If I could have one bike at any cost, but only one bike, it would have to be a Alex Moulton Double Pylon. I’ve always admired Moulton’s approach to designing bicycles. Moulton being a very accomplished engineer, disregarded all dogma about how bicycles should be designed, and redesigned the bicycle from scratch. The latest refinement of Moulton theory is a bike that has a reasonable weight, comes apart for travel, performs like a high end road bike, but is fully suspended and can handle light touring loads.
As far as aesthetics, it’s a beautiful piece of hand-crafted machinery. Stainless steel tubing is elegantly brazed together with more joints than any bicycle I’ve ever seen. The carbon fibre fenders are a nice touch as well. The finish is simply breathtaking and just as stunning as any hand built bike by Richard Sachs or Vanilla. The fit and adjustability is also amazing. The double pylon can have its stem raised and lowered and stem length lengthened and shortened very easily. You can have upright handlebars for touring, and then turn around and lower and lengthen the handlebar reach and lockout the suspension for racing. At almost $10,000 you’d expect a bike to do just about anything. I think the double pylon almost can.
This isn’t a new fighter jet from the military. Instead it’s Doritos new flavor. I saw the new dorito in a Turkey Hill whilst paying for my gas. The mysterious black packaging had me hooked immediately. The addictive thing about X-13D isn’t the taste. It’s the cognitive dissonance X-13D creates because your brain can’t accept what it’s tasting. This is similar to how clear pepsi messes with your head. Even though the caramel coloring doesn’t affect the flavor, our brains associate caramel color with pepsi like flavor while clear soda usually gets linked with sprite like flavor. Similarly the X-13D looks like a normal dorito, but your brain doesn’t have any visual references to put the flavor to an actual foodstuff. At least with cool ranch doritos, your brain thinks about ranch dressing, and hence the lack of confusion when eating them.
All of this palette discombobulation made me eat another and another as I tried to decipher the taste. I finally cracked the mystery of X-13D when K asked to try one. I told her she wouldn’t like it, and I was right, she didn’t. But how did I know this? So I started going through foods in my mind that K hates until I figured out what the secret ingredient is. Warning this is a spoiler of sorts so if you want to know read on. (more…)
…or at least it deserves to. We’ve seen all manner of abuses on the Interwebs, but this one by and far should give an alien race an excuse to wipe us out, because there’s no intelligent life here. I find a banner ad for bagborroworsteal.com and I think it’s just some sort of hoax. Nope turns out it’s a legitimate business that rents luxury handbags. That’s right, luxury handbags. First the term luxury handbag shouldn’t exist. Why on earth can a small amount of leather and fabric cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars? Especially when they’re put together by workers in Bangladesh who are earning a few dollars a day. I can understand the case for luxury cars. I wouldn’t want one, but it’s obvious why a Mercedes or a Ferrari cost as much as they do. They have millions of euros worth of engineering and skilled labor invested in them, and so the price tag, albeit high, makes sense. Ah well, I suppose the high end engineering is in developing ways to get fools so easily separated from their money. I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term carpetbagger.
If I were Elvis rich I’d hire someone to haul me around on this. Nothing says you have gobs of money like being chauffeured around town on a human powered segway.
