We are not on fire here. Far from it, in fact. Twenty-five degrees and windy at the moment, which is why Her Majesty Miss Mia Sopaipilla is curled up in the Winter Palace.
There was an alarming degree of peachy cloud cover to our west this morning, which in my ignorance I will attribute to secondhand smoke from the Los Angeles fires. Holy hell. The pix look like Dresden after (or maybe during) the Allied bombing.
My fellow velo-scribe Zapata Espinoza is among those whose homes went poof (h/t to the lads at my old shop, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News). A GoFundMe has been set up to help Zap and Xakota in their hour of need.
In all our years together Herself and I have never been in the shit. In the vicinity a time or two, but never to the point of grabbing go-bags and critter kennels and beating feet. We know things will never be the same, but we hope they get better.
President Jimmy Carter. Photo: LBJ Library and Museum
Jimmy Carter went west on Sunday. He was 100.
It seems appropriate for him to pass on the Lord’s day off. I expect the Big Fella wanted to supervise the welcome wagon Himself.
Jimmy had a rough ride in the White House, but he may have been our best ex-president ever. George Washington is right up there for refusing to let a grateful nation king him. But ol’ Jimmy just kept on doing the people’s business, often with his own two hands, well into his 90s. The New York Timeshas an extensive obituary.
And he hung on long enough to vote against the pestilence-elect. It wasn’t enough, but we must consider it his last full measure of devotion.
I never voted for him. I went for Peter Camejo (Socialist Workers Party) in 1976, though Hunter S. Thompson had pronounced himself impressed by Jimmy in a lengthy screed in Rolling Stone that was republished in his collection “Gonzo Papers Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt.” Four years later, I voted for independent John Anderson in an Arizona newsroom full of young Reagan Republicans, and then fled the joint like a rat out of a garbage fire.
But damme if I don’t wish I had voted for Jimmy, at least once. Peace to him, his family, and friends.
Alice and Arlo, lifted from the latter’s Facebook page.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.
Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.
We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.
We’d bailed on election-night coverage as it slouched inexorably toward its denouement because someone around here has to get up at stupid-thirty to make us some money. Not me.
If I had dreams, I don’t remember them. But I do remember something Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post said during the PBS coverage last night.
It was a particularly fatheaded pronouncement, even for an associate editor of The Washington Post. And I didn’t make a note of it because I’d said something similar the first time TFG flipped his wig into the ring. That the 2016 election would show us who we were as a country.
Plenty of us already knew what we were then. Not enough, though. But surely anyone who has been paying attention since has caught up. Right?
Well, there’s the phone, on the nightstand. It’s not my practice to take the pulse of the planet before coffee, but I could hear Herself prepping in the bathroom and thought that if I got cracking I could make her a bite of breakfast before she left. If she had any appetite.
And so I picked up the phone.
Well, the rest you know. Another massive breakdown of politics, press, and populace. We’re just waiting on the details, is all.
Hunter S. Thompson has already filed his report, of course. He had the scoop after my first election, in 1972, when he wrote:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
[George] McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.
Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?
We still don’t know the answer to that one, Hunter old sot. The barrel appears to have no bottom.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for writing,” he said, looking back on his career, in a 2006 interview with the online magazine Country Standard Time.
“I never would have gotten to make records if I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have gotten to tour without it. And I never would’ve been asked to act in a movie if I hadn’t been known as a writer.”
“Writer” was the occupation listed on Mr. Kristofferson’s passport.
Mad Blog Media 