“Flights delayed or canceled, you say? Let them take private jets!” — Scott Kirby, CEO, United Airlines
No, he didn’t say that. But he might just as well have. Oink, oink.
When pigs fly (in private planes)
Month: June 2023
Shakedown Trail
if he wants to.
I’m not quite certain what (or if) I was thinking yesterday.
The bike docs at Two Wheel Drive had rung me up Tuesday afternoon to say my 1995 DBR Axis TT was out of headset surgery and doing nicely, but I couldn’t get down there to collect it before closing time.
TWD doesn’t open until 10 a.m., so I thought I’d go for a 45-minute trail run Wednesday morning before motoring down to fetch the bike. Sweat a little rather than a lot, don’t you know.
These things I did, then had a medium-heavy bite of lunch.
Sensible so far, yeah?
Don’t worry. It never lasts.
Weather conditions be damned, I just can’t not ride a new/recently repaired bike.
So I kitted up and rolled out to the Elena Gallegos for a short shakedown cruise that wound up being about 90 minutes.
It was toasty out there — just shy of 90 degrees — but bearable. And anyway, I barely noticed because I was having so much fun riding this 28-year-old mountain bike.
Don’t tell The Industry, but you can still mine a few giggles from a made-in-USA titanium MTB with a Tange steel fork, triple crank, eight-speed XT, V-brakes, flat bar, Grip Shift twisties, 26-inch wheels with 2.0 rubber, and a creaky old 1954 MeatSack® motor that couldn’t pass an emissions check in Mexico City no matter how much mordida you paid.
It’s frisky and maneuverable and weighs just under 24 pounds with a saddlebag holding two spare tubes, tire irons, and a minitool. The flat bar, V-brakes and plumpish tires let me roll over a few items I have to dodge on a drop-bar ’cross bike with cantis and 32mm knobbies. And the smaller wheels put me a little closer to the ground for purposes of falling off onto sharp rocks and spiky foliage.
I managed to keep the greasy side down yesterday through an abundance of caution and the avoidance of all truly technical sections, though I sampled a few rocky bits in the name of Science.
Mostly I was just noodling along, enjoying my little trip down Memory Lane, recalling the Good Old Days® when a rigid 26-incher with an eight-speed triple and 2.0 tires was as good as it got.
• Editor’s note: “Shakedown Street” is, of course, a tune and an album by the Grateful Dead, produced by Lowell “Little Feat” George. My favorite underground cartoonist — Gilbert Shelton (“Wonder Wart-Hog,” “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”) — did the album cover art. Last, but not least, a resounding “Damn The Man!” goes out to the Save the Elena Gallegos rebels, who gave a righteous beatdown to an ill-considered plan to install an unnecessary and unwanted “visitors center” — the thin edge of a development wedge — in our little piece of paradise. Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.
Delta Farce
“If you’re traveling this summer, you better hope that you don’t need help from an airline.” — Mac Schwerin, “Somehow, Airline Customer Service Is Getting Even Worse,” in The Atlantic.
And yet people wonder why I refuse to fly the unfriendly skies.
Last evening Herself and I — from the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and The Duck! City, respectively — were watching her scheduled departure time shift from 6:35 p.m. Minneapolis time to 8:13, then 10 … and finally right off the clock entirely. Mickey’s big hand gave us the finger. Canceled. Sorry ’bout that.
According to FlightAware, the Delta aircraft headed her way from Maine was delayed more than four hours before finally taking off just before 6 p.m. Duck! City time — whether it had been in Maine all that time is anybody’s guess, as is where it was actually headed once it left the Pine Tree State — and for a while there it was looking like she still had a chance of getting home by stupid-thirty Tuesday morning.
But nix. No wheels up for you, toots. Go stand in line with the other poor saps to learn nothing useful from a Delta agent. Word on the concourse was that all Delta flights for Tuesday were already full up, and there might not be a seat available until Thursday. Yikes, etc.
So I book her a room at the nearby Hilton Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport … after which she decides to rent a seat on a Southwest flight to The Duck! City via Phoenix leaving at 5:35 a.m.
This means being at the Minneapolis airport by 3:35 a.m. for check-in, so there’s no point in cabbing it to the Hilton for a $200 wash and brush-up and then heading right back to the airport for another beating.
