… I bought a fresh digital copy of “Over-Nite Sensation” to replace the one I had in college.
No, not the bigger-and-better, new-and-improved version. The original, you slime. Do I look like I’m wearing a Sears poncho?
Don’t worry — I got a little something for you, too: Daniel Felsenthal’s look back at Zappa and that album over at The Atlantic.
Felsenthal calls “Over-Nite Sensation” Zappa’s “most inviting listen, forging a muscular, funk-inflected sound that couches the denseness of his more avant-garde music in pop hooks. … The album’s lyrics made a cutting statement about the flimsy values of its time — and the songs themselves were a tightly wound coil of Zappa’s musical ideas.”
You gotta love anyone who posits that Zappa’s long hair and beard resembled a fermata. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with dirty love, you preverts — it’s a symbol of musical notation.
Big Red after we exited the Elena Gallegos trails.
Having grown weary of thumbing through heaps of dusty grimoires in my fruitless quest for the incantations through which I might impose my will upon the WordPress Block Editor (curse its name, yes), I stepped away from the Mac, climbed onto a bike, and pedaled out for an hour of rolling meditation with a heavy overlay of just not thinking about the fucking thing.
The bike was my red Steelman Eurocross, sporting a new seatpost; its predecessor, a RockShox suspension post, had begun showing its age, and for safety’s sake it’s worrying enough that the senile old fool in the saddle has been doing that for a few years now.
So I thought I’d get that minor gear change dialed in, and since the sun was out, I decided to take it off the pavement and onto the dirt at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
In case you’re wondering, yes, the dreaded Brown Stripe followed me home.
Except the dirt was mostly mud, except for where it was snow or ice or all three at the same time. Oh, yeah, right — we got a half-inch of precip’ on Thursday. Duh, etc.
The mildly sketchy conditions reminded me of the Good Old Days™, when that bike, its mango-colored older brother and I motored around Colorado in search of 45 frosty, filthy minutes plus a lap.
Nobody else in Elena Gallegos was rocking drop bars and 35mm rubber today, and a couple spectators at my one-man not-so-hot lap pronounced themselves impressed, which says less about me and my mad skillz than about the visibility of actual cyclocross in The Duck! City.
In truth, I shouldn’t have been on those trails, as wet as they were, and once I saw how soft the surface was with no improvement in sight I headed for the nearest exit and thence for home.
Santos Claus ain’t comin’ to town no mo’. Not if the town is DeeCee, anyway.
The House lit him up and he’s nothing but a bad smell, with no salary, no pension, and 23 felony charges. Cast out, like a leper with herpes, running sores, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, into the cruel political wilderness.
In other words … he’ll probably be just fine. He’ll be hosting “Saturday Night Live.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. …
Mad Blog Media 