I like the blog the Bike Snob. I ride a bicycle a couple times a week and I’m a snob, so it fits. The Bike Snob is heavy on witty trash talking. One of his favorite techniques is to make something ridiculous up, for instance imagining the septuagenarian founder of the Paris Review, George Plimpton riding around on an ugly Trek Y-frame.
Anyway, when my friend (I do actually have a friend) forwarded me the Paris Review post, my first thought was, “So by some extraordinary coincidence did George Plimpton actually ride a Y-Foil?” Then I wondered, “Maybe I didn’t make up the quote after all and I just think I did because it seems like something I’d come up with.” Finally though, it became clear that somehow the current editor of The Paris Review must have come across my bullshit quote and accepted it as fact. Furthermore, now that it’s actually been published on their website, everyone else will accept it as fact as well, and thanks to a certain popular search engine poor George Plimpton will be forever associated with one of the ugliest and Fredliest bicycles ever made.
It really makes you think about the complex relationship between reality and absurdity. Take religion for example. Sometime back in the Iron Age some wiseass probably made a joke about milk and meat, and now thousands of years later Jews need to have two dishwashers.
via Bike Snob NYC: Foiled Again: Truth is Faker than Fiction.
Life of refinement 