Judas Priest. More rain. Happily, I managed to reduce the back-yard jungle with the lawn mower before the skies cut loose with a fresh dousing of angel piss. Must be the Kennedys celebrating the latest arrival. Dunno what they’re drinking up there, but clearly prostate issues don’t carry over into the next life.
Author: Patrick O'Grady
After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
Bikes ‘n’ beers
Two of my favorite things, to be sure, and they were both on hand Saturday at the Rocky Mountain Bicycle Show at the National Western Complex in Denver.
I dropped round for a look-see, having missed last year’s inaugural show in the People’s Republic of Boulder, and shot the breeze with a few folks I know. There was Jon Cariveau from Moots, velo-advocate Al Brody from right here in Bibleburg, Chris Grealish and Brook Watts of CrossVegas, Brian Riepe of Mountain Flyer magazine, Eric Sampson of Sampson Sports and Mark Nobilette of Nobilette Cycles.
There was plenty of eye-catching stuff on show, but having recently developed a casual interest in bicycle touring I was particularly drawn to a touring frame that Mark had on display in his booth, complete with custom powder-coated racks front and rear; it was the one that got him the Best Fillet Brazed Bicycle award at the 2009 North American Handmade Bicycle Show.
Mark built a custom Reynolds 853 cyclo-cross frameset for me a while back, and I’m finally going to hang some bike jewelry on that beauty this fall. It’s taken a while to get all the goodies together, but a guy can’t slap just any old crap from the parts box on his first custom frameset. If this touring thing gets any more traction in my brainpan I may have to throw a few more bucks his way.
Tech weenie Lennard Zinn was also wandering around the joint, representing VeloNews, and he has more bike porn for you here. And don’t forget to check back to VeloNews.com later today or tomorrow for more on day two of the show.
Something to chew on
Bumper sticker of the day: “Slap the Stupid People.” This I like. And I see a way to monetize the concept, Pentagon-style, by selling equipment to both sides.
For the slappers, surgical gloves, to protect them from whatever cooties these slobbering nitwits are carrying. These are to be worn under official DopeSlap™ gauntlets, in plebian chain mail or aristocratic articulated plate, to prevent damage to the hand.
For the slappees, catchers’ masks and wooden teeth, just like the Father of Our Country had before this uppity nigra showed up from Kenya with his socialized medicine.
Can you say “win-win?” Sure. I knew you could.
Un-co-op-erative
We already know the wingnuts hate the idea of government-run health care, no matter how many of them are taking advantage of it. And now that Adolf Saddam Hussein Obama has hinted that he might be OK with a non-profit health care cooperative, well, they hate that, too.
As Steve Benen notes at Political Animal, “for months, Republicans said a public option would mark the fall of civilization, but a co-op alternative is entirely palatable. But in light of signals that a genuine public option is in trouble, the Republican Party that found co-ops reasonable has decided to change course. Now, they’re against co-ops, too.”
He continues: “(N)o matter what Democrats propose, Republicans are going to reject it, even if they’ve already signaled support for the same idea. Consistency and honesty are irrelevant — the goal is to defeat health care reform, no matter what’s in the bill.”
Speaking of what’s in the bill, Bob Herbert at The New York Times says we’re headed “toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.”
Without an “efficient, nonprofit, government-run insurance plan,” and with a requirement that most Americans buy health coverage, writes Herbert, “Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.”
He continues: “If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan — well, that’s reform the insurance companies can believe in.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling so good.
Watering the tree of crazy
How is it that these people didn’t bat an eyelash at eight years of the Daffy-Fudd Reichstag barbecue, but go batshit crazy in less than a year of Obama-Biden? I’ll bet the Secret Service has given up drinking coffee and is horning lines of Ethiopian hararrharrarhar right off the counter at Starbucks.
I lived in Arizona, briefly, back in 1980, and had the same handgun I do today — a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum — but my mild hippie-anarchist gun-nuttery didn’t prepare me for seeing a motorcycle gangster roaring down the road with an assault rifle slung over one shoulder. Or a line of greasy-spoon stools bearing rednecks wearing holstered pistols.
If I recall correctly, back then you could wear a sidearm or fetch a long gun pretty much anywhere in Arizona, barring banks, bars and liquor stores. But I don’t recall anyone fetching one to a Ronald Reagan rally. We had to wait until 1981 and the nation’s capital for that, when John Hinckley Jr. punched a few .22-caliber holes in the prez, press secretary James Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delahanty and SS agent Timothy McCarthy.
I remember folks being somewhat upset over the idea that a crazy fucker with a gun might have the audacity to shoot a president. I guess times have changed.
