Month: June 2010

A long, hot summer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.

Squeezed another nice, hot ride in today, this time out to the Air Force Academy and back.

I was thinking about riding out to Palmer Lake and back, which is a 50-mile U-turn, but man — it was hot, windy, dry and dusty, so I called it quits at the AFA’s North Gate and turned around. Good thing, too, ’cause the wind went nuts shortly after I got home. Now I can smell smoke from either the Royal Gorge fire, the Medano blaze or some other seasonal conflagration, and it looks like tornado weather out there.

Meanwhile, some folks will be riding their bicycles around France starting a week from tomorrow, and that means I’ll be working five days a week just like the rest of y’all, assuming you are fortunate enough to enjoy continued employment in this mess they call an economy.

It’s no time to be on the dole, to be sure — not with Senate Repuglicans smugly flipping a neatly manicured, pudgy middle digit to the unemployed. As Steve Benen noted at Political Animal:

“We’ve gone from one erratic senator flipping off a reporter to an entire party caucus flipping off millions of Americans. We’ve gone from a seemingly unstable lawmaker telling a colleague, “Tough sh*t” to the entire Republican conference telling the whole country, ‘Tough sh*t.’

“In the late winter, Jim Bunning was something of a laughing stock. In the early summer, we have an entire Party of Bunnings.”

So true. And so sad. I don’t know how one deals with a completely unprincipled, mendacious opposition with the compassion of a rabid hyena on a gutpile and the smarts of a bag of hammers.

Parking it

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Oh, Colorado's calling me (Hey! You!)
Oh, Colorado's calling me (Hey! You!)

Today I did something out of the ordinary — I rode my mountain bike. And in an even more startling departure from the norm, I rode it in Cheyenne Mountain State Park.

What can I tell you? I was sick of my usual rides and got all Monty Python on my bad self (“And now for something completely different. …”).

It feels wrong to write about this place again, because this park continues to be largely undiscovered. In two and a half hours of riding I encountered two hikers, four mountain bikers and one extremely hard individual who was running the trails with a large rucksack and ski poles. It ain’t exactly I-25 at rush hour, is what I’m sayin’ here.

My outing took in Zook Loop, Sundance, Talon, North and South Talon and Blackmer Loop, and oh, man, was it ever fun, despite my minimal and rusty skills. I may not be the world’s worst mountain biker, but will do until he (or she) shows up.

I middle-ringed pretty much everything until machismo proved to be stupidissimo — a guy with the right legs and medical plan can ride quite a few of these trails on a cyclo-cross bike — and then I became one with the Tao of the Little Ring. Nobody’s watching, so there was no one to impress.

My park pass ($6 at the gate) is good until noon tomorrow, so I may just dash out there again. After all, I only heard the one rattlesnake, and the bears, bobcats and mountain lions apparently are on vacation.

Dis-miss

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

So, Stan the Man got the heave-ho. Alas, you can’t call the boss a pussy and his staff a bunch of faggots and expect to keep climbing that old career ladder. At least he had his Class A goin’ on when he showed up to take his beating.

Dude’s been in the Green Machine for 34 years now, having graduated from The Point in 1976. What’s next? Some lesser post? Retirement? I’m guessing the latter. Take one for the team — “Fellas, this is what happens when you forget that in the United States, the military is under civilian control. …” — and then join a couple think tanks, pen a memoir, become a talking head on Fox, hit the rubber-chicken circuit, form a militia.

Hey, could be worse. Most of us 50-somethings wouldn’t have unlimited earning potential, a lifetime pension and free medical care if we got sacked for being dicks. I’d have a mortgage, a whole bunch of things that suddenly needed selling and a really pissed-off wife.

Runaway general

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Anybody have any thoughts on Gen. Stanley McChrystal?

On first glance, the dude seems like a gen-yoo-wine ass-kicking samurai cross-bred with the kind of political general who has the shrunken yellow heart of a REMF but likes to dress up as G.I. Joe. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight him, but neither would I care to follow him into anything more dangerous than a briefing room.

A casual Google doesn’t turn up much in the way of a real combat record, and the much-hyped Rolling Stone story sure doesn’t answer many questions. It paints him as some class of Zen archer, if Zen archers also happened to be egomaniacs. Col. Walter E. Kurtz comes to mind, as does Julius Caesar. Maybe George Armstrong Custer.

My shoot-from-the-hip observation is that he’s another one of these ivory-tower dudes who has a theory he’d like to prove if you don’t mind contributing a few of your friends, neighbors and family members to the experiment.

Must be fun to be in the White House right about now, eh? Can him or keep him, it’s gonna be nothing but incoming.

• Late update: The Los Angeles Times has failed to distinguish itself on many occasions in recent years, but this aside in a straight news story about the McChrystal contretemps that should display no bias is particularly appalling:

Obama, who has not served in the military, has sought to solidify his status as commander in chief through frequent appearances with troops. Such appearances have sought to convey that he has the confidence of the American military.

Uh huh. No wonder these cocksuckers declined to hire me as a copy editor back in the Eighties, ’cause I would’ve folded that paragraph into a conical shape and shoved it up someone’s ass.

Well, dipshits, like it or not, he is the CINC, and you don’t have to go back very far to find CINCs who liked to be photographed hanging around with the grunts, feeding them plastic turkeys. Let’s hope that this one is less eager to feed them into the meat grinder.