Can you fish an atmospheric river? Maybe. But you’ll need a strong casting arm or a flying longboat.
What Ken Layne has is a leak in his roof (or two, or three). But he’s fishing that atmospheric river anyway from the pier at Desert Oracle Radio. And he wants us in that celestial skiff with him.
“So get a bucket or a cereal bowl or something and we’ll all paddle to Hell together,” he sez. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the sky. …
In the market for a new bike? Rivendell Bicycle Works sends word that ordering for the next batch of Sam Hillbornes goes live on Wednesday, Feb. 3.
And speaking as an owner of one, you could do a lot worse (hint: generic alloy “gravel bike” with plastic fork, eleventy-seven Klik-Speedz, hydro discs, etc.).
Rivendell bills the Sam as suitable for all roads, paved, dirt, or gravel, “and the kinds of fire trails a Conestoga wagon could negotiate, but not the kind that would require a jackass.”
“If you’re skilled and have good judgment and fattish knobby tires, you can ride the Sam where you shouldn’t. Stick with what it’s designed for: all the above, and road touring, road shopping, and road commuting.”
And if you’re feeling froggy, you best jump. Quoth the Rivendealios: “The way our production schedule is shaping up, we won’t have Sams again [until] at least late 2022. We have lots of bike orders placed but Sams didn’t make it in there, so consider this a maybe last chance at our V-brake’d country roadish bike.”
Sam has gotten posts for cantis/V-brakes since I got mine, which uses long-reach road calipers. They stop me just fine, even when I’m riding it where I shouldn’t.
“The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture and Industry?”
“Are you for real?” you ask.
“Does Howdy Doody got wooden balls, man?” I reply.
It’s no joke, ese — the vato loco half of Cheech & Chong has been collecting Chicano art for years, and soon some of it will be on display at a former public library in Riverside, Calif.
According to The New York Times, Cheech has already donated 11 works and plans to donate 500 more once storage is built for them. His holdings have been on display at more than 50 museums in the United States and in Europe.
Says Cheech: “We are going to make Riverside and the Riverside Art Museum the center of Chicano art in the world. And we’re going to bring the world to Riverside.”
Orrrrrrale, homes. No word yet on whether Sgt. Stedenko will be tasked with guarding the collection.
• Y tambien: Right next door in Orange County, Gustavo Arellano writes about “the agony and stupidity that is the coronavirus in Southern California.” And he passes along a new portmanteau of which I had not heard: “pandejo,” a combination of “pandemic” and “pendejo.”
“It’s a winter wonderland!” Herself sang as I flung open the bedroom door, growling like an elderly bear, a hitch in my gitalong after a night of imperfect sleep.
Son of a bitch. Right again. No wonder they pay her the big bucks.
Happily, neither of us has to take our chances on the Duke City streets this fine frosty morning. Herself continues to work from home in Year Two of the Plague, and I am a senior citizen on a fixed income who doesn’t have to do jack shit other than sit on his arse, bitching about this and that, while waiting for Uncle Sugar to give with the free money.
I’ve seen two fine auto crashes in the past two days. The first was on Tramway near Comanche; a Honda Element and some other vehicle came to grief in the southbound lanes as I was cycling northward on Sunday. The second ate up two northbound lanes on Juan Tabo near Lomas on Monday, as I was taking the Fearsome Furster in for an emissions check and re-registration.
The emissions tester was a man unhappy in his work, probably because he was freezing his nuts off in his tiny shed, which let the bitter southeastern wind roll in with each customer. Nevertheless, he and the State conspired to rob me of a couple hundy for the dubious privilege of courting death on the mean streets of the Land of Enchantment in a 16-year-old rice grinder, and then we were both in a bad mood.
I won’t take my brand-new sticker out for a spin today, thanks all the same. We have already established that my neighbors can’t keep the shiny side up on a sunny day, and I’ve just paid in advance for two years’ worth of happy motoring.
Anyway, it’s cold out there. Colder than a gut-shot bitch wolf dog with nine sucking pups pulling a number-four trap up a hill in the dead of winter in the middle of a snowstorm with a mouth full of porcupine quills. …
Damn, I don’t know how I managed to overlook Claude Bolling’s departure. He and Jean-Pierre Rampal helped spark my interest in jazz way back when.
I got in by way of what they called “fusion” — outfits like The Crusaders, Weather Report, Pat Metheny Group, Return to Forever; individuals like Stanley Turrentine and Grover Washington Jr.; and so on.
Some classical and jazz purists turned up their snoots at this sort of thing, but I loved it. Being a flutist of sorts myself I instantly found a connection with the Bolling-Rampal collaboration, right down to the whimsical cartoon album covers.
Bolling himself seemed to have a playful nature, and he resisted attempt to categorize what he was doing musically.
Mr. Bolling’s compositions were sometimes described as “combining” jazz and classical music, but he had a different view.
“I don’t like the word ‘combination,’” he said in 1982 in an interview for The Syracuse New Times, a weekly paper. “This is simply a dialogue between two kinds of music. I have made nothing new. This has been going on for a long time.”
His music will do likewise, no matter what the snobs say.
Mad Blog Media 