Bike Snob NYC Unboxing
When I was a young boy I used to order “signed” baseballs out of magazines. I use dismissive quotation marks here because they were really just stamped on facsimiles of signatures. The balls came in cheap plastic display cases and even at what I remember to be around 15 dollars were probably vastly over priced. Much to my parents’ credit though, they would, from time to time, allow me order such a novelty item. Perhaps it was because of how I waited. If you have ever ordered any novelty mail order good then you know that there is a lot of waiting involved. My econ professor in college admitted to getting drunk and ordering some sort of sandwich maker at two in the morning and receiving it six months later without any clue as to why. Similarly, these baseballs were promised somewhere between six weeks and just before I you lost interest in baseball. After about a week I would start sitting outside in the front yard from when I got home until five. Truth be told, I enjoyed being in my front yard. But there’s something about a kid hanging out waiting for the mail man that just gets to parents.
Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysterious Bike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.
The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small. Perhaps that is because it was built for performance. I immediately decided to take some measurements.
Like succulent homarus americanus meat ripped right out of a claw
In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.
As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.
And one and a half eyes wide. I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine. It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI. I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.
This bodes well for a quick, snappy read. I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.
