That is all.
Month: August 2012
The real Tampa Bay buccaneers
Oh, Lord, am I ever glad that the likes of Charles P. Pierce, Ed Kilgore and Steve Benen are following this Floridian fuckery so I don’t have to.
There is something excruciatingly discordant in the keening of pirates who, after scuttling the Ship of State with pointless warfare and the dispensation of booty unclaimed from same to all their mates, have the effrontery to dress down the colored fella we hired to police up this mess for his failure to immediately raise the wreckage from the Mariana Trench in which they left it, tow it to drydock a la Jack LaLanne and then promptly outfit it as a luxury yacht for honkies who make extravagant bets with each other using other people’s money and call that work.
Thus after a quick whiff of the same old bullshit I sailed away on my Nobilette for a cruise through the Broadmoor, then fired up the Vespa for a voyage to the Colorado Farm and Art Market to take a few pix of a nifty startup, The Local.
This food truck is manned (womaned?) by a couple of lively U.S. Air Force vets who are bringing tasty Mexican-American-Asian cuisine to the landlubbers here in Bibleburg. I’m talking burgers on a pretzel bun with bacon jam — yes, bacon jam — and Korean barbecue tacos.
I shot the pix for The Farm Beet, one of the many sombreros worn by my friend and colleague Hal Walter of Hardscrabble Times, and I don’t imagine that he’ll object if I post one here.
Free at last
When a guy hasn’t had an actual job for 21 years, a long stretch of actual work comes as something of a shock to the system. I had a number of perfectly good reasons for quitting that last job, and “actual work” topped the podium.
Still, a man must earn, and thus I spent the last 11 days on the clock, and ain’t I glad that’s over. Now I can get back to viewing with alarm, peeing on various wingtips and riding the damn’ bike.
Today I played catch-up on the chores that had gone begging while I was locked to the money teat. I bought a metric shit-ton of groceries (including ice cream); treated myself to a new pair of running shoes from Colorado Running Company; went for a short jog; and got my old eyeglasses repaired while contemplating some new cheaters (I’m feeling a bit like Mister Magoo after an extended bout of pixel-pushing).
Tomorrow I’ll get back to business around here. I understand the Republicans are playing One-Handed Spit-In-the-Carpet in Florida. Won’t that be fun?
Pro cycling challenged
Well, shucks. I didn’t have a chance to observe first-hand the USA Pro Challenge as it barreled through Bibleburg.
I’m often critical of pro cycling, but I still like to watch it, the way some guys like to look at fake tits. Happily, Herself, who has neither need nor desire for surgical enhancement — not that this is any of your business — cycled downtown to observe the festivities on my behalf, as I was buried in chores that reminded me of the time I tried to dig my way out of the Supermax in Florence wielding only a cracked plastic spoon, a Mason jar of pruno and a finely honed sense of moral superiority.
Still, I was able to watch stage five from Chez Dog, via Adobe Tour Tracker, and as I had anticipated, spectatorship seemed sparse, confined mostly to Bibleburg’s infamous drinkin’-an’-fightin’ ghetto on Tejon, between Bijou and Colorado. Happily for those who earn a living from such things, the camera adds 10 pounds to everything, including crowd estimates.
Damiano Caruso (Liquigas-Cannondale) screwed the pooch on the finishing circuit, sprinting to victory a lap before everyone else even bothered to queue up. And who can blame him? Given the altitude at home, he might as well be racing on Mars against the Curiosity rover, sans spacesuit.
Tyler Farrar won, with Taylor Phinney second, and now everything shifts north to the People’s Republic, where I expect the crowds will turn out for real on Flagstaff Mountain. I won’t be there, either. But I will be watching via streaming video between chores, if only because Herself won’t let me watch videos of … well … you know.
Lanced
It may be the only fight he ever walked away from. Still, you have to hand it to the guy.
Had Big Tex gone to arbitration the outcome probably would have been the same, but he’d have come out looking like he’d done a thousand-mile low crawl through a Third World leach field. This way he remains as clean — on the outside, anyway — as is humanly possible. Lance Armstrong, Cancer Killer.
It’s a cliche, of course, but I think it would have been good for the sport to have had a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle fistfight over the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s charges and a final decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. We could point at something then, claim to have an answer, even if it was the wrong one.
This way, the thing will never end. Believers will continue to believe, and haters continue to hate. Nothing has changed.
And for the immediate future, at least, nobody will give a shit about what happens in the Vuelta a España, the USA Pro Challenge or any other two-wheeled sporting competition. They’ll all be gazing upon Cancer Jesus, hanging up there on the carbon-fiber-and-titanium cross that he’s built for himself.
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