Why I Wear A Helmet Cam On My Bike

Wearing a cam or taking video while riding your bicycle is becoming increasingly popular. I subscribe to all kinds of bike cam types on youtube. Most of these are from the UK, where it looks to me like the crowded streets of London and the narrow 2 lane roads of the suburbs and countryside provide for all kinds of interesting traffic video. I greatly enjoy watching the footage and it may actually do some good. One of the best in my opinion is CycleGaz:

Gaz also has a youtube channel called Silly Cyclists which in my opinion kind of balances things out a bit and marks him as somebody who isn't mindlessly biased.

As many of you know, I occasionally use the cam for the same kind of thing. The natural assumption most people make is that my cam is about "catching" people in cars behaving badly. This is not so. I know this post is kind of a repeat of a recent one I titled The Human Element a little while ago, but it is truer today than ever.

I know now why I have spent years riding around looking like a weirdo geek cam head. It was so I could capture this moment:

Oh yeah, that's what I've been after. Really!

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

If Snakes Got Tattoos

I have suffered a WTF (Word To Form) Syndrome double-whammy! If you don't know what I'm talking about, click here. 

Anyway, long time reader of Rantwick and awesome thoughtful blogger Cafiend, aka Citizen Rider, wrote something that struck my WTF bone pretty hard. Go here for full context, but in short he has suffered some sort of bite or sting that is requiring loads of antibiotics and stuff. In reference to said bite, likely that of a spider or insect, he wrote, "This would be a lot easier to take from a nice macho rattlesnake". Of course I knew exactly how he meant it. But WTF caused me to wonder what a "macho rattlesnake" would look like. Damn.

WTF syndrome is not to be trifled with, so I got to work right away when I got home from work. So: What does a macho rattlesnake look like?

Tom Selleck's Moustache (literally), Steak House kinda guy, tattoo. Done.

When I was working on the stupidness above, I drifted into a second wave of stupid: If snakes got tattoos, what would they get? I figured a deadly human preparing to strike, y'know? So, if you're a snake, what does that look like?

Angry dude with a shovel. I was channeling a snake spirit I think. I ended up spending more time on macho snake's tattoo than macho snake himself. And so, another episode of WTF has occurred and been dealt with. I won't bother with the usual apologies and stuff; it changes nothing. Let us all just move on. 

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K