Pee-wee Herman has pedaled off for that final Big Adventure. He was 70.
“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Reubens wrote on an Instagram message posted today. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”
It was cancer that did for him, according to his estate, and Reubens kept quiet about it, which I find oddly admirable in an era when anyone will say everything about anything, including me. Peace unto him, his family, friends, and fans.
Our backyard hummingbird shower.* *Hummingbird not included.
The GOP pestilential dogfight is shaping up into something like “The Lord of the Rings” as reimagined by Charles Bukowski with an assist from William Gibson.
Thus we get Scum Baggins, Douche Baggins, Colostomy Baggins, and so on.
In this Bukowski-Gibson cyberpunk edition the Shire is a casino built on a Superfund site, a former dogfighting venue called Slobbiton.
The Wizards are all off somewhere dicking around with AI, social media, and first-class-only rocket flights to nowhere special for the Elves (Dwarves can’t afford a ticket).
The Rings of Power are not limited to the Elite — they’re Watches of Power, and can be acquired by anyone with the do-rei-me — but all they do is let you answer the phone that’s perpetually in your hand anyway and tell you to get out of the La-Z-Boy for a couple minutes every hour, you great fat bastard. Mostly the Ring-wielders use that time to go to the fridge for some tasty Boar’s Head snacks.
Speaking of pigs’ heads, at some point our revised narrative careens off piste entirely into “Lord of the Flies” territory. The Wizards and Elves get voted off the island on charges of being woke, trans, or both; everyone left is some variation on Jack or Roger (though George Soros makes a brief cameo as Piggy); and the Royal Navy never turns up to set things aright because THIS IS AMERICA BUDDY! YEAH, BABY! USA! USA! USA!
All things considered we’d rather watch a sprinkler in the back yard. Now and then we get to see a hummingbird enjoy a brief shower.
July has been a scorcher, with 12 triple-digit days and one record high (104° on the 17th).
It was 103° yesterday. Not a record, but still, damn. Today, at 3 p.m., it’s 97°.
And I’m gonna try real hard not to bitch about it because I’m not one of the landscapers trying to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that is our back yard.
I didn’t even go out to sweat for fun yesterday.
But the landscapers were out there bright and early under Tōnatiuh’s broiler, with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, excising scorched swaths of grass, excavating edging stones gone all wobbly like a meth-head’s dentition, and wheelbarrowing railroad ties off to … who knows? A railroad, maybe?
All the livelong day, too. As an expression of solidarity while motoring to the grocery for some grub that would not require cooking I refused to turn on the a/c in the Subaru.
“What more could anyone ask for than to work for a beer company?” Fat Freddy wonders.
Well, a living wage might be nice, say the brewery workers on strike against Leinenkugel’s in Chippewa Falls, Wis. It’s the first strike against Leinie’s since 1985.
“We’ve just fallen behind every contract,” [John] McGillis said after wrapping up a strike shift next to a rushing creek, where neighbors have been dropping off doughnuts, pizza and words of encouragement. “We’re behind what everybody else in this area is paying.”
The corporate bigwigs at the Molson Coors mothership disagree, because of course they do. They’re about making money, not beer, and probably up to their third chins in a scheme to have A.I. brewing virtual lager for digital pubs on Facebook. Dispense with that irksome human element, don’t you know.
Or maybe it’s worse than we think. While the Teamsters are out in the streets some scab plumber is probably rerouting the toilets to the taps. And for minimum wage, too.
Remember your W.C. Fields: “I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.” People do those things, too, W.C. old scout. Say, does the “W.C.” stand for “Water Closet?”
• Java jive redux: In other news from the morning side of the beverage industry (for those of us who are not day drinkers, anyway) maybe I have to reconsider that occasional Starbuck’s Americano.
Like Old Blue Eyes, a friend and mentor who called him “the best singer in the business,” Tony Bennett did it his way.
He died Friday in Manhattan at age 96.
But Bennett went down swinging. Despite a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, he kept performing and recording. His last public performance was in August 2021, when he sang with Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall.
And he got a top-notch sendoff from The New York Times.His very fine obit in that august publication comes to us via the retired obituary writer Bruce Weber, cross-country cyclist and author of “Life is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America.”
Mad Blog Media 