I Hope Santa Doesn't Leave Coal In My DeFeet Socks

Am I so influential as a blogger that I now have a curse or jinx?

Or is my internalized Catholic Guilt kicking in?

The other day, I wrote about Anthony Hoyte, a.k.a. the Pedaling Picasso, whose rides have been making images of Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman and other Christmas-related motifs on Strava.

Well, Santa and his reindeer aren't bringing good tidings or shiny new bicycles to some folks who work for the company that gave us the app 100 million cyclists, runners and other athletes use to record and share their rides and workouts.  

The company got caught in the crosshairs, if you will.  The COVID-19-induced surge in demand for bicycles, tech products and services and all things related to both has cooled off.  Also, three years after the pandemic began both industries have been plagued with supply-chain issues and some of the sharks have swallowed the guppies--or, as the business media likes to say, there have been "consolidations."

It's not clear as to which forces, specifically, have led Strava to laying off 40 employees, or about 15 percent of its workforce.  But, being both a bike- and tech-related company right now is, I guess, a bit like being a real-estate and finance company in 2008.

If I jinxed or cursed those now-former Strava employees, I am really, really sorry.  I hope Santa doesn't leave coal in my DeFeet wool socks--though, I imagine, it's difficult to leave some of the sustainable energy sources.  I mean, even though I have pretty big feet, a wind turbine--even a teensy weensy one--probably won't fit!

Should The Pedaling Picasso Become A Planner?

Who is an artist?

More specifically, what makes an artist an artist?

OK, I know that you (some of you, anyway) don't come to this blog for answers to questions like those.  Greater minds than mine can't come up with them, so I won't try to formulate any on this blog, let alone in this post.

There are, however, cyclists who make, if not objets d'art, then at least conceptual creations when they ride.  

Anthony Hoyte, a.k.a. The Pedaling Picasso, created this Strava image of Pere Noel in and around Paris.  While pedaling 109.7 miles over 13 hours and 19 minutes does not yield an impressive average speed, you have to remember that works of art, great or not, take time.  In Hoyte's case, he probably spent much of that time simply navigating his route.

Likewise, his GPS must have worked overtime as he pedaled sketches of Frosty the Snowman, a reindeer, Santa's head and the words "Merry Christmas in and around London and Birmingham.

If he could make street-level route maps of those images, they would be more useful than some of the "bicycle infrastructure" built lately:

I mean, what is the point of a "roundabout" in a bike lane? An intersection with signal lights synchronized so that cyclists cross before the traffic would be infinitely  more practical--and safer. 

A true artist would know better, I think.