new Tower of Babel – the blogosphere. In this amazing world without gravity or laws of physics or consequence, where everything travels at the speed of light, outright falsehoods gain instantaneous momentum and become cyber-facts. Dirt crusted, real-world findings can be dismissed with a few witty key taps and a carefully placed emoticon.

“Alright, you pathetic Luddite, we get it. You don’t trust the internet. What, sweet Jesus, does any of this have to do with mountain bikes?” Right. Ummm, yeah. I was about to get to that.

So, anyway, in all this wandering around in cyberspace (wow, anyone else have the feeling that ‘cyberspace’ is now a quaint anachronism? Use of it denotes a quirky out-of-touchness, sort of like when grandparents refer to digital watches as chronometers or Tools Of The Devil), while gritting teeth and trying really hard not to think of monkeys and typewriters, I began to contemplate what it would be like to work for a bike company that produced bikes made solely to comply with the wishes of internet forum users. And I concluded the following:

1. The bikes would be made from steel, because steel is real. OR, they’d be made from a magical composite that was one part titanium, one part Kevlar, and two parts of a wonderful new laminate derived from spider silk. Best yet, they’d be made from steel AND the new magical composite. That way people could still argue endlessly about the protective benefits of linseed oil inside frame tubes while simultaneously being able to get really geeked out about whether or not their frames can actually trap insects. The conversational possibilities are endless.

THE MOUNTAIN BIKE.... ALL GROWN UP

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