... John Kerry spends a lot of time suddenly appearing in the horizontal. This time, the SOB appears to be sand:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry took a spill from his bicycle after hitting a patch of sand during a ride Sunday afternoon, but he was uninjured, campaign officials said.

Kerry was riding south on a two-lane road at about 1:00 p.m. in the direction of Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, a quiet, suburban town about 18 miles northwest of Boston.

He was approaching a stop light at the intersection with Route 2 and was slowing down when he veered left into the oncoming lane and fell, according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed him fall. Secret Service agents and local police immediately stopped traffic while Kerry and a handful of bicycling companions moved to the shoulder.

The Secret Service detail apparently stayed off the bicycles, which meant that Kerry couldn't blame them for falling off of his customized bicycle -- which Tim Blair notes has to run somewhere in the $5K range. The Boston Herald, in a prescient moment, ran an analysis on this very subject on Friday:

How much would you pay for a bicycle? Is seven grand too much?

Not as much as John Kerry [related, bio], I daresay, now that we know, thanks to a front-page story about his butler in The New York Times, that he owns a Serotta bike. The Serotta, see, is custom-made, with the ``holistic (whole-cyclist) approach to bicycle fitting.''

Translation: It's very expensive. How expensive, you ask. Serotta's ``price points'' are between $1,800 and $5,000 - just for the frame, mind you, if you want extras, like gears and titanium spokes, tack on another $2,000 - which raises the question: what do you suppose Kerry's point is?

Consider that Kerry's second wife owns a Gulfstream V jet, the Flying Squirrel, worth $35 million, and also bought him a personal powerboat, the Scaramouche, worth at least $800,000. So do you think Liveshot's wife's first husband's trust fund bought a bike on the low end, or the high end?

I'll go out on a limb and say Liveshot's bike is worth five large. And that it actually belongs, not to the solon himself, but to his ``family.''

The man of the people, indeed. Next time, maybe the Secret Service should insist on training wheels, custom-made, of course. (via Just About Everybody In The Damn Blogosphere While I Was Watching The Sopranos)

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is