Ask a MAMIL

Dear MAMIL,

Why are MAMILs like you, as a group, so hated on? I mean, it’s not like you’re hurting anybody and as we age, non-impact exercise like cycling makes a lot of sense.

Lisa M, Ross, CA

Dear Lisa,

Indeed, “MAMIL” is a largely derogatory term. Fun fact: the Oxford English Dictionary added this word in 2014, defining it as “A middle-aged man who is a keen road cyclist, typically one who rides an expensive bike and wears the type of clothing associated with professional cyclists.”  It doesn’t mention the negative connotation, but then dictionaries seldom do.

I suspect the antipathy relates to the intersection of Lycra, middle-aged-ness, and maleness. So many middle-aged men are shameless about wearing Lycra despite their un-svelte girth. This can create reactions along the lines of “why are you doing this to me?!” from onlookers. The hardcore cyclists with weedy builds are no better … why would we want to accentuate such a physique with form-fitting clothing?

On top of that, cycling is an expensive sport, thus much of the ridicule is based on the showy display of wealth and status by people we don’t actually envy and wouldn’t want to be. On top of this, the very fact that cycling is a virtuous activity can trigger the gag reflex. But I think “MAMIL” is a fairly lighthearted mockery, and of course anyone able to afford this sport, and in good enough health to do it into middle age, ought to be a good sport about it. If you call me “MAMIL” to my face I’ll good-naturedly reply, “Guilty as charged.”

Dear MAMIL,

Let’s just be real for a minute here: isn’t the point of men wearing Lycra to show off their junk?

E.A., Albany, CA

Dear E,

The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is hell no. The full answer is: I’m not going to discuss genitalia in this column. Nice try.

Dear MAMIL,

How can you justify the horrendous cost of your clothing? I mean, isn’t it like $200 for a single pair of shorts? Wouldn’t that feed a poor village for like a week?

Malcolm D, Oakland, CA

Dear Malcolm,

You can actually spend $400 on a pair of Assos bib shorts. There’s no doubt about it, cycling clothing is atrociously expensive. A relatively upscale Castelli costume (i.e., a pair of bib shorts and a jersey) is, ounce for ounce, more expensive than  MacBook Air, a leather jacket, a pair of Nike Air Jordans, or a pair of Doc Marten boots.

(Take the above AI-generated chart with a grain of salt, as I didn’t hallucination-check it.)

Now, a lot of this cost is basically a luxury tax for an upscale sport. But to some degree the cost is justified, because the fabric, the cut, the design, etc. really do help the clothing perform well. I fully appreciated this one cold January morning when I was getting ready for a race, but hadn’t changed yet, and was freezing my ass off in jeans and a sweatshirt. Once I put on my ABCs (that’s cycling vernacular for “angry biker clothes”), I was immediately more comfortable.

Fortunately, if you scour the Internet (and, depending on where you live, even your local thrift stores) you can find cheaper gear. The high school mountain bike teams in my region get styled out with all kinds of free gear, because MAMILs love to upgrade their wardrobes and donate perfectly good stuff.

Dear MAMIL,

Is there really an article of bike clothing called “bibs”? I was overhearing my teenager talking about his team’s clothing order and I kept hearing “bibs.” I know bikers eat fast, and it’d be a shame to spill on their expensive biking jerseys, but bibs? Really?

Phyllis R, Topeka, KS

Dear Phyllis,

“Bibs” is short for “bib shorts.” These have shoulder straps, kind of like suspenders, instead of an elastic waistband. The vast majority of MAMILs use this type of short. They’ll tell you it’s because bibs are more comfortable, cause less bunching, etc., but in reality it’s a) a mimetic thing (i.e., it’s what the pros wear), b) for the corset effect, and c) to avoid the discomfort of the elastic waistband cutting in to our belly fat.

Middle-age spread aside, I’ve been wearing bibs since I was a teenager. The main reason, originally, was bullying. It was surprisingly common (i.e., almost inevitable) in those days, at least in Boulder, for a rival teen rider to come up behind you, grab the back of your shorts, pull them down, and hook the waistband under your saddle like a super-wedgie. In most cases the perp then grabbed his water bottle and hosed down your butt. Once this started happening, no one I knew ever bought another pair of non-bib shorts.

Dear MAMIL,

It seems like most of your readers ask questions about the Lycra side of MAMIL. What about the middle-aged part? Doesn’t anyone care about that? I’ll start: isn’t cycling a younger person’s game? Why persist at something so physically taxing, not to mention dangerous? At our age, what’s wrong with golf?

Perry L, Sarasota, FL

Dear Perry,

I’ve wondered myself about the preponderance of clothing-related questions. I suspect it’s just harder to articulate inquiries around the inchoate wistfulness that accompanies middle age. In answer to your question—why do I persist?—I think the short answer is because I still can. Ageing alone is hard enough, with the loss of muscle mass, power, and stamina, but psychologically I was dealt an extra blow upon becoming an empty nester. For the past few years, life in general—and cycling in particular—have come to feel like when you get Extended Play during a car race video game. The real work has been done and life is starting to wind down, and it feels like if I pause for too long in my cycling I’ll suddenly discover I can’t do it anymore. So in a way, cycling is more important to me than ever … it’s like one of the few strands left connecting me to my younger life.

As for danger, the risk of injury with cycling is less than soccer, basketball, skiing, snowboarding, and even running and jogging if you factor in overuse injuries. With golf, meanwhile, you run a roughly 100% chance of being a dweeb.

Dear MAMIL,

Not all of my cycling clothing has the same washing instructions. Some tags include crazy decrees like “line dry in the shade.” Can you give some general tips that I could safely apply across all my bike garments?

