[dude]

BikeSnob hat seine ultimative Geschenkliste rausgebracht und die war mal wieder ein highlight.
Auszuege:

Actually, the biggest problem facing the bicycle industry today is engineering a carbon fiber wheel that can support the considerable heft of the typical "Fred," who stands to gain absolutely nothing from it in terms of performance yet insists on owning the stuff anyway. It's like Victoria's Secret having to design a line of sensual lacy undergarments for a bunch of Hell's Angels.

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If you have a friend, loved one, or family member who's a "hipster," here's something you may not know: "Hipsters" are highly susceptible to neck chills, especially when they're riding their bikes. They may not use brakes, and they may have no use for bar tape, but as soon as the mercury plunges below 65 degress they will wrap up their necks like they're Michael Hutchence about to auto-erotically asphyxiate themselves.

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There are a lot of problems with cycling, but probably the biggest one is that it's tremendously enjoyable. It's cheap, it's easy, and there's only a simple machine between you and the road. Over the years, people have come up with many ingenious ways to make the whole endeavor less enjoyable and more "serious." Some use electronic monitoring devices that constantly inundate them with data that quantifies their poor performance; others remove the brakes from their bicycles so they have to writhe and backpedal and skid to a stop. But few of these methods are as absurdly sublime as PowerCranks.

PowerCranks are like ordinary cranks, only they're far more expensive, and they don't work. The key to PowerCranks is that they allow you to pedal with both legs on the same plane, so that you look like a kangaroo in a hurry.

This can result in tremendous performance gains for amateur cyclists, though these gains are more mental than physical. This is because, for some reason, mediocre cyclists think that doing something pointless and inconvenient during the "off-season" will somehow allow them to to dominate their hobby next year. And what could be more pointless and inconvenient than riding on broken cranks? Basically, the more irritating the training tool is to use, the more effective it is, so at this rate I expect PowerCrank unicycles to be the hot "training" set-up for 2011.

Of course, PowerCranks do have tremendous physical benefits to athletes who compete in sports that are based on producing power while keeping your legs together, like sack racing.