Credit Crunch

So the TA retrieved it's credit card from the Finance Officer following the Christmas Crackers post, knowing that with BTC stalwart Tom Rogers' fourth installment of Livemultisport's Christmas list it might have to be returned forthwith. Having seen the new list (which dropped yesterday) it turns out that merely returning it to the Finance Office was not enough and the only recourse was passing it repeatedly over a strong magnet, cutting it into very small pieces and mailing aforesaid pieces back to VISA. The CC equivilent of being hung, drawn and quartered we suppose. It really was the only way.

The previous lists were modest in scope; a hat, an espresso machine, earings. Areo-wheelcovers or maybe Cliff's NSFW hot-tub were as grand as it got. Tom's list starts with some "gotta do races" and goes downhill (or uphill depending on your credit rating) from there.

What would the choice be? As with the other lists, there was one stand-out for us; wind-tunnel testing. Not that we stay up all night worried about our aerodynamics. If we did, we could do worse than get rid of our Jammers and get something a little, well, flatter. There's a video somewhere of your faithful reporter "getting aero" (hefty dose of irony) that would make a tri-coach shudder. Neither would we drop $390 USD/hr (and like so many things, one hour minimum) in any belief that it would improve the TA's athletic abilities. The TA is pushing the envelope to keep evens in a TT (20mph/32 kph), so doing a Cadel Evans and welding one's stem to the steerer-tube through a cut-out in the head-tube to reach the heady maximum of 21 mph would only come at the expense of a worsening back and a wicked case of vertigo.

Cadel Evan's TT rig. Yes, the stem really is bolted to the steerer tube!

No, rather, it's because sometimes the best gifts aren't necessarily things that you want or even need. Sometimes, they are the things that you wouldn't even dream of buying for yourself. So, because wind-tunnel testing is so outrageously in the "not only what the TA doesn't have on his Christmas list but is so far out there he didn't even think to put in on his Christmas list in the first place"category, by some strange concatenation of logic, it makes the perfect gift. Plus, having your own private wind-tunnel data; that would be so cool! How could you not name-drop that in TZ?

What would you pick (assuming you don't have half of them already)?

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