The prez is coming to town today, but he hasn’t texted me, so I don’t suppose he wants to hang out, maybe go for a bike ride, drop a hint or two about the cell he’s having prepared for The Defendant on Gitmo.
His motorcade is likely to play hell with the already-chaotic Duck! City traffic, which resembles nothing so much as a fire-ant colony remodeled by M-80.
Maybe his SS detail can thin this perpetually stampeding herd of road-ragers during the presidential visit. They could probably use the target practice, and for sure we could use fewer hotheads with lead feet.
Don’t let the clouds fool you. It ain’t even cool around here.
Yesterday we roasted another record with 102°, the old mark of 98° having stood since 1952, two years before this old dawg was whelped.
Naturally, being an eejit, I was out for a ride. Nothing strenuous — not quite 30 miles, a couple of hours in the saddle, a couple thou’ of vertical gain.
Getting big air over I-25 (with the help of a bike-ped bridge).
But I confess I felt a tad toasted by the time I got home. I’m glad I didn’t go for the extra-credit mileage I’d been contemplating. I’d be a rank smear of B.O. and bad ideas in the valley some’eres. Even the coyotes would give me a miss.
“Sheeyit, homes, smells like sunscreen and chamois cream ladled over old scars and regrets. Let’s hit the Dumpster behind Golden Pride.”
Speaking of eats, it should go without saying that I’ve been rooting through my archives for recipes that require a minimum of cookery in this heat.
For breakfast, oatmeal is out, fruit smoothies are in. Lunch is something equally light, either sandwiches or leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.
Last night’s dinner was Martha Rose Shulman’s pasta with cherry tomatoes and arugula. I don’t object to boiling water for pasta; it helps humidify the house.
Night before last we had Melissa Clark’s shrimp salad, layering the shrimp and its sauce over a bed of arugula, red cabbage, red leaf lettuce, sliced grape tomatoes in a variety of hues, and various another crunchables from the fridge and pantry. I foreswore the diced red onion (Herself hates raw onion), but snuck in a few thin slices of scallion when she wasn’t looking.
Hetty Lui McKinnon’s tacos de papa require a little stove time, but not enough to have you sweating into your skillet, especially if there are some leftover taters on hand.
We’ll be revisiting Martha’s recipe this evening, with a side salad. Today’s record high of 100°, set in 1910, might be a goner, too, because by 3 p.m. it was already 100° at the airport.
The Defendant, the insult comic who talks more shit than Richard Pryor on the dumb dust, only without all the funny bits, says he’s facing a grand total of 561 years in the hoosegow.
Which is not nearly enough. But I’m a reasonable fellow. I’d settle for that.
The biggest downside I can see, other than the strong likelihood that none of this will ever come to pass, is that all the poison he sucked through his pursed little piehole during a lifetime of culinary sins would probably kill all our new plants, shrubs, and trees.
Good reads
• Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. You have to love a guy who writes so clearly and forcefully, while throwing in a bonus reference to “The Verdict,” one of my favorite Paul Newman flicks.
In fact, it is in its precision where lies this indictment’s real power. In no place, does Smith get out over his skis. It is monumental as a historical document, but, as a legal document, it is carefully crafted, almost delicately etched. For example, there is no talk of citing the former president* for treason or for insurrection. Smith clearly has crafted an indictment precisely drawn to conform to the whopping silo of evidence he has compiled and nothing else. And it is precisely drawn to sit the former president* down under a swinging lightbulb in a dark interrogation room.
George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what “we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”
Mad Blog Media 