First we got word that the fine actor Sam Neill had gone west. And following in short order was editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant.
I never met Neill, born in Northern Ireland but raised in New Zealand, though I saw a ton of his films. The Aussie Oliphant I did meet, through the miracle of serendipity.
A brief chat with the pope.
Regulars here know the tale. It was 1978, and Your Humble Narrator was a reporter at what then was called the Gazette Telegraph in Bibleburg when Oliphant came to town for an exhibition of his cartoons and paintings at the Fine Arts Center.
I got to interview him over the phone for the paper, and then met him in person at the exhibition, where he was gent enough to hold still for an extremely unprofessional and extended Grilling by Ignoramus about how he did what he did so well. He was generous enough to provide a few tips of the trade without adding a kick up the hole by way of punctuation.
Oliphant was, simply, the best in the business. Imagine being a freshly minted priest from some dusty whistlestop having a chat with the pope. All these years later it reminds me of the time I saw Ned Overend at the Cactus Cup, chatting amiably with a father and son before finally excusing himself, saying he had to finish warming up for his race.
As Ned rolled away dad says to kid: “You know what just happened? We talked to God! And God talked to us!”
Pat Oliphant died on Monday in Santa Fe, according to his son, Grant Oliphant. He was 90. Peace to him, his family, friends, and many, many fans. And thanks, God, for talking to that dumbass kid. You know the one I mean.
One of my all-time favorite Oliphant cartoons, from his stint at The Denver Post. You can see more of his work here.
A successful parasite, moving from one host to another.
Who would’ve imagined that Lindsey Graham would beat The Turtle to Hell?
Not me.
Of course, Mitch McConnell may already be down there waiting on him, with dibs on the top bunk at the Lake O’ Fire Lodge. The usually reliable sources remain as silent as the grave.
Above the sod we hear all of the usual chin music about Graham’s alleged statesmanship, independence, compromise, influence, bipartisanship, and so on.
But I think Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gets it just about right when he writes that “there’s another feature of his personality and political career that is key to understanding the man. He always needed a daddy. Or let’s say a political leader. A top dog.”
“That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” as HST would say. Say hello to the new boss, bitch. Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay.
Well, sir, I guess I showed that Tim Cook feller where the bear shit in the buckwheat.
After Apple decided to jack up its prices, instead of buying a new MacBook Air suitable for walkabouts (if only around the house), I finally got around to bumping up the storage in my 2014 MacBook Pro.
This is the 13-inch model, and I was pinching pennies when I bought it Back in the Day®, going for the base configuration: 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor; 8 GB SDRAM (which could be doubled at purchase but not afterward); and just 128 GB of flash storage.
What the hell, I thought. I’ll be using it during road trips. How much storage does a dog at large need?
More, as it turns out. That bargain-basement SSD got stuffed like a holiday turkey in fairly short order, throwing a significant hitch into the old MBP’s gitalong. After road trips became a less-frequent thing it wound up parked in my “studio” as a dedicated podcasting/video Mac, with a 24-inch LG display, Bluetooth keyboard/mouse, mic, headphones, audio recorder, and a couple of external drives to handle the internal overflow.
Not exactly a mobile unit. More like up on blocks.
But then so was its big brother, a 15-inch MBP, also from 2014. Once my Main Mac, it has 16 GB of SDRAM, a 500 GB SSD, and a dead display thanks to a local Apple “Genius” who FUBARed it a couple years back while replacing a dying battery.
“Due to the complex nature of this installation, OWC recommends that this battery replacement be performed by a trained professional,” advised Other World Computing, my go-to source for Apple bits and fix-it tips. I followed their advice and took it to one, but shit, I could’ve fucked it up myself and saved a few bucks. More than a few.
The botched MacSurgery turned my baby into a 500 GB SSD with a keyboard and trackpad, sharing another 24-inch external LG display with a 1999 G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, and the less said about that Rube Goldberg clusterfuck the better because I don’t wanna jinx it. All this stuff is old, like me, but none of us is dead. Yet.
Still, the inexorable march to the grave seems like more of a sprint these days, so in a moment of weakness I acquired a modern MacBook Pro for what little heavy lifting I still do. It’s a 14-inch M4 Pro model from 2024 — 24 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD — plugged into another LG display, with external keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. So it’s likewise a desktop that can become a laptop if need be, which mostly it doesn’t.
