Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes Part 2

I've ranted about fixie bikes before—those no-brakes fashion accessory bicycles that Mission hipsters love to park in front of Ritual Coffee Roasters on a Saturday afternoon. I'm a self-confessed curmudgeon about them... But I'm not the only one.

A couple of days ago I was parking my double caliper braked hunk of junk down at the Best Buy on Harrison Street. Peering down at the rack I copped an eyeful of the following:

Okay, so the photos taken by my mobile phone are blurry pieces of crap—definitely not up to Brit standards—but you get the idea. What I love about it is that it combines two of my favourite things: nerdy lolspeak and a heathly disdain for riders of fixies.

In the lower right-hand corner of the sticker an email address is listed. I contacted the person on the other end of the intertubes asking for a clearer image of the text listed below the main headline. Here's what I got. Behold, in all its glory!

You can click on the image for a larger version, or you can exercise your constitutionally enshrined right to be a lazy bastard and just read my retyping of the fine print.

fixed gear bikes are for people who live in plains states. welcome to san francisco, or wherever you are. fashion and peer pressure can make you do anything, even something as misguided as eschew gears in a hilly town. "obey your thirst." different, better advice: get over your bad self. don't forget to use lube. power down. stay healthy. if you keep it up, something inside you's likely to explode. BLAM! then where will you be? huh? well, right where you are now, but with an exploded body part. and nobody wants that. get there in the end, & our cardiovascular systems can still beat marketing execs' in a fair fight. above all, ride predictably. don't run red lights. participate in 4-way stops. PLEASE. it is frustrating when car drivers ignore us, but ignoring them is not the solution. and ignoring them and the traffic laws will get us killed. get home safe. look around at us. have empathy. believe me, some-bloody-body needs to.

Yeah, fight the power! I'm with her/him all the way except for that meandering middle part about brushing your teeth and exploding body parts. That was way too cosmic for my tastes. But the rest of it? Right on the money. I'm so glad somebody is out there changing the world, one pointless sticker at a time. I'm especially glad when said sticker fuels my crankiness, and with a lolcat twist to boot!

Long Time No Type

Yeah, I've been out for a while. There are a few stories to be told and they'll trickle out like a runny nose over the course of the next few weeks. The short excuse is that I was busy studying and feeling sorry for myself. A month and a half is enough time off, I think, and now I'm feeling the urge to throw myself back into the fray. I'll get back to covering a few of my favorite topics...

• Custom licence plates
• The Great Organiser
• Cat Wars
• Me

I found this rolling cliche in the parking lot outside my therapist's office (yes, I'm in therapy, that's got a whole lot to do with my extended absence).
I think the owner of the Mini is a pedophile. What else could KIDWRK mean?

Pet Peeves - Upside Down Eights

The lazy posts continue unabated.

I hate upside down eights. Usually they rear their top-heavy heads on petrol station price signs, screaming to the world at large that whoever shoves the back-lit numbers up there on the board can't tell his elbow from his arse. Or at least his head from his feet.

Upside down eights are glaring markers of a fundamental lack of attention to detail in the life of the person who saw fit to confuse the big loop with the little loop. "Check me out," they say, "I can't work out how to read a fucking number. Guess what else I can't work out? Lots of stuff, I'm betting."

So I was walking down San Jose Avenue near my house on the weekend and no shit, this is what I saw bolted to the front of a house...

It's your house! Your fucking $800,000 house! Get it fucking right! I can forgive a barely employable and savagely undereducated petrol station minimum-wager for mucking it up, but when you're attaching these things in a more or less permanent fashion to the exterior of your San Francisco love-pad you should probably take a second or two to see which way is up. It's not hard. Pretty simple really. Little loop on top. Big loop on bottom. Christ!

Pet Peeves - More Custom Licence Plates

This is what I do when I'm either too lazy or too busy to write a decent post: I submit a new custom licence plate.Ric's alma mater-sporting (another pet peeve I've not yet addressed) Benz was found proudly displaying its pedigree at the Park-n-Ride by the Black Mountain Road exit off 280. Keep in mind that the Black Mountain Road exit serves to feed the well-heeled through to the palatial grounds of an exclusive golf course. And there you have it: Ric likes to mingle with the gentry and whack off a few tees, if you know what I mean.

Thanks for telegraphing it to the rest of us via your custom licence plate, Ric. We really couldn't give a shit.

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Oh man, they're at it again with their custom licence plates. This one makes no sense whatsoever. Can any of you decipher it?I'm at a total loss. Is it supposed to refer to Luciano Pavarotti, "You, Tenor!"? Is the driver of the vehicle a big fan of the Under 10 Experimental Audio Research squad? I'm flat-out stumped when it comes to grasping the connection between the San Francisco Giants and whoever the fuck U10EAR might be. Now I feel as dumb as the person who paid the DMZ for this useless licence plate piece of shit. I'm going to go and dip my head in a pot of boiling oil right now. thx bye.

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Still feeling curmudgeonly and peevish? I am. Despite being Australian—we're supposed to be the most laid-back people on the planet—there's a lot out there in the world that grabs my goat. That goat can be kind of gruff and angry sometimes.

