It’s a gray day in Bibleburg. We had some rain last night and the forecast calls for more of the same over the next week. Maybe it’ll tamp down the tree pollen a bit. Herself and I are going through boxes of Kleenex at an alarming rate. An entire rain forest soaked in snot and flushed down the loo to Pueblo.
At least we don’t have any active volcanos in the neighborhood. That Icelandic rascal is dumping hot ash over many a traveler’s itinerary, including Monty Python’s John Cleese. According to The New York Times, Cleese found himself stranded in Oslo and hired a Mercedes taxi to drive more than 900 miles to Brussels, where he hoped to get a train to London. Three drivers took turns at the wheel and the fare came to about $5,000, said one of his agents, Dean Whitbread. Rather too far for a silly walk, don’t you know. Right, off you go.
Meanwhile, expect a reduced field at Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race thanks to air-travel restrictions. Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins, Cervélo’s Carlos Sastre and Volodymyr Gustov, and Caisse d’Epargne’s Alejandro Valverde, Luis Leon Sanchez and Luis Pasamontes are among the riders who apparently can’t raise the cabfare.
Seems like the print media aren’t the only journos suffering in the Internet era. The Gaslight writes of how the local TV stations are hiring only people “capable of being able to do it all,” which is the kind of English one has come to expect from the video crowd.
Notes Paul Kavanaugh: “The local stations’ Pueblo bureaus, for example, used to be staffed by a reporter and a photographer. Now, they’re staffed by so-called ‘one-man bands’; one reporter writes, shoots, edits and broadcasts.”
Well, shucks. It makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure, as the late Hunter S. Thompson once said. The print people have been in that sinking ship for quite some time now, augmenting pad and pen with digital sound recorders, point-and-shoots and camcorders, and dashing out quick reports for dead-tree edition, website and blog.
And it only seems fair that TV should join newspapers in the Information Age tar pits, since the Internet is only finishing the job on the print media that TV started. Back in the day the local TV crowd piggy-backed on the daily newspaper, eschewing original reportage for the rip-and-read, whipping a slight rewrite on an ink-stained wretch’s story and shamelessly reading it before the camera. Occasionally we could recognize entire sentences lifted whole.
When the vidiots bothered to attend an event in corpus, the cameraman would often pan around over the audience. I had long hair and a beard then, and was something of a camera magnet, scribbling away on a note pad, and after seeing myself on TV a few times I took to scratching one cheek with an extended middle digit whenever the camera panned my way, bringing a quick end to my TV career.
My favorite moment remains an important school-board meeting disrupted by the video circus, which showed up late as always and bustled about, setting up tripods, lights and whatnot. The superintendent was well into his opening remarks, so naturally they asked that he start over from the beginning.
This was the last straw for my colleague from the smaller paper across town. She remarked, “Hey, assholes, the news doesn’t come packaged in tidy segments of 30 seconds apiece.”
It still doesn’t, of course, but that’s all you’re going to get in the era of the one-man band.
You ain't gonna be spendin' no 40 days an' nights wanderin' ’roun' this desert, bo'. Move along, move along.
If Christ were to begin wandering around our local wilderness, collecting disciples and preaching sermons, sooner or later he and they would run afoul of Bibleburg’s latest ordinance forbidding camping on public property.
The ordinance is both shameful and silly in that it (a) demonstrates the lack of compassion in the black, withered heart of Industrial Christianity and (b) will be impossible to enforce.
Regarding the former, I always thought that it was the money-changers who were supposed to get tossed out of the temple, not the poor and helpless. As for the latter, if I’m a stony-broke homeless guy living in a tent by the creek and a cop hands me a ticket, I’m wiping my ass with it and sending it downstream to Pueblo. Put me in jail for noncompliance and I’m enjoying three hots and a cot, plus regular showers, at taxpayer expense. Shameful and silly, as I said.
Homelessness is a real problem, for the campers and the Chamber of Commerce alike, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some campers are just down on their luck and awaiting better days. Others are mentally ill, addicted to this or that, and perpetually in need of social services that are either stretched beyond the breaking point or simply unavailable. And still others are real, honest-to-God hobos who prefer nibbling along the tattered edges of our consumer culture to diving in head first. Treating them all the same is absurd.
The private sector, various non-profits and individual volunteers are doing what they can. One local businessman sees an opportunity to house the homeless in a former KOA campground off South Nevada Avenue, but the city is standing in his way.
Many a passage from the Sermon on the Mount comes to mind here. Let’s try this one on for size — Matthew 8:21-23:
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
Another blisteringly cold day. Yesterday neither Herself nor I left the house. But today she bundled up and toddled off to work. I spent the morning processing pixels, then slipped out for a short run around noon after things warmed up a bit.
I probably should’ve ridden — after all, I’m not going to be running around southern Arizona next month — but I like to run, and besides it can’t hurt to mix things up a bit. Yesterday my legs felt like giant sausages full of botulism after three consecutive days of riding hills in the cold, and spending all Sunday sitting at the iMac, posting copy and photos to VeloNews.com, didn’t exactly meet my admittedly loose definition of “active rest.”
Speaking of high technology, we’ve finally debugged our Rube Goldberg TV hookup (streaming video via laptop, Blu-ray player, rabbit ears) and have been watching bits of the Winter Olympics. My God, how does anyone get through an evening of American television without the skull exploding like a Pfalzgraff piggy bank zotzed by a .40-caliber hollow-point? The drug ads provide some amusing irony, and there’s no denying the improved sports coverage possible with digital video, but still, damn.
It’s not enough that an athlete kicks ass. No, he or she has to have a touching backstory: grew up living in the trunk of a Chevy Caprice in the Appalachian hills; has a one-eyed half-brother with the yaws and 13 toes: plays the uilleann pipes professionally when not doing something insane involving ice and/or snow.
Speaking of which, it’s gonna be cold again tomorrow. Tonight’s low should bottom out around 11, and NOAA says we’re looking at a high in the mid-30s tomorrow. But a man must ride, and so I’ll be out there, me and my three long-sleeved jerseys, the neoprene leg warmers and pretty much everything else in the kit kloset.
And maybe — just maybe — with my just-completed Nobilette cyclo-cross bike, too. Stand by for fresh bike porn.
Feh. Again with the cold and snow. What is this, February in Colorado?
This is soup weather, for sure, and we’ve been through quite a few of my favorite recipes lately, among them a posole from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook and a Spanish vegetable soup from Martha Rose Shulman, who runs the “Recipes for Health” shop over at The New York Times. We’ve had her vegetable soup for dinner the past two nights and it’s definitely a keeper. A guy could beef it up some with the addition of dead-animal parts, maybe some moderately spicy sausage links sliced into half-inch rounds and sauteéd in olive oil, but it’s fine as is.
Here’s another posole from the Santa Fe folks. I haven’t tried this one before, but it’s early yet and all I need is the chicken thighs. Looks like a visit to the Whole Paycheck is in order. Oboy, my favorite, an icy slide to the corner of Collision and Contusion so I can transfer a century note from my pocket to John Mackey’s.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether I should go for a mountain bike ride — I still have a few fingers yet to dislocate — or choose the better part of valor and ride the trainer. Maybe I’ll split the difference and go for a run.
Mad Blog Media 