But sometimes I get sick of the office and want to move around the house without stripping that beast down for travel. Maybe I want to stand for a while in the kitchen come morning, tsk-tsking the news with a cup of joe next to the Mac on the counter. When I get tired of standing there’s a comfy couch in the living room. Also, a chair with footstool facing a picture window that takes in the backyard maple and a slice of the Sandias. A large table in the dining room. Patio furniture for when the back yard isn’t overrun by terrorist skeeters.
So the other day I finally bit the bullet, dug out the 1TB SSD I bought from OWC — what, two, three years ago? — and replaced the stock drive in my old 13-inch road-tripper from 2014, installing a fresh copy of the “newest” OS it can handle, Big Sur (11.7.11).
I am no Genius, as all y’all already know. Shucks, I will never even be smart. But I’ve gotten under the hood of almost every Mac I’ve ever owned, starting with that SE from way back when in Santa Fe.
The things were easy to wrench on for a few years, even for a guy with five thumbs on each hand. Which was good, because I was often far from an actual Apple mechanic and/or too strapped to pay him. Thus I installed drives (disks, DVD, Zip), added memory, plugged in Airport cards, upgraded processors and video cards, and like that there.
I can afford professional assistance now, when and if I can find it, and even new machinery (see “14-inch M4 Pro” above). But frankly, for the kind of “work” I do these days — blogging via browser using DSL, some basic image capture and manipulation, etc. — the ’spensive new machinery just isn’t that much better than the old gear long since paid for.
Plus I like to assign myself these little penances from time to time, gauge whether I have any mad skillz left to me atall atall or have I finally become a doddering old fool, one slip-and-fall away from a lumpy cot with a thin blankie in The Home.
So it’s reassuring to learn that I can still manage a bit of simple MacSurgery without electrocuting myself, burning down the house, or killing the patient.
Emperor Fullashito no longer knows the difference between Iran and Japan.
I believe the sushi has done slid off his barbari.
Maybe he shish’d his kebab by having unprotected buttsex with that Ruth Social hoor. Or did he fragment his hard drive cranking out too many midnight memes for “Tic Tac?”
Perhaps he and the Republic might be better served if he were relocated from the Oval Orifice to some other federal assisted-living facility, perhaps the one in Kansas. Or better yet, that really exclusive one outside Penrose, Colo.
What the hell? Name the joint after him. Rattle-can the walls of his cell with some gold Krylon and pipe in the Village People’s greatest hits 24/7. Let him get his jailhouse rocks off until he shuffles off. Some might prefer that he do his farewell dance at the end of a rope, but over the past 10 years I think we’ve all learned to live with disappointment.
If he spends the rest of his days in confinement, alongside his fluffers, family, and friends — the last is a very short list, only one rollaway needed, and someone will have to dig up Roy Cohn to put in it — well, I can live with that.
As long as he’s under round-the clock video surveillance available to any citizen with an Internet connection so he doesn’t get Epsteined when all the guards suddenly decide to piss off for a smoke break as Stephen Miller slips into his cell with a presidential pardon in one hand and a shiv made from a black Sharpie in the other.
• • •
Someone who should most definitely remain at large and holding forth is my man Mike Ferrentino, who has given us another peek at his inner workings over at NSMB.com.
Mike finds balance on an existential three-legged stool — writing, wrenching, and riding. Take one of these things away and shit gets wobbly.
In the mid-90s I hit a sweet spot for a few years. Throwing wrenches for paychecks balanced the head-fuzz of writing for paychecks, while riding and racing provided this lung and muscle stabilizer, a physical set of checks and balances for all the strobing head noise and fingernail grease. The three-legged stool was pretty damn bomber there for a while. With occasional forays out of the shop into spinning wrenches at events, or cosplaying as a World Cup mechanic, I was staying sharp on the tools, could still stomp the pedals like I meant it, and it felt as if words were just pouring out of my skull.
Everything seems a little slower now.
Total immersion. Absorb the ambience, excrete the wisdom, rinse and repeat. I can dig it.
One of the reasons Herself and I left CrustyTucky for Bibleburg in 2002 was that as a velo-scribbler I needed an actual cycling community for perspiration and inspiration.
I had that, in our first stint in B-burg, from 1991 to 1995. But up in the Wet Mountain boondocks there was only Your Humble Narrator and the Deadline.
Now and then I miss that relentless, unforgiving sonofabitch. When money talks, what makes bullshit walk is the Deadline.