John L, Ithaca, NY

Dear John,

It can definitely be confusing. Check out this label from a pair of shorts I had (click to enlarge):

Can you believe it? Two sets of conflicting washing instructions on one garment! I think it just goes to show, there aren’t many hard-and-fast rules. But my decades of experience (see how asking a MAMIL has its benefits?) have taught me a few things:

• You can use whatever detergent you want (my wife often makes her own)
• You can (and should) use a stain remover like Shout or Spray ‘n Wash
• There’s no need to wonder about fabric softener because nobody, and I mean nobody, has used this product since my neighbor Mrs. K—back in the ‘70s
• Wash all of your cycling gear (including the socks) on cold, permanent press or “casual” cycle (whatever one step down from “normal” is on your machine)
• Don’t worry about separating darks from lights, that’s a completely mythical rule with zero basis in reality, other than that weird pair of unripe-plum-colored “Thai fisher pants” that my wife bought once that turned everything pink
• Line dry all your bike clothes (except your socks), and yes, it’s okay to dry them in the sun if you want (I mean, think about it, it’s not like we only ride at night!)
• Wash your shorts right-side-out (to protect the chamois), but dry them inside-out (because it’s faster)
• For really fancy shorts like Rapha, hand-wash, and only in bottled water (just kidding—if you have any Rapha clothing,  donate it to the Goodwill and then go buy something less hipster-douche-y)

Dear MAMIL,

This isn’t a big deal or anything, but I’m kind of hung up on why we call so much apparel “Lycra” when it mostly isn’t. If I see “Lycra” on a clothing label at all, it’s usually a pretty small percentage. Can you shed any light on that?

Sean D, Austin, TX

Dear Sean,

Lycra is a brand name for a high-end version of elastane, aka spandex. A number of my cycling garments say “elastane” on the tag, and a few say “Lycra,” and none say “spandex.” (I reckon this is because “spandex” is associated with women’s apparel like swimwear, leotards, dancewear, and ‘80s aerobics wear.) Cycling shorts tend to consist of 20-35% elastane (or Lycra if they’re fancy) and 65-80% nylon. That’s enough Lycra/elastane to give enough stretch, but keeping the nylon content high makes shorts more durable. Jerseys, on the other hand, tend to be mostly (or entirely) polyester, which is a totally different material from elastane (polyester being polyethylene terephthalate, to be precise, vs. elastane which is a polyurethane-based elastomer). But we just call it all “Lycra” because that gets the point across, just like “Kleenex" and “Xerox” do.

In fact, it’s a good thing the term “Lycra” still predominates, because if we always said “elastane” then I’d be a Middle-Aged Man in Elastane, i.e., a “MAMIE,” which sounds like “someone who is maimed.” Though actually, considering how hard this sport is, that kind of fits…

Dear Mammal,

I still breastfeed my 18-month-old and refuse to apologize for it. In countries like Norway this isn’t even considered strange. Why do you suppose so many mothers in my community seem freaked out by this?

Joan L, Burlington, VT

Dear Joan,

I’m sorry, I think you’ve got me confused with another columnist. While I am a mammal (and admittedly prone to occasional mansplaining), I am not equipped to field your question about breastfeeding. I hope you’re able to find the right expert to help, as opposed to a MAMIL which is all I purport to be.

Dear MAMIL,

I’ve noticed that a lot of cycling clothing isn’t so sleek and form-fitting anymore, particularly mountain biking clothing that can be downright baggy. Why don’t more MAMILs sensibly wear that instead of continuing to wear Lycra kit that in many cases puts their extra “padding” on prominent display?

Rob S, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Rob,

At first blush this newer clothing, mainly used for mountain biking, seems like a fine idea, and in many cases totally is, but there are both practical and cultural impediments to replacing Lycra with modern, baggy bike clothing.

If a middle-aged cyclist is fairly new to the sport, isn’t worried about what cultural signals he is sending, and doesn’t need gear that’s high performance, baggywear (to coin a term) is totally fine with just a few minor caveats. One, the baggy mountain-biking shorts don’t always have a chamois, so either you wear traditional Lycra shorts underneath (which means spending more money) or you get a sore butt. Two, if this cyclist is skilled enough to hit really high speeds, the flapping of that jersey could get annoying (and eventually irritate the skin if worn as a single layer). Mountain biking is slower, which is why this clothing works at all. The final caveat is that the mountain biking jerseys often don’t have pockets. This is fine if you use a seat bag, or a Camelbak-style pack, or one of those crazy compartments that some modern bike frames have. But if you do long road rides, you’ll want pockets for your vest, your jacket, your food, etc.

Culturally, baggywear is designed around youth who think Lycra is for, well, MAMILs. When I was head coach of a high school mountain bike team, and leading the big kickoff meeting for prospective new riders, one of the questions I fielded from a new kid was, “Do we have to wear the Lycra?” My answer—that you can wear whatever you want in training, and whatever shorts you want in the races, but you have to wear the team jersey in races—really put this kid at ease, and in fact he went on to do most of the rides in a t-shirt and sweatpants. (This was before baggywear existed.) So, when I see an adult (e.g., a fellow coach) in the baggier stuff, my spidey-sense starts tingling and I wonder if it’s a case of arrested development. If I’m honest, this is probably just sour grapes because the other adult can pull it off better than I could. But if you go down this path, you should be aware that others, particularly youth, may think you’re trying to be cool, which is widely held to be a major gaff, especially when perpetrated by the middle-aged.

A final practical consideration applies if you are both a roadie and a mountain biker. If you want to wear the baggy stuff off-road, but wisely stick to Lycra on the road, you’re talking about doubling the size of your (expensive) wardrobe. My advice? Just stick with the old-school Lycra and own it.

Dear MAMIL,

It’s not like only men ride bikes. Is there any female equivalent for “MAMIL”?

Tina O, New York City

Dear Tina,

I’ve never heard one, and my light research hasn’t unearthed anything in widespread use. ChatGPT suggests MAFIL; Gemini asserts MAWIL and OWL (Older Women in Lycra); and Copilot purports to have come across WILMA (Women in Lycra, Middle Aged) and SOMAT  (Slightly Overweight Middle-Aged Totty) though it credits Single Track World magazine which it acknowledges is a very niche publication.

I’m not a fan of any of the above. Let’s see if we can get MAVIS to take off: Middle Aged Vixens in Spandex!

Dear MAMIL,

I once thought I could fight the “MAMIL” stigma by simply not wearing Lycra when cycling, but eventually I got over myself and starting wearing the proper gear. This started with just shorts and jersey but now I’ve discovered arm and leg warmers—what a game-changer! I don’t know why it took me so long to understand their value. Are there other types of cycling apparel I might be missing out on that actually help?

