06.05.09
Pointless
I was sent another link at work today. It’s one of those “10 things” things where some under-employed journo has to come up with something to fill some pages up.
Anyway; it’s “10 pointless things“. One might argue that the article itself would count, but apparently not.
Now there’s some plenty banal rubbish on it (the pic of the male swan chorus on point 1 was a surprise though) but number 2 is rather intriguing.
Unicycle: As its name suggests, a unicycle is similar to a bicycle but it only has one wheel. The effects of removing a wheel are all negative. Balancing on a unicycle requires much more effort and leads to a much greater likelihood of falling off. Taking away a wheel is also much slower. The maximum speed reached on a unicycle is approximately 35 km/h (22 mph), while Chris Hoy (pictured above) has reached speeds of 70 km/h (40 mph) on his bicycle.
Now I’m no unicyclist but there does seem to be a lot of wrongness in there.
I know this is a light-hearted attempt at filling in dull days in dull office jobs but there’s some good points here.
“The effects of removing a wheel are all negative” eh? Not sure I’d agree.
One of my main contentions re the world is that stuff should be fun. Unicycling ticks that box for plenty of people, hence not useless.
Secondly, why measure such a random thing as speed as a measure of usefulness? In that case a transit van is more pointless than a Ferrari, after all it would be “much slower”. NB the claimed “40mph” is pretty far short of top speed on a bike anyway.
But what else is useful re unicycling?
As I can testify (and Clurb can corroborate), unicycling is much harder work (at least at first). They even mention this but apparently miss the significance of it. It gives you a harder workout, it works your core stability muscles, it helps your balance. All rather useful things from my work point of view. There was even a “unicycling for back pain” article in one of the charity publications from Back Care.
Not sure they thoroughly thought this one through.
Either that or they couldn’t be bothered either because they’re lazy or the article really didn’t need to be particularly thought through.