“They’re eating what?” exclaims Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.
You know how you can tell this is bullshit? Because if it were actually happening, TFG would have a piece of the action, through a shell company incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in Saudi Arabia and a board of directors drawn from Interpol’s Red Notices.
Remember Trump Steaks? Ran out of the money at Aqueduct and straight into your refrigerator.
How much capital would it take to start snapping up struggling animal shelters and add drive-through windows? Poach the Chihuahua that used to shill for Taco Bell? (That’s a cookin’ joke, son!) Better yet, make J.D. Vance wear a Chihuahua suit, see if the hillbilly sonofabitch can generate a little positive cash flow. The dog’s cuter, but Vance is already on the payroll. Put Stephen Miller on the job; he’d deep-fry his own mother if he had one.
Before you could sing a bar of “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” TFG would have franchises out the wazoo. Most of them along the border, of course. Your customers are your workforce and vice versa. It’s practically a perpetual-motion money machine.
It’s not about the bicycle, unless of course it is.
During Herself’s recent visit to Aspen she was compelled to endure a bit of the hee and the haw and the ho ho ho directed at her bicycle, a 2006 Soma Double Cross.
My own Soma Double Cross.
As you know, we are not slaves to velo-fashion here at El Rancho Pendejo. Shucks, I have been known to turn up for a road ride aboard my own slightly newer Double Cross, which has cycled through a number of incarnations — cyclocross bike; light touring bike with fenders, rack, and sacks; townie with swept-back bars; you name it.
At present it’s an eight-speed, “all-road,” drop-bar bike with two bottle cages, IRD Cafam cantis, Dura-Ace bar-end shifters, a triple XT crank (46/34/24T) with Ultegra/XT derailleurs and an 11-34T cassette for a low end of 24x34T (19.2 gear inches), bar-end shifters, Shimano 600 brake levers, IRD Cafam cantis, Mavic Open Pro rims (Dura-Ace hub up front, Velo-Orange behind), and 700×36 Donnelly X’Plor MSO adventure knobbies. Just the vehicle for a short dash around the Elena Gallegos Open Space or a rolling road ride through the foothills.
If you’re me, anyway.
Herself rarely leaves pavement and never rides in foul weather, and so a bike’s capacity for fat-tire fun and fenders isn’t even on her radar. Especially when we consider that while her Double Cross is a 42cm and mine a 55, hers actually outweighs mine by (wait for it) three pounds.
Steel is real — real heavy, if you’re a 5-footer and not rocking the lightweight components.
Don’t get me wrong. The Double Cross is a fine frameset, and I’d buy another in a heartbeat if Soma still did a canti version. But we outfitted hers on the cheap.
She’s pushing about 1.2 pounds more rubber than I am with every pedal stroke, and hasn’t got that 24T granny for the steeps. Plus her saddle, handlebar, seat post and wheels are all heavier than mine. Ditto the controls: chunky 105 STI brifters instead of my bar-cons and pre-Ultegra brake levers.
So, even though I’ve been dropped like an empty bidon by dudes rocking raggedy-ass kit and rattle-canned DUI-mobiles, I can see how the “you get the lunch, I’ll buy the bicycles” types might find Herself’s whip a tad plebeian.
In my defense, I will note that at 5 feet tall and under a hundy, she’s hard to fit. Still, since she makes all the money around here while I do … uh … hold on, gimme a sec’, it’ll come to me. …
Shit. Not much, it seems. I should probably do a bit of shopping, hey?
Call it an impulse, if only because I’ve heard one pitch from a friend of a friend of a friend for something along the lines of a Bianchi Impulso GRX 600. Anyone else got a recommendation they’d like to share?
If the TV hucksters are going to pitch these affairs as though they were sporting events I think the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency should drug-test the competitors.
I’ve been in rooms with people who behaved like Felonious Punk did last night, thanks to various and sundry powders and potions, and we never once thought about running them for president. We thought about running away from them before the cops came, is what.
One dark night in the Seventies I didn’t run fast enough and wound up in the Denver sneezer with a couple of pals. At some point around stupid-thirty our jailers emptied the drunk tank, stuffing all of us minor offenders into cells, so a PCP fiend could have the run of the joint without mayhem.
Dude is bouncing off the walls with his eyes out on stalks, screeching like a banshee about this, that, and the other, when finally a screw marches in and purrs, “If you don’t settle down I’m going to have to consider you an asshole.”
As he turns to leave our duster suddenly had a moment of clarity.
“What’s an asshole to you?” he asks.
At which point one of our cellmates shouts, “You an asshole, motherfucker! Now shut the fuck up! We tryin’ to get some sleep!”
It’s a shame these two dudes weren’t moderating last night’s “debate.”
“Stick to cycling!” the critics would howl whenever one of my columns or cartoons drifted off the back of racing or retailing and into the gutter of politics.