Paul M, San Francisco, CA

Dear Paul,

I eschewed the cycling vest for over thirty years, as I just didn’t see the point. What’s wrong with sleeves, right? Well, now I have seen the light. A cycling vest is a very close fit, which is doable because you don’t have the problem of bunching up around the armpits. The snug fit makes them warmer than a jacket and they don’t flap around at all. Plus, a vest can be made of a relatively stout fabric like Gore Windstopper (typically just on the front panels) and still scrunch up nice and compact in your pocket.

Another amazing accessory is the Lycra skullcap, such as Castelli’s “skully,” which looks like those weird caps astronauts wear under their space helmets. It’s just thin Lycra so it fits really well under a helmet, yet for some reason it does an amazing job keeping your head warm. I’m so fond of this skullcap, I think if it were chilly out and I couldn’t find it, I’d probably just not go.

Dear MAMIL,

A pal told me Castelli makes a product called a “light head thingy” and though I was sure he was pulling my leg, I checked and they actually do! My question is, who wears this thingy, and why?

Bart B, Chapel Hill, NC

Dear Bart,

Who wears it? That’s easy: Thing 1 and Thing 2! And why? Because Thing 1 and Thing 2! (Full disclosure: they actually don’t, which came as a big disappointment to me. Why did I think they did? Because The Cat in the Hat wears one! His happens to have a brim, but look at it: it’s clearly a light head thingy.)

Hey MAMIL,

Why are you people so annoying?

Anonymous, Irvine, CA

Dear Anonymous,

I think you meant to sign off, “Anonymous motorist.” If you were a cyclist, you probably wouldn’t find us annoying. But you live in Irvine, so you are clearly a motorist. Most non-cyclist motorists view the world though a very narrow perspective: that of somebody who is perennially frustrated while behind the wheel, but doesn’t know why. The reason, of course, is that you’re so often stuck in traffic, and instead of thinking, “I’m getting what I deserve,” you’re blaming your situation on others, like other motorists, and on traffic laws, and on red lights, and—especially—on cyclists. We drive you bonkers because we’re actually allowed to just ride right past you, gliding along merrily while you’re there fuming.

Oddly enough, I used to be just like you when in motorist mode. I would be driving my daughter across Berkeley to her ballet class, and running late, and feeling stuck, and just generally being terrorized by the imposed paralysis that is the condition of the urban motorist, and I would be tempted to start lashing out the way you do. In fact, for a brief, senseless moment I once started to criticize the city of Berkeley for all the streets I couldn’t take because they were blocked to cars and labeled “Bicycle Boulevard.” But then it hit me: Berkeley isn’t the problem; I’m the problem! I shouldn’t be driving a car, I should be on my bike! So from then on I made my kid bike to ballet class with me. It went splendidly because Berkeley, wisely deciding it had catered to motorists long enough, has designed its roads to be truly bike-friendly. Wait, don’t go yet! There’s an epilogue to this story: fast-forward a bunch of years, and my daughter is now a young adult and hasn’t bothered to get a driver license. She bikes everywhere, like her old man. Her middle-aged old man in Lycra.

A MAMIL is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a MAMIL,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Specialized Aethos - The Full Scoop

Introduction

Why are you even here? Are you actually in the market for a $7,000 racing bike? Or do you just love bikes and/or albertnet? Wait, don’t leave, I’m gonna tell you exactly why you’re here, or at least why you should stay.

Most bike magazine reviews are, let’s face it, kind of pointless. They’re based on the fleeting impression a journalist (i.e., potentially a non-racer) gets about a bike, filtered through the lens of not offending anybody, particularly a potential advertiser. (See here for the most blatant example of the pay-for-praise faux-journalism model.) The last negative bike review I can remember in “Bicycling” was of the Motobecane Prolight all the way back in 1982, when the reviewer unsparingly and laughingly decried how flex-y it was, only to recant everything an issue or two later, obviously having caught some heat. So much for that. (Full disclosure: I haven’t leafed through a bike magazine in many years so for all I know they’ve completely changed and are now fiercely honest … but somehow I doubt it.)

Of course you might actually be considering buying a Specialized Aethos and have been combing the Internet for reviews etc. like I did. That’s great, and there were some fairly helpful ones, but what I’d wanted to know is what it’s like riding this bike for months, over all kinds of terrain, and the way it was meant to be ridden—that is, jolly hard. I wanted feedback from someone with decades of experience, a real/former racer who could actually put the bike through its paces vs. some columnist I know nothing about. Well, I provide that perspective here, having put over 1,300 miles on my Aethos over flat roads, short but brutally steep climbs, long climbs, dirt roads, and full sprints. And if you’re interested in road bike technology and in industry trends in general, this post gives some color on that, comparing the Aethos to my high-end 2013-era carbon bike with its mechanical shifting and caliper brakes. I’ll weigh in on whether Di2, disc brakes, through-axles, and tubeless tires live up to their promise.

You’ll also get a handy way to compare frame geometry; a comparison of SRAM E-tap vs. Shimano Di2; an analysis of the important differences between the 2025 Aethos and the 2026 Aethos 2; and a primer on how and why to name your bike. If all goes well you might even get a chuckle or two.

Why the Aethos?

I’ve always liked Specialized bikes. My wife and I crossed the country on them in 1994, she on the Rockhopper Comp I sold her the day we first met, me on my Stumpjumper Comp. (We still have them.) Plus, Specialized supports the NICA high school mountain bike racing program for which I’m an assistant coach. On top of that, one of my most esteemed cycling pals, Craig, rides the Aethos and watching him drop me on it, repeatedly, has made an impression (though in fairness he also dropped me on his Canyon, which he threw over for the Aethos). Finally, the bike looked good on paper, which can mean a lot.

When I shop for a road bike, the main thing I look at is frame geometry. I have to believe that any modern carbon fiber frame is going to be light, stiff, etc. and in my experience the main thing that will differ from one make and model to another, and significantly affect the ride, is the design of the frame: seat tube angle, head tube angle, top tube length, and wheelbase. This is, after all, what differentiates a touring bike from a racing bike. As  explained here, I once bought a frame online without knowing the head tube angle, and discovered on that bike’s maiden voyage that it was too slack, a major letdown. Following that misadventure I rode nothing but custom made frames for the next decade. That was in the days of aluminum; I have yet to encounter a company what will build a carbon frame custom. So you have to choose carefully among stock frame geometries.

