No, that’s not the stairway to heaven — that’s a shot of the pergola over our back deck, taken from a folding chair while the cats chase bugs around the yard. Alas, those beautiful blue skies are supposed to give way to showers this weekend, a little gift from the gods to the body-armored knuckleheads who live for manhandling their double-boingers across the wet clay trails of Palmer Park, where their tracks will remain for alien archaeologists to ponder some eons hence.
Speaking of dark clouds, some of you may wonder why I haven’t weighed in on the debate over “enhanced interrogation techniques” that has been so much in the news of late. It’s because in a sane society no debate should be required. Torture is wrong, period, end of story. And anyone who says otherwise should be tortured.
And speaking of torture, there is much bicycle racing coming to flyover country here as April segues into May. There’s the 31st edition of La Vuelta de Bisbee, which starts today in the Arizona town of the same name, and the 23rd annual Tour of the Gila, which kicks off April 29 in Silver City, N.M. I covered LVDB once, back in the day, but I’ve never been to the Gila. VeloNews.com’s grand poobah, Steve Frothingham, is headed that way again this year, so look for lots of word count, pix and maybe even some video.
Mad Blog Media 
Pergola? So that’s what they’re called. I’ve been studying a huge Japanese style one at a cushy house down in Baraboo that used to be the site of the International Crane Foundation. Plan on building one behind the house, when our old house sells and we have some improvement money. Looks nice.
being a southern colorado boy I still forget how deep blue the skies are. I kind of get homesick till I see Denver and the springs with the urban defecation.
Patrick, Nice photo, taken either by your “good eye” or by accident. Nonetheless, a good one. Silver City. Not been there for a long time, but there is a nice lake into the Gila some, just outside of Silver. I can’t remember its name. Long ago, I took my bride camping there, joining a bunch of amateur radio friends. But! The Gila has one of the highest incidents of lightning in the lower 48. A bad place to be on a bike, especially in the afternoon.
Might still be a little early for the lightning season in Silver City, if they get it at the same time we do (mid summer monsoons). But some spectacular roads out of town that should make for some fine riding. We were down there around last Thanksgiving for just a short mental health break from the Nuke Werks and I didn’t bring the bike. I subsequently spent the weekend kicking myself for such a bad decision.
Oh, and agree with Patrick as to whether we should even be having a debate about torture. I thought such questions were decided at Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1946. Maybe we need to renovate Spandau Prison.
Hey if the retro Spandau was good enough for Hess, Walther Funk, Erich Raeder, Albert, Baldur von Schirach, Konstantin von Neurath and Karl Dönitz ..well you get my drift. Unfortunately it was torn down in 1987 on Hess’s death to keep it from becoming a place of veneration for neo-nazis. A few of whom where at (near) the opening of the Illinois Holocaust and Education Center in Skokie. The opening ceremonies were fantastic.
That’s right, Ben. I recall that Hess was the last inmate at Spandau. Forgot that they tore it down. Sure would have been a good symbolic place to have handy for torture advocates including Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury. Not to mention Messrs. Bush and Cheney.
On the other hand, maybe Congress should simply abandon past principles and legalize torture. Seems the public is evenly divided on it.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1202/torture-terrorists-public-remains-split
How can half of Americans be in favor of torture? Sorry, but if Pew has it right, this just doesn’t seem to be my country any more. Maybe I should have taken that redneck asshole’s advice, given to me at about 1 a.m. in a supermarket on Long Island, and moved to Canada. Damn. Its such a suck time to sell a house.
My brother sent me the clip of that Shepard guy on Fox, going off on his panel-mates over their tap-dancing around the torture discussion. Very cool that there are still some Howard Beale types out there. “We are America! We do not effing torture!”
Those half in favor, along with the bloviators on the right (Hannity, you know who you are) would be changing their tunes pretty darn quick if such methods were being used on our guys. They’d be cryin for heads to roll.
Silver City is a terrific place to bring a bike. The ride up Emory Pass is a peach. Talk is that some darn fine riders with be showing up for the Gila this year because some teams can’t afford to travel across the big water.
Swell, I can’t take credit for the pergola … it was built by the last Irish-American to own this place, which according to the neighbors is the official Mick House, having been in the hands of the brethren for the past three or four owners so. We zip-tie a mesh cover to it in summer to keep the worst of the sun off our little garden parties. And John, yes, the skies remain that deep blue for at least 10 or 15 minutes per year.
Bruce, the shot was strictly an accident. I was sitting there looking upward and thought, y’know, that looks kind of cool. I should grab a camera. Digital cameras are a blessing for old newsdogs like me. I’ve had a bunch of SLRs over the years, and spent way too many years fussing with film and editing pix at various newspapers. Digital frees the mind, lemme tell you. Instant gratification. Shoot until your fingers bleed and then pick the best.
As to lightning, now, B&K, the rule around Weirdcliffe was “get down before noon” if you were in the high country. My man Hal has lost appliances and animals to what we used to call The Great Zot, from Johnny Hart’s “B.C.” strip, back when he was still funny.