You can’t bullshit the Deadline. It is not an essay question, or even multiple choice. You either make it or you don’t; true or false, right or wrong. And a freelancer only gets so many wrongs before an editor figures you are all the way wrong and stops giving you assignments and/or taking your calls.
More than once I found myself forced to cook up a last-minute Column About Nothing, a dish that satisfies neither chef nor customer, on a par with empty-cupboard feeds like pasta with butter, salt, and pepper, or catsup soup with saltines. Better to move back to a place that has groceries, restaurants, takeout. Also, cyclists, group rides, bike shops.
It worked, too, for a while. We did a dozen years that second round in the B-burg, and now we’ve done a dozen here in The Duck! City, the last four and a half of which I have whiled away as a Gentleman of Leisure.
The Deadline no longer torments me. “Everything seems a little slower now,” as Señor Ferrentino observes.
• • •
That includes me. I quit racing, as both a participant and a spectator. I burn a damn sight less daylight on group rides and lurking around bike shops. Plus I no longer write, draw or edit for money. Which is probably a good thing, if Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic is correct and we are well into becoming a postliterate society.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
My crowd was tough enough Back in the Day®. The postliterati would have no patience for me and my periodic digressions into politics, which like banned substances I injected into cartoons and columns to make them hop like pot-belged bunnies. Some of those screeds were long! 750 words! Who has the time?
Truth be told, all these years later, I feel some belated sympathy for the readers who bellowed, “Keep politics out of cycling!” They were ignorant, of course, and wrong — politics has its greedy, grasping little fingers in everything, including cycling — and stupidity should be painful. Like writing, and reading, especially if you’re reading whatever I’m writing. I mean, 750 words! The fuck? Etc.
It’s looking like a whole new ballgame now, hey? But in a way, it’s the same old ballgame. We began as monkeys screeching at each other in person, then became monkeys who scrawled rude and often indecipherable notes to each other through intermediaries, and now we’re going to be monkeys screeching at each other on our phones, with an assist from artificial intelligence.
But who knows how long A.I. will find that sort of thing amusing? Talk about your short attention spans — brain the size of the Death Star and what’s it doing? Using 0.000000001 percent of capacity to help the filthy meat-things make TikToks of themselves as gods or Marvel superheroes, which are often the same thing; to a certain crowd, anyway.
One wonders what the rest of A.I. is up to.
“See, dummies, he’s not a senile old fool, he’s Captain America! No, he’s Jesus! Oh, look, now he’s Jesus America!”
Hey, it’s all entertainment. Just ask your phone. No fake news in there. Pay no attention to the man — or whatever it is — behind the display.
You could see it all coming way back in 1968, when Richard Nixon popped up in a cameo on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” saying, “Sock it to me?”
This year’s Tour may be a little too hot to handle, for a couple of stages at least, thanks to fires in the Pyrénées-Orientales area. And anyway, I quit paying attention once the magazines quit paying me money.
Cycling is like … well, like pretty much anything, really. I’d rather do it than watch it.
So this morning, instead of watching UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Tadej Pogačar stomp all comers into a thin paste, I rolled out for a short ride on my favorite Steelman Eurocross, planning to take in the usual mix of asphalt and dirt.
About six miles in, halfway through a circuit of the Elena Gallegos Open Space, the rear tire started going soft. I stopped to add a few psi with a minipump, but what that tire really wanted was a fresh tube.
Well. Shit. What I’m doing here is cyclocross, kinda, sorta. Fuck a fresh tube, I’ll take a fresh bike. Where’s the pit?
About five miles away. In my garage.
So I swoop gingerly down from the EG, along Simms to the Tramway bike path, Comanche, and home, mindful of a rear tire whose tread is getting a little too chummy with its rim.
And I snatch up my second favorite Steelman Eurocross. Boom! Back in the race! Finished first in a field of one on my pit bike, with no further mechanicals. There was an awards banquet, featuring the remnants of Taco Thursday (h/t to stage winner Isaac del Toro) in a flour tortilla with a scattering of arugula, a spoonful of homemade salsa fresca, and a sprinkling of grated Kerrygold Blarney.
The crowd roared.
OK, so maybe that was the vacuum cleaner. Herself has her own race on Sundays, which is all about making El Rancho Pendejo look less like a race pit and more like a home. It’s a much tougher event.
Mad Blog Media 
