Graphic? Certainly. Titillating? I'm not sure what that means. Culturally significant? Most definitely. Surely the final step in something becoming a real cliché is when it's incorporated into pornography. It's sort of like how your country isn't officially blighted until celebrities start showing up and taking your children away. Now that bike messengers have joined the long line of cable installers, plumbers, and repairmen waiting in line to have consequence-free sex with America's erotic heroines, their mainstream appropriation is surely complete.
While I'm on the subject of sex, I'd also like to warn you about what appears to be a disturbing new trend in bike saddles. Following is a photo which reader Ed Buffington (which, truth be told, would be a good name for the male cyclist in the Bust story) took with his camera phone during a recent trip to New Haven, CT. The bike was apparently locked up outside of a bar near the Yale campus. The image isn't quite safe for work, and it's definitely in poor taste, so in the interest of propriety it will be preceeded by three warnings.
Warning 1:
Warning 2:
Warning 3:
OK, you asked for it:
Sorry for all those warnings, but you can see it's quite shocking. Not only does the bike have a pie plate and a reflector, but it also still has the sizing sticker on the seat tube. I really hate to see that on a bike, especially such a fine one as this Trek "Snap-On" edition mountain bike. Oh, right, the saddle. Yes, it appears to be some kind of dildo. Disturbing.
