Breaking the rule of “never read the comments”.
If you look at bike websites for the best way to clean your bike or lubricate your chain, you always run into the outrage videos and blogs of “why does this bike cost more than a car?”
Yeah, the inflation rate says that it’s still too much. Yeah, late-stage capitalism and marketing. But I work in in business that does low volume semi-custom kinda purchases, like high-end bikes, and those have all gone up by a factor of 4, not 2x as the inflation calculator might tell you. Lead times have gone up 4x. Everyone is sick all the time. People get paid more now, which is where all the expense is anyway [1], and they should. $15k bikes aren’t round tubes anymore, and super-light NACA profile Kamm-tail molded or 3D printed CFRFP aero bikes with hidden cables and disk brakes don’t get designed and built by a guy in a barn anymore [2]. They get designed by a team of people in a wind-tunnel. Engineering degrees cost money, and engineers expect to get paid.
As they should. You wouldn’t be even looking at $15k bikes if you didn’t expect to get paid. Selfish bastard.
[1] “Costs walk on two legs”. In other words, the materials costs are inconsequential. Putting those together into a bike-shaped object is not
[2] That person in the barn is also expecting to get paid at least $15k for that custom-made bike
As you could tell from Airplane Movies 2023, I spent a lot of time on planes last year. A. Lot. Of. Time. All I’ve got to say about that is that having Black Titanium Card status [1] on United ain’t worth much. Sam Elliott did not come out of the cockpit to give me The Card with my name embossed on it. In my head canon, I’d imagined a combination of Up In The Air with the business card scene in American Psycho. Instead, I got an email. And a couple of titanium luggage tags [2], which are unusable in practice because they would cut your luggage [3] to shreds as they are thrown about.
Even with all the travel [4], and not being a big fan of airplane rawdogging, I honestly haven’t spent so much time spent watching airplane movies [5]. Frankly the airlines have been letting me down here. It’s not for lack of time sitting in a seat, there just hasn’t been that much that I wanted to watch, even with the proviso that airplanes are where you watch movies you wouldn’t pay for, whether that be art-house or grindhouse.
But it still has to be something you kinda wouldn’t mind watching.
Or maybe it’s Hollywood just making a bunch of crappy movies? I can’t watch super-hero movies anymore.
There also haven’t been any series-only-available-on-services-I-don’t-pay-for that I wanted to binge, which was always a fallback in the past. That’s how I got through Westworld [6].
I did watch The Fall Guy (it wasn’t available on a plane at the time, so not included here, but frankly should have waited to watch it on a plane for free [7]), and did not realize until just now that Aaron Taylor-Johnson was one of the kids in KickAss. Smarmy there, and smarmy in every movie I’ve seen him in since. So if that’s what he’s going for… I hope he’s not 007. It’s on the plane now, so I guess I could review it, but I bought it on AppleTV as a brainless jet-lag watch, so not sure it meets the stringent AMR criteria.
The good news is that I have about four long-haul trips planned between now and 2025, and four planned for the first 5 months of 2025, so if UA and the global movie industry work with me, I can have get a lot more airplane movie reviews in and also get super-duper status for next year.
Potential candidates for the next trip, if they’re still playing in a month:
Between one and three long-haul trips remaining this year, so here’s hoping for more interesting AMR failures.
[1] if they still gave out physical cards, which they don’t
[2] blank, not personalized
[3] and others
[4] I reached the published top tier by May
[5] Theirs anyway. My touchpad-unlock iPad is full. I still wear masks, so can’t use the new one I bought figuring that the risk of Covid would go away
[6] Except the season finale which was starting when the annoying landing we-pause-this-for-an-important-announcement-about-signing-up-for-our-credit-card messages start, which is always the sign to give up. And I was so done with WW at that point that I didn’t care what happened to Rachel Wood (who I saw in a pizza joint the night before the pandemic shut everything down) and The Man in Black
[7] The Fall Guy: not good
[8] How do you think I got all those miles? Flying to Oz for a one-day review, twice, will do it. I had to take a day in Sydney as my butt would have seceded otherwise
[9] Thus the allure of watching Heat and every other Hollywood movie, and all the meta-vid (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Shotgun Freeway, Haim videos, 1-Adam-12, etc.) just to see all the places you’ve been, or haven’t quite, or 10 20 30 40 years ago. Sheesh. I’ve been here a minute…
[10] Could be biased by that being one of the first movies I saw on my new 1080p HD TV set at the time, and the quality which I had never see outside a theatre (and mostly not in them) absolutely blew me away.
[11] The accompanying Man Ray/Lee Miller exhibition suited me better…
“To go fast on two wheels was the point
“To go fast on two wheels is the point of life, isn’t it?”
— Frederick Seidel
When I made this the tag-line for this widely unread blog, after trying out a few things from Buckaroo Banzai [0] and other cultural references going back to Moby-Dick at least, and arriving at this commentary on unexamined assumptions and selection bias, I had no evidence there might be any truth to it. But since the orcas started the war with yachts [1], their cousins the dolphins are also fighting a rear-guard action.
So I guess I will keep this around for a while longer while we see how this plays out in the rising oceans.
[0] Laugh while you can, monkey boy
[1] You’re welcome [2]
[2] Is that dark sarcasm?
Spring fever
When I first moved to Los Angeles lo these many years ago, I had spring fever every day. Not too hot, not too cold, not too humid [1]. Anywhere that I had lived previously, if there was a day like any average day in LA, you’d take the day off, because there would only be five days like that a year. You couldn’t afford to waste them doing something stupid like school or work.
Eventually, I overcame the impulse to blow off work every day [2], because the weekends were also nice, so it was okay [3]. I’d get my nice days in every weekend [4].
But spring fever is coming back. The summers are no longer mostly pleasant. Humidity, anopheles mosquitos year round, high dew point — the evenings don’t cool off so much. Winter isn’t as cool. No adiabatic frost on the grass. I haven’t even thought about backcountry skiing in the San Gabes in a decade, nor heading up to Baldy for a morning.
You can still avoid it by living over the hill. I still needed a sweatshirt at the Hollywood Bowl in August. Maybe it’ll be worth adding the 90 minute commute back into the day, twice a day, soon. House prices will reflect that, but maybe it’s time to get while the getting is good.
[1] Yeah, it could get hot for a week in the summer a couple of times, but it was a dry heat, and below freezing in the winter in Pasadena, but the evenings cooled off, and the days warmed up. Though I installed central air when the c. 1913 floor heater died around 2005, it didn’t really get turned on very much until 2015
[2] I didn’t
[3] You didn’t used to need to check the weather in the summer between May and the end of September, because tomorrow is going to be just like today, statistically.
[4] and also I would schedule my time so that I could play hooky Wednesday mornings and go to the Hole from 6-11 in the morning in the summer, and ski Mt Baldy from 7-11 in the winter, and still get a full day in. Those days are also gone…
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