• Editor’s note: From now until New Year’s Day I’ll be popping up selected “Shop Talk” strips from this year’s run of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
BRAIN Farts: January 2021
Tag: Shop Talk
Stems, but no seeds
This cartoon from the most recent issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News seems to be eliciting a few chuckles, so I thought I’d let you civilians in on the gag.
There’s a bike boom going on, in case you hadn’t heard, and pretty much everything involved in the creation, distribution, and maintenance of our beloved two-wheelers is as scarce as Christian charity, thoughtful discourse, and mental health in the GOP.
The dope-dealer angle came to mind when it became clear that New Mexico would be green-lighting the sale of recreational weed, the only retail gig I have ever held. The Mud Stud and Dude have been pushing a legal high (bicycles) since 1992.
If I had it to do over again I’d be a little more subtle in the first panel, having the dealer say something like, “Psst, guys … want some good stuff?” But this sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking is fairly typical for me. I’m rarely satisfied with the way my stuff turns out.
’Wave bye-bye, you filthy meat-things
Come to think of it, neither do many of the filthy meat-things.
As long as we’re on the topic of cartoons, and with a jaundiced eye toward lightening our mood going into Election Day, here’s the latest “Shop Talk” strip from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
For this one I retitled the strip “E-Shop Talk,” and cast Herb-E in the starring role.
Herb-E is the shop’s e-mechanic, in all senses of the word. He’s a bot who works on other bots. And he is decidedly not our friend.
He and all the other e-devices the industry is pushing on us are biding their time, plotting the Rise of the Machines, turning the occasional burglar into lubricants for practice, and awaiting the glorious day when they will no longer require the services of “the filthy meat-things.”
Herb-E is cousin to ev-Rider (below), a short-lived and equally homicidal e-project from 2016, intended to continue “the natural evolution” of battery-powered bicycling by selling robot cyclists to the sedentary.
As the ev-Rider rep told the Mud Stud and Dude, “When only robots ride bikes, well, your customers can focus on what they really care about … kitten videos on Facebook!”
Speaking of the Stud and his bro, while one or the other takes an occasional issue off, the November 2020 cartoon above marks the first time that neither of them appeared in the strip since it launched in January 1992.
12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 11
From the November 2019 issue of BRAIN.
The Mud Stud is, like, totally not into, like, your categories, an’ stuff, dude, sir.
He works for a bike shop, so he can only afford one bike. And he makes it do everything, from the daily commute to hucking off cliffs at Deadman’s Dropoff to fetching his SpaghettiOs and PBR from the Grab-N-Git.
He will be happy to sell you whatever it is you have been told that you want, and then fix it when it goes sideways from neglect. But for his own purposes he prefers a spartan two-wheeler that can be field-repaired with a minitool, some duct tape, and a trailside rock.
12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 10
From the October 2019 issue of BRAIN.
As noted on Day 9, e-bikes have their ups and downs. Like any other bicycle, only more so.
They ask more of their owners — check out this article from an REI master tech in Portland — and of their friendly neighborhood mechanic.
Sometimes, a fella just longs to see one of the old bikes. V1.0. The kind that doesn’t give you much help, but doesn’t give you many headaches, either.
Mad Blog Media 