For as mellow a winter as most places had, Spring seems to be out of the gates strong this year, with April Fool’s day apparently being celebrated far earlier and longer than usual, and almost more glorious madness than a chronicler of such things can manage.

By now you (and nearly five million other people) have to’ve seen the dude who created bird wings that briefly got him airborne.

Except that they didn’t, the whole thing being a really elaborate hoax perpetrated by one Floris Kaayk, an artist in the Netherlands. Apparently Kaayk (which I believe would be the ultimate name for the first automobile bike rack from IKEA) really did intend to inspire people, but also to conduct an “experiment about online media.” Whatever that was, seemed like it worked. Hoax or not, why do I suspect kids in the Netherlands will be flying to school while we’re still taking our kids to school in these?

In the interest of full disclosure, in the past I did alternate picking my daughter up from school on the bike with picking here up in this.

In my weak defense, it was supposed to be the company car for my original bike company, Asylum Cycles (big wheels, get it?), and Tall Dan the Mechanic and I had converted it to run on veggie oil, but what it really ran on was wads of burning cash. Also, the doors rarely closed properly, and trying to accelerate hard to slam the door shut while my daughter teetered precariously six feet above the ground, giggling uncontrollably, definitely made an impression on the other parents at the school. After the Mog, they even gave me extra room when I showed up on the bicycle.

(Owning a ’77 Unimog was maybe the best and worst thing in my life.)

At any rate, it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the true stories from the jokes. Consider Nokia’s patent on vibrating tattoos. Hard to imagine why Nokia’s lost so much market share.

But arguably the most unbelievable of all recent news has to be the return, at age 46, of troubled bike fabricator and world record setter, Graeme Obree and the latest bike he’s created for the attempt.

As is his way, Obree built the bike he’ll use to contest the hour record out of basic bike parts and plenty of stuff he found himself around the house. Yes, in the age of using wind tunnel testing to shape carbon fiber structures for maximum aerodynamics, Obree is coming out of retirement on a Reynolds 653 steel frame he cobbled together with a combination of classic components, stuff he modified with a grinding wheel, and parts he literally whittled himself. You really should go check the full bike out at Cyclingnews.

Between Merckx riding through his entire career with a life threatening heart condition–then shrugging off the news once he found out–to Obree’s well-documented struggles and obsessions, if there seems to be a pattern to my recent ramblings about the true characters of cycling, it’s not an accident. This is mankind at our most self-deluded and absolutely magical, and I’m certainly pulling for Obree again. The thing is, just like our strange friend in the Netherlands didn’t really need to fly to get our collective attention, Obree really doesn’t need to break the record again. He’s already succeeded in creating another incredible story for us, which is really what he’s always done best.