Thursday night I toddled off to a nearby LBS, which is very close to a Local Book Store, as between them they were sponsoring a talk/booksigning by Eben Weiss, aka BikeSnobNYC. You either like BSNYC or not, and I do, so there's no point in discussing that, but in his prepared (?) remarks he said a couple of things I thought would amuse the C&V crowd:

1. Bicycling is a $6 Billion dollar industry in the US. However $4 billion of that goes to replacing broken carbon fiber framesets.

2. Bike porn is bad, because it hurts our relationships with the bikes we already have. After all, how is the bike out in the garage supposed to compete with some (probably Photoshopped) beauty shot from the NAHBS?

Okay, not exactly Victor Borge material here, but I liked it.

I thought most of "the industry" was Wal Mart and its cohorts.

Not good to piss off the old reliable.

Sure, a lot of us fool around with some French floozy,
English tart, or the occasional Italian bimbo. But face
facts, eventually you always come back to the mother
of your children.

.................................

A minor correction. Since you are talking about BikeSnobNYC, that should be "crabon".

BTW, I'm 2/3 of the way through his new book. it was off to a slow start with a very different tone from his usual. However, there is no way you can talk about 9-11 in a humorous tone. About the 3rd chapter, once he mentioned "smugness, he was back to his usual snarky style.

I think he lost his mind about the time he started writing for Bicycle Magazine...and trading promo plugs with Grant Petersen. (I'm still waiting to hear the location of Grant's dumpster of carbon forks, I want to grab a few.)

If I recall correctly BS-NYC used to write about the beauty of scarred up, road dirty and personalized bikes. That left a good impression on me.

And thirty-seven percent of statistics are made up on the spot.

And 54.7% of the jokes on this forum are recycled

Decent writer. He once gave an implied nod to the Ironman..

Not PJ O'Rourke, but decent.

I was just saying I don't believe what he said. Maybe he didn't mean it literally, but Al reported as a "real" fact. I'm not buying it.

Yes, you are quite correct to be suspicious of such a '"real" fact.' That must be what I meant, though I was quoting, or more accurately, paraphrasing, something said by a blogger known for his humorous use of exaggeration and irony.

That reminds me, I am deeply upset by your use of a dead chicken as headgear, as shown in your avatar, and am going to call on my friends in PETA to set up a picket line outside your house and workplace.

So the joke made it over your head, even with that chicken in the way.

fify. Not sure why people think he's humorous. People write better stuff about bikes on this forum all the time. More humorous too.

Chalk it up to internet communications. I took it that Al was accepting it as fact.

The mother of my children is a half-Italian, half-Japanese supermodel, and sometimes even that isn't good enough for me.

...

Thanks, 3alarmer. This one seems especially relevant.