Since this might be getting a bit dull, I’m going to proceed with this review in the time-honored tradition of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Cue the Ennio Morricone score of this iconic western (and if you want to quibble about my use of the Oxford comma just now, click here and/or email me).

The Good

If I hadn’t committed myself to this good/bad/ugly structure I’d use a stronger word, like amazing. As you can see here, I’ve had a lot of high end racing bikes, and I’m here to tell you the Aethos is the best I’ve ever ridden. It’s the lightest, at 15.8 pounds (in size XL no less); is just as stiff as its last five predecessors (i.e., I can’t flex it); is the most comfortable in how it soaks up the bumps; and feels the most surefooted on descents. The ride is so plush, it’s as though the asphalt were carpeted. And when I stand on the pedals, the bike just leaps to life, like it’s snapping to attention—“Yes, sir!” I’ve never experienced a bike that’s so lively, and I guess it’s down to overall low weight and the crazy light carbon rims. And the geometry chart of the Aethos doesn’t lie: as expected, the handling of this bike is superb. For the last ten years I was on a Giant TCR Advanced, with a 73° head tube angle, and until I rode the Aethos I didn’t even realize how much I missed the 74° that I had on my custom bikes. (Note that all my geometry figures herein are based on my size of frame. Smaller frames will have differences, but the design characteristics are typically consistent across sizes.)

Here’s the thing about a steeper head tube angle: it does make a bike a bit twitchier, but in the best possible way. A bike with a 74° head tube angle will dive happily into a curve, vs. bike with a 73° that kind has to be coaxed. It’s like the difference between Tigger and Eeyore. Yes, more skill and attention is demanded of the rider, but it’s well worth it. I so prefer the steeper head tube, I really can’t understand why any company producing a racing bike would ever choose 73°. But then, companies produce all types of retarded shit, like social media, aerosol whipped cream, microwave popcorn, and soft drinks. It’s a weird world.

My custom bikes had a 72° seat tube angle which I always thought was crucial. The Aethos has a 73°. I find that a) I don’t miss the shallower seat angle as much as I’d expected, and b) this geometry discussion has gone on long enough.

Of course not all of the enjoyment I get out of this bike comes from the featherweight frame and the great geometry. The wheels are also super light, and though they’re probably not as aerodynamic as the Dura-Ace ones I raved about in these pages, they have wider rims, which—coupled with the wider tires and tubeless-ness—give a much nicer ride and presumably lower rolling resistance. Nothing about this bike feels slower on the flats that my Giant, which had aero head  and seat tubes and an aero seatpost in addition to those punishing wheels. Yes, the Specialized Tarmac and other bikes are more aerodynamic than the Aethos, and if you like to haul ass on the flats, of course you should factor that in.

My old bike had Dura-Ace 9-speed with a worn-out right shifter that barely worked. So obviously upgrading to 12-speed Di2 electronic (albeit only Ultegra) wasn’t going to cause any complaint. Not surprisingly, the shifting is excellent. At first I was a bit bothered by the whirring sound of the front derailleur, but actually it does something really clever: it moves just enough to shift the chain, and then a fraction of a second after the shift is complete, it moves again, just a tad, to give the chain more clearance so it’ll never rub. This gets around a compromise traditional derailleurs have always had to make. And I don’t think SRAM does this—I’ve rented three or four top-end bikes with eTAP over the last eight years, and all of them threw the chain at least once (details here). For road bikes, Shimano is better and if you don’t agree you can come fight me. Now: would I say everyone should be on electronic? My answer is still no. Modern cable-pull shifting, when your equipment isn’t twenty years old and totally worn out, is great.

I’d never run tubeless before but now was the time. As detailed here, I see no legitimate reason not to adopt this technology. Oddly, the mechanic who built the bike for me recommended tubes, saying unless you’re going with super fat tires at really low pressure, you run the risk of spewing sealant everywhere when you puncture, especially when the tires are worn. Well, these S-Works tires (which ride great, by the way) are now completely worn out and I never had a problem, other than with a twisted valve as detailed here (and now I’ve got that sorted). Installation was easy. The ride is lovely, reminding me of the plush feel of tubulars (aka sew-ups) back in the day. The slightly wider (28C) tubeless tires are surely part of why this bike is so comfortable.

Do through-axles make a difference? Well, it’s hard to say, because nobody just goes from old-school quick-release hubs to through-axles without changing pretty much everything else. This technology means carrying an Allen key, but that’s no biggie. (I almost said “Allen wrench” but that sounds too heavy.) But I will say, this through-axle setup must exist for a reason (better stiffness and better disk brake alignment, I suppose) and like I said before, this bike descends beautifully and maybe this is part of the equation.

Speaking of disc brakes, are they a game-changer? Well, I certain can’t complain. The rotors tend to stay cleaner than rims which is mainly a benefit on mountain bikes but does simplify maintenance on this bike, too. Hydraulic brakes are a bit more powerful than the Dura-Ace caliper brakes on my old bike, and if I ever get caught riding in the rain I’ll really appreciate them. I also don’t miss the hiss of my old brakes (particularly when the rims were grimy) but then, I dread the day my hydraulic brakes start moaning for no reason.

It’s a real treat to buy a bike and not feel like you have to replace anything. My Aethos is completely stock, down to the bar tape and the saddle, and even those are great. The saddle is super light carbon fiber and—once I got used to it, which took just a ride or two—is totally comfortable. For a while it started creaking, especially on really steep climbs, but before I got around to troubleshooting the problem, it went away.

The Bad

Okay, I lied about not having to replace anything. The stem this bike came with, though perfectly fine (I mean, it’s a piece of metal…), was too short. I’ve never seen an XL bike before that came equipped with an 11 cm stem. For this much money, the company ought to let you swap it out for free, but this is not the case. Weirder still, I couldn’t find a Specialized stem in matte black to match the bars and the overall matte finish of the bike, and I looked everywhere. I finally had to source a Ritchey stem, for like $130. That kind of stung after all the money I’d already shelled out. And imagine if I’d gone with the Tarmac SL8 Pro, with its integrated cockpit … that’d be over $500 and a royal pain in the ass to change out.