And Spandau? Let’s bring the sumbitch back, Nuremberg trials and all. Folks need the work. Other folks need reminding that America used to be a place where people cringed at the sort of things Darth Cheney seems to find palatable. Just ’cause Dracula likes blood doesn’t mean McDonalds should start serving up a McCorpuscle shake, f’chrissakes.
We (‘mericans) may not f-ing torture, but we do kill, maim and pillage. Or so I hear, see and read in the non-mainstream press. I guess that’s the fine line, and why 50% of us (or so) seem to see it as peachy keen, a-okay and the moral thing to do. Or am I reading that all wrong?
Oh, my bride helped me remember that lake in the Gila, Roberts Lake. Fishing was only so-so, but I’m a lousy fisherman.
I can vouch for the advice to get down before noon, at least once the summer monsoon pattern sets up. I spent a an hour or so one day in the Jemez Mts., literally hiding and freezing under a rock ledge, as a big storm blew in with magnificant Zots, rain, and then marble size hail as the temp dove from seventies to forties.
My bride finally came up and rescued me and as we drove down Rt. 4 back towards Los Alamos, we saw bikes under trees and a while bunch of bikes huddled around the outhouses at one of the trailheads. I guess the smell inside was better than the Hell outside.
That stuff often ends as suddenly as it starts, but can be pretty dramatic while the light show is going on.
Khal, we used to get some real barn-burners in Weirdcliffe. Our place was 10 miles east of that booming metropolis, at 8800 feet in the Wet Mountains, and when the Zot came out to play it was best to be indoors. Hal lost a couple teevees, stereos and other electronic gear to lightning strikes, and once I saw a bolt vaporize a tree down the hill from our house. Looked like something out of “Star Trek.” Cured me of wearing my tinfoil beanie outdoors, I can tell you.
Khal,
Didn’t need no one to tell me to get off Long Island. Figured it out in 5th grade when the population hit a million and everyone wanted it to be 2 million. Left right after High School graduation.
The east end of the south fork use to be such a pretty place. the North fork just barely hangs on to that same charm.
I just don’t go back anymore, it literally hurts to see the old places covered in second homes.
Can’t we make an exceeption to the torture thing for bankers, certain CEOs, and maybe some of the Republicans that think it’s such a great idea? I was thinking maybe making them ride cyclocross for a whole season…… :>)
Hi, Ben. I left L.I. in 1987 as soon as I finished my graduate work. Visited once in 1988 and have not been back since. The open fields east of Port Jefferson that I remembered from 1979 were being attacked by bulldozers when I was packing my stuff in the fall of ’87. I wonder what happened to those wonderful quiet roads out to Mattituck, Shelter Island, and Orient Point that had us on four hour bike rides every Sunday.
I used to ride my motorcycle out to Montauk Point in those days. It was really beautiful in spite of all the Beautiful People out there wondering what a thug like me was doing in their world. On the North Fork, there was a great little bike shop in Mattituck, called Country Time Cycles. Its still there if the Web is accurate. Mattituck was a favorite ride turn-around in those days when I weighed about 139 lbs and could motor those flats (and those north shore hills) from Stony Brook to Mattituck and back in about four hours after work during the summer, hitting a farm stand along the way for refreshments.
Western Long Island sucked back then and probably still does. Seemed like fifty miles of parked cars and cursing Lawn Guylanders. I turned down a job with the US Geological Survey (water resources) as it would have meant living near Huntington. Although there were/are groundwater problems on Long Island that I could have worked on till retirement, it was too developed for this country boy.
The damage that sprawl has visited upon Bibleburg over the past 40 years is appalling. When we moved here in 1967, there was pretty much nothing between our place near Academy and Constitution and the Air Force Academy. Before long the northeast side was overflowing with shitbox houses, tacky strip malls and every chain beanery known to mankind. All the places we used for our stoner woodsies during “high” school were murdered and buried under uncounted tons of concrete, steel and asphalt. And it just keeps metastasizing. It’s a perfect example of Ed Abbey’s truism: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Back in ’67, my mom was stunned to see how much the place had changed since she and a girlfriend lived here in the Forties. Now I know how the ol’ gal felt. The running joke I inflict upon Herself goes as follows: Point at pretty much anything east of Hancock Avenue and bellow, “Y’see that? None a that shit useta be here!” But it’s really not that funny.
Patrick, that sprawl curse, or as you say, that cancer, was the reason we bailed from Honolulu. Meena grew up there since 1959 and she was sickened by what happened in the last half century. In desperation, we bought a little place out on the eastern end of Oahu in ’92, and by 2001 it too was overrun by McMansions and shitboxes. Most built on speculation. Recall that Joni Mitchell wrote Big Yellow Taxi (“They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot”) about Honolulu.
From Wiki: “…I wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart… this blight on paradise. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song.[1]…”
By 2001, it was definitely time to leave.