I Don't Work for Trek Bicycles

I refuse to allow car dealers to make me advertise for them on the back of my car with a nameplate or license plate frame, and last night, I'm looking at my bicycle in the garage and I see branding every few inches.

There's the giant Trek logo on the down tube, the model number on the top tube, some sort of bragging about special aluminum on the seat tube and then the Trek emblem on the head tube. Besides the emblem on the front, which popped off with little effort, the rest of the markings are decals which are fairly impossible to remove, buried under a few millimeters of ClearKote. But Trek is not alone in advertising on my bike. Bontrager decides they need no less than seven logos on the seat and seat post, five per hand grip and multiple placements on the tires. Shimano naturally will not be left out and brands the shifters and the front and back derailleurs in multiple places. The local Trek dealer also placed a couple of super-adhesive, nearly impossible to remove stickers on the frame. After looking at this a while it started to piss me off.

I love my bike and have blogged about it fondly in the past. It's a low-end hard-tail but it's durable and has served me well over the few years I've owned it. But damnit, I'm not Lance Armstrong and these manufacturers aren't sponsoring me. I'm not a paid shill for Trek or any of the components Trek uses in the manufacture of their bikes. So I went about blackening-out or painting over every single logo today.

One family member has already dubbed it "the junkyard bike." I prefer to think of it as some sort of post-apocalyptic Road Warrior.

Now I guess I need to remove the swoosh from the shirt I wear when I ride.

Hell's Half-Acre on God's Green Earth

The Global Warming Cultists have figured it out. You can't have some hipster dick giving us the spiel about conservation and alternative sources of energy. The hipster dicks are already WAY on board. As are their hipster girlfriends who voted for Obama and are toying with the notion of veganism. And those types of spokespeople only piss off the naysayers. Last thing they want to see is some half-man who just discovered he can almost grow a beard, pleading for the planet in a plaintive, nearly-crying voice.

The people not sold on the Earth is Dying Tomorrow Doctrine need to hear from an old dude in an old truck, mixing his metaphors, confusing God and Satan and who owns that patch of ugly land he drives his plug-in green Ford F-150 around.

He talks tough and throws in a dig at the dirty Iranians, so you know he's "one of us." He mentions he's from Arizona, so you know how he cast his vote. Only thing missing is a McCain bumper sticker.

I think this is from Al Gore's group.

What is it About This Spokesman That Isn't Trustworthy?

I'll give you a hint: he looks like the kind of guy who would run for President and lie about cheating on his wife while fathering the child of some pretend documentary filmmaker lady and then deny fathering the child.



1975 called. They want their feathered hair back.

From the Streets of Sacramento to the Freeways of LA

I love to throw together truthful parodies of the crap I'm working on sometimes, if only for the benefit of keeping my coworkers lighthearted and mindful that we're really just bullshitters at the end of the day. (My boss called my "cynical" yesterday. I said "You are too, you just try to hide it.") Or I like to inject truth into an ad that I know the market will respond to, even if the client might freak out. Those ideas usually get shot down, but I've always believed in speaking to the audience honestly, and if I can talk someone into letting me do it, I know it will get results.

Sometimes when the camera's rolling, things get a little playful. This spokesman is doing a stand-up for some car dealer in San Bruno, a San Francisco suburb, in what appears to be the late 60s or early 70s. The info at YouTube says this was a live broadcast, but I can't believe that. I'm sure it was to tape, with the crew goofing off and saying what they really thought of this business of selling used cars. At any rate, it's gold. Lots of adult language, so if that might offend you, don't watch.



Here's an essay I wrote in 2002 about used cars.