Author Topic: Cyclists could earn a little pocket money  (Read 2550 times)

Andre Jute

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Cyclists could earn a little pocket money
« on: August 31, 2018, 01:46:40 pm »
In a thread where my reply would have been a bit too far off-topic, John Saxby suggests:
Title for a Southern Hemisphere photo-essay, Andre: "Utes, Bakkies, and Bogans".  any takers?
There was a time when that idea would have been a gift, but today, with the Ford F150 being the biggest-selling vehicle in the USA (and probably in the world, or at the very least second only to Toyota's indestructible little truck), and thus the biggest advertiser, even the techno-rednecks at Wired (says he, lifting his feet for his robot vacuum cleaner to scurry underneath) are sensitive to calling truck owners "bogans" (Oz slang for rednecks). A couple of magazines that aren't averse to a little elitism* (not snobbery, god forbid) are Quadrant in Oz and the late William F. Buckley's National Review in the States, but they're not big on photo essays. No, the obvious market is actually the New York Times or the LA Times or The Guardian, or the equivalent limo-left-doormat magazines, whose readers are closet snobs and would be delighted for further proof that "ute-driver" and "deplorable" are synonyms, but which brings us right back, since all the media from the post-office age are hurting for advertising which used to be their main source of income, to Ford's mighty advertising budget for the F150.

All the same this suggests to me a way the photographers and writers on the forum could earn a little pocket money. The Guardian in particular is a bicycle-friendly paper (more to do with virtue signaling than actually riding, you understand, but it makes no difference) and the biggest menace to British cyclists are big trucks with limited visibility to their sides in narrow ways, and where they turn. There's a shocking photo essay there. And The Telegraph will probably pay for a photo essay sending up the politically correct cycle lanes that end nowhere or dump cyclists into fast-moving traffic.

*My version is "meritocracy" -- Uh-huh. Gotta go. My robot just fell down the stairs.