Miss Mia Sopaipilla knows what to do with a brisk fall morning — make a blankie burrito out of herself at the foot of our bed.
Ordinarily she’s not a bed kitty, though if we leave the door ajar at night she will jump on our heads at stupid-thirty to see if we’re interested in playing with and/or feeding her.
But come fall, once everyone’s up and doing their little bits of business, she’ll burrow under the covers and assume her nom du sommeil of Lumpy the Bedbug.
OK, so we chain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to the bottom of an empty Olympic-size pool. We charge average Americans $5 a go to pee in the pool, and sell the “streaming” rights to the highest bidder.
All proceeds go toward eliminating the debt and deficit, minus a small cash prize to whoever finally puts the two of them under water.
There will be some who say this won’t eliminate the debt or the deficit, or even shove Sleepy Joe’s Incredible Shrinking Build Back Better bill through the legislative sausage grinder. And they’re absolutely right.
But let’s do it anyway.
Well, now I know what I want for Christmas.
Start passing the sombrero*, y’all. I think you’re gonna need a big one.
* A tip of the hat to Adventure Journal, which agrees with me that “if Toyota was fun and not merely practical, they’d put this sucker into a production run.”
I’ve been neglecting my footwork lately, so I left the bikes on their hooks yesterday and took a hike.
Herself thought this a fine idea and joined me, setting a brutal pace as per usual. I had to take a picture just so I could remember what she looked like in case some good Samaritan happened upon me as I lay collapsed in a weepy heap at trailside.
“Have you wandered away from the Home, old timer? Mind if I rummage through your pockets? You won’t need the wallet; the coyotes don’t take Visa, and they sure as shit won’t honor this UnitedHealthcare card. Say, you don’t have a keeper somewhere nearby, do you?”
“Yes (sob) … she looks like this.”
“Oooh, iPhone, cool, I’ll take that too.”
I’m not casting a very long shadow around here lately.
Frankly, there’s not been much to report. That little tease La Niña is in town again and I’ve been chasing her around on the ol’ bikey bikes.
While all you Left Coast/PNW types deploy your parasols and Gore-Tex your loins against the Million-Pound Aquahammer, we here in the desert Southwest are enjoying a balmy period which makes us forget that before long we will be drinking our own sweat and tears, like Paul Atreides and his mom in “Dune.”
Yep, we watched Part I on HBO Max, and it was a’ight, pretty damn fine actually, not bad atall atall. Made the 1984 David Lynch flick look even worse than it actually was, which was pretty fucking bad.
Denis Villeneuve’s take on the Frank Herbert novel might’ve worked better as an HBO series; then he could’ve used a scalpel instead of a cleaver to move things along over the course of a season or two. But only a geek like myself, a science-fiction dweeb who’s read the book 1,207,275 times, is liable to grouse about the subtleties steamrollered to make the narrative march.
Too, if a series proved successful, there would be the temptation to milk the rest of the “Dune” tales. (We may have to deal with this in any case.) Me, I lost interest after trudging through “Dune Messiah” and “Children of Dune,” which is a very short trek indeed through the vast Duniverse.
Anyway, Rebecca Ferguson is the best of the bunch as Lady Jessica, and Timothée Chalamet is a whole lot better than I expected as Paul. He brings a whiff of Nic Cage and maybe a soupçon of Christian Bale to the role. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem as Stilgar is definitely channeling Anthony Quinn’s Auda abu Tayi from “Lawrence of Arabia.”
And the Hans Zimmer score is a character all its own, though digging it through our obsolete surround-sound system was like listening to the London Philharmonic performing Metallica over a walkie-talkie.
Still, it beat squeezing into the old stillsuit, flagging down a passing sandworm, and crossing the Duke City desert to the Harkonnen IMAX. We got beverages around here ain’t even been drunk once yet.
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