Category: Agitprop

Where’s the beef?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
There's the beef
Burgers and T-bones and chuck, O my!

This is what a steer looks like after the people who know its people get hungry and descend upon it, brandishing checkbooks.

Herself and I were share owners in this steer, along with a few other folks who were better acquainted with him, and after a quick out-and-back to Crusty County one-eighth of him resides in our freezer alongside a half-dozen quart bags of Pueblo chile. I foresee a synergy between the two in the very near future.*

Thinking about, acquiring, preparing and consuming food helps keep my mind off the ongoing clown show that is American presidential politics. Rick Sanctimonious is getting wiggier by the minute, practically a character in a Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition. And don’t get me started on the RomneyBot 2012. Last machine I saw perform this erratically was a 1996 Ford F-150. It wound up in a ditch, and I wound up back in a Toyota.

* I actually started this post yesterday and didn’t get around to slapping it up until today. Thus the Larga Vista Ranch chile has already become acquainted with the Crusty County beef in the form of a very tasty pot of chili con carne.

A bridge to somewhere

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
New bridge
This new bridge spans the creek just south of Bijou Street.

I gave the Innertubes the slip at midday yesterday and went out for a rolling 23-miler, missing exactly 23 tweets. This I call a fair trade, especially since I had a tailwind on the hilly bits while Twitter is always pretty much up in your grill.

The hard part lately is finding that sweet spot in the actual wind. Some days it seems to be generated by the handlebars. If you’re riding deep-section rims you’ll occasionally get a probing gust from port or starboard, generally when riding no-hands to adjust some article of clothing or fetch something from a pocket.

While out I noticed a new bridge on our major north-south bike path. It replaces an iffy concrete dip that was occasionally underwater during spring runoff and thus seems a major upgrade, unless you’re the sort of GOP dipshit who thinks that bicycles should be the littlest pig at Uncle Sammy’s trough.

I crossed it on the way home and felt as though I’d hit the lottery. Unc’ usually spends my money bombing brown people, giving a wink and a nod to white-collar criminals or holding hearings on women’s health issues to which only Penis-Americans and those who love them are invited.

But every now and then the crooked, simple-minded old fool throws the little people a bone — like a bridge that actually goes somewhere.

Congress wants to stick a pump in our spokes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Cycling advocates nationwide are up in arms over congressional assaults that the League of American Bicyclists says “threaten 20 years of progress in promoting bicycling and walking as energy-efficient, healthy and safe modes of transportation.”

You probably already know this — but just in case it comes as news to you, LAB, the America Bikes coalition, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Adventure Cycling and other organizations are fighting tooth and nail to keep bike-ped funding in the House and Senate transportation bills presently slithering through the legislative sausage-making process.

In the Senate, advocates are backing an amendment by Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) to guarantee local governments a voice in transportation decisions and provide funding for bikeways, sidewalks and safe routes to school.

In the House, they are urging representatives to oppose the entire transportation bill — it’s that bad. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), interviewed for “Living On Earth,” called the measure “arguably the worst piece of transportation legislation I’ve seen that has been proposed. Not just in the 15 years I’ve been in Congress, but for many years before that.”

If you haven’t already contacted your senators and representatives, please do so. And thanks.

Drop the SOPA

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Doug Lamborn
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Slops) was unavailable for comment.

I briefly considered blacking out the DogS(h)ite in solidarity with Drop the SOPA Day, then decided against it. This ill-conceived legislation is not of your doing. So why punish you, Dear Readers, by denying you my whizdumb in these dark days?

Instead, I contacted one of our senators, Mark Udall, via his website, and thanked him for opposing the Senate’s version of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), called the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Alas, the websites of Rep. Doug Lamborn and Sen. Michael Bennet — a co-sponsor of PIPA who is suddenly reconsidering his support — were FUBAR for some reason (pirates off the port bow, arr?). Happily, Bennet seems to be getting the message without further prodding from me, and talking to Lamborn is a complete and utter waste of time, right up there with trying to teach a Yorkshire pig to whistle “The Internationale.”

The call for an Innertubes blackout has proven problematical, according to The Christian Science Monitor — while thousands of sites are said to be participating, with Wikipedia and Reddit the biggest digital dogs on that virtual porch, others are staying up while linking to more information about the legislation and its opponents.

That made sense to me, so here I am in all my link-dispersing, informative glory. You’re welcome.

Trouble every day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Hey, whaddaya know, it’s Dec. 12, which means … something. I dunno what. I got nothin’ here.

Oh, yeah — this was the day back in 2000 that the Supremes pulled the plug on Al Gore’s campaign, which had been on life support for the better part of quite some time.

Well, as “Odd Bodkins” cartoonist Dan O’Neill was fond of saying, “Reality is a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court.”

We now return you to the reality-based community, which is already in progress.