure whether you should use butyl tubes or TPU tubes you could always use PTU tubes and split the difference:
And no, I’m not making fun of him for making a typo. I make like 20 typos on a good day. Look, what do you even want from me? You can have a post every day, or you can have no typos. Think of this as the butyl tube of cycling websites: far from perfect, but at least it gets the job done.
But yes, Jan Heine says TPU is faster than everything, even tubeless, so that’s it, case closed, he’s the last word on everything, don’t question it:
The performance benefits of TPU tubes are real and borne out in real-road tests. If anything, TPU tubes perform even better in the real world, with a rider on the bike, than in lab tests on steel drums—a phenomenon also observed with supple tires. TPU tubes are as fast as ultra-thin latex tubes. TPU tubes are significantly faster than butyl tubes or tubeless setups. (They are also stronger, lighter and offer better ride feel than butyl tubes.) Based on these results, we went ahead with the development of our Rene Herse TPU tubes, confident that they would provide a real-world benefit for us and our customers.
Though if you read enough Jan Heine you know he’s got a real problem with steel drums, which frankly seems unwarranted:
What, you’ve got a problem with the sweet sounds of calypso and being aurally whisked away to the Caribbean or something?
Jeez, Jan, lighten up.
Meanwhile, it’s Classics Season, which marks the start of the racing season, and also the European protest season:
So be sure to consult Jan Heine for the best way to glue yourself to the cobbles this year:
Come on, everyone knows you’ve got to let the glue cure for at least 24 hours:
According to the race’s organisers Golazo, Mouton had intended to glue himself to the cobblestones as the peloton approached – in a similar manner to the Scottish climate activists who briefly halted the men’s road race at the 2023 Glasgow world championships – but failed to do so in time, and was ejected from the course by security, moments before the riders reached him.
Mouton, indeed.
But at least he was wearing a helmet.
At this point, having confessed to you just how little I know, I should probably also confess that I’ve never seen the film “A Sunday In Hell.” I admit this is like being a film buff and never having seen “The Godfather,” or being Italian and never having seen “The Godfather.” However, I am finally getting around to remedying that, and have been watching it in pieces on a popular video hosting website. Anyway, if you’ve seen the movie, that year’s Paris-Roubaix also began with a protest:
In this case they were print shop workers:
“They’re demonstrating against one of the sponsors of the race, the newspaper Le Parisien Libere, and they are protesting against the redundancies of the operators on linotype as a result of automation. It’s a long-standing labour conflict – and the organisers of the race are not entirely unprepared.“
50 years later and half of what you read hasn’t even been written by a human, much less printed on paper.
OK, that’s it, I’m going for a ride.