On the chopping block this time around are custom licence plates. I hate them for a number of reasons. Firstly, they're a crap form of expression. You're constrained to a set of seven characters, of which most combinations have already been snagged, so you're going to have to fight the laws of the English language pretty freakin' hard to come up with something vaguely original. Most of those "original" end products are so bastardised as to bear little resemblance to the word or concept they were initially supposed to represent. I'd kill to have a good example at my fingertips right now, but I don't.

What I do have is this, and it brings me to my second point.

It would seem he or she—let's be real, it's a "he" isn't it?—has his 450 HP, and I don't think he's referring to a Hewlett Packard computer. It couldn't be made any more obvious unless the plate was bordered in pink neon, and that's been known to happen.

What we're asked to assume here is that the car is capable of spewing forth around 450 horse power. That's a lot of horses. He's evidently very proud of it, and why wouldn't he be? He's probably blown untold sums of money jamming an air-forced filter here and a muffler expansion there just to extract a handful of extra horsies out of the motor. And he wants you to know it too. As he hits the 280 during rush hour and starts dropping the foot on the pedal as he weaves through the banks of traffic, he wants you to look on in in amazement as he streaks past in a blaze of red. He wants you to clock the licence plate as it disappears into the vanishing point and think, Jebus, those were a whole lotta horses that just flew past and it seems like that red Supra is the car that's got 'em—all 450 of them. The licence plate tells me so.

This is the part that disturbs me the most. When did our cars become such an extension of our personalities that we feel obligated to customise what is perhaps the least customisable part of the car in order to advertise to the world at large an inconsequential aspect of our lives? Nobody but the driver cares how many horses are in that car. Nobody else is impressed. You forked over $100 extra or whatever to the DMV so that you could engage in perhaps the lowest form of self expression. The money would have been better used had it been donated to charity.

Coming up soon: Mini Cooper drivers and the vehicular extension of personality.

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes

You've seen a fixie before. They're those bikes ridden primarily by hipsters around the Mission District. They have no brakes and run via a direct drive mechanism—no slack-legged freewheelin' for our well-heeled trendy types, just a lot of arse-over-tit skid stops and plenty of more-fashionable-than-thou looks at the stop lights, assuming they bother to stop at the lights. And that's kind of rare. Stopping is kind of difficult on a fixie. But everyone cool is riding a fixie these days. Why aren't you?

This is a fixie. No brakes. No gears. Only hipsters ride them.

Well, if you're like me then you're avoiding them on account of the fact that they're the hipster analog of the oversized jeans worn by would-be gangsters that belt loosely around their mid-thigh region. Okay, the analog falls apart when you consider that fixie bikes are a mode of transport whereas half-mast gangster jeans are a, erm, um, I'm not sure what they're supposed to achieve. But they're a fad, just like the current eighties revival that's compelling far too many young women to wear leg warmers and inflict a kind of Flock of Seagulls attack on their hair.

Roll into the haughty arrogance that comes with being hipper than anyone else on the street the kind of sanctimony expressed by far too many bicyclists. You're both pushing the limits of fashion AND kidding yourself that you're saving the planet. It's a great mix. The end result is perhaps the most obnoxious group of riders on the road, SUV drivers included. With all that in mind you can imagine the kind of laugh that came blurting out of my mouth when I noticed the following bumper sticker on a car as I belted my way down Page on my single gear clunker bike. It's not a fixie. There is a difference. The sight was enough to make me use my brakes (yeah, brakes, fixie riders, they're handy things), turn about and take a snap.


If driving a beaten up black Jetta around San Francisco means there's one less fixie on the road then I'm with you, whoever you are. Keep fighting the good fight.

Pet Peeves - The Upside Down Eight

I'm a man of many opinions, some might say too many, and stashed away in that peanut brain of mine is a litany of pet peeves. One of my favourites is the gas station upside down eight. By the way, I gave up clinging to referring to gas stations as petrol stations a few years ago. Some battles are futile and when it comes to how one refers to the location where one procures fuel for one's vehicle it's best to adopt the "when in Rome" approach. For the record I still call aluminium "aluminium". The fact that America persists in referring to that particular metal as "aluminum" hints at a cockup as vast and as far reaching as the one that instituted the use of the word "entre" as an umbrella term for the main course instead of the starters. You'd think that the translation of the word from the French would have given the progenitor of that mistake a decent idea about its intended use.

Anyway, so I hate upside down eights on gas station pricing signs. The little loop goes on the top, the big loop goes on the bottom. It's not hard to sort out. Just take a look at the number: little loop top; big loop bottom. If you can't work something as simple as that out then there's probably a whole raft of other aspects of your life that are seemingly simple to most but confound you at every turn.

And I won't hear any of those "we're free to be creative with our use of language" arguments either. Those sorts of arguments usually come from people who can't muddle their way through the use of such newly dispensable stuff as, um, grammar and punctuation. Hey, if it's too tough to work out just jettison it wholesale and write the exercise off as an act of creativity. Guess what, folks, you have to know the rules before you break 'em. James Joyce knew how to handle direct quotes before he resorted to that whole hyphen thing.