Being male is all about excess, those over-the-top, “I’m speechless” moments that make you glad to be a guy. And rare is the guy who admits that he has enough — tools, horsepower, stuff. But look at the bicycle light in this picture.
Her name is Betty, and she comes from a company named Lupine. Full on, Betty puts out 1,400 lumens. You read right — one thousand, four hundred lumens. For perspective, the most common automotive low-beam puts out about 1,000 lumens. Betty costs $995 (that’s no typo, either). But as a Lupine staffer wrote, “We did not build this light to be cheap but to be the best.”
Look at her. Cast-aluminum body, titanium lens cap, special lens that focuses each of her 7 LED bulbs for maximum effectiveness. And then there’s the tiny battery. The whole system weighs about a pound — 6 ounces for the business part, the rest for the battery. So little, so much joy. My nocturnal cycling commutes from Chicago to Highland Park now have a nuclear option, and heretofore-joyous HID cycling lights suddenly seem a bit … well … underpowered.
And Betty might be enough. She doesn’t just turn it up to 11. This is more like 15. You can mount her on your bike or on your helmet. And when you turn her on, the world stops. She has stopped a drunk driver and cleared the way on Clark Street. She even made a taxicab pull over.
Betty’s other advantage is that she is LED (light emitting diode). LED bulbs are lighter, longer-lived and cheaper to replace than HID bulbs. She runs for just over three hours on full mojo, and more than five hours at about half-power.
So. Betty arrived, and the maiden and I hit the front porch to fire her up. First, every moth in the yard flew toward us. Then a well-lit couple passing by on the walkway more than 200 feet away stopped to look. Then the maiden spoke. “Whoa!”
Exactly.
