Whipping post

My friend and colleague Charles Pelkey will be appearing on “The Outspoken Cyclist” with Diane Lees on Saturday. You should give it a listen.

But first, listen to Frank and the band performing the Allman Brothers classic “Whipping Post” live in Barcelona, circa 1988 — with a few interesting alterations to the original lyrics — and praise Jeebus that Frank never got hooked up with Cher the way Gregg Allman did.

Nanook rubs it

Great googly-moogly! The thermometer has been pegged at the low teens all day long. I ventured out exactly twice, the first time to broom away the light snow that fell overnight, and the second time to collect a few bottles of antifreeze from the local grog shop in order to toast my fellow Zappatistas on this, the frigid second day of Zappadan 2011.

The temps are supposed to drop to minus-7 tonight. This would feel like a relaxing soak in a hot tub to my man Charles Pelkey, who reports that last night’s low in Laramie approached minus-30. The thud of engine blocks exploding and water mains bursting must keep folks up at night.

The downside about being stuck indoors on a slow cycling-news day is that one is tempted to look at the real news, and lately that is enough to set the stoutest young Eskimo boy to beating himself upside the head with a lead-filled snowshoe. Or perhaps depriving himself of his sight through the application to the eyes (via a vigorous circular motion) of the Deadly Yellow Snow, from right there where the huskies go.

I mean, can you imagine a world in which Newt Gingrich is the front-runner for the GOP nomination for president of the United States?

Hey … I think I just cheered myself up.

Freedumb isn’t free

Berg's Little Printer
It's ever so much cuter than an actual journalist. I mean, have you ever seen an actual journalist? Eeeyeew.

OK, I think I have Freedumb Communications’ little content-distribution problem solved. Let’s run this one up the strategically repositioned collaborative flagpole and see who facilitates a transformative salute in real time.

First you buy up a metric shit-ton of Berg’s Little Printers. You’re buying in bulk, so there should be a deep discount.

Next you pre-program the cute little dickenses to download updates from The Associated Press, Mayor Bach’s smoke-and-mirrors dispensary and the Colorado Springs Police Department blotter. And finally, if there’s anyone left in the art department after the last round of layoffs you get him to redo the face so it looks like Tim Tebow just before you have security escort the poor, no-longer-useful sonofabitch off the premises. Hell, the fucking thing already has orange feet — give it a blue body and you’re golden.

Then you sell ’em to the readership — whoops, pardon me, the community — at a steep markup.

And hey presto! Content delivery without all the hassle, expense and human interaction required in content creation. You’re welcome.

Merry Christmas, you’re fired!

The Bibleburg Gazoo continues to bleed like a hemophiliac with Ebolla in a sandpaper suit.

Yesterday word came — not from the Gazoo, natch — that owner Freedumb Communications had sacrificed another dozen or so staffers to The Invisible Hand of the Free Market.

It wasn’t clear whether editor Jeff Thomas was among those fed to the Beast or resigned in protest.

Today, the G finally issued a statement — in MarketSpeak®. Any journalist who would write content-free spooge like the following should be slapped in the mouth with a copy of “The Elements of Style” (duct-taped to a baseball bat).

The goal is to reposition The Gazette’s content center strategically to create and facilitate community conversation around issues that are important to the region, and deliver relevant information that serves the needs of readers on any platform.

“We need to evolve to meet the changing needs of our audience,” (content director Carmen) Boles said. “We’re embarking on a transformation. We want to collaborate in real-time with the community in defining what is relevant.”

Talk about spinning a story about continuing layoffs at a struggling newspaper in hopes of showing vision rather than myopia. This would be good for an F-minus in any tank-town community-college journalism class. George Gladney would have stuffed copy like this up the author’s ass back in 1977.

I still know people at the G, folks who are doing good work under difficult circumstances. But there are some dreadful hacks on the payroll, too, as the above clip shows all too clearly. And frankly, any newspaper that gives Michelle Malkin a platform is going to have trouble “defining what is relevant.”

It can’t be long before Billy Dean Simpleton at Digital Fist-MerdeNews adds the poor old Gazoo to his odiferous collection of bumwads. There goes the neighborhood.