Bikes Outside: Snow Goose

This morning's Bikes Outside features a Mongoose MGX locked up in front of an apartment building across the street from the Broad Street Community Garden. It was just accumulating snow last Tuesday, but the owner could have been having all sorts of fun riding around a snowy park instead. I have a hardtail Mongoose mountain bike frame that I started making into a ghetto 96er snow bike for that very purpose, but it has been a low priority. That has already been named Snowgoose, but mine is an open nomenclature and I'm willing to share.

Mongoose is a brand that lost their way the past decade or two. There was something solid and straightforward about them back in the day, but more recent models seem to be all about flash and hype. There seems to be a lot of stuff written on this bounce bike's frame--perhaps a bit more than the world needs to know. It's like the bike equivalent of tuner-style cars with Eibach, Toyo,"powered by Honda," et cetera plastered all over. Part of me wants to replace the "Powered by SRAM" decal with "Powered by legs" or some other admittedly prosaic but more accurate slogan. With tubing this large, I suppose designers felt compelled to fill up some of the space, but they could have gone in more interesting directions. How about a series of photos? Perhaps Haiku...

I spent the first half of yesterday at the Dudley bike swap meet sharing a table with Erik. The booth next to us specialized in vintage BMX bikes, so in among the Hutches, GTs and Thrusters were a few of the looptail Mongoose frames I would have liked to own as a kid (not as much as I wanted a "Tri-Power" Thruster, mind you, but neat bikes just the same)

Here's my brilliant marketing idea for the day: I think that if Mongoose, or any of the 1980's BMX superpowers started selling reasonably well-made 26" bikes that were essentially scaled-up vintage 20" BMX bikes, they would sell like hotcakes. The nostalgic force is strong with the thirtysomething demographic, and people have done far more ridiculous things to harken to their youth. A 130% sized BMX bike sounds ridiculous, because, well, it is, but I still kind of want one now.