C’mon. You knew it was coming.
USA Triathlon announces a gravel tri series.
Boy, the swim leg is gonna be a bitch.
Don’t forget your helmet
Category: Casual snark
Trails, please, and hold the tears
I’ve been in something of a metaphorical rut lately, bikewise, so today I thought I’d get in an actual rut as a change of pace.
The Voodoo Nakisi and I took the foothills trails south to the Hilldale Loop and back, and real, physical ruts there were aplenty. I hadn’t been down that way since November 2021, and it seems weather and traffic have done some remodeling in my absence.
when you really need it.
The weather was brisk, and there weren’t a lot of people out and about, which was fine. The trails and I were getting reacquainted, and we’re both old enough to do without chaperones. Nobody needs to see me busting a move, especially if it ends with a busted bone.
My attention has been known to wander, and occasionally I find myself riding the trail in my mind, not the one under my wheels. This caused me to perform a trick dismount once in Bibleburg’s Palmer Park, when the mental and physical trails differed by a couple crucial meters after some unheralded renovations by the trail fairies. The bike went down, but I did not.
Today I kept the pace moderate and the autopilot off, and my miscues left neither paint nor DNA behind. I have an appointment with the dermatologist coming up and I don’t need any quips about leaving skin removal to the professionals.
Speaking of getting skinned, here’s hoping that the Jan. 6 committee gets to hang a big, greasy, orange hide on its wall now that the Supremes have declined to pull The Very Stable Genius’s fat out of the fire he started.
Ordinarily I don’t approve of trophy hunting, but some heads just beg to be mounted. The National Archives taxidermist better have all of his shots and a hazmat suit.
A Monday mooning
A few observations under the Wolf Moon:
• A Puck in the gob. The Albquerque Journal has a little piece on my favorite political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, who spent 60 years pantsing the powerful before failing eyesight finally pushed him away from the drawing board. I met Oliphant in the Seventies, when the Fine Arts Center in Bibleburg hosted an exhibition of his work. He was very gracious to a dumbass hippie kid who claimed he was a cartoonist too, enduring a bit of grilling and even volunteering a few tips.
• Dave’s not here. Hal Walter’s dad, Dave, recently passed away. The two had had their differences over the years, as fathers and sons often do (see O’Grady, Harold and Patrick), but Hal took a moment to remember the good times with the man who introduced him to the great outdoors.
• And The Biggest Midget in the Room Award goes to. … The Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame. Every niche needs its shiny object, I guess. But if you can get to it via paved road it’s bullshit.
Piss on the dogs and call in the fire
What’s that ominous rumble? O buggah — it’s the Trane XR80 roaring to hideous life astride the cooling carcass of summer.
Mid-October is a wee bit early for this sort of thing. But these are strange times, and getting stranger by the minute.
Captain Kirk rode one of Jeffy Bozos’ dick-missiles to the edge of space yesterday and returned to tell us all how glorious it is to be a wealthy white man with friends in high places. A first-class ticket for Aer Dingus is just one more thing you can’t afford, suckers. Now get back to work.
“Live long and prosper,” murmur the Vulcans. But they’re being ironic, as usual.
Either that or they’re talking to the Vogons, whose Constructor Fleet should be popping round to start work on that hyperspatial express route any day now.
Resistance is useless!
The Farce is with you
“I felt a great disturbance in The Farce, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.” — Mark Zuckerberg, Jedi Not
All those delicate eggs in Facebutt’s inexplicably unraveling basket. Has anybody pulled in the Easter Bunny for questioning? Just what is it he does between Easters, anyway?
In its coverage, The New York Times observes:
The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger have long been more than handy tools for chatting and sharing photos. They are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns, responding to emergencies and much, much more.
Pardon my smirk, but the only reason these “services” have become “essential” is because the rubes, marks, and suckers have made them so. Some of us limp along just fine without them.
I croaked all my social-media accounts long ago and I don’t even pop round to piss on their graves, that’s how little I think about Buttface, Twatter, and the rest of ’em. Hideous time-sucks that encourage humans to indulge their every whim, no matter how grotesque.
Convenience is not always your friend. Convenience leaves you with Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks after the mom-and-pop corner stores are gone. Anybody remember AOL? Email, messaging, browsing, website hosting, chat rooms, etc., all under the same leaky roof. O, the howling when that dog decided for one reason or another that it would not hunt when you whistled it up.
Some of us eventually built our own website(s) elsewhere, set up any number of email accounts, used Netscape for web browsing, and so on and so forth. More fiddly, but more rewarding, too.
I did use AIM for instant messaging when Netscape and AOL teamed up for that project. What the hell, it was convenient.
Mad Blog Media 