Hot town, summer in the city, as the fella says. Welcome to the summer solstice in the Year of Our Lard 2026.
It’s 76° at 15 minutes after the big hour of 9 a.m. here in The Duck! City, with a high of 95° expected — three degrees above normal but well short of the record of 103°, set all the way back in 1981, when “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes topped Billboard’s Hot 100 as Ronald Reagan shredded the social safety net while bulking up the Pentagon.
Well, there you go again. … Good times. Maybe not. Better than now? Your mileage may vary.
Where there’s heat, there’s often fire, and it should go without saying that we have a few: Deer Canyon, south of Mountainair; Osha Canyon, south of Placitas; Rio, at Mesa de la Gallina; and Elk, in the Pecos Wilderness.
Rather than add my little flame to this hot mess I whipped up cool smoothies for breakfast: Mango, strawberries, banana, yogurt, honey, rice milk, and a sprinkle of Vietnamese cinnamon.
Up north my man Hal Walter was putting the finishing touches on his Substack series, “The Blur Goes to College,” which over the past two years chronicled son Harrison’s adventures in higher education. And I do mean “higher” — The Blur attended college at 10,000 feet, in Leadville, after growing up at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe.
Hal’s plan is to transform the Substack chronicle into a physical book, with a cover by noted Leadville artist and old pal Craig Schreiber. Mine is to go for a ride before it gets too bloody hot.
I can’t go all the way back to 1981 for a bike — that year I had just abandoned a Seventies Schwinn when I fled The Arizona Daily Star and Tucson for parts unknown, shortly after my father’s untimely death in Bibleburg.
But I can time-travel back to 1994, when I bought a DBR Prevail TT from John Crandall at Old Town Bike Shop in that very same town.
Mad Blog Media 
Happy Solstice ! If we were up in Fairbanks, our legs might be tired this morning from running the Midnight Sun Run last night. A great event. Being a little further south now, the solstice represents a time when the real summer temps start occurring. So far the weather has been pleasant this year, but it looks like we might hit the century mark on Tuesday. That’s ok, 100F isn’t too bad. So long as there isn’t a string of several high digit days.
Stay cool and enjoy the ride !
We hit the mid-90s again and it looks like a streak of same for the foreseeable future.
Ah, well … if we get out early enough, there’s still plenty of bikeable hours in the day. I ain’t got nothin’ to complain about.
Hard to grasp how Paris, France and my little burg, SE Arizona, will be the same temperature next Tuesday through Thursday. WTFO?
Zut alors!
Mon Dieu! My car has been eaten by rats. I shall have to go into town by velo.
Was your auto a Citroen 2CV? Quelle tragédie! Is your trusty Peugeot at the ready?
Packrats? Did they chew up the wiring? Inquiring minds wish to know. Me too.😉
I was simply “borrowing “ from an old Barry Kliban cartoon. Also remembering The Turk series which was truly mind boggling if you were say, a bit stoned. Not that I would have been. Well at least not on Tuesdays. Or was it Wednesdays?
Again, something that passed me by. But, I can fix that.
B. Kliban was the shit. There were so many killer cartoonists back then, and damn near all of them got work in Playboy.
The old gag was “I only read Playboy for the articles.” I read Playboy for the cartoons.
National Lampoon had a top-shelf comics section too. “Dirty Duck” and “Cheech Wizard” were well worth the price of admission. Also, “Son O’ God Comics,” drawn by Neal Adams, who reimagined The Batman long before Frank Miller and Christopher Nolan got their hands on him.
Paris was 102 degrees today just like us. WTFO?
Yowch. And another scorcher is on tap today — we have a heat advisory on from noon until 8 p.m.
Just 95° for us here yesterday. But my geezer brethren decided to bump the Monday-Wednesday rides from 9:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. anyway. 95° when you’re 85 — or even just 72, like Your Humble Narrator — can be a bit of a bitch.
I was going to say something about the heat where I’m at but got distracted by thinking of all the light clothing that the women in Paris must be wearing.
What was that you were talking about again?
With the humor aside, I hope that the temps subside quickly in Europe. I see that some locations are reporting well about the 102F that POB mentions above. It’s a lot easier to handle in a rural area with some air flow and there aren’t a lot of structures around to capture and re-radiate the thermal energy,
With that thought, it looks like the current temp at the South Pole is -75F. Do you need to warm up your coffee now?
well “above” the 102F ….
Allow me to blame auto-complete.
Believin’ in Magic … ha ha, the good old days, when a guy could play the autoharp and also claim to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band.