I’ve decided that I truly fit the bill of being a retrogrouch. I was reading the Rivendell catalog the other day. The Rivendell catalog is put out by an ex-Bridgestone guy, another card carrying retrogrouch. It's like an extension of the old Bridgestone Owner's newletter, which I've never seen, but which I'm told was quite good. This is fundamentally a bike catalog for a lot of oddball stuff that he sells, but is about 50% articles on biking. In one article he recounts being asked if he subscribed to ancient remedies for saddle sores such as putting raw steak in his shorts. He said that he did not actually put raw steak into his shorts as an antidote to saddle sores, but did indeed once sew a potholder into them. I'm not sure how the steak concept would fly these days -- perhaps chicken or fish would be better. Vegetarians would be at a definite disadvantage. Somehow, I don't think a healthy serving of greens would provide quite the comfort of something straight off the hoof. I must confess that I did once do something similarly creative with my shorts. I knew about chamois, but didn't have any in my possession. I did, however, have some scraps of rather thick leather around (I think this was a remnant from my sandal making ersazt hippy days). In any case, I reasoned that chamois and this stuff both came from the same animal (just like steak, only from the outside), so this should work. So I embellished one of my pairs of cutoff jeans with a leather bottom, sort of a variation on liederhosen (still couldn't yodel worth a damn, though). They were stiff enough to double as armor, and even I didn't wear them for very long.
The trouble with me as a Rivendell customer is that I'm too cheap to actually buy the catalog, and most of the interesting low tech solutions he comes up with, I can usually lower tech myself. For instance, he was selling a musette bag as an alternative to a handlebar or saddle bag. A musette bag, for those of you who don't spend most of July glued to the tube watching the Tour de France, is a little canvas bag with a shoulder strap that is filled with food and handed up to the racers as they blast past. This seemed like a good idea to me. Upon further reflection, I determined that rather than spend $12 on a prefabricated bag, I could make my own out of an old pair of blue jeans. The next item was a tool and tube tote, that was basically a 16" square of fabric you folded around the tools, etc. Not much value added here. Now $2 is not much, but I figure that my old pair of jeans would be worth about $10 suitably repackaged as tool bags. Actually, old calculator cases make excellent tool bags. I seem to have a lifetime supply of those.
I'm too cheap to pay for the catalog, so I will gradually be phased out of their mailing list. It is against my religion to pay money for a catalog. Basically, you are paying money for the opportunity to spend more money. Something un-American in that. Like paying for air.
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