Bring out your dead
Month: October 2018
And now for something completely different
When I went to check the forecast this morning Weather Underground served me up an ad for bipolar-depression medication. Judging by the list of side effects, which ran longer than the CGI credits in a Marvel superhero flick, anyone prescribed it will soon be longing for the good old days of bipolar depression.
Clearly, with another Monday hanging over our heads like a 16-ton weight, what we need here is a solid dose of the best medicine: laughter.
Thus, for your amusement and/or bemusement, we have a twofer from Marc Maron, who last week chatted with John Cleese and Eric Idle, and a New York Times Q&A with Jerry Seinfeld, who basically channels a Cleese line from “Life of Brian” when he says of their shared line of work in troubled times: “We’re figuring it out as we go along.”
• A Cellar’s Market: Speaking of troubled times, the Comedy Cellar, where Louis C.K. has been inching back into the spotlight, is getting into late-night TV on Comedy Central. The piece is worth reading for the gags about Megyn Kelly and Il Douche.
• Wot’s All This Then? And finally, Netflix is airing a ton of Monty Python, from the original TV show to the movies to the various Pythons’ side projects.
Stem education
We’re back to what passes for normal, weather-wise, in the Duke City, which is to say sunny and warmish.
The uniform of the day is knickers, short sleeves and arm warmers, with long-fingered gloves held in reserve.
On Friday I’d planned a quick outing on Steelman Eurocross No. 1, a mango-colored Reynolds 853 bike. But as I mounted up the front tire felt squishy, and sure enough, there was a slow leak in the sonofabitch.
Happily, we do not lack for two-wheelers here at El Rancho Pendejo, and so I snagged Eurocross No. 2, a red jobber with a couple of shaped True Temper tubes in the frameset and Brent Steelman only knows what else.
It was part of a batch of framesets Brent made for the Clif Bar team back in … 1999? He thought of me when ordering the tubes for no good reason I can think of, other than that he was and is a righteous dude, dudes. And thus I always have a solid backup in the pit, though it’s rare to have to pit before the gun goes off, or even if it never does, since I haven’t raced since 2004.
Somehow this bike wound up with a 110mm, 6° Ritchey WCS stem, which is ridiculous for an inflexible elder of the geezer persuasion, and after a steady diet of shorter, taller stems (and frankly, fatter tires) I often found myself in my own way while horsing it around and about on the local singletrack.
Happily, I didn’t have an audience, it being a workday for the plebes. I like to be laughed at for a narrow selection of reasons, one of which is not the way I ride a ’cross bike on trails.
So, yeah. Yesterday morning I found a 100mm, 25° Giant stem in the parts bin and slapped that on. Boy, did that ever make a difference. It felt like a new bike, if I overlooked the crust of filth, the death-rattle of the beat-to-shit Shimano 600 rear derailleur, and a number of other oversights in dire need of correction.
Afterward, I patched the leak in Steelman No. 1’s front tube, because as any ’crosser will confirm, a pit with no spare bike is the pits.
Matt Foley, Mad Bomber
Looks like the John Laws have a suspect in the MAGAbomber case. And he lives in a van, down by the river.
There is no slow lane on the road to Hell
“Thank God it’s Friday,” you say? Not so fast, Sparky. Just when you thought things were winding down, turns out I’ve been winding up another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
This one has its roots in a New Yorker essay I read about a risk-management program gone all pear-shaped. The author, neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, like me an elder of the geezer persuasion, did himself an injury while test-driving an escape ladder and afterward mused at length on the vicissitudes of the calendar, caution, calamity, and consequences.
I had recently been on a ladder myself — not a cheapo folding one, and not dangling from a third story — but happily I made it back to earth without burning up on re-entry.
I can’t say I enjoyed the experience, but if need arose I’d probably do it again, my guiding principle being, “I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway.” This is why, like Levitin, I have spent some time enduring the tender mercies of the medical-industrial complex.
As Roy Blount Jr. has taught us, fucking up is not what it used to be. That was the lede, word for word, to his essay “I Always Plead Guilty,” from the 1984 collection “What Men Don’t Tell Women,” and it’s a lot funnier than Levitin’s New Yorker essay or even this episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
Blount wrote it in an era not unlike today, in a nation “where major corporations are in charge and there is absolutely no charm left in fucking up.”
Nevertheless, he argued, fucking up is a very American thing — “going into the unknown for the challenge of it” — and urged that we find some middle ground between caution and catastrophe, asking:
“Why do we have to draw back so far from the abyss?”
So, yeah. Read the essay, buy the book, and lend a ragged ear to the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded using an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB microphone and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. I edited the audio on a late-2009 iMac using Apple’s GarageBand. The sound effects are from Freesound, and the blues loop playing in the background is from fredsonic at Freesound.
Mad Blog Media 
