Having received few donations for my doomsday cult here on the eve of destruction, I found myself distracted again by shiny, material possessions. Among the big news today, Campagnolo has set a date of November 7th for the release of their iShifters.
Personally, I never warmed to Shimano’s Di2, but make it Italian and move the decimal on the price tag a couple places to the right, and suddenly creepy little robots moving my derailleurs sounds hot. Not as desirable as a regular system without electronics, or a simple hydraulic system, or a bike that lets me spin some vinyl while wearing my skinny jeans but desirable as in, “Meh, OK.”
And yet it’s still such a drag to have to move your fingers to shift. Me, I’m holding out for that Parlee Prius that lets you shift with your brain.
This is as opposed to shifting with your Catholic upbringing, which is mostly how I ride, relying on a refined sense of self-loathing and desire for suffering that keeps me in tall gears and spinning a cadence somewhere in the single digits. Thus, on my short list of probing questions regarding this system:
- Do you have to squint your eyes in concentration to shift (please say yes)
- Would Mel Gibson be able to get out of the 53×11?
I know what you’re thinking. Sure, I hate having to accurately manipulate my fingers to shift a bike as much as the next guy, but that’s a dream compared to having to look around and steer to avoid stuff. Enter Google street view.
That looks exhilarating! It’s good to know a technology is being invented that lets us pedal a bike through a slightly laggy and occasionally blurry version of the world we’d otherwise be forced to venture out into.
And that technology might be arriving just in time, between the daily battle it is just to ride a bike, and certain subtle changes in the environment:
Yes, the march of technology is truly incredible. To think that one day soon, some company will make it possible to bypass all the silly moving around and thinking entirely, and instead just implant the pure impression of riding a bike directly into the brain. Though the technology doesn’t exist to express this, I suspect it’ll go something like this.