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.
Mad Blog Media 
Seventy and he hits the silk. Ugh, that hits home…
Yeah, no shit. Oof.
I didn’t realize that he and his old Groundlings bro’ Phil Hartman co-wrote “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” There’s another dude who left us too soon.
If I recall correctly, my old comrade Charles Pelkey once opined that “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” was the best bicycle movie ever made. Now, true, the competition was not stellar (“Quicksilver?” “American Flyer?”). But still.
I missed Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Still, it would have to be pretty good to rival Breaking Away. Still, after all these years, if I want to bust the tempo, I put on Gioachino Rossini or Mendelssohn’s #4 and remember the day I actually drafted an 18 wheeler back into Port Jefferson from out on eastern Long Island. Back when I was young, that is.
Another sad story from up north.
Yeah. Awful. Hal tipped me to that one this morning. A brother cyclocrosser. Seventeen years old and a drifter kills him on the Diagonal in broad fucking daylight. Let’s all be careful out there, wherever we are.
Goddamn it. How do you drift onto the shoulder with a bike in front of you unless your head is up your ass or you are texting? Not to mention, many of those roads up around Boulder gave me The Fear, with all the development and heavy traffic. Damn.
The ability to be quiet is golden. I wish I could do it better. Watch those drivers boys and girls. They have multiple screens and speakers distracting them.
Word. I just can’t keep my piehole shut.
Meanwhile, look around you at your next stoplight. Everybody’s looking down, and not at their dinguses or lady parts, which aren’t nearly as fascinating as their phones. Anything might come out of that phone at any minute! We already know what comes out of dinguses and lady parts.
I wish I had a dollar for every dipshit I’ve seen motoring along at 20 mph over the posted limit with two wheels in the bike lane. Some day soon I expect to read about a Peloton cyclist getting killed in their own living room by an errant motorist. I already know one dude got hit by a truck on a trail in a city park.
No amount of new “driver safety” features in the latest vehicle offering will protect us from getting smashed to smitherineens when on foot or bicycle. Thankfully some of us have non motorized pathways to ride. Sorry as hell for those who don’t or have to commute by bike on America’s Mean Streets
I need to document my story about confronting our school’s rent-a-cop about parking her land yacht in the bike lane. Pointed out eight things that she did wrong, and was about to get the 8 x 10 glossies with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one. The whole time she just sat there, staring about 6 inches over my head, breathing through her mouth.
Nobody cares, and the three people who do care don’t know what to do about it.
Oy. Down to here bike lanes are for trash cans, beater vehicles, junkies on the nod, work trucks with trailers (two wheels in the bike lane, two wheels on the sidewalk), delivery vans, SWAT tanks, and Albu-Cray-Z’s fabled Roadside Bottle Recycling Program, in which glass bottles are routed via auto window to the asphalt, where they are broken down into smaller components easily hauled off by bicycle tires.
And up here, they eulogize a really talented and creative motorcycle designer who got greased by a car and don’t even tell us if the motorist was cited.
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/santa-fe-man-revolutionized-motorcycles-with-hand-drawn-designs/article_a12dcc7c-2c94-11ee-baec-bb17e9cb8c10.html
Thank you Khal for posting the article about James Parker. As one who still board drafted in the early days of CAD (before AutoCAD), I can appreciate his view of designs. Albeit my design talents were (are) likely a few floors below Mr. Parker’s. I have an artist brother with a passion for motorcycles and I can imagine he would have enjoyed chewing a cylinder or two with Mr. Parker.
I’d like to know what copy flow is like at The New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal in the modern era. If they have actual copy desks to handle the scutwork of correcting spelling, grammar, AP style, and plugging holes in copy — “Uh, what do we know about how this person got killed?” — I don’t see the rim rats and slot men credited in the mastheads.
The New Mex has a “news content editor,” a “digital enterprise editor,” an “assistant city editor” — who apparently assists no one, because there is no city editor — and a “copy chief/designer.” In 1991, before I bailed, I recall the newsroom having an executive editor, a managing editor (who was very hands-on because he loved hard news), city editor, an assistant city editor, a news editor (copy-desk chief), assistant news editor, and three or four copy editors standing guard between the reporter and the reader.
