A smattering of Oliphant from the Mad Dog library.
A few observations under the Wolf Moon:
• A Puck in the gob. The Albquerque Journalhas a little piece on my favorite political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, who spent 60 years pantsing the powerful before failing eyesight finally pushed him away from the drawing board. I met Oliphant in the Seventies, when the Fine Arts Center in Bibleburg hosted an exhibition of his work. He was very gracious to a dumbass hippie kid who claimed he was a cartoonist too, enduring a bit of grilling and even volunteering a few tips.
• Dave’s not here. Hal Walter’s dad, Dave, recently passed away. The two had had their differences over the years, as fathers and sons often do (see O’Grady, Harold and Patrick), but Hal took a moment to remember the good times with the man who introduced him to the great outdoors.
• And The Biggest Midget in the Room Award goes to. …The Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame. Every niche needs its shiny object, I guess. But if you can get to it via paved road it’s bullshit.
A nearly full moon and a bowl of jambalaya will spice up your dreams.
Eating spicy dinners as a full moon looms is a recipe for weird dreams.
The Wolf Moon won’t arrive until tomorrow, but it’s been howling at me for a few nights now, ever since I made a pot of jambalaya, a favorite dish adapted from a recipe by Judy Walker and Marcelle Bienvenu by way of The Washington Post.
Last night I dreamed I had been confined to an assisted-living facility, and was sitting at some sort of crafts table with a couple old biddies, one on either side of me.
I was trying to write captions for some photos — longhand, on paper, since I had no laptop — and the biddy on my left kept crowding me, piling napkins and letters and whatnot onto my workspace. The one to my right asked me what a young pup like me was doing in the old mutts’ home, and I explained that I had apparently gotten my bell rung in some sort of bike mishap and was being held for observation.
This led to a good deal of cackling, especially after they asked how I was paying for my stay and I said I had no idea. Certainly not by writing those goddamn captions, ’cause I wasn’t making much headway there. If Herself had thrown me over and the Repugs had finally croaked Social Security and Medicare I was in a world of shit. “Golden Girls” meets “Cuckoo’s Nest.”
When I woke up it was in my own bed and Herself was still here, so I made her toast, tea, and oatmeal just to stay on her good side. You never know. There’s a bad moon on the rise.
I was out for a ride yesterday and noticed a hang glider freshly launched from the Sandia Crest. If you squint you can just barely make him/her out in the upper right-hand corner there. The original iPhone SE camera doesn’t exactly bring ’em back alive. Not from that altitude, anyway.
It was a good day to be above it all. Cyberattacks shut down the Albuquerque schools and FUBARed various Bernalillo County operations; the county clerk is not amused. My fellow Burqueños are back to croaking each other in bulk after setting a record last year that will be hard to top. And I forgot to invoice The Greater Outside+ Vertically Integrated Globe-Spanning Title-Killing Silo O’ Sports & Fitness, LLC, for my final cartoon of 2021.
The good news is, today is a fine day to be a cat in a sunny spot. But then when is it not?
A quick peek at the Elena Gallegos Open Space, where I have not been riding.
Bit by bit I’m returning components of exercise to the daily regimen.
I began with walking, the most basic form of locomotion for a biped. Unless you count crawling. This we have all done, at first while diapered, and perhaps later while suffering the side effects of our reality-management system of choice.
Next came cycling, sans hills. Then the jogging. And finally, the cautious lifting of very light weights.
Yesterday I threw caution to the winds and climbed some of the lesser hills in the ’hood, aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition), which has a low end of 20 gear inches. And yes, I used every inch, while dispatching scouts along the spinal column and down the legs to check for sleeper agents in the hamstrings.
Luna. See?
The stretching? Kinda, sorta. The yoga? Mmm, not so much. But as regular readers know, I will never be smart.
My only half-smart moves to date have been (a) to ease back into daily exercise after an extended back spasm, and (2) to avoid the off-road cycling.
When you ride singletrack using rigid steel, drop bars, rim brakes, narrow tires, and equally narrow gearing, you need to use a lot of English (or, in my case, Irish) when negotiating obstacles. If the lower back will not do The Twist you are slam-dancing with yourself in a minefield.
So, yeah. Road bikes. Broad gearing. 38mm tires at 60/65 psi. My running can be identified as “running” only because it seems slightly faster than walking. And my weightlifting? Arnold probably uses a heavier toothbrush.
Meanwhile, speaking of heavy lifting, BRAIN contributor Rick Vosper wonders whether the Bug-boosted, bike-buying bubble is ’bout to burst.
He quotes Jay Townley of Human Powered Solutions as predicting that retailers — suddenly finding themselves overstocked after The Great Product Drought while consumer interest returns to something approximating normalcy — could soon be slashing prices and running sales to attract buyers and reduce inventory, with the financial burden falling “particularly hard on bike shops and small to midsize retailers.”
Rick adds that this does not apply to e-bikes, the industry’s latest shiny object for the wandering eye. Shocking, I know.
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