Urban Celebrity Gossip site

I like celebrity gossip. I find it fascinating! Though I keep an intellectual distance because I assume they're mostly made up stories, ever since I first encountered a People magazine at my grandma's house I have never broken the habit of following who is dating who, who is rumored to be cheating, and other scandalous stories. I don't listen to top 40 radio, I don't watch broadcast TV, but through my insatiable thirst for tawdry details I manage to keep my finger on the pulse of pop culture. Today I noticed some bicycles in the gossip news.

The first bicycle was underneath reality TV personality Coco. Coco is married to rapper/actor Ice T and, well, she's famous for having a really large butt. In these pictures, Coco is riding a bike on a beach boardwalk. Boardwalk bicycling is one of the few forms of biking that never became unacceptable for adult Americans. At many beaches, you can rent a cruiser with a really low seat and handlebars angled so that your hands fall asleep and awkwardly make your way down a crowded path. For many people, this might be what comes to mind when they think about bicycling: riding as a diversion in a space set aside for recreation, like a beach or a park. Does the image of a woman with a hypersexualized body on a beach cruiser still promote bicycling as transportation? Should the League of American Bicyclists hire Coco as a spokesmodel?

I first learned about Coco because I read a gossip website called Dlisted, written by a blogger named Michael K. He's a mixed race gay man who writes tawdry commentary about celebrities, and he has a penchant for featuring people whose cultivated personas could be called tactless at best. The site has a daily "caption this" contest where Michael K posts some weird picture and his readers submit jokes, usually based on nicknames and other phenomena from Dlisted canon. Today the picture was of someone riding a tall bike.