Heil, Caesar!

Another dick-tator with a golden comb-over.

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!

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.

Boom-boom or bye-bye?

“Yo, I got your solar, wind, and geothermal technologies right here. …

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, etc.

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.

R.I.P., Brian Wilson

A classic.

Now it’s dark. And he’s alone. But he won’t be afraid. Peace to Brian Wilson, his family, friends, and many, many fans.

Give us your favorite Beach Boys tunes in comments. This is one of mine.

For some reason I had “I Get Around” stuck in my head the other day. Maybe because I did. Always looking for a place where the kids were hip.

R.I.P., John Neugent

My 1994 DBR Prevail TT with its Neuvation wheelset.

John Neugent has gone west, according to Bicycle Retailer. He was 76.

Like many of us in the bike biz John wore a series of hats. His résumé includes stints at (or with) Sunshine Cycle, Service Cycle, Sachs USA, EV Global, Trico and Schwinn.

Eventually he went consumer direct under his own shingle — Neugent Cycling — and kept in touch with his customers via e-mail newsletter and a YouTube channel that he used as a showcase for his banjo chops and wheelbuilding skills.

John was an affable gent, occasionally mildly retrogrouchy, but without the grouchy bits, and he maintained a certain flexibility as regards the catechism. Here’s an example from a March 2019 edition of his newsletter:

It recently occurred to me that there is a generation, maybe two, who never used friction shifting. The type I grew up with that preceded index shifting, hyperglide, and electric shifting. Any real rider would also have downtube shifting where you needed to take one hand off the bars and bend over enough to reach the downtube. There are no studies done on this, because, in all likelihood, a bike like that made with modern technology would result in a much less expensive, lighter, and, one could argue, better bike. The real problem: They would be less expensive.


Imagine if you might how light a real 10-speed (five in the back and two up front) with downtube shifters and pedals using toe clips would be. Add tubular tires and carbon frames and rims and you are probably well under 10 pounds. Probably even more when you consider how much weight they could save in brakes, derailleurs, chain, sprockets, and anything else. I know there are grand fondos that require the use of bikes like that but they don’t use today’s technology.


At some point they are going to have bikes that pedal themselves. Oh wait, they’ve already done that. They’re called electric bikes and they are the new rage. How come I feel that many steps forward are really steps backward?


If someone presented a post-modern bike like the one I imagine I bet people would look at it with awe in the same way they recently did with single-speed bikes (known as track bikes 50 years ago). True spoke-sniffers like myself are not only dreaming of the possibilities, but are thinking about how to put one together with parts lying around.

John and I emailed back and forth now and then, and I always enjoyed his laid-back perspective on La Velo Nostra. I never got my DBR Prevail TT down to 10 pounds, but it wasn’t the fault of his Neuvation wheelset — I hung on to my heavy STI shifters, nine-speed cassette, clipless pedals, and ti’/chromoly frameset.

Peace to John, his family, friends, and customers. He will be missed.