It’s raining today, but I rode anyway, since not only do I have a perfectly good rain bike…
…but thanks to Vulpine I also have an excellent rain jacket:
Here’s what it looks like on an aging wet schlub:
Sure, there are cheaper ways to stay dry, but this is nicely cut and quite comfortable, and this past September I even donned it before descending a giant mountain:
That story is currently with a legitimate publication and as soon as they decide to legitimately publish it I’ll let you know.
Speaking of Vulpine, I’ve also been getting good use out of this insulated riding shirt:
It’s warm, it’s comfy, and it affords you plenty of mobility when you’re pretending to inflate your tire while being forced to wear a helmet:
I also still wear their jeans pretty much every day, on the bike and off, and they’ve been quite durable while offering sweatpant-like comfort. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find someone with better bike commuting attire than me–and yet I have nowhere to commute to, go figure.
Moving on, in non-haberdashery news, remember how back in 2016 Zipp/SRAM/etc. came out with a wheel shaped like a whale fin?
Well I just saw on the VeloNews that they’re suing some other company for copying it:
Though if anybody is gonna sue anybody shouldn’t it be the whales suing SRAM?
Either way, you’ve got to appreciate the marketing savvy of “inventor” Dimitrios Katsanis:
Who based the entire gimmick concept on some random whale paper from 1995:
The patents describe a rim or spokes with an “undulating configuration” that is said to reduce aerodynamic drag, especially in crosswinds. Among the publications cited in the patents is “Hydrodynamic Design of the Humpback Whale Flipper,” published in the Journal of Morphology in 1995.
From what I can tell, Katsanis does have a long and accomplished career both in and beyond cycling, but I’m still willing to bet that in this particular instance he thought the word “morphology” was cool and worked backwards from there.
All that aside though, if Princeton is arguing that their wheel is any different from SRAM’s, then their case has more holes than a whale’s baleen:
But maybe they’re arguing something else, and if so I can’t be bothered to find out what, because I have no interest in gimmicky wheels beyond laughing at them and so I’ve officially stopped caring as of the end of this sentence.
I’m still interested in aquatic mammals, though:
That fin would make a fantastic rim.
Finally, given my tribulations over the flawed design of the first-generation C-Record rear derailleur, it’s good to know I can always upgrade to the revised version:
At that price obviously I ordered two of them.