But cycling and politics are inextricably linked. With the right people at the helm, if you’re lucky, maybe you get peace and prosperity plus bike paths, open space and crosswalk push-buttons that you can reach from the saddle (and that actually work).
Ever negotiated with The Authorities while promoting a bike race? That’s politics. Sought cyclist-friendly safety improvements at a dangerous intersection? That’s politics too. Ditto dealing over e-bike access to — and speed limits on — bike paths, where most of the motors run on carbohydrates and water.
Thus my retort was inevitably something like: “You don’t like my work? Don’t watch. Plenty of other stuff to read around here. Now stand back and let The Big Dog bark.”
Well. That was then, and this is now.
I still feel as though I should be writing more about politics. But damme if it isn’t a long pull into a stiff wind.
No matter what else is on my mind, it’s always there in the background, ticking away. Could be an old analog clock; could be a time bomb. Only way to find out is to have a little look-see.
Last night it was a three-hour (!) YouTube stream of a school-board policy-committee meeting. Tonight it’s the steel-cage death match between Komrade Kamala and Felonious Punk.
As debates go tonight’s action seems likely to be less lofty than in the word’s modern definition (a regulated discussion of a proposition) and more like its two-fisted past (the Anglo-French debatre, from de- + batre, to beat, from the Latin battuere).
Jaysis wept, etc. Who wouldn’t rather write about cycling, given the choice? In another corner of this little shop of horrors I’m 300 words and counting into a post about Herself’s 2006 Soma Double Cross.
But Charlie Pierce had to go and pull my chain. Actually, he was pulling A.O. Furburger’s chain for not letting The New York Times call a fascist a fascist.
Wrote Chazbo:
He is a mentally unraveling out-and-out fascist and he is within a whisker of the White House again. He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it. To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November is the proper, truthful, and, yes, the objective thing to do.
Talk about a long pull into a stiff wind. ’Tis a flick of the elbow Charlie is giving us so. I don’t propose to make every post about politics, but I feel as though it’s only proper to lay off the wheelsucking and stick my snout in the breeze now and then.
Things have been a little “Groundhog Day”-ish around here lately. On a loop, dully predictable, like customer-service hold music or the hourly news.
Thinking I might derive some mental-health benefits from taking a little road trip somewhere, I had the Subaru serviced. But then it struck me that I couldn’t think of anyplace a reasonable drive away in a 20-year-old car that would be a step up from where I already was.
Anyway, long stretches of the calendar had already been spoken for. A plumber was to diagnose and treat a leaky toilet. Herself blocked off a five-day visit to Aspen. Labor Day reared its capitalist head.
And finally, in-laws were inbound — Herself’s two sisters, the only survivors of a much larger expedition that, like Your Humble Narrator, just couldn’t seem to get buckled up and backed out of the garage.
Thus, lacking opportunity and inspiration, I’ve been trying to shake some of the dust off my local cycling routine, which over the long, hot summer took a two-wheel drift into a 20-mile rut.
It went like this: Get up early, have coffee, then some more coffee with toast, then a serious breakfast, and finally dash out for a 20-mile romp through the foothills before Tonatiuh started cooking.
This is fine, as far as it goes, which is not very; about 20 miles per sitting, according to my cyclometer(s). But after a while this sort of repetition devolves from joy into work. Exercise. Basically, gym class, which I always hated.
No wonder people get fat. Bor-ing.
So lately, with Tonatiuh having stepped away from the stove for a spell, I’ve been trying to mix it up a bit.
Last Saturday I joined a few other riders for a bit of paceline practice, zooming down Tramway to the North Valley and then drilling it out to Bernalillo and back. All told it was good for about twice my usual mileage.
Northbound on the bosque trail.
On Tuesday I cranked out a solo 42-miler, likewise down in the valley, but this time south on the Paseo del Bosque trail to just past Interstate 40 and back. I hadn’t ridden the bosque since March; half a year later the trees are starting to show hints of fall color, so I need to get back down there soon.
Yesterday I grabbed a Steelman Eurocross and did a quick hour on the trails in the Elena Gallegos Open Space. Hadn’t done that since mid-August.
Grunting up a few steepish rocky pitches reminded me that I needed to replace the bike’s chainrings, chain, and cassette. Not just from wear and tear, though there’s plenty of that, but mostly due to the mileage on its 1954 engine. Down with the 48/36T chainrings, up with the 46/34T! And the cassette will get four extra teeth at the fat end. Death to the 36x28T — long live the 34x32T!
Today various crucial segments of Your Humble Narrator were complaining bitterly about working conditions and threatening to go on strike, so I decided to take a lazy jog along our shortest foothills loop as a change of pace.
What? Hit the back button. Doritos? See-through mice? Holy hell.
Is this for real? A lactic-acid flashback? Or maybe the WaPo’s A.I. just filed the serial numbers off an abandoned Monty Python script to make the Limey boss-fella blow his breakfast gin out his snout.
Whatever. I think I just got a great idea for a Halloween costume.
Mad Blog Media 