Herself and I ordinarily start our Thanksgiving Day drive north to dine with my sis and bro-in-law by listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” and finish the drive home with Sam Kinison’s “Live From Hell.” It’s not exactly your typical family tradition, but then we’re not exactly your typical family.
Alas, this trip we got rooked out of Arlo — KRCC wasn’t playing it until noon, when we were well out of range, and KUNC must have played it before we got in range. *
So we listened to Sam on the way up and Richard Pryor’s “… is it something I said?” on the way back. And thus, since the Comedy Rule of Three is clearly in effect here today, and in order to shine a bit of comedic light on the festival of consumerist idiocy called “Black Friday” that precedes The Greatest Bullshit Story Ever Told, we herewith present a portion of George Carlin’s 10th HBO special, “George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy.”
* Incidentally, we did finally get our Arlo fix around 8:30 p.m. Bibleburg time thanks to the miracle of the streaming internets. There may be a god after all.
Mad Blog Media 
I watched and enjoyed Gaga’s Thanksgiving Special on tv.
If I wait a bit longer I can watch ‘A Night at the Opera’ on TCM.
I had the radio on earlier when I was in the kitchen: Delilah doing her live remote Thanksgiving broadcast, thus Christmas tunes.
Now must watch the George Carlin – thanks!
Netflix has a ton of George Carlin videos in their on-demand streaming service. Richard Pryor too. They never get old!
Italian TV news doesn’t much cover the US of A unless there’s a big disaster….but tonight’s news had one story from ‘murica. You probably already guessed — the dolts camped out in line at a Best Buy store to get first crack at a deal on some electronic gizmo sure to make their lives of greedy, mindless materialism a whole lot better. This is one of those times (including the entire eight years of GW Bush) that I’m truly embarrassed to be a US citizen in front of our Italian friends.
We heard a story about a woman who pepper sprayed her way into a Big Box store on Friday morning. One more reason I never set foot in any of those mass consumer places on the day after Thanksgiving. The turkeys are always out in force. Riding home from the moto shop that afternoon was an exercise in dodging maniacs.
I scored a Black Friday trifecta: three meals, three slices of pie. (Apple-cranberry, pumpkin, and blackberry.)
I bought a 1995 BMW K1100RS on Friday in honor of Black Friday. Crashed my mountainbike Saturday and limped home sore and bloody from an altercation with Mr. Bandelier H. Tuff, proving once again that you don’t need a gas motor to get in trouble.
Yeah, Larry, its not an Italian bike. I actually test rode a Monster 800 after finding out a close cycling friend’s wife had a near identical bike to the Little Monster (695 cc) I was thinking about. That bike was a hoot but not what I would want for a three day trip.
But the BMW rides nice at high speed in a massive crosswind, that’s for sure. Plus, now I can go back to riding moto escort on the Tour de Los Alamos. Have not done moto escort on a big bike race since I left Hawaii. Had a lot more fun riding moto in a Cat II race than falling off the back of a cat IV.
O’Grady and my wife are already taking bets on my demise….folks can feel free to put into the wager pool.
Khal, the Monster is for annoying the shit out of your neighbors and fellow citizens with wheelies, power slides and other a-holiness. They’re worthless for much of anything else — I bet the K-bike will be perfect for what you want to do AND it’s not something tempting to test the limits of traction (or your nerve) with. Good that you already have ideas for using it to marshal the bike races. Makes me remember one time being in a follow car at a chronoscalata stage of the Giro many years ago. The driver of the car was sketchy at best and I think it was Maynard Hershon riding shotgun with the spare wheels. I remember joking that yours truly should be up front with the wheels and the guy we used to work for should have been driving – we just prayed the poor shlub we were following didn’t need any help! Luckily for him (and us) he didn’t!
We used to have a pretty high attrition rate on the second half of the Dick Evans Memorial Bike Race on Oahu. You cleared the North Shore and headed down towards Kahuku and eventually Hawaii Kai, where you climbed a small rise and finally caught the end of the race. It was into the wind, heat, and humidity for forty or fifty miles. One year we turned the moto into a rolling feed zone. We rigged two big milk crates, one on either side of the motorcycle like huge saddlebags, and filled them with water bottles. I would get ahead of the peloton, they would form up in a double paceline, and I’d let off the gas a little and ride backwards through the formation so people could pull bottles out. Then we would refill the motorcycle. It worked really well, and riders were not falling off from dehydration.
Awfully quiet today. I guess I’m not the only one having the Day from Hell.
Has anybody been around the velo barrel to make sure our fearless leader is still kicking?
I went for a looksee and couldn’t find his name anywhere on the Tim Johnson article. However…he or some nefarious imposter is tweeting under the maddogmedia banner.
Fearless Leader must be under the lash! I hope he gets in a ride or two to work off the stress of work…