Man, the smoke around here last night was wicked — we had to close all the windows to keep the house from smelling like a Cub Scout campfire.
Now a slurry bomber has crashed, grounding the fleet, and the fire folks are using helicopters instead. Lovely.
And the VeloNews.com website has developed some sort of hiccup just in time for me to clock in. Is this Monday or Sunday?
As a resident of Bibleburg, I am most definitely living in a glass house when it comes to throwing my little stones. We are zoned for dingbattery here on a commercial scale, welcoming the likes of Industrial Christianity, Doug Bruce and Michelle Malkin with open arms, both of them on the right side of our sociopolitical body.
But no matter how powerful is the champ, there will always be contenders. Like Rutherford County, Tenn., where District 6 House candidate Lou Ann Zelenik (The Crazy) cites Martin Luther King in her opposition to a Muslim community center. (Full disclosure: I am related by marriage to more than a few residents of Tennessee, and while they are all batshit crazy, at least the majority of them are Democrats.)
Then there’s North Carolina, where Rep. Sue Myrick (The Crazy) says Hezbollah is partnering with Mexican drug cartels and may be planning “Israel-like car bombings of Mexican/USA border personnel or National Guard units.”
Leave us not forget Texas, where The Crazies want to reinstate sodomy laws, end the state lottery and federal sponsorship of pre-kindergarten schools, require that evolution and global warming “be taught as challengeable scientific theory,” and demand that Congress get US out of the UN — an old John Birch Society maxim once seen on billboards in these parts — and evict the global body from our shores.
The Birchers once opposed the fluoridation of the nation’s water supplies as a Communist plot to poison America. Maybe it’s time to start spiking the fluoride with a little lithium.
Squeezed another nice, hot ride in today, this time out to the Air Force Academy and back.
I was thinking about riding out to Palmer Lake and back, which is a 50-mile U-turn, but man — it was hot, windy, dry and dusty, so I called it quits at the AFA’s North Gate and turned around. Good thing, too, ’cause the wind went nuts shortly after I got home. Now I can smell smoke from either the Royal Gorge fire, the Medano blaze or some other seasonal conflagration, and it looks like tornado weather out there.
Meanwhile, some folks will be riding their bicycles around France starting a week from tomorrow, and that means I’ll be working five days a week just like the rest of y’all, assuming you are fortunate enough to enjoy continued employment in this mess they call an economy.
It’s no time to be on the dole, to be sure — not with Senate Repuglicans smugly flipping a neatly manicured, pudgy middle digit to the unemployed. As Steve Benen noted at Political Animal:
“We’ve gone from one erratic senator flipping off a reporter to an entire party caucus flipping off millions of Americans. We’ve gone from a seemingly unstable lawmaker telling a colleague, “Tough sh*t” to the entire Republican conference telling the whole country, ‘Tough sh*t.’
“In the late winter, Jim Bunning was something of a laughing stock. In the early summer, we have an entire Party of Bunnings.”
So true. And so sad. I don’t know how one deals with a completely unprincipled, mendacious opposition with the compassion of a rabid hyena on a gutpile and the smarts of a bag of hammers.
Today I did something out of the ordinary — I rode my mountain bike. And in an even more startling departure from the norm, I rode it in Cheyenne Mountain State Park.
What can I tell you? I was sick of my usual rides and got all Monty Python on my bad self (“And now for something completely different. …”).
It feels wrong to write about this place again, because this park continues to be largely undiscovered. In two and a half hours of riding I encountered two hikers, four mountain bikers and one extremely hard individual who was running the trails with a large rucksack and ski poles. It ain’t exactly I-25 at rush hour, is what I’m sayin’ here.
My outing took in Zook Loop, Sundance, Talon, North and South Talon and Blackmer Loop, and oh, man, was it ever fun, despite my minimal and rusty skills. I may not be the world’s worst mountain biker, but will do until he (or she) shows up.
I middle-ringed pretty much everything until machismo proved to be stupidissimo — a guy with the right legs and medical plan can ride quite a few of these trails on a cyclo-cross bike — and then I became one with the Tao of the Little Ring. Nobody’s watching, so there was no one to impress.
My park pass ($6 at the gate) is good until noon tomorrow, so I may just dash out there again. After all, I only heard the one rattlesnake, and the bears, bobcats and mountain lions apparently are on vacation.
So, Stan the Man got the heave-ho. Alas, you can’t call the boss a pussy and his staff a bunch of faggots and expect to keep climbing that old career ladder. At least he had his Class A goin’ on when he showed up to take his beating.
Dude’s been in the Green Machine for 34 years now, having graduated from The Point in 1976. What’s next? Some lesser post? Retirement? I’m guessing the latter. Take one for the team — “Fellas, this is what happens when you forget that in the United States, the military is under civilian control. …” — and then join a couple think tanks, pen a memoir, become a talking head on Fox, hit the rubber-chicken circuit, form a militia.
Hey, could be worse. Most of us 50-somethings wouldn’t have unlimited earning potential, a lifetime pension and free medical care if we got sacked for being dicks. I’d have a mortgage, a whole bunch of things that suddenly needed selling and a really pissed-off wife.
