Today is December 23rd–Christmas Eve Eve, or the day some people observe as Festivus by erecting an aluminum pole:
By the way, you’ll note there in the lower right-hand corner of that Cannondale catalogue page that their Festivus technology yielded frames that were “light as metal matrix.” I didn’t know what metal matrix was then, and I don’t know what it is now. I do seem to recall it was a thing Specialized were doing, and clearly it was popular enough at the time that Cannondale felt the need to denounce it along with titanium and chrome-moly. To my knowledge nobody’s tried to resurrect it yet, like they seem to do with magnesium every 10 years or so:
Apparently, riding a Vaast is an out-of-body experience, which…wow:
I don’t liken it to reducing your tire pressure, however, as that often comes with more bounciness and a generally more vague sense of what the contact patches are doing. Instead, it’s almost what I’d imagine an out-of-body experience would be like where I’m watching myself ride from above. It’s very weird, and very unusual, but also very comforting (in quite the literal sense).
Presumably if you fitted it with some Jan Heine tires you’d ascend directly to heaven.
By the way, I was testing magnesium bikes before it was cool:
That was actually a pretty badass bike. I’m also a pretty badass bike blogger, because I got questioned by the shomrim while taking all those photos. Fortunately I was able to give them the secret handshake, otherwise I might have been forced into the back of a Honda Odyssey and who knows what might have happened to me.
Anyway, with the holidays upon us there’s a better-than-decent chance you may not be hearing from me again before the New Year, though I do deserve the right to pop in if there’s something I need to share before them. I’ll also note that my hot tub installation continues. This has rendered my bicycle-specific clothing only intermittently accessible, which in turn means I’ve been plain-clothesing it on my pair of Rivendae on a daily basis instead of Fredding it up:
I was a day late for the winter solstice, but you wouldn’t know it from the sheer Druidity of that tableau.
Anyway, all of this is by way of wishing you a festive and velocipede-filled holiday and a laterally stiff and vertically compliant New Year. May your tire pressure be optimal and your drivetrain smooth and friction-free. And thank you for reading the words I persist in typing into the void all these years later, even if it’s mostly just a way for you to kill some time on the terlet. (I will neither confirm or deny that I write this blog in order to kill time on the terlet.)
This is going to be the best 2022 ever, I can feel it!
XOXO,
–Tan Tenovo