Another minor issue is that I have to remember to charge the battery on this bike. I first realized this about half an hour into a five-hour ride with my pals, after I’d had the bike about a month. (Fortunately the battery did hold out.) Charging my bike is just another ongoing task to keep track of, and there’s so much tech in my life already. I know I could get the Di2 app for my smartphone and thus have an easy way to check the battery, and even to adjust the shifting (I think someone said), but reviews of the app are generally fairly weak, and a few of the 1-star reviews complained that a firmware update that went wrong bricked the entire bike, requiring a trip to the shop to get sorted out. Life is too short to delve into such things, at least for now. With my old bike, I never need an app or a charger, and I can fine-tune the indexing while riding.

I guess the only other thing I could complain about is how expensive this bike was (and of course that’s not a complaint about the Aethos per se, it’s the entire industry). Which reminds me: if you’re thinking of breaking into my house to steal this bike, think again! Since I work from home, the only time I’m not here is when I’m out riding, so the bike will be gone too, duh! Plus, as far as you know I have a pit bull whom I’ve trained to rip the zipper out of a pair of jeans, and/or a resident weird uncle who is a gun nut and fantasizes constantly about defending my home and property.

The Ugly

You can decide for yourself based on the photos above whether anything is ugly about this bike. Myself, I think it’s cool looking. I like the color, and the lines, and the very subtle branding. On the downside, I don’t care for the spacers I’ve kept, for now, in the steerer tube stack, two of them above the stem. At some point I’ll probably cut down the steerer, if I decide I’m confident enough in my ageing back to commit to the current stem height. But that’s a minor point. You know what is ugly, though? The modern aero stems like what come on the Tarmac and on the Aethos 2 Pro. Look at these.

It’s like they’re embarrassed about being mechanical. (I’m reminded of the little knit covers, sometimes with a pompon on top, that some people put over their spare roll of toilet paper, as if ashamed of it.) All that plastic … it’s like the modern car industry, so much window dressing. And consider that in the catalog photos the steerer is cut all the way down … with the stem up a bit, you have to use weird non-cylindrical washers, and the assembly starts to look more and more janky, especially if there are spacers above the plastic cowling as well. Look, a bicycle is a tool, and it’s mechanical, and it’s okay—even desirable—to show that. Stop trying to make everything into a Rivian or an iPhone! Meanwhile, I’m not bothered at all by the looks and supposed wind drag of the exposed hydraulic lines. (Aesthetics aside, bleeding disc brakes is enough of a hassle without internal routing.)

I also don’t like the small rear triangles of so many modern road bikes, including the Tarmac. They look kind of stunted to me. This setup is supposedly stiffer and maybe even more aero than the traditional setup, but I don’t need extra stiffness, and this bike is aero enough, and even Specialized concedes that the Aethos has a more comfortable ride than the Tarmac, which I’m guessing is due to the larger rear triangle. But mainly I just like the look of these stays.

One of my original complaints with electronic shifting is that it makes the derailleurs large and more bulbous. They’ve gotten a lot better, but I still don’t love the look of them.

But then, who looks closely at this stuff anymore? As a teenager I scrutinized every part at length, but now my eyes aren’t even that good and I can’t be bothered to squint. It’s all a blur, it’s all good.

Naming the bike

A bike should mean more to its owner than, say, a microwave oven or dresser does. Because of the way a great bike disappears beneath you, it kind of feels like an extension of yourself. Suffering for hours at a time on your bike kind of bonds you to it as well, like you’re sharing this bold adventure; I wonder if this is how cowboys think of their horses. Thus I name my bikes, as should everyone. My Giant is called Sirius Black (named when my kids were still reading Harry Potter); my 3-speed is the Arseless (short for Arseless Horse, which name I stole from the writer Roddy Doyle); my mountain bike is NOS (for “new old stock” because it had been forgotten in a warehouse for a couple years before I bought it, and as a nod to the rapper Nas).

I thought of my Aethos’s name when I was showing it to my younger daughter. She asked what I liked best about it and I described how the steering is quicker than on other bikes. She asked why all bikes aren’t made like this and I said it’s a bit trickier to handle, like Porco Rosso’s seaplane. And suddenly it dawned on me how good a name Porco Rosso is for this bike. I mean, it’s red; it’s kind of the color of rare pork; it has that quick handling like the plane; and we all love Studio Ghibli. Both my kids agreed with me immediately: not only could I name this bike Porco Rosso, but I had to. Done.

The Aethos 2

It’s probably in adherence to a corollary of Murphy’s Law that as soon as I decided to review this bike, a new version came out threatening to render everything you’ve just read obsolete. But actually, hold on: there are important differences between mine and the new version, and if I were buying a bike today I’d still go with the original Aethos. With new model, they basically wrecked the geometry. Click here for a really cool website that makes it easy to compare geometries, and shows how the Aethos 2 differs. It’s got a shorter top tube, a shallower head tube (!), a steeper seat tube (!!), and a longer wheelbase. It’s basically a touring bike, designed for people who want to sit up straight and tall like the wicked witchy neighbor woman in The Wizard of Oz. The good news is, even if you’re reading this review too late to snap up an original Aethos, the Tarmac geometry hasn’t changed (i.e., it’s still effectively the same as my Aethos). You’ll just have to settle for a very slightly heavier bike that is harder to service and isn’t so pretty (though it’s more aerodynamic).

Are there other changes in the Aethos 2? Yes, it will take 35 mm tires if you really want to gild the lily (i.e., if you’re basically looking for a 15-pound beach cruiser). And as the Specialized website proudly proclaims, “no gram was safe from our scalpel”—they shaved 9 grams with the new seatpost, 6 grams with the new bottom bracket shell, 2 grams with the new brake mounts, and 2 more with the new derailleur hanger. Seriously, guys? Grams? These are trivial savings. Why not just wipe off some of the road grime, or blow your nose before your ride?

