His August Majesty, the Emperor Turkus Jerkus I, Attacker of Feet, Drinker From Sinks, and Filler of Litterboxes, is currently posing for your edification and enlightenment via The TurkenCam®. That is all.
• Editor’s note: ‘Is Lordship has left the building.
I’ve never liked gyms, and I despise the stationary trainer. Back when I was still a man, instead of whatever it is that I am now, I would go for a run when the weather got sideways, but creeping decrepitude seems to have written finis to that sordid chapter in my exercise history.
So what’s a fat bastard to do in January?
Ride his old mountain bike in the snow, that’s what.
After moving a little of the white stuff around this morning I decided it wasn’t all that cold out — 20-something, but not a really nasty 20-something — so I aired up the tires on the old DBR ti’ to about 20 psi, tugged on a shitload of winter kit, and got busy.
And y’know what? It was big fun. I’d forgotten how much I like riding in the snow.
With the Hutchinson Python 26×2.0s at low pressure there was plenty of traction, and conditions weren’t wet enough to freeze up that old eight-speed XT drivetrain, though they were cold enough to freeze my water bottle.
The only bad part was the start, heading north without a balaclava into what proved a pretty stiff wind.
Happily, I had brought a bandanna along and that did the trick, even if it made me look like a Canadian terrorist out to attack the fascist maple-syrup cartel.
Well, it’s snowing, anyway. Nothing of back-East proportions, but still, it will affect a fella’s ability and/or desire to ride the ol’ bikey bike.
I just saw Dr. Schenkenstein go running past Chez Dog, and if that cyclo-crossin’ sonofabitch is afoot, it means I’m likely to be riding the trainer today.
In the meantime, while Mister Boo gets into character for another exciting edition of The BooCam®, you can get a glimpse of the first snow of the new year via the Mad Dog Media WeatherCam™.
• Editor’s note: The cam will be offline for a while as I try to hurt myself on a mountain bike in the snow.
Cheech and Chong* must be laughing their asses off.
“By a 3-to-1 margin, journalists inside 3D Cannabis outnumbered customers waiting outside before the shop opened,” reports The Denver Post in its coverage of today’s first sales of legal recreational marijuana in Colorado.
“This is history I just made,” crows a Georgia gent who slept in his car, with his dog, in order to spend $180 on 6 grams of smokable herb and some munchies.
Well, Stoney, let’s get real here. Buying a legal bag of shit is not quite up there with integrating a redneck lunch counter, landing on the moon or inventing the Internet. But we take your point. Folks in Colorado — certain parts of it, anyway — can now purchase the fabled Whacky Tobacky over a counter instead of under the radar, and from someone who doesn’t look the way I did when I was selling $12 lids in Alamosa, too.
Bibleburg, naturally, decided not to participate in this making of the history. Retail sales of firearms, tattoos, payday loans, superstition, fuck books, tonsil polish in a thousand-and-one flavors, and all manner of other smokable products? Fine, fine, go about your business.
But the recreational mary-joo-wanna? Nossir. Might set the younguns to rubbing theyselfs in public, cause the Army to make bongs of its M203s, maybe even lead to dancing on Sunday.
So Manitou Springs, Pueblo and Denver will get the mota-related jobs and taxes, and Bibleburg will get the mumbling stoners. Assuming said stoners have recourse to money and reliable transportation, anyway. So we got that going for us.
Pretty silly, hey? But not as silly as the 62-year-old masters racer who just drew himself a two-year ban for using amphetamines, testosterone and EPO. Talk about hitting the trifecta. It’s a wonder the cup didn’t dissolve when he pissed in it. Doping to win masters races is like standing tiptoe on a stack of prescription pads to make yourself the biggest midget in the room.
* Looks like Tommy Chong is going to be paying a visit to an area dealer. Dave must finally be here.
I had not yet been set loose upon the world on Jan. 1, 1954. That blessed event occurred nearly three months later, on March 27, in the hospital at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
As family legend has it, Mom’s obstetrician, upon learning I was to be named Patrick Declan O’Grady, proposed inducing labor to get me born on St. Patrick’s Day. Mom declined, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Out west in Colorado Springs, the Ivywild School was already open for business, and had been for years. In fact, it was one year older than my old man, who was born in 1917 in Bogalusa, La.
I didn’t attend Ivywild — by the time we got here in 1967, I was a ninth grader, and anyway, after a brief flirtation with a bomb-shelter-equipped home in the Skyway area we settled well outside downtown proper in what a newspaper colleague would later confirm was most emphatically not part of Colorado Springs, our suburban trilevel being well east of Hancock Avenue.
Ivywild gave up the ghost as a school in 2009, but was reborn recently thanks to local entrepreneurs Joe Coleman and Mike Bristol, who turned the picturesque old pile into the new home of Bristol Brewing, plus a number of other ventures: The Principal’s Office (booze and java); The Meat Locker (deli and charcuterie); Old School Bakery (breads and pastries); Hunt or Gather (seasonal foods from area farmers); Bicycle Experience (the second location of a neighborhood shop); and office space.
I hadn’t conducted an inspection tour since Ivywild’s resurrection, but last night Herself and I, along with a neighbor and the latest tenants of The House Back East®, dropped in to scope out a New Year’s Eve bash in the gym (think back-in-the-day sock hop, but with the booze actually sold on site, plus more and older wastrels).
It was pretty damned impressive, as you can see from the pix if you clicked the link above. The music was less so — the gym was a mighty small space, with either an indifferent sound system, poor mixing or a combination of the two, plus lots of chatter in the audience — but still, chapeau to all involved in making the Ivywild revival happen.
Ivywild is a welcome reminder that it’s not all Industrial Christianity and LiberTea here in Bibleburg. I plan on sentencing myself to a few rounds of detention there in 2014.
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