Month: October 2019
Turds vs. Kurds
Why a single, solitary Kurd continues to believe a single, solitary word spoken by a representative of the United States government is a mystery to me.
Those poor saps get sold more often than a hot gun in Albuquerque.
• Extra Credit Chazbo: Meanwhile, I hate to kick off the week with two “Yeah, what Chazbo said” posts, but if Joe “Mr. Clean” Biden doesn’t want to apply for the job with a vengeance, let him get the fuck out of the queue. God save us from another “But it’s my turn!” candidate.
R.I.P., Ginger Baker
The cantankerous carrot-top has finally drummed himself off to the Other Side.
It goes without saying that I listened to a lot of Cream as a young ne’er-do-well, and this cut was a fave. So was this one. And this one.
Baker was apparently not fond of reminiscing about those days — “Oh, God, Cream’s a bloody albatross around my neck,” he once said — but I remember them fondly.
What I remember of them, that is. At least I managed to steer clear of the smack.
Sports Eviscerated
Sports Illustrated has gotten the VeloNews-CGI treatment: Pharaoh bids them make bricks without straw.
I’m not and never have been a sports fan, though I appreciate certain subsets of sportswriting (see Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, et al.). Thus I can’t speak to the quality of today’s Sports Illustrated, though the new management’s strategy certainly sounds familiar.
“Bricks, bitches. Chop chop. No, you don’t get straw. Who do you think you are, Frank Deford?”
But boy howdy, have some big hitters ever swung through SI’s pages over the years.
I’m talking Deford, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Jenkins, George Plimpton, Rick Reilly, Kurt Vonnegut … that’s right, Kurt fuckin’ Vonnegut. Not your basic dime-store jargon-jockeys, is what.
Over at Deadspin, Ray Ratto posits that the gutting, as has become traditional, “was pointless, needlessly cruel, stupid and thoroughly corporate.”
And Ratto expects more of the same:
I want to be more depressed and affected by what seems to have happened to Sports Illustrated, but it is the fate that awaits everything. Some corporate lamprey is coming for every generation’s best and brightest, dimmest and thickest, because you can count money and clicks but not curiosity and discovery. Others will have to provide those last two things now, and will have to do so while knowing that it’s a finite world out there. We will lament its passing too late because we have come to accept the mortality of things we thought would never die, and watch with a shrug as the monuments of our formative years are demolished and turned into Stalin’s Finest coffee stands, and eventually into parking lots.
I’d say that about sums it up. Back to you, Jamie “Mr. Awesome” Salter.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
The Adventure Cycling Association has hired itself a new executive director.
My attention was elsewhere when the deal went down, and I don’t know what it means for The Organization. I may have met Scott Pankratz in the course of my wanderings, though I don’t recall doing so. I have met many people, many, many of them, and they have met some version of me.
In any case, he seems to have been involved in good works, co-founding (with wife Julie Osborn) the nonprofit Ecology Project International; serving on the boards of the Montana Community Foundation and the Montana Nonprofit Association; and riding the ol’ bikey-bikey from Hither to Yon and back again.
“My passion and enthusiasm as the incoming executive director at Adventure Cycling come directly from transformative moments in the saddle from Alaska to Mexico,” Pankratz said via press release. “I look forward to expanding our community to give everyone with a bike the confidence, community, and gratitude that is at the heart of the Adventure Cycling experience.”
Scott takes over from the departing Jim Sayer early next year. Best wishes to both.
Mad Blog Media 