Conclusion

If your road bike is more than a few years old, and you like to climb a lot, and you’re a seasoned rider who isn’t afraid of a fast-handling bike, what are you waiting for? DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT.

Postscript

In case you were wondering, Specialized did not compensate me in any way for this positive review, and I would be required to disclose this if they had. I truly am just an honest, happy customer.

Related reading

• From the Archives - The CarbonTech Debate
• Test Ride - Specialized Turbo Levo SL 2 Carbon E-Bike
• What’s Wrong With Shimano?
• Letter to a Middle-Aged Cyclist - Buy New Wheels NOW!
• Bomb Pop - A Bicycle Retrospective
• A Cheap Bastard’s Guide to Inflating Tubeless Tires
• Colorado Mountain Road Test - SRAM eTap Electronic Shifting
• Disc Brakes for Road Bikes?
• Carbon vs. Steel & the Bike Geek Divide

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIV

Introduction

This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.

If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.

May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara

You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.

Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!

So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!

Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.

January 19, 1991 – Berkeley

Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?

April 6, 1991 – Berkeley

Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.

Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else”  anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!

August 19, 1992 – Berkeley

School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.

November 6, 1992 – Berkeley

Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.

I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.

I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.

November 16, 1992 – Berkeley

I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” So I told her, “I’ve got a job lined up in a factory deburring plastic parts on an assembly line. You see, when plastics are molded, there are flashings left over from the holes the liquid material was poured through. It’s actually pretty tricky, because if you slip with the file you can ruin the whole piece.” I was pleased to have pulled off the entire speech with a straight face. “Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s great!” Still managing not to laugh, I retorted, “No it isn’t, T—! It’s pathetic! I’m so ashamed!”

In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

Introduction

Two posts ago, I described what I think is a fundamental dichotomy between two central capabilities of modern AI chatbots: 1) helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation like coding software or scripting HTML, and 2) creating something original, like an essay or story. The first category involves being a resourceful researcher blessed with excellent natural language processing; the second is probably closer to what humans are (so far) uniquely capable of doing.

Earlier this year I did a whole post on the first category, “What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?” And last week I blogged about one aspect of the second category: writing a scholastic essay. To further explore AI’s ability to generate meaningful content, and to evaluate its ability to truly understand language, I turn this week to poetry. That is, I decided to have the three dominant chatbots—Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot—write a poem in an unusual meter: dactylic trimeter, a poetic form I learned in high school (details here). I chose this meter because, as described here, ChatGPT does a pretty good job at the classic Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, but I wonder if that’s just really good parroting since there’s such a vast amount of training data out there for that. I think this exercise really puts the chatbots through their paces, giving us insight into which is the closest to being truly intelligent. As you shall see, the differences in performance are not subtle.

(Custom art by Whisk. No rights reserved.)

Gemini’s effort

To start out, I quizzed Gemini about dactylic trimeter, to see if it knows what I’m even talking about. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm of such a poem would be “DA-da da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da,” and an example it created of the form was reasonably close. So far so good. But then, to make the rhythm better, I instructed  the chatbot to add an extra trochee at the end of each line. A trochee is a two-syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, as in the word “praises” and the word “spirit.” As an example of this modification to dactylic trimeter, I provided Gemini these lines (that I took from a poem you can read here, in this albertnet post):

Once in a while a voice will sing praises,
Something to levitate everyone’s spirits.

A really smart AI, I would argue, could reverse-engineer the meter from those two lines alone, but I went one better and described exactly what I wanted in technical terms. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm would therefore be “DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da” but its initial attempts at it were totally screwed up. I gave it a lot of coaching. I guess this is okay; a human with actual intelligence might require this as well.

Moving on, I prompted Gemini, “Now I would like to see if you can write such a poem based on an essay I provide. You can work in as much as you think works, understanding that not everything will fit. If I paste in a 1,600-word essay could you do that?” It said (in its usual obsequious way), “That sounds like a very interesting challenge! Yes, I can absolutely take a 1,600-word essay and distill its key themes, concepts, and emotional tones to create a poem in the specific Dactylic Trimeter + Trochee (11 syllables) structure.” I added that the poem should be ten lines long, with an ABBA rhyme scheme for the first two quatrains and then a rhyming couplet at the end. And I told it, “Focus on the idea of caprice: choosing the more difficult route simply to exercise one’s radical freedom and prove one’s mettle to oneself.”

Now, if you are a devoted follower of albertnet, you may recall that some years ago I wrote a poem in dactylic trimeter about my favorite cycling hill climb, the one-two punch of the steep, twisty roads El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. And, as with most of the  poems on this blog, I provided copious footnotes and commentary, just as you’d get in an anthology of Shakespeare’s sonnets. To help AI write a good poem, the “essay” I uploaded was the compilation of my footnotes, so that Gemini had plenty of material to work with: the fleshed-out observations, feelings, etc. behind my Lomas poem. The idea here is to give you, reader, the ability to do a side-by-side comparison of two poems on the same topic—one written by your amateur blogger, the other by a much-ballyhooed AI. You can decide for yourself who did the better job. Here is my poem (and you can click here for the footnotes):

Ode to Lomas Cantadas

El Toyonal is a beast of an uphill;
Pedaling here is a bit self-defeating.
Lomas Cantadas will sweeten your beating:
Insult to injury, sweet overkill!

Most riders wisely take Wildcat Canyon.
Half the uphill, after all—and you’re tired!
Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired
In glory, in notions of being a man.

Sometimes caprice is much better than ease:
Radical freedom is here to be seized!

Here is Gemini’s poem, representing its effort to incorporate all my footnotes and commentary:

Reckless Choice

The simple road beckons And calmly the wind calls,
We stand at the turn now, Deciding to stay free.
To choose the hard pulses Our own perversity.
We turn for the suffering feeling the high walls.

The logic demands the Less burdensome track-way,
But we must display the Radical self-might.
We take the bad option Defying the pure light.
To prove we are strong to Our own confidences.

Yet this is the price of The joy and the pain-fall,
A reckless decision That answers the soul’s call.

