My wife, bless her heart, got me a subscription to Bicycling for father's day last year. She's a wonderfully thoughtful woman and I love her for it.

Setting that aside, I'm done with Bicycling. At first I thought I was in love with a retro-filtered photo of Ultra Romance (a guy with that nickname should have been a red flag) on the cover shredding trail with a vintage dirt-drop mountain-ish bike. But the honeymoon didn't last long. Every issue was packed with "best new gadget," "awesomest new bike," and "learn to make your friends jealous with your hill-climbing ability" crap. I was expecting bedroom advice to start showing up when last month's cover featured a guy riding with his dog. (Don't get me wrong, I love dogs and would train a pointer for hunting if the afore-mentioned beloved spouse wasn't deathly allergic to them.) Yes, the feature article was about people riding with their dogs or just about them and their dogs.

It wasn't long before this month's issue came out and, sure enough, it was about the latest and greatest bikes. Did we get thorough reviews? No, we got soundbites, barely a paragraph about each bike. It was virtually impossible to tell the ad-copy from the bike reviews (if you could call them that). The absolute last straw was when one of the bikes was reviewed not in English but in Bicycling emoji! A translation was provided elsewhere in the magazine, but it was about all I could do to keep myself from using the issue as fire-starter right there and then. The pages rip out easily, by the way, and this issue came with the center page pre-ripped-out. Usually I have to turn through that page at least once for it to tear out, but, thoughtfully, I was saved the effort this time.

I have already acquired a three-year subscription to another magazine that gives thorough reviews of bicycles (admittedly through a specific lense) and doesn't take 26 pages of ad-copy to get to the first bit of content.

Best,
Contented Curmudgeon Cummings