The San Francisco Citizen

The case against Crocs shoes is now the conventional wisdom. Don’t they just make you want to scream?

Or maybe that’s the whole idea?

“Tom Wolfe, as famous for his distinctive attire as for his bracing fiction, once explained why he had begun to wear his trademark hand-tailored three piece white suits (worn with a hat and umbrella): “I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January - and found it annoyed people tremendously.”

“It’s kind of a harmless form of aggression, I guess.”

What’s the funniest line in this article from San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Dan Giesin - Single-minded cyclists have old-school cool 

“We’re shedding new light on an old tradition,”

“You feel like a purist,”

“You don’t need all those fancy gears.”

Too many gears can actually spoil the ride.

“…we single-speeders…”

“They are such a cool group,”

“It’s kind of a counter-culture,”

“There is that underground element: a little bit different, a little bit dangerous.”

This is called starting your own league, so it’s the same old thing. These people aren’t really dangerous either. They’re just having fun on bikes, nothing wrong with that. But you can have fun on bikes with or without gears, right?

There’s probably a more extreme element of fixed gear MTB-ers out there. The photo below clearly shows the typical non-fixed, freewheeling setup:

simondbarnes via Flickr

It’s the same crowd that’s attracted to fixed gear city bikes that find single-speed mountain bikes appealing.

And arthroscopic surgery is becoming cheaper and cheaper these days, so you should get in on this fun as well.