So … how would you rate Gemini’s poem? Is AI going to come after our poets and put them out of work? Frankly, I’m less than impressed. The meter is a crude approximation of what I asked for, but as you surely felt (whether or not you could articulate the precise problem), almost every line is too long by one syllable, and instead of the easy, rollicking rhythm of a proper Krooprian poem, Gemini’s ode staggers and stutters. The AI pretty much blew it.

In case you really want to geek out, here’s exactly where the AI went wrong: in nine out of the ten lines, for no apparent reason, it preceded the first dactyl with an unstressed syllable, violating the rule I set forth about dactylic trimeter. Meanwhile, words like “perversity,” “radical,” and “confidences” aren’t padded out properly so we either have to mispronounce them to preserve the meter, or sound them out naturally which disturbs the rhythm—and since we don’t know which to do, we’re stopped in our tracks.

As far as the content, you can sense the AI compromising sense in order to (try to) achieve the rhythm and rhyme. Why else would it use the word “pulses,” the phrase “high walls,” and the Franken-words “track-way,” “self-might,” and “pain-fall”? The chatbot is practically babbling.

So is that it? I give it, say, a D and we move on to the next AI? Not so fast. I made the rookie move of feeding my prompt to the default version, 2.5 Flash, instead of the flagship version, 2.5 Pro, which Gemini tells me is “more adept at tasks requiring complex reasoning, deep instruction following, and high-quality creative output.” The good news is, as the AI assured me, all the context of my chat with 2.5 Flash can be used by 2.5 Pro, so it was super easy to switch to Pro and have the chatbot try again. Here’s its second effort, using the 2.5 Pro version:

The Gauntlet Thrown

Sober thoughts point the logical straight-way,
Turning left proves a man is still willing,
Recklessly choosing what he must still be,
Turning from all that the reasonable say.

This is the freedom to throw all the rules about,
Knowing the payment and what it will cost him,
Twenty hard minutes of everything lost now,
Heeding the irrational gonzo-man’s shouting.

A purely perverse act of personal pride,
Proving the mettle he carries inside him.

Well, I suppose it’s a bit better. Only one line erroneously starts with an accented syllable, and three of the lines actually have the correct meter (a modest improvement over 2.5 Flash’s zero). There’s some nice alliteration in the penultimate line. I also appreciate that 2.5 Pro didn’t do weird stuff with capitalization in the middle of each line. But the rhyming is pretty janky, and we still have these weird bolted-together phrases “straight-way” and the truly bizarre “gonzo-man.” To top it off, the very last word of the poem violates the rhyming convention, so the poem goes out on a flat note. This second poem is better but not by much.

Conclusion: if Gemini offers to write my next albertnet ode for me, I’ma be like, “Naw, I’m good.”

On to our next contestant.

ChatGPT’s effort

I asked ChatGPT if it could write a poem in dactylic trimeter. It said, kind of curtly, “Definitely — I can write in dactylic trimeter.” Unlike Gemini, it didn’t bother to give me a sample straightaway. Maybe this is to save on computing cycles (and thus energy and water), which I can appreciate. But ironically, this is the one chatbot whose capability I have reason to doubt, because as you may recall, I tried this prompt before, almost verbatim, with version GPT-3.5, back in February of 2023. That chatbot crashed and burned with this poetic abomination:

Pedaling up Toyonal, heart pumping fast
My mind is clear, free from the world’s contrast
With caprice and freedom, I take each turn
Pushing through pain, for what I will earn
Onward I climb, up Lomas Cantadas
My legs scream out, but my spirit never fades
The wind in my hair, the world fades away
A moment of peace, that I long to stay
And at last I reach the summit high
A sense of triumph, that no words can deny

Ugh. I almost threw up in my mouth rereading that. As you can see, GPT-3.5 ignored my instructions about meter, made a very half-assed effort to weave the theme of caprice into its poem, and worst of all produced pure treacle, like the verbal equivalent of Thomas Kinkade. Needless to say I was eager, this evening, to see how the more modern version would do.

I gave GPT-5.1 the same prompts as Gemini, uploading the same 1,600-word essay, and here is what it produced:

Lomas Caprice

Turning toward Toyonal, reckless and laughing
Choosing the steep when the wise path is brighter
Mocking my reasons, the prudent, the lighter
Savoring folly my sane side is quashing

Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me
Just for the thrill of defying the sensible
Proving I’m bent for the wholly nonsensical
Riding the harder way just ’cause it shakes me

Pain is a dare that I answer with pleasure
Freely embracing the hurt as a measure

Well, ChatGPT has come a long way for sure, but GPT-5.1’s effort is only somewhat better than Gemini’s. Certainly the meter is better, with a majority of the lines being correct. But the content is really off, with a bunch of the words clearly chosen just to satisfy the technical requirements without adding much meaning. The bit about “wise path is brighter” really makes no sense and is clearly just there for the rhythm and rhyme, no more sophisticated than Hall & Oates’ “your kiss is on my list.” In the next line, who is doing the mocking? And how does “the lighter” fit into anything? Lighter sky? Lighter weight? Cigarette lighter? It’s just a random word dropped into the poem. And in the next line, the word “quashing” in no way rhymes with “laughing” and doesn’t make sense as an intransitive verb. (“What are you doing this weekend?” / “Oh, you know, I’ll just be at home, quashing.”)

 I confess, I rather like the line “Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me,” but then the poem loses momentum again and commits rhythm-sucking metrical errors on the next two lines (though I like “bent”). The eighth line, suggesting that a hard climb “shakes me,” is lame, another word selected only because it rhymes. And that last line? “Freely embracing the hurt as a measure”? Huh? What is it measuring? This poem is lame.

Since AI does its best work when you iterate with increasingly refined and specific prompts, calling out what it did wrong in its previous attempt, I decided to give ChatGPT another chance, and told it, “I think it would be better if it didn’t assume what you and I know already about this climb. Consider that somebody encountering this poem for the first time wouldn't know that Wildcat Canyon is the easier climb, and that choosing the 1-2 punch of El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas makes no logical sense but appeals to one’s love of suffering and sense of caprice. So, please try again on the poem and give the reader enough background to grasp all this and thus to understand the choice.” It came back with a poem that was quite broken, with the same issue that Gemini’s first effort had: starting each line with an unstressed syllable. It also screwed up the rhyme in the second quatrain. I coached it repeatedly to fix these issues, and after several tries this ended up being its best effort:

Reckless Climb

Climbing the hills of green Berkeley foothills,
Pedaling hard as the thighs start to quiver,
Wheels weaving wild like a paperboy’s river,
Lungs heaving fire as the body fulfills.

