O, ’tis true, the druck traffickers are a shower of bastards.
Just say “No” to them drucks, kids. Especially in traffic.
“You got to know the right people,” indeed. Starting with a good copy editor. Or at least one who isn’t on drucks.
Archive for the ‘Casual snark’ Category
‘You got to know the right people’
September 29, 2019Country swing
September 9, 2019
A photo of the damage done to Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” by a banjo-swinging Texican. (Stolen for purposes of satire and parody from
Michelle V. Agins of The New York Times.)
It has been said of a poor marksman that he couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a banjo.
This dude went for the head shot and only nicked a horn.
Speaking of colloquialisms, this is not what they mean when they say, “Fuck with the bull and you get the horn.”
The Farce is with us
August 30, 2019
How much closer? Honey, call the Space Farce!
Hm. No flying saucers up there. Not right this minute, anyway.
I guess we need a “space force” anyway, though, if only to learn how to flush money down a zero-gravity toilet.
Look for a low-Earth-orbit version of the F-35, coming to a military-industrial complex near you.
“Jesus, Chet, now they want the fucker to be a spacecraft, too. They’re lucky it gets off the ground at all. Oh, well, it’s only money, amirite? Haw haw haw! Back to the ol’ drawing board. …”
Trails and tribulations
August 14, 2019
The Paseo del Norte path, from just east of Rio Grande Boulevard.
Fine cycling weather around here lately, if you don’t mind hot and humid.
Yes, I said “humid.” For New Mexico, anyway. We’ve had a couple real frog-stranglers lately, the sort where you throw the doors and windows open to let the cool fresh air in, and then close them again a few minutes later because it’s coming down sideways and the furniture is getting power-washed.
Anyway, the idea in August is ride early to avoid heat stroke and/or hypothermia and (possibly) electrocution. That’s quite a list of things you don’t need. Throw in random gunfire and drunken drivers or some combination thereof and you can have yourself an honest-to-Dog life-changing experience on the ol’ two-wheeler.
The path alongside Jerry Cline Park, which leads to the Paseo de las Montañas trail.
The pix are from Sunday’s ride to the bosque and back via an oddly efficient hodgepodge of high-speed highway, rural roads, bike paths and multilane avenues. It being a weekend, I saw nearly as much dumbassery on the bike paths as on the mean streets, but that’s on me. I knew better, but I rode the bike paths anyway.
Yesterday was much nicer. All the dipshits were in their cars or cubes and I had a marvelous time herding a Soma Saga with a bike overnight’s worth of weight around and about. And up, too, because there’s a lot of that around here. I was a full three minutes slower than usual climbing Tramway with that weight. Three minutes! I could’ve been late for something! Happily, my schedule is a blank slate.
Today I finished renovating the Voodoo Nakisi. New Velocity Cliffhanger/LX wheelset from Rivendell, nine-speed cassette, chain, and chainrings (two of three); a brake swap (off with the old Cane Creek SCX-5’s, on with the even older Paul’s Neo-Retro and Touring cantis, outfitted with new Kool-Stop pads); and finally, a new front derailleur cable. Soon, the new front derailleur, but not right this moment.
From time to time I like to remind myself what a rotten mechanic I am by performing some simple chore slowly and badly, which helps me justify hauling another, more difficult project to the shop so the pros can handle it.
But I survived the test ride, which weakens my argument. The Comptroller of the Household is small but fierce.
The long-neglected Voodoo Nakisi, my go-to trails bike,
finally gets a little love.
Gimme shelter
August 14, 2019
Doomsday bunkers are making a comeback!
Boy, that’s a stunner, hey? The same folks who can pay cash for an RV that costs more than your fixed location and a Caribbean island stocked with preteen girls to drive it around on are springing for upscale hobbit-holes in case Ginger Hitler fumbles one of the various crises on his plate between cheeseburgers.
According to The New York Times:
The 12 apartments in Mr. Hall’s Survival Condo, as he calls it, begin at $1.3 million. When he started selling the condos around 2011, he said, all the units sold within months.
