The tulips popped up the other day, just in time to catch a good old-fashioned spring soaking, our first in many a moon.
Yay! It’s Tax Day, my favoritest holiday ever, just ahead of National Polka Festival Day and George W. Bush’s birthday.
Naturally, I don’t concern myself with taxes, being an arteest rather than an accountant. But Herself, who serves as Mad Dog Media’s Custodian of Records, advises me that the State of Colorado screwed the pooch on our return, sending us a refund check for $199 when in fact we owed $24 and had sent them a check for same.
Goldurned gummint can’t get nothin’ right. Where’s m’tea-bag hat? I feel a protest comin’ on. ‘Specially after reading this Mother Jones piece about how tax-prep outfits scam the poor.
There is at least a partial solution to be found in one Coloradan’s complaint about the rising cost of fuel. See if you can find it:
For drivers such as Robert Wagner, 51, a high school teacher from Thornton, Colo., the higher fuel costs mean cutting back on movies and dinners out for him, his wife and their two children. “We’re very, very frugal right now,” he said as he trickled enough $3.09-per-gallon gasoline into his Chevrolet Suburban to get him to his next pay day.
Now try to figure out who will get the blame for this appalling state of affairs. Will it be (a) auto-motoring Americans who insist on surrounding themselves with more armor plating than a phalanx of Middle Ages knights aboard Percherons, or (2) a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist richly deserving of impeachment?
Turkish, our local version of the IWW Sabo-Cat, takes a Labor Day break from his duties, whatever those might be.
Holiday, schmoliday. I had to work this morning. Not very hard, or for very long, but still.
The prez was working, too, calling for a $50 billion public works plan that seems to have absolutely no hope of coming to fruition before the Congresscritters scurry home, running like rats for re-election, proving yet again that they care more about whether they stay employed than whether we do.
Kevin Drum, another poor sod at the keyboard instead of the grill, is dismissive of the proposal, calling it “too small to be more than a pinprick.” Steve Benen speaks more gently of the plan, saying “it’s good to have lawmakers put on the spot before the election, taking a position on sensible, effective economic proposals like this one.” He also reminds us that Rep. John Boehner (R-Tanning Salon) is an idiot.
And Paul Krugman, drawing parallels with FDR’s situation in 1938, moans that “politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes.”
He adds: “And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.”
True dat, Paul old sock. Buckle up, folks, it’s gonna be a rough ride.
• Late update: To celebrate Labor Day Herself and I attended an Arlo Guthrie concert — yes, thatArlo Guthