Month: June 2023

Meanwhile, back on the bike. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Dirty work, but someone’s gotta do it.

While we wait for the sounds of steel bracelets clicking shut, steel doors creaking open, and a judge intoning, “Will the defendant please rise?” … how’bout a bit of bicycle content?

Find the typo.

I haven’t been spending much time in the Elena Gallegos Open Space lately, other than in passing during road rides, so yesterday I grabbed my favorite Steelman Eurocross and headed over there from the Embudito trailhead.

The trail pixies have been busy in and around the EG, laying out alternatives to old routes, and as of National Trails Day last weekend I guess they’re finally official, with cautionary signs and everything.

The old routes had some sections that were pretty well overcooked and sketchy in spots, with a few slip-’n’-slides, gullies, and blind corners tailor-made for mayhem. The revisions are twisty, narrow, and mostly lack thrilling descents, but also present fewer opportunities for high-speed, head-on collisions.

I didn’t ride every trail in the area — there are a few that remain just plain unfriendly to 69-year-old stumblebums rocking rigid steel, drop bars, and 33mm tires — but it was pleasant as all get-out to escape The Duck! City drivers (and the news) for 90 minutes.

Canadian bakin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Smoke gets in your eyes. And your nose. And your hair, your clothes, and. … | File photo by Crusty County correspondent Hal Walter

Huh. The Elitist East Coast Big City Liberal Smartypants Media has finally discovered what us hardy Westerners have knowed for years — huffing a giant forest fire’s secondhand smoke sucks.

We’ve experienced a few lulus over the years in Bibleburg, Weirdcliffe, and The Duck! City. And yeah, they got a little ink despite being largely confined to Flyover Country.

But holy hell. When the Big Apple looks like the Devil’s been feeding his firebox a passel of green wood with a weak draft you gon’ git yoreself some wall-to-wall coverage, son! That’s Scripture!

And even a dyed-in-the-Carhartt mountain man and desert rat like Your Humble Narrator has to admit that a few hundred Canadian wildfires blowing smoke from Maine to Spokane might just be worth a few “Live”  headers over to The New York Times.

My old hometown of Ottawa has been taking a hit (and not the kind made famous by Cheech and Chong).

And I expect our Great White North correspondent Ol’ Herb might have a few thoughts on the matter, if he can stop coughing long enough to file a report expanding on the Detroit News coverage. Anyone else out there wearing their N95s again?

Running on empty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
And miles to go before I eat.

You think you’re living on the edge, miles from home with a cargo area full of perishable groceries in early June and the low-fuel warning light giving you an orange mal de ojo from the dash.

Until you get passed by someone driving on the rim.

So there I was, motoring back from the Wholeazon Amafoods with a week’s worth of grub, and I knew my low-fuel light was on. It flashed me before I even got to the store to offload a hunk of my Socialist Insecurity entitlement funding on tasty bits of this and that.

Ah, bugger it, I thought. I still have a couple gallons in the tank. Shit, I could probably make it to Santa Fe for an early lunch at La Choza, if I had a cooler and some ice for all this chow. But it’s probably smarter to head for home, refrigerate the perishables, and gas up the next time out.

Thus I’m in the left lane on Wyoming, getting set to hang a left on Comanche, when I hear this hideous racket coming up fast in the middle lane.

I figure it’s the Devil finally come to collect, or maybe just some poor workingman’s beater truck fixin’ to retire before he does, and in some spectacular fashion, too. But it sounds even worse than either of those possibilities, about like three Terminators dry-humping an Alien in a junkyard full of feral cats.

As I make the left lane I glance right and screeching past shudders some shitbag sedan with the left front tire completely gone and the driver either deaf, drunk, or some combination of the two, ’cause he ain’t making any effort to get out of that middle lane and over to some safe place where he can maybe figure out why the hell all these assholes are staring at him and how come he can’t hear the radio goddamnit?

This may or may not be a metaphor for politics in 2023.

Some of us are low on gas, but we’re aware of the situation and hope to address it at our earliest possible opportunity.

Some others are gonna just drive it right into the ground and Dog help you if you’re standing anywhere near where the wreckage skids to a stop.

The good news is, you can hear it coming a long ways off.

‘Where’s the money, Lebowski?’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

The after-action reports are rolling in, and the general consensus seems to be that Congress spent the latest debt-ceiling “crisis” either jacking off, letting its mouth write checks that its ass can’t cash, or some combination of the two.

Performative government at its finest. Hollywood dreams of getting a script like this. Alas, the writers are on strike.

At The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky says the mouths that roar over at the FreeDumb CuckUs basically brought a spork to a gunfight. At The Atlantic, staff writer Russell Berman suggests that the GOP really doesn’t want to cut spending in any significant way because — hey, guess what? — their leadership recognizes “that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.”

And at Esquire, Charlie Pierce dismisses the whole magilla as a matter of the money power flexing a pinkie:

“In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise. [Jim] Jordan, [Marjorie Taylor Greene], et. al. are about as much a threat to the real established political order as a water pistol would be to the Nimitz. ”

That’s the bad news. The good news is that cracker-barrel regular Pat O’B turns 74 today. Happy happy joy joy to him and his. Dog willin’, we won’t be singing “The Parting Glass” to the oul’ fella anytime soon.