The Journal is likewise light on working editors, though they have the funds for three “designers.”
Computers and content-management systems have advanced in leaps and bounds since 1991, obviously. But software won’t catch everything. Not yet. You still need eyes on the prize.
This sort of corner-cutting extends to the top of the game, by the way. The NYT reporter who wrote about Magnus White’s death at the hands of a 23-year-old motorist has beaucoup chops, but is not from the sports department, which no longer exists.
Meanwhile, from a Denver TV station, we get this:
A helmet is probably not going to save you if you get done from the rear by a drifting 3,000-pound Toyota Matrix. This sort of boilerplate bullshit drives me witless. “Good on you, dead kid, for wearing your plastic hat. We’ll see that it goes in the coffin with you.”
The New Mexican editorial page has also been circling the bowl. They don’t always think their own opinion pieces through and often run stuff they buy elsewhere. The letters section is getting atrocious. It often reads like an Animal House skit or occasionally rises to a level a few floors below a Friday Foaming Rant. They ran a Sunday editorial asserting that people can’t pay their school loans because of the predatory rates and compared them to payday or title loans (“We don’t allow predatory interest rates on payday or title loans, so why do we still allow them on educational loans? “). Hell, I looked up the school loan rates and find me a payday loan rate of 4 to 7 percent and I’ll hustle right over.
There was a time when the New Mex had an editorial page editor, Jan, who would call bullshit on those statements and kick the submission back with a request for documentation (or submit it to the round file) now it just gets printed.
Unfortunately, that is what passes for “civil discourse” in this age of social media, where there is no pause switch between thinking something half-through or outright lying and then hitting send. And the New Mex posts the shit as well as the Shinola.
We can’t have just anyone doing those Foaming Rants, nosirree. That sort of thing is reserved for properly trained, nat’chal-borned Rabid-Americans like myself. The Great Unwashed must restrict themselves to the social medias.
Remember your George Carlin, specifically Biff Barf:
“Good evening sports fans, Biff Barf here in the Biff Barf Sportlight Spotlight, biffing ’em up and barfing ’em right back atcha. I call ’em the way I see ’em … and if I don’t see ’em, I make ’em up!”
No worries there mi amigo. Many have tried a “Foaming Rant, and all have failed save one. The word wrangler himself, Patrick of Duke, is the one.
It was dirty work. But I was a dirty fellow. ’Tis unknown the tons of filth I slung, like a popup sprinkler fed by a sewage lagoon.
She drifted, as in, she got her gib and spinnaker mixed up and a sudden gust took her off her line?
I expect she was sailing the stormy seas of Instagrim, DikDok, Buttface, X-Twatter, or whatever the flavor of the month is among 23-year-old motorists these days. Hard to keep it between the buoys when your attention is on makeup tips from celebrity influencers.
It’s been decades since I last rode the Diagonal, and the shoulders look plenty wide on GoogleVision, but friends say it’s not a great road for us two-wheeled types these days. As should be all too obvious now, I guess.
Name two guys shot in the back of the head in a theater: Abe Lincoln and the guy sitting in front of Pee Wee. har har I know I know. Couldn’t resist.
“By Jove, I seem to have come!” he ejaculated.
Copy editors love this kind of joke. This explains why we have such difficulty finding and retaining life partners.
That’s a good one! Now I realize why Patrick loved the copy editor stuff. He could inject snark randomly into the “mainstream” press without notice. Only his co-conspirators would know, maybe. I assume the “boilerplate bullshit” was written by AI and edited by the last writer standing. They just looked at it and said OK just to get the shit out of their email in box.
Ok. What do fisherman call a master baiter that is master baiting while baiting and an occupational injury of the genitalia occurs?
A Hooker.
Tom Nichols throws down the gauntlet.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/08/trump-indictment-charges-overturn-2020-election/674887/