Head in the Sand

A new cycling video has gone “viral” online in the past week. It’s not a grainy account of some ridiculously impossible stunt but rather a satirical look at cycling, particularly road cycling. The video is called “Performance” and features MC SpandX.

Watch "Performance" by MC SpandX

I watched the video as I'm sure you just did and was mildly amused. Well I’m sorry to spoil the ending but the video is not an independent expression of cycling art as it would have you believe but rather a piece of indirect marketing by an online bike shop “Performance Bicycles” . As exposed by Bike Snob NYC this video if full of subliminal marketing including flashes of a banner promoting Performance Bicycles fall sale. SHAMELESS!!

This kind of conduct by companies seems to be standard practice these days. I'm not sure if it only seems this way as information becomes more and more available or if societies degenerative spiral is reflected by the companies we support in our market place.

This unscrupulous behavior by companies is only annoying in cases like Performance Bicycles but downright sinister in many other industries. Like the fact that my disposable shoes are made by a 10 year old child kidnapped from his villages in rural China to work in factory city.

Is this true…. maybe? Do I bother to find out? I guess I really don’t want to know, or maybe I am too busy to care, or too overwhelmed with information to distinguish the trust. This bombardment of information allows me to ignore these inconvenient possibilities.

I find that once I do have reliable information my conscious does kick in and I somehow find the energy to make the right decision. My wife has much more of this kind of energy then I do and she often drives change in our family. She just finished reading Slow Death By Rubber Duck which documents some of the chemicals that we Canadians are exposed to in the products we buy and use. Everything from carcinogenic store receipt paper to formaldehyde in baby shampoo.

The fact that I, as a North American consumer, am being inundated with countless chemicals is something I have definitely been aware of for awhile. What I was really shocked by was the process by which these large chemical companies are allowed to have their products sold in the market place.

Basically a chemical company invents some new chemical. A good example is a fire retardant chemical from DOW Chemicals that is currently used in just about everything you can think of. The chemical is tested by DOW and as long as it doesn’t kill all the rats in the lab they deem it to be safe. There is no independent testing of the product instead the responsibility is placed on the medical community to prove through decades of research that the chemical is harmful and usually a bunch of people have to die before the research even starts.

Mean while Dow employs a bunch of people to lobby the government to improve fire safety of electronics suggesting fire retardant chemicals are used to save lives.

“Just think of the children”!!

The result is a house full of electronics spewing cancer causing chemicals propelled by little cooling fans through vents on the back.

Hey, this is only one side of the story, maybe it’s not true. I mean the authors of Death by Rubber Duck wouldn’t have much of a book if Chemical companies were acting in the interest of the greater good, right???

Ahhh…. the sound of my head being plunged back into the preverbal sand.