Good morning! Wait, what time is it?

I realize it's not a good idea to tempt the weather gods in February, but it's feeling a little springy outside--springy enough that this morning I put a bag with flowers on it into a basket:

Took to the mean urban streets:

And, well, dropped the bag off someplace.  

What was inside the bag?  And where did it need to go?  Well, I can't tell you that, but only because the answers to both of those questions are profoundly boring.

So instead, let's just say I was driving my car yesterday, and that I wasn't really paying attention because I was busy sending the following text:

Then let's say I kind of maybe ran over a cat just before hitting "send," and despite my best attempts to resuscitate the poor feline with both mouth-to-mouth and jumper cable defribrillation, I was forced to pronounce it dead.  Naturally, I couldn't just leave it there, so I consigned it to my trunk until this morning, when the cat's owner left for work.  Finally, I removed it from the trunk, slipped it into a Trader Joe's shopping bag, rode it over to the owner's house, and left it on the front stoop with an anonymous note pinned to it that read, "Sorry about the cat."

Oh, and the reason I rode the cat over instead of driving it was that I didn't want to lose my parking space.

Now that would be an exciting story, especially if I also incorporated a vignette about how I told the story at David Byrne's Oscar party that night and we all got into a big fight over it:

(Dead cats are not funny.)

Of course, none of this actually happened, but you still kind of hate me a little bit now anyway.  Whatever, I made it all up, get over it.  Anyway, there are far too many cutesy stories about smiley people riding their bikes to the food co-op or to yoga class because they're concerned about the environment.  Who can relate to that?  Cycling will never truly be a mainstream mode of transportation in America until people understand that it's just as compatible with craven, depraved behavior as it is with smugness.  There will always be serial killers, but there's no reason they can't transport their victims' remains in a bakfiets instead of a car.  It's a real oversight on the part of the "bike culture."

One thing that totally did happen though was that I saw my shadow during the ride:

When a douchebag sees his shadow that means there will be six more weeks of bad scranus jokes.

(Scranii are not funny.)

I'll make that guy crack a smile one day, I swear to Lob.

Speaking of weather, if you're the kind of person who doesn't like to experience it while riding, you'll be thrilled to learn about the "Tour de Rue," which promises to make riding outside obsolete:

There was once a time when I too used to ride indoors, and then one day I made an important discovery, which is that riding indoors is idiotic.  When the weather is too foul to ride, that's the Great Lobster On High's way of telling you to get a life and do something else.  Or, if you can't manage to take your mind off bikes for even two seconds, you can at least use the time to do something useful, like patching tubes or learning to build a wheel.  Maybe if Freds weren't so busy scampering around on their hamster wheels they'd actually know something about their own bikes--though if they did that would put Specialized out of business.

Also, some people compare riding a trainer to masturbation, but that's not really a fair comparison.  This is because masturbation is a pleasurable alternative to sex, whereas riding a trainer is not a pleasurable alternative to riding a bike outside.   Sure, it involves a bike, but that's where the similarity to actual cycling ends, and if anything, riding a trainer is like hitting your genitals with a rubber mallet.  Nevertheless, people delude themselves into thinking they need to do it, because they need to "train:"

Firstly, you don't need to "train," because chances are you suck, and the sooner you come to terms with that the better:

Secondly, the "experts" say all kinds of stupid crap, and you should never, ever listen to them.  For example, remember when Allen Lim was making everyone on RadioShack swallow tiny thermometers, which they'd then dig out of their stools and analyze?  Well, it turns out that was just to distract people from the fact that they were all doing EPO.  Still, who knows how many Freds were rooting around in their own feces in a disgustingly scatological bid for Cat 4 glory?  

Still, I suppose there's something to be said for being able to "ride" anywhere in the world:

For example, here's someone riding through what appears to be a riot in Angola:

Maybe now I can finally take that North Korean bike tour I've always fantasized about:

Nevertheless, there's only one reasonable answer to this question:

And that answer is "outside."

Lastly, in other important Fred news, one builder at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show has finally reduced the bicycle saddle to a single layer of crabon:

That's one small step for Fred, one giant leap for punishing his scranus.