So I go to cancel that room … only Hilton won’t let me do it online for some mysterious reason known only to the servo-bots running the Hilton website. So I have to call and speak to an actual human being. How 20th century of them.
Happily, the obsolete meat-things prove friendly, efficient and helpful — tip of the Mad Dog Rivendell cap to Alicia working the front desk in Minneapolis — and the room is canceled without penalty, leaving Herself at liberty to wander aimlessly through the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport dragging Old Pinkie, her battle-scarred, doughty rolling suitcase, which Delta did not send to Tierra del Fuego, Ukraine, or the Event Horizon in orbit around Neptune.
Now, some might say that looking to Southwest for salvation is like hailing a passing shark to take you from the Titanic to that iceberg over there. And I am one of them.
But at least those pirates finally got her and Old Pinkie off the deck and into the air. If only to Sky Harbor. Happily, they have Hiltons in Phoenix too.
• Editor’s note: Yes, I read about the weather nightmares, traffic-control problems, and the overheating cable at Ronnie Raygun Intergalactic Airport. Thousands of flights delayed or canceled. And like Mac Schwerin I appreciate the complexities of arranging air travel. (“Delta flies something like the population of Sacramento every day, on average.”) But still, you’d think Someone in Authority might empower the boots on the ground at the Delta counter to grab a hot mic and shout, “You’re all fucked!” rather than making their customers queue up to get the same message one at a time.
Surprise
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” — Proverbs 16:18
Boy, looks like Yevgeny Prigozhin got way out over his Wagner skis, hey? You need a real big stick to poke the bear, and it seems as though he couldn’t find one when he reached into his fatigues for something to wave at Vladimir Putin. I haven’t seen a bootlegger’s turn that snappy since “The Rockford Files.”
Watching bloodthirsty fascists bumping dickheads over the best way to fuck up someone else’s country is not my idea of light entertainment, especially when I have no idea how much of it is performance art.
Some smart folks say Prigozhin is a dead man walking, a bad dog who snapped at his master and got shipped off to a farm in Belarus where he’ll have the run of the back 40, happily chasing bunny rabbits all day.
Others say Prigozhin caught Pooty-poot with his Stalinist drawers down, the inept Russian army overcommitted and outmaneuvered, and forced him to cut a deal using Belarus boss-fella Aleksandr Lukashenko — who seems to be a bro-brah of both belligerents — as a go-between.
The guys to watch, it seems, are Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin would like to have their jobs, their stature — and, not incidentally, their nuts for a necklace.
And since Shoigu and Gerasimov are fucking up in spectacular fashion what was supposed to be a cakewalk in Ukraine, maybe Vlad the Impaler is using Prigozhin as an adjunct to the Kremlin’s HR department.
If one or both of them suddenly decides to retire to spend more time in their dachas with the family, Putin gets another KGB merit badge from the media, and Prigozhin starts to look less like Steve Buscemi and more like Steve McQueen.
Doesn’t mean Putin won’t croak him too, of course. Talk about your toxic work environments.
Cleared to land
The thing I hate most about driving to the airport at dark-thirty, surrounded by one-eyed, high-beam tailgaters, lift-kitters’ lugnuts, and Fruehauf mudflaps, is that I am never the person actually flying anywhere.
Other than to the airport, that is.
I have not flown through the air with the greatest of unease since March 2014, if memory serves. Unless you count my unscheduled short-range trips on the local trails, which cause only physical trauma.
Could I even remember how to navigate the unfriendly skies after nearly a decade on the deck? Unlikely. Also unnecessary. If the trip is under 2,000 miles and involves no bridgeless water crossings I will travel via Air Subaru, where the pilot is unreliable but a close personal friend, we go and stop at my convenience, and all the mechanicals take place at ground level.
But Herself, who is made of sterner stuff, blazes a trail straight through the customer-disservice wilderness without batting an eye.
She did it again this morning, far too early, in order to visit a friend in Minnesota. I was the first stage of her launch vehicle and burned up during re-entry, which necessitated a short nap.
But now Herself is safely in orbit around Minneapolis and I’m back at my desk in Mission Control, where the temps are inching toward triple digits with winds of 25 mph and up.
Say, did someone ship me to Mars while I was napping? Anyone seen Elon lately? You can’t take your eyes off that bozo for a nanosecond. That’s his mission, anyway. I find myself rooting for simultaneous knockouts.
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