This is so not a 20-minute ride from my house. No, sir. Nuh uh. Never happen. Horrible place for cycling, Albuquerque. Don’t ever come here.
Ridge lyin’
Month: November 2014
Eye yi yi
Speaking of vision issues (see the 2014 midterm elections), we learned last week that Mister Boo’s eyesight had finally deteriorated to the point of requiring surgery.
His bad eye had gotten really bad — couldn’t see a damn thing out of it, thanks to an old lens luxation, and it had begun causing him some discomfort, being subject to periodic corneal abrasions. His good eye, meanwhile, had sprouted a mature cataract. Both of these issues are fairly common in Japanese Chins.
So, we pulled the trigger on a two-fer, having the defunct right eye removed and the left lens replaced. Didn’t use none of that socialistic Mooslim com’niss ObummerCare, neither. We paid for it in good ol’ fiat currency, and plenty of it, too.
“He looks like he was in a bar fight,” the vet tech warned me before bringing Mister Boo out for pickup yesterday. No shit, and he lost it, too, I thought after seeing him for the first time.
Now the poor little fella gets to take eight medications throughout the day — four drops, two pills, one gel and a liquid — and faces several follow-up visits to the vet over the next month or so.
But his appetite is excellent, he’s taking in plenty of fluids, and while he’s down to one eye, it seems he can see out of it.
So we might not have to buy Mister Boo a white cane and a German shepherd for solstice. But an eyepatch and a parrot? Maybe. Arrr.
Back to the drawing board
Erection Day
Well, here we go, headfirst down the rathole of what the GOP expects will be Christmas in November and the rest of us fear will be a hole full of grinning rats, wearing American-flag lapel pins.
It seems the Founding Fathers intended the business of running a republic to be tough sledding, given our whole setup. “That government is best which governs least” is a line often attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
But I don’t think ol’ Tom, or any of his bros, intended it to be impossible.
And yet, today, we, the inheritors of a republic we don’t seem able or willing to keep, are said to be eager not to solve the problems of self-governance, but rather to exacerbate them by turning the Senate over to a collection of bunko artists, waterheads and loons. It’s like electing a full slate of Hell’s Angels to run your local school board.
God knows that the Donks have not covered themselves in glory here. Candidates like Mark Udall in Colorado and Bruce Braley in Iowa have run inexplicably feeble campaigns, and as a consequence we seem to be on the verge of elevating Neanderpols Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst to the upper chamber of our national legislature. All hat and no cattle, and two very small hats at that.
This is in part the fault of the media, which focuses on horse race and narrative over résumé and platform. But it’s also the fault of an electorate that prefers chowing down on a steaming plate of deep-fried bullshit to actually rustling around in the national kitchen to see if there’s anything more nourishing to be had.
And we do this all the time. We elect Republicans who make a shambles of things, then elect Democrats to clean up their mess, and then elect Republicans again because the Democrats aren’t cleaning up the Republicans’ mess fast enough. It’s like watching an arson victim chase the firefighters off at gunpoint and then invite the firebug inside for a Molotov cocktail.
I voted, like always, but I won’t pretend to be happy about it. The folks at the county clerk’s office were friendly and helpful, and they said turnout was surprisingly good for a midterm, and I felt like I was using the last few squirts from an old can of Krylon to scrawl my name on a collapsed bridge on an abandoned road.
Mad Blog Media 