A wee bit monochromatic for the wearin’ of the green.
O, ’tis a fine soft day we have here so.
The rain awakened Herself, but not me. I thought she was selling me a bill of goods when she said it rained during the night, until I glanced outside this morning.
There’s a dusting of snow just up the hill, and the cul-de-sac is dampish. This wee sprinkle will do a fine job of tamping down the sand in the arroyo I’ve been riding lately. I’ve only seen one other cyclist in there and he was riding a mountain bike; also, down, not up.
It will save me from the raking of the lawn as well. No point in busting my hump corraling all those soggy pine needles now. Wait until they dry out and lighten up.
Ditto for the trails. Never ride ’em wet. After a rain the knuckleheads in Bibleburg would slash the gooey singletrack into something that looked like Rodan the Flying Monster’s landing strip. The ruts would set up harder than times in 1929, and riding them on a cyclocross bike meant taking a hot lap on Satan’s Slot Car Track.
The ground here in The Duck! City is mighty thirsty, though. Getting it wet enough to damage with bicycle tires might require the sort of deluge that made a sailor of Noah.
Tags: cyclocross, rain, Snow, St. Patrick's Day
Mad Blog Media 
March 17, 2022 at 8:54 am |
Moisture! The gods favor us here in the Bibleburg, CO area. 7 inches of white stuff has fallen and another 2-4 inches still on tap. Poor choice of words … “on tap” …. on Saint Paddy’s Day, eh?
Happy and safe Saint Paddy’s Day to all!! 🙂
March 17, 2022 at 9:45 am |
On tap? JD, you have my undivided attention! A Beamish stout please, and one for my friends.
March 17, 2022 at 12:59 pm |
Looks like our action, such as it is, is happening a few hundred feet further up the hill. O, well, I hear it trickles down.
March 17, 2022 at 9:11 am |
I hope we get some of that Moisture from Heaven up here. The City Indifferent is drier than a popcorn fart, to quote one of my former lab techs.
March 17, 2022 at 9:15 am |
Oh, and happy St. Patrick’s Day, Patrick!
March 17, 2022 at 1:00 pm |
Thank you, sir. I was playing a long set of Bothy Band, Chieftains, and Planxty, but the cat grew annoyed so I pulled the plug. She needs 26 hours of sleep a day to keep fit, y’know.
March 17, 2022 at 9:51 am |
Ah Paddy, mi amigo. I hope a Clausthaler is in the fridge cooling for your midday repast! A tip of my David Hanna & Sons walking cap to you and Shannon. Patrick and Shannon are two fine names for today!
March 17, 2022 at 1:06 pm |
Indeed they are, sir. I had been thinking about trying some of the Guinness 0.0, but forgot about it, and now I’ll be damned if I’ll go into a grog shop on St. Patrick’s Day.
March 17, 2022 at 10:46 am |
Happy St. Paddy’s Day to you and all. Don’t forget that green is a combination of blue and yellow. Colors that are waving in the face of fool and followers. Like Ireland battling for it’s own self-rule in the past, let’s all drink now, a few to Zelensky and the great people of Ukraine and their continued independence. May they chase the misguided russian soldiers back to Moscow and burn their tanks and trucks (or perhaps recycle them as farm implements) as an offering to the Celtic gods. Ukraine Go Bragh!
March 17, 2022 at 1:08 pm |
And for anyone who would like to help keep the economic pressure on Voldemort Poutaine, here’s a list of companies that are either part of the solution or part of the problem, from the Yale School of Management.
March 17, 2022 at 1:38 pm |
Thanks for the link. The Truly Bad Boys are in category 4.
I never eat at Subway. Don’t recall any recent purchases of LG or Pirelli (I prefer Continental or Michelin). The dryer is an LG but it conveyed with the house. I used to do a lot of business with Schlumberger Electronics but that was back when I had a corral of 4 big mass spectrometers. I think those got phased out of the newer instruments, but I’m retired.
March 17, 2022 at 3:13 pm |
We have an LG clothes washer (replaced a Samsung Exploder); an LG refrigerator; and two LG computer monitors. Sigh. We’ll be looking to replace our elderly Whirlpool double ovens before much longer and LG will not be on the shortlist.
March 17, 2022 at 4:15 pm
That’s too bad for consumers, as LG generally gets great reviews.
That said, I’m not in the mood to support a business that turns a blind eye to what is going on Over There.
Our kitchen heavy weapons are Frigidaire, and they are great.
March 17, 2022 at 5:28 pm |
It’s interesting that several of the companies still doing marginally normal business in russia are oil and gas companies. Specifically, Air Products, Baker Hughes, Haliburton, Koch Industries and Schlumberger. Oil and gas is greedy enough that those in the business don’t always care who wins. At least until some of the staff is loaded onto trains for the gulag.
