I wish I could tell you that I’ve been enjoying all the decades-overdue dope-slaps Cheeto Benito has been getting from judges lately. Incidentally, you wanna wash those hands afterward, Your Honors. You don’t know where this mook has parked that fat orange mug of his.
Or that the GOP pestilential “debates” featuring the also-rans — a junior-varsity rogues’ gallery that Batman would hand off to Robin (“Here, kid, take care of my light work. …”) — have been must-see TV. I haven’t watched a nanosecond of them, preferring to let Charles Pierce (“doomed and useless”) and Kevin Drum (“shitshow”) handle that thankless bit of heavy lifting.
No, I’ve mostly been riding my bikes, awaiting tonight’s Harvest Moon — the last supermoon of the year — and fiddling idly with the WordPress Block Editor.
I’ve had several back-and-forths with a WP “Happiness Engineer” name of Liz about the Strange Case of the Spastic Comments, and she’s been very patient with this senile old fool, who basically wants to keep driving his 1954 Studebaker Conestoga of a blog editor until the wheels come off.
Which they may very well be doing. Who knows? My WP theme is retired, and so am I, but at least I remain functional. Most days, anyway.
Anyway, with one eye peeled for that instant when a wheel or two or three passes me and my Studwhacker as we’re getting our kicks on Route 66, I’ve been under the hood of an unused WP blog, banging on greasy bits I don’t recognize with a good hammer and a bad attitude.
Any of yis who are still experiencing technical difficulties with commenting on this blog are cordially invited to visit that one and try to comment, see if its swinging door leads to a jukebox and a barstool instead of the Three Heads of Cerberus (Drunk, Confused, and Angry).
It’s a one-post blog, with a new(er) theme called “Hemingway Rewritten” — yeah, I know, the gall of me — and none of the usual bells, whistles, and aaaooogah horns in the sidebar. Plus, since it’s a free blog, there are ads. Ick.
Frankly, you’d be better served by howling at the moon.
Mad Blog Media 
Good on you for thinking more about the bikes than about the state of the State. It’s becoming a time for those with decades more youth to burden themselves with that worry.
Interesting about the Leon Redbone addition. I was just thinking about him a couple of days ago and he’s not somebody I think about very often. Maybe there’s been something in the news recently that has been a catalyst and stirred my memory of him.
With respect to the moon, it sure was purty last night up here in Ore-agone. Shining bright enough to cause me to consider an evening ride. Perhaps tonight if the Autumn rain holds off.
I’ve been entertaining myself re-reading some of your old posts. I guess back then because I read you in Velo-News and with Pelkey and the LiveUpdate group often enough, that I didn’t stumble over to your blog as much as I thought. I enjoyed your flow-by-flow account of your basement effluent infiltration in your bibleburg house. I’m sure that was a pleasant time. An interesting phenomenon of those old posts is that it appears that folks were a little more liberal (lengthwise) in their reply comments. It doesn’t seem that we are as long winded as we were in the past. It’s almost as if we have all changed to a shorter communication window that parallels how we receive some of our news now. Perhaps it comes about from the days of the 144 character tweet, or maybe it’s just that we try to access more sources and we have only so much time.
There’s only so much “content” we can take in, I think. Or create.
I started “blogging” back when AOL first let users build those rudimentary websites. In the mid- to late Nineties I was cobbling together some self-hosted stuff at a couple small-potatoes ISPs in central Colorado, and the Wayback Machine still has a couple grabs from those. Then in 2000 I started doing a self-hosted WordPress site. Two years of that are missing, but I pretty much have everything from 2002 on in the archives here.
It seemed like I was always cranking, cranking, cranking, because that was how a free-range rumormonger got paid. The Old Guy cartoons and “Friday’s Foaming Rant” at VeloNews. “Shop Talk” cartoons and the “Mad Dog Unleashed” column in Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. Live Update Guy with Charles Pelkey, which at its height was nine weeks per annum of jabbering about the grand tours. And finally the reviews for Adventure Cyclist. Plus I went to Interbike for a lot of years with BRAIN, Anaheim and Vegas both, but did a little sumpin’-sumpin’ for the other guys too.
And all that time I was blogging, too. For free. Because I was and remain insane.
Nobody could wade through all that stuff. I’m not even sure I was there for it. Not all there, anyway.
It’s no wonder our attention spans shrunk. It’s self-preservation.
I suppose then, that each morning when I’m performing what is considered a constitutional duty, I may be considered a “content creator”. If that is the case, then perhaps I should peel the SAG card from the roll and submit it to MAX or Disney for my appropriate royalty. But first I need to box my artistry up and send it off. But, Wait ! Damn ! I already flushed.
Commenting is the same on the Block Editor, so do what’s easier on your little grey cells.
Man, I hate that Block Editor. I suppose I could get used to it if I had no other choice. But still, damn. Intuitive it is not. Any fool can open up the Classic Editor and build a blog in minutes.
Plenty of the newer themes won’t let me edit sidebar widgets in the Classic Editor, so switching themes might just shit the Dog bed. Right now my retired theme lets me edit everything in Classic, so I’m inclined to stay put, no changes.
The Block Editor must save them something on the server side. It sure ain’t no fun from the driver’s seat.
I have to agree with you on that one, Block Editor sucks raw eggs.
The worst. Absolutely nothing self-explanatory about it. You need an advanced degree in WTF? to puzzle the sonofabitch out.
I’d been riding about 75 miles a week this year. This September I decided to crank it up and am planning on hitting 480 or more miles tomorrow. Not a lot by the standards of my youth, but a lot for the last couple years. Especially as my knees keep threatening to explode. But anything to avoid reading the crap passing for new these days is a good idea. And I have no plans to ride past a statue of Juan de Oñate, even if it is to take a piss on his foot.
500+ on Saturday right? That’s great! I might make it to 300 this month, but anything is ok with me.
Well done indeed, sir. I’ll be lucky to hit 400 miles this month after riding 478 in August and 423 in July. I was starting to get slightly out of control so I dialed it back a bit this month. One week (Sept. 11-17) I logged all of 35 miles, taking two days off entirely and doing three short trail runs as a change of pace.
There’s a lot of vertical gain in the program — 5,930 feet so far this week — but some of that is fairly casual social riding on Mondays and/or Wednesdays with a small group of geezers that collected me a couple years back. We’re not training for anything other than not being dead.
I know the out of control part. When I was doing less riding, I was not interested in doing more riding. This month I’ve been compelled to ride lots and on the occasional day when I don’t, I get all weirded out.
That’s the big one, training for not-being-dead. I’ve been training for that one since 2001. Keeps getting harder and harder to come back to the starting line.
Oof. Just clipping in is a bitch some days.
Batman? Robin? Debate?
The penguin! If only the GOP had a penguin instead of a rotting pumpkin and a field of cow pies.