The Rio Grande, pictured July 11, two days before it was declared officially dry in The Duck! City.
Welp, piss on the dogs and call in the fire — the Rio Grande is now the Rio Ground.
John Fleck reports that the “official” call is that the Rio ran dry in the heart of Albuquerque last Sunday evening, for only the second time in the 21st century.
I was down by the river last Friday (not to shoot my baby; I was on a longer-than-usual bike ride) and took the above snap from the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge paralleling Interstate 40. A stone bummer it was and will be; the future does not look bright, but we’ll have to wear shades anyway. And possibly Assos stillsuits as well.
Happily, I took two tall iced water bottles on this 45-miler. And I had drained both of them before I saw something that made me smile, in Lynnewood Park just short of The Old Home Place.
The Paseo de las Montañas Trail runs right through the park, and on the concrete path someone had drawn a rough square with a message inside: “Dance Here.”
I would’ve, too. But I was hot, tired, and thirsty, and the soles of my ancient Sidis have been ground down to nubbins by the years and miles. Plus it would’ve felt a little like dancing on my own grave.
One of the many books Sam Abt wrote about his summer vacations.
The great Sam Abt is finally done following the Tour de France. He went west this week at age 91.
I never met Sam, much less worked with him. He was an editor at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, a real chain-smoking pro who worked on the Pentagon Papers and other top-shelf stories and covered the Tour de France — in his spare time — because he loved it. I was a editor at a series of lesser papers who read Sam at work (if the paper subscribed to the NYT wire service) and rode bicycles in my spare time because I loved it.
But my friends Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood knew and worked with Sam, as did James Startt, who has a fond remembrance of him over at Velo.
Writes James:
Simply put, his writing was exceptional. It was at once efficient, witty, insightful and at times downright transcendent. Oh, and his fans went well beyond the press room, as at least one head of state would call him during the Tour to get his take on the race. All of this from a chain-smoking reporter who never really rode a bike. But he knew the sport like few others did.
Sam was covering Le Tour in those dark days when an American fan had to settle for a soupçon of “Wide World of Sports” coverage, a couple grafs from The Associated Press in your local paper’s sports section (if you were lucky), and Winning: Bicycle Racing Illustrated, which would hit your mailbox about three months after the race was done and dusted.
When VeloNews moved to Boulder in the late Eighties I latched onto the back of that breakaway and hung on for dear life, doing what I’d always done for newspapers — cartooning, writing and editing. I even helped cover a few Tours, from a distance, as an editor. The magazine offered to send me abroad a time or two, but I always declined, thinking I could get more done at home.
But that meant I never got to meet one of the titans of the Tour. Not a racer — I met more than a few of those folks — but Sam, who fed the monkey for all us bike-racing junkies.
Abt was a mentor and inspiration for a generation of English-language journalists who later came to cover a once-exotic sport that’s since gone global.
Peace to Sam, his family and friends, and to his many, many devoted readers.
“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.”
To boldly go … where? To the bank for a cashier’s check, it seems. Hold the phasers, drop the shields, piss on the dilithium crystals and call in the Tribbles.
Beam me up, Scotty — there’s no intelligent life down here.
On the first day of July, the month named for Julius Caesar, the Senate bent to its dictator’s will and approved his giant, ugly-ass, abortion of a bill.
Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina— who will not seek re-election after Orange Julius Caesar threatened to find someone to primary him — were the only Repugs to vote nay. All others assumed that fabled position.
Prince MAGAbelly had to cast the deciding vote, and now this huge, loathsome turd must float back to the House for resolution of the changes made in its version. A vote there could come as early as tomorrow.
Might there be a few hurdles involved? Hear ye, hear ye, from Ye Oulde New Yorke Times!
The changes senators made to a version of the bill the House passed in May have raised the cost of the package while also teeing up deeper cuts that would lead to more Americans losing health insurance coverage. That alienated both poles of the party — fiscal hawks concerned about soaring deficits and mainstream Republicans wary of shredding the social safety net — complicating its path in the Senate and threatening its prospects in the House.
It would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already-bulging national debt over a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Sunday — a cost that far exceeds the $2.4 trillion price of the version passed in the House. And it would result in $1.1 trillion in health care cuts, nearly $1 trillion of them to Medicaid, causing 11.8 million more Americans to become uninsured by 2034, the same office found.
Hurdles, you say? It is the hee, and also haw. The majority in the House makes the Senate look … well, senatorial by comparison. The Senate is up to its saggy tits in senile old hoors, to be sure, but the House is the political equivalent of a Bizarro World Alice’s Restaurant, where you can get anything you want, including Alice, her husband, Ray, Fasha the dog, the entire complement of the Group W bench, and maybe Officer Obie too, all rolling around in a half-ton of garbage, if that’s what blows your skirt up.
So poor people will starve, get sick, and die, rich people will get richer and write letters to their senators complaining about how they have to step over the stiffs on their way to the squash court, and Elon Spunk will start a new political party in a frantic attempt to … save us from ourselves? Nope. To put himself back in the news cycle as anything other than a bad joke, despised even by the people who bought his cars.
Better debug that exploding Starship stat, bruh. I hear OJC wants to claw back your subsidies and deport you to Mars, and for sure he’ll make you drive your own paddy wagon.
The roving Eye of Mordor has fallen upon Sandia National Labs. And where the Eye goes, the Sword shall follow.
The deets remain elusive. But the gist of it is that Sandia plans “to reduce its workforce” by as many as 510 employees as part of a “restructuring effort aimed at cost reduction,” which may include a “voluntary separation program” and a hiring freeze.
This is PR-speak for “budget cuts, buyouts, and layoffs.”
One to three percent of the staff is not a huge bloodletting, unless you happen to be one of the 510 and have a couple kids in university, a parent in a nursing home, and the usual credit-card debt and home/auto/college loans outstanding.
Nevertheless, you may well ask, how is it that the Military-Industrial Complex is reduced to counting its pennies in these dark days?
Well, it seems as though the Military portion of the Complex is in tip-top shape. No shortage of comfy chairs, caviar, and Champagne in the Boom-Boom Room.
But the Industrial aspect? Well … it suffers from elevated levels of solar, wind, and geothermal technologies that don’t kill foreigners, DEI, or The Woke, and thus are not covered by MAGA Cross-Red Shield. So those have to come off, stat. And with a scimitar, not a scalpel.
Anesthesia, you ask? Ho, ho. Suck it up, Buttercup. Drugs are for Closers. And you posie-sniffing Poindexters wonder why you weren’t invited to the King’s Birthday Parade. You should’ve grabbed a chair in the Boom-Boom Room before the music stopped.
Mad Blog Media 