"Is there an adequate supply of cream? Yes? Then we have no problem."
Forget about that little problem in our nation’s capital, folks — we’ve got a problem right here at home. Seems there are more beer drinkers than there is beer for them to drink.
I’m talking about real beer, of course — Colorado craft beer, not the swill the megabrewers pitch to America’s small hat sizes during televised sporting events. I’d rather drink water. And you know what fish do in water.
Happily, there’s good news on the booze front. The United States has slipped past France to become the world’s biggest consumer of wine. And I helped! We’re No. 1! USA! USA! USA!
Plenty of sporting propositions this weekend, ladies and germs. First we have the Elefinks and Donks playing pocket pool with people’s lives, then we have Paris-Roubaix, where I’m gonna go out on a limb and say George Hincapie will not win again.
If I were to cross the water to watch a bike race, it would either be cyclo-cross worlds or the Hell of the North. Paris-Roubaix is like the original heavyweight championship of the world, when there was only the one sanctioning organization. The guy who can take it and dish it out is the guy who gets to stand with his fist in the air at the end of this slugfest.
I do not, however, care to journey to DeeCee to watch white millionaires in dark suits fart higher than their fat asses. A country of smart people with a lower tolerance for bullshit would have stormed this Bastille long ago, taken their heads, stuck them on pikes and paraded them around the National Mall.
But even voting is too wearisome for our flabby body politic, which spends its time at another mall altogether, in the food court. “Yeh, gimme a double-cheese Republican, extra bacon and Freedom Fries. Drink? Tea, a’course.”
Finally, a little help with the lawn-watering program around here.
We got a very welcome spring rain last night. The sound of the lawn, shrubs and trees cheering (“Yaaaaayyyy!!!) kept us up all night long.
Or perhaps that was the shit monsoon, which continues unabated in DeeCee, where the Tinfoil Beanie Party continues to hone its management philosophy, taken from the manifesto “Everything I Know About Getting My Way I Learned in Kindergarten.” What a shower of bastards we have sent to the nation’s capital.
And how God must chuckle when He looks down to see His monkeys at play, screeching and flinging dung at one another. Kind of makes You wish You hadn’t taken that seventh day off, eh, Big Fella? You could’ve used it to perform a little quality-control check on your most famous product.
Well, well, well. There may be cause for hope in our benighted Republic after all.
Yesterday Bibleburg voters roundly rejected a so-called “Reform Team” slate full of tinfoil-beanie neotards, fuckwits and assclowns, among them Ed Birnham and Doug Bruce. The mayoral race between real estate pimp Steve Bach and pragmatic lefty businessman Richard Skorman was too close to call and will go to a runoff in May.
Said at-large council candidate Tim Leigh: “I think the citizens have spoken very loudly that they don’t want to go back 20 years.” Word. Y’all think this place is fucked up now, you should’ve seen it 20 years ago. Or 40. We had a John Birch Society bookstore downtown — right across Tejon from where Skorman’s Poor Richard’s complex is now, if memory serves — and in the late Seventies we enjoyed a Ku Klux Klan revival (the button-down David Duke version). Good times.
The news on the national scene is less reassuring, alas. The visionaries in the GOP are itching to shut down the nasty ol’ socialist gummint — however will they redistribute what remains of our wealth to their rich pals without a gummint to act as middleman? — and proposing a seriously unserious budget that Paul Krugman has called “a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” Thanks to Steve Benen for the word.
• Late update: Also by way of Steve B. comes the word that if the feddle gummint shuts down, the troops won’t get paid. As he notes, it sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “all-volunteer force.”
The Jamis Aurora Elite: It's less expensive than 17 SUV tanks of gas and your ass will be less expansive as a consequence of taking it places.
In the spring a young American journalist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of … gas prices.
Every year about this time, as gas prices rise — as they will — the hacks trot out their woeful tales of the long-suffering American motoring public to celebrate the impending summer road-rage season. This one is from The Washington Post, and it is superior to the usual vacuous drivel in that it mentions the bicycle. Once.
Not as a tool for actually taking that road trip, mind you, but for scooting around the vicinity of your motel once you’ve parked the 12-mpg family battlewagon.
Sigh.
Famous alien spokescreature and marketing Machiavelli Gregg Bagni has posited that we may see some drift away from four wheels toward two once gas prices hit four smacks per gallon, which is just a few klicks down the turnpike. We paid about $4.30 per gallon in Hawaii in March, and nationwide the average has topped $3.50.
So, yeah. Should be interesting. Meanwhile, for $1,700 — about the price of 17 tanks of gas in the old Cadoo Escapade — a guy can buy himself a touring bike like the Jamis Aurora Elite* and hit the road under his own power.
You can’t take the family along, of course. But some might consider that a feature rather than a bug.
* In the interest of full disclosure, I’m test-riding an Aurora Elite as we speak and will review it for Adventure Cyclist magazine.
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