Turning to torment, no reason persuades me,
Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding,
Twists of the road, and the thrill never fades me,
Searing the legs, but the spirit is standing.

Pleasure is folly, the wholly absurd,
We choose what will hurt us, yet laugh at the hurt.

Right off the bat, the first line has three problems: it trips us up with a missing syllable; the hills are not always green; and hills/foothills is somehow both redundant and oxymoronic. The rest of the lines have correct meter, but a bunch of really clunky constructions. Wheels weaving wild? Really? And what could “like a paperboy’s river” possibly mean? “Lungs heaving fire”—what am I, a dragon? And the body fulfills what? (I just asked ChatGPT if “fulfill” can be an intransitive verb, and it replied, “No — “fulfill” is fundamentally a transitive verb, which means it requires a direct object.”) The mention of the twists of the road isn’t connected to anything, and “thrill never fades me” makes no sense—I mean, is the thrill like the sun, and I’m a curtain? There’s just an abundance of nonsense here, though I do like the last line. My last complaint is that the AI didn’t consistently follow the rhyme scheme I asked for: its second quatrain is ABAB, not ABBA. I asked it five times to fix this and it never did.

In summary, I’d say this poem is marginally better than Gemini’s effort (I mean, it doesn’t have anything as glaring as “irrational gonzo-man’s shouting”) but it’s basically unusable. Maybe GPT-6 will do better.

Copilot’s effort

Copilot knew exactly what dactylic trimeter was, and its initial example was remarkably good. I suppose it could have plagiarized something, or has a bit of boilerplate at the ready, but in any case I was impressed.  I gave it the same extra instruction about tacking on an extra dactyl, and it got it almost right on the first try; a bit more coaching and it nailed it. After invoking Smart (GPT-5) mode, I fed Copilot the full prompt, with the same footnotes from my Lomas Contadas poem. Here is what the chatbot came up with:

Caprice on the Hills

Turning away from the sensible roadway,
Madness compels me to suffer the steepness.
Reason protests, but I laugh at its weakness,
Choosing the torment that beckons me boldly.

Freedom is found in the reckless decision,
Mocking the logic that urges avoidance.
Pain is a proof of my will and its poignance,
Glory is born of capricious derision.

Taunted by Toyonal, daring and cruel,
Lomas Cantadas declares I’m no fool.

Wow. Just wow. It is so much better than what Gemini and ChatGPT came up with. The meter is actually perfect. (Full disclosure: the meter falls short of what’s in my poem, but only because I forgot to give the AI one more instruction—to shorten the final line of each quatrain, and both lines in the couplet, by one syllable, to give them more punch. To be honest I’d forgotten I did this with my ode.)

I think the AI did a pretty job with the content as well. Calling my will “poignant” is a bit of a stretch perhaps, but we could chalk it up to poetic license. Meanwhile, the word “roadway” (like “poignance”) is nonstandard and evidently chosen to fit the meter, and also doesn’t rhyme very well with “boldly,” but this is nitpicking. My main issue with this poem, which is the same issue I had with the others, is that it doesn’t give the reader enough context to really understand some of the basics: that there’s an easy option (Wildcat Canyon) and a harder one (El Toyonal + Lomas Cantadas).

Perhaps as a victory lap, Copilot offered to write two more versions with slightly differing tones (the last being a drinking song). These weren’t actually as good as the first so I won’t bother dissecting them, but I did like the final couplet in one of them. I decided that since Copilot’s initial poem was good enough to warrant refining, I would point out its central error and let it try again (using the new couplet). Here’s its revised version:

Caprice on the Hills

Wildcat is gentle, a steady road climbing,
Toyonal rises with crueler intention.
Still I turn left in a rash intervention,
Mocking the voice that would counsel good timing.

Freedom is folly, a dare to my reason,
Choosing the torment that makes no good sense.
Pain is a jest and its cost the expense,
Glory is born of capricious decision.

Madness is mettle, a jest I renew,
Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you.

Again, it’s not perfect. The bit about “turn left” doesn’t really make sense without more context. And what is meant by “counsel good timing”? There is no timing here. In addition, the phrase “its cost the expense” seems redundant. But those matters aside, the meter is solid, the rhyming consistent, and that final couplet is a real banger.

These AI chatbots always seem to want to extend the dialogue and provide more and more and more, which is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as human beings we should always be working to limit our time online and get out there in the world, right? On the other hand, refining what we get from chatbots is pretty key to making them an effective tool. So when Copilot asked if I’d like it to craft a prose introduction to the poem, I suddenly had another idea: what if I asked it to now create its own footnotes? This post is long enough already so I won’t post them here, but let me say that Copilot did a pretty good job on that.

And here is where I see this AI having a role with a real human writer (at least at the student or blogger level): it could probably help with writer’s block simply by producing something worth polishing. It kills me to concede this, actually, and I am far too proud to ever resort to this kind of “Hamburger Helper” approach to my own writing. But honestly, a cyclist who would like to compose a ride-themed poem in dactylic trimeter, replete with footnotes, could do worse than to start with Copilot. (Neither poem above truly passes muster, but taking the best of each, and from perhaps a few more attempts, and then replacing all the weak parts with our own lines, would be easier than—albeit still inferior to—starting from scratch.) The output of such an exercise might actually have some value, versus the writer getting frustrated, giving up, and producing nothing.

Crucially, the thing the AI will never be able to do is go on the bike ride, have that experience, and grasp what is important about it. So a human could start there and then get some help from AI in expressing himself or herself, since not everyone has the luxury of a liberal education. If AI is called upon to bridge that gap, the current Copilot is far better poised than Gemini and ChatGPT, I think we can now conclude.

If you read my last post, you may recall that Copilot did the best job of these three chatbots at writing a scholastic essay as well. Keep an eye on this one … Microsoft, through its partnership with ChatGPT’s OpenAI as well as its own resources, seems to be ascendant.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini

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