March 17, 2022 at 11:00 pm |
Hate tossing this turd into the punch bowl, but I’ve seen too many good intentions go south, so wanted to share this note I stumbled upon. Of course, now I can’t find the link, so I’ll keep digging and get back to you if I find it. But the Reader’s Digest version is:
Companies pull out of Russia.
Russian workers now have no income.
Can no longer afford their VPNs.
And now have zero access to real news.
There were similar discussions around big tech companies pulling out. Eg, Apple isn’t selling any more iPhones over there. Sounds like a smart move, except that right now, we need more Russians with international communications capabilities, not fewer.
March 17, 2022 at 11:14 pm |
Wasn’t this article, but it covers the same ground:
https://apple.news/AKLqgWnd6SNOUbBEZLecPOw
March 18, 2022 at 7:13 am |
Yeah, I saw a similar story — like yours, now lost in the dim mists of Doomscrolling — about how the U.S. and its partners didn’t want Big Tech to entirely abandon the Russian people to Poutaine’s echo chamber.
This is one of the reasons that early on the BBC dug out all its old shortwave gear and revived that elderly means of communication.
Any of yis got shortwave gear? I used to have a portable radio with that feature, but it’s long gone.
March 18, 2022 at 7:20 am
My last shortwave radio vanished along with my misspent youth, but I spent many an hour as a kid listening to Radio Hanoi, Radio Peking, and Radio Moscow during the Vietnam War. All on a little tabletop radio whose best feature was a fine tune dial as well as the standard tune dial. You really needed that on the SW bands.
Wish I still had one of those rigs and have recently been wondering if there is still a thriving shortwave radio bizniz since the advent of the Innertubes.
March 18, 2022 at 7:50 am
The folks’ Telefunken console had shortwave, IIRC. That beast had everything. Weighed more than a Buick Super.
The Amazone has receivers for sale, but I don’t recognize any of the manufacturers. Looks like eBay has a bunch too.
March 18, 2022 at 12:19 pm
I used to be an avid shortwave listener back in the 90s. Lots of good portables out there with shortwave coverage. If you are thinking of one, I recommend one that has digital tuning and single side band reception.
March 18, 2022 at 1:20 pm
Did some sniffin’ around on the intertubes just now, and shortwave receivers are hard to come by, with single side band (SSB) reception only in the more expensive sets. But, if you just want to listen to nations stations like BBC, VOA, or Radio Moscow, you don’t need SSB. Lowes has a nice Sangean portable SW radio for $110.
March 18, 2022 at 3:18 pm
I should grab me one of these little portable numbers. We don’t have a portable, though we have the Yamaha receiver with its AM and FM, and Herself has an AM/FM clock radio at bedside. Be nice to have a battery-powered number just in case it all goes pear-shaped and whichever low-level Cabinet officer winds up president wants to holler at us about beware the mutant cannibal zombies and whatnot.
March 20, 2022 at 1:32 pm
We will see leaflets raining down on Russia before this is over. Only reliable way to communicate is 3×5 slips of paper.
March 18, 2022 at 8:09 am |
I would say that here in the US if we lost internet ability there would be a total meltdown and revolt. I’m not too sure that some in Russia won’t feel the same as they are probably as addicted as us. Besides, couldn’t Poot-in lock out content on the internet as the Chinese have done in a fashion so that you only see what they want you to see? Unsure about that. As Poot-in takes away more and more of the people’s freedoms and clamps down with rules; the worse it will get for him.
As for Subway, for some reason I always get the shits whenever I partook their subs. Always thought they lathered some chemical on their veges to keep em from going brown but they swear they don’t.
My daughter had the refrigerator version from the Samsung Exploder line of products. What an expensive debacle….
March 18, 2022 at 11:14 am
Can you imagine the chaos if those little plastic rectangles that everyone has glued to their mugs 24/7 suddenly went dark?
Ditto laptops and tablets? Your fridge can’t ring you up to let you know you’re out of arugula? The Apple TV turns into a paperweight? Siri and Alexa shut their virtual pieholes?
My God, man. There would be blood in the streets.
March 17, 2022 at 2:12 pm |
You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.
~ Jimmy Dean
March 18, 2022 at 2:53 pm |
Somewhat late and a shilling or two short, and if you haven’t already had the chance to enjoy it, some of you may like the following:
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1084896776/daniel-hope-tiny-desk-home-concert
For those of us stretching the old libatious celebration out for a day or so, Happy St. Paddy’s Day again !
March 18, 2022 at 4:42 pm |
Shawn: Thank you! I’m catching up late to the dire epistles before ye, so your melodic and most welcome cadenza/finale soothed my soul. Well done!
March 20, 2022 at 1:33 pm |
I had missed that one, so a big mahalo for that!