







Here's "Bicycling's" write-up on the coat:


("All You Haters Warm My Cockles")
Yes, you should always take your cycling style cues from a person who wears a sleeveless jersey and puts his glasses on under his helmet straps, and you should always choose your warm garments based on the fact that they're worn by people who do most of their riding in the sun-drenched Land of the Epic Burrito. At any rate, after reading about the coat, I wondered if Armstrong had anything to say about it, but all I found was this Tweet:
I'm glad to see he's enjoying the off-season.

Speaking of psychedelia and make-believe, most of us have a desire to alter our reality once in awhile. This can involve taking hallucinogens and having a 2010 Tour of California-esque "happening" in your mind, or it can involve visiting another part of the world, or it can involve simply altering your normal route a little bit. Occasionally, when I feel the need to alter my own reality and I don't have ready access to either LSD or plane fare, I engage in the last. Here, in New York City, where the burritos are paltry and the California transplants can be identified by the fact that they wear canvas sneakers even in winter, there are three bridges that traverse "The Big Skanky" and connect Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan:
While I generally use the same bridge every day , I do so not out of convenience but rather out of fear that if I choose a different one it will lead me not just to a different part of the city but also into a completely different reality--that somehow if I, say, choose the Williamsburg Bridge over the Manhattan Bridge I will enter an alternate plane of existence in which a truck that might have missed me will instead run me over, or a terrorist attack will take place that might otherwise have been foiled, or that I'll fall victim to a food-borne illness from the lox in my paltry New York-style burrito. Maybe I'll even arrive in Manhattan to find that in this alternate reality the American Revolution never took place, and in fact the English never took Manhattan from the Dutch. Consequently, New York is still New Amsterdam, and I'll be taken into custody and placed in the stocks in Times Square for the horrible crime of not riding a Dutch city bike. (Actually, we're not too far from that now.)

Still, it's important to face your fears, so it was with both trepidation and excitement that I set out this morning across the Williamsburg Bridge. It certainly was different. Not only were there people filming their artistic endeavors in front of the artistic endeavors of others:

But also the riders on the Williamsburg Bridge wear little holsters and carry their keys on the outside just like you see on the Internet!
Fortunately, when I arrived in Manhattan, it was not under Dutch rule, and the Dutch city bikes were grappling with scooters for pole space:
This is not to say that I would ever side with a scooter over a bicycle in a parking dispute; it's just that I was relieved to find Dutch bikes had not yet taken over the city entirely. It's bad enough we're also being attacked by "footbikers:"
Certainly a contraption like this is evocative of an alternate reality in which neither the chain drive nor the direct drive was ever invented and the best we managed to do was to refine the "dandy horse."
But also the riders on the Williamsburg Bridge wear little holsters and carry their keys on the outside just like you see on the Internet!
Speaking of alternate realities, as fantastic as the notion of them may be, it's certainly true that two completely different existences can inhabit the same space. I was recently reading an article in The New Yorker by music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, whom I've mentioned before in the context of the "bullshitification" of language. Frere-Jones is sort of the Ben Franklin of irritating quotes, and this article provided a number of them--in particular, this one, in which he tries to show his "street cred:"