To Mr. Hall, and to many in his field, this is a calling, not just a business. “I’m saving lives,” he said during a recent visit to his bunker, the exact location of which he insisted be kept under wraps. He entered the building’s elevator as it began its long descent into the earth. “To me, this is something to feel good about.”
Uh huh. Especially the part about “representatives of the Saudi Arabian military, who have asked him to draw up plans for an on-site heliport and underground mosque.” You want to frisk those dudes for box-cutters before giving them the code to Watership Down, Bubba.
When we got transferred to Bibleburg from San Antone the folks looked at a house with a bomb shelter, just northeast of the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex. This felt not unlike Wile E. Coyote deploying a parasol to ward off the falling boulder.
Can you imagine all these rugged individuals sharing a shelter, however well appointed? Better bro-deal one of the smaller units to a couple of cutters from the local Level 1 trauma center, because every HOA-board meeting is going to end in a gunfight.
Meanwhile, in the back of the bus. …
August 12, 2019
Have we got a job for you. …
Bus we mus’? Maybe not.
The two companies ’Burque has dealt with while trying to improve its mass-transit system are facing charges that they failed to follow through on their end of wage-and-benefit deals, according to The New York Times.
BYD we’ve discussed before. Now New Flyer, the outfit the Duke City turned to after its deal with BYD wound up on blocks, faces a fraud complaint in California.
Says the Times:
In a 2012 proposal to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for an order of up to 900 buses, New Flyer said it would create more than 50 full-time positions that paid $11 to nearly $50 an hour.
New Flyer won the contract, worth about $500 million. But the company did not pay the wages it said it would and misrepresented the value of the benefits it was providing, according to pay stubs and corporate reports recently unsealed in the fraud case.
“It was a commitment — it matters,” said Madeline Janis, the executive director of Jobs to Move America, the nonprofit group that filed the complaint against New Flyer in California state court. “This case is about holding a huge company’s feet to the fire. … They make deals with public agencies and promise whatever, and think they don’t have to follow through.”
Is it just me, or does the invisible hand of the free market seem to spend a lot of time jerking off the rubes?
Meanwhile, in the Course of human events. …
July 20, 2019
“Don’t tread on me … especially with those knobby tires.”
Herself and I were out for our morning constitutional when we rolled up on this lollygagger here.
Gopher snake? Bullsnake? Beats me. I check for rattles, and if I don’t see any, I go all like, “Ooo, cool-lookin’ snake.”
This vagrant wasn’t loitering in a median, soliciting contributions, though the practice retains the usual protections, no matter what (or if) Trudy Jones thinks. And in fairly short order he (or she) had drawn quite a throng of admirers — two cyclists, a roofer, and a gent with two kids in his truck.
After a while, the roofer persuaded the snake — without resort to cops, courts, fines, or confinement — to abandon the right of way for safety’s sake. And we all — cyclists, family, roofer and reptile — went back to enjoying Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
‘What boots it,’ indeed
July 17, 2019
These boots are made for earning.
In the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Michael LaPointe muses at some length on “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” as performed by the literati.
Following his examination of two recent books arguing for “walking’s invigorating literary power” and capacity for resistance to “the desire of those in power that we should participate in growing the GDP … as well as the corporate desire that we should consume as much as possible and rest whenever we aren’t doing so,” LaPointe wonders whether, for the writer, walking to work is really nothing more than another day at the office, albeit a larger, airier one.
And he poses the question: “What would it mean, for once, simply to walk and say nothing about it?”
What it would mean, Michael old sock, is that you would not get paid.
“Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet. …
Recycling is the new golf
July 2, 2019
You oughta see the rough. Photo nicked from John Terhune | AP
Fanta Se plans to irrigate its golf courses with drinking water. Apparently Bonterra hasn’t been able to supply enough organic Chardonnay.
Curb your enthusiasm
June 1, 2019
It was one of those days. First we saw the hare; then we saw the tortoise. They weren’t racing, though.
Herself noticed this armored gent during our ride through High Desert this morning, and I inquired whether he knew Mitch McConnell.
“That asshole,” he replied. “Fuck that guy. He’s a snake on his mother’s side, you know. Gives us all a bad name.”
