"I am doll parts." - Kurt Cobain's murderer

(jk)

His supporters don't see this stuff.

"Your kid can have two full-size Snickers but only if you TURN OFF THAT FUCKING MUSIC"

I grew up in Ohio in the '70s. We would get our first snow in late September and by the end of October the ground would have permanent snow cover. We wouldn't see grass again until some time in April with the last snow coming in May. The giant mounds of plowed snow would last into June. It's hard for me to even imagine a six-month Winter now, but that's what we got.

In Summer the "heat wave" was when it got to 85°F during the day.

I ain't gonna play Sun City.

i.e. you can get a ticket for driving 5 km an hour over the limit

I'm a school bus driver and my superior once tried to tell me that it was legal to drive 5 mph over the speed limit. I laughed and said "what the fuck are you talking about?" TBF it's de facto legal to do it because you're extremely unlikely to get a ticket for it and you could argue in court that a recorded speed 5 mph over the limit is not statistically different from the actual limit, but that's not the same as actually "legal".

Looking at your phone while driving?

I'm a school bus driver. My coworkers frequently use their phones while driving the buses -- even though we have cameras mounted inside and they keep getting caught at it. Somehow nobody has gotten anything except a warning from the boss for doing it. I just do not understand how they're getting away with it.

Some of the drivers also vape on the buses.

animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation

My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as "weak" and "sickly" and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.

The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn't get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.

What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations?

Actually quite a lot. The pace of evolutionary change is a function of the amount of variation present in a population and the intensity of selection (i.e. the death rate). There was one study done of the variation of bone dimensions present in modern populations of chimpanzees that suggests that the transition from chimpanzee-style locomotion to full bipedality (at least the variant of bipedality observed in Ardipithecus (~5 million years ago) could have happened on the scale of a few thousand years.

This is not to say that it did happen that fast, just that it could have given a strong enough intensity of selection. There is a weird tendency in paleoanthropology for researchers to propose something that might have happened and it becomes accepted by the general public as something that did happen.

My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they've been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.

I’m always riding on the flats or the drops

I always did the same on my road bike (a Cannondale Cadd-8, not nearly as antique as your bike here). Last year I gave up and mounted straight handlebars. I like the steering leverage better and if I want to tuck I have aerobars mounted for that.

I love old bikes, but I think the only thing about your bike I wouldn't like is the downtube shifters. I haven't used them since my old Raleigh in the '80s, but I remember struggling with them and having to devote a lot of my attention to them while riding.

I bought a Trek 4200 in 2006, basically my first bike (as an adult, anyway). All yellow, and after experiencing my first numb penis episode, I bought this very long, thin, red, split Italian racing bike seat and put it on, so it was a very distinctive-looking bike (it even had tribars which aren't often mounted on mountain bikes). After a ride one day I left it on my front porch and forgot it was there and it was eventually stolen. I didn't even realize it until a week later when I was getting ready for a ride and couldn't find my bike anywhere. I was pissed but I immediately went out and bought the exact same bike in gray (which I still have and it has over 70,000 miles on it).

A few months after it was stolen, I was sitting in my house one day and got the strange urge to go out on my front porch, something I basically never did. While I was standing there, a pickup truck drove down my street, and mounted upright in the back was my original yellow bike, complete with the long red seat. There's no way it was a different yellow Trek 4200 with a long red seat and tribars. I was too surprised to do anything and it drove by and was gone. Probably wasn't the person that stole it, anyway; more likely they bought it from a pawn shop or craigslist. Just a really fucking strange experience.

The 4200 is/was a great bike. Not top of the line by any imagination, but durable and reliable as fuck. I'm glad I still have one of them, at least.