In what may go down as the most devastating blow to aggrieved urban bicycling content since Gersh Kuntzman left Twitter, British broadcaster and aggrieved urban bicyclist Jeremy Vine will no longer be producing his aggrieved bicycling videos:
The reason? People want him to die:
Jeremy Vine is absolutely right that getting “crushed under a truck” is in fact a “very real danger” to cyclists, which he so effectively illustrated when he intentionally positioned himself in exactly the right place to get crushed under a truck:
I give Jeremy Vine two weeks before he misses the attention and starts uploading videos again, just like Gersh Kuntzman announced to Twitter that he’s “really not here very much anymore…”
…yet still seems to tweet something at least once a day:
This is not to imply that as cyclists we don’t have reason to be aggrieved or that our lives aren’t subject to the whims of drivers whose heedlessness is exceeded only by their obliviousness; it’s just that the more you seek out the poor behavior of others the more likely you are to find it, and I certainly know that the more deeply I immersed myself in the world of advocacy the more irritable I became. And while Jeremy Vine’s videos may provoke the fleeting ire of people who hate bicyclists (most of them probably just hate bicyclists for the 30 seconds it takes to reply angrily to one of his posts, then they go back to not thinking about bikes at all), I suspect what they really do is provoke a more lasting and pernicious ire in bicyclists, in that when you ride around with the Vine Mentality you too become angry and defensive and ride around in a heightened state of aggrievement akin to psychoactive substance-induced paranoia which does nothing but fuel a Vicious Cycle of Aggrievement.
Obviously this doesn’t mean you should completely ignore all the stupidity and the recklessness, for the simple reason that if you do that you die. However, it does mean that the only way you can sustain your love of bicycling in the long term is if you learn how to deprioritize the stupidity and the recklessness somewhat unless it threatens you directly. Riding around with a camera on your head for the express purpose of documenting it all is the exact opposite of that, and perhaps this is the conclusion Vine has finally reached.
Anyway, it’s much easier and more amusing to be aggrieved over things that make no difference whatsoever, like watching every single discarded technological “innovation” of the last 40 years come back from the dead in gravel form:
This time, it’s elastomers:
Though it is comforting to know I can still get elastomers for the suspension fork on the Y-Foil:
George was so ahead of his time…
Finally, speaking of aggrieved people, I’ve watched Path Less Pedaled guy’s update on the Growtac shifters and whereas before I was merely skeptical I am now beginning to believe they may be the most needlessly complicated shifting system ever invented:
They seem to have engineered all the simplicity and durability completely out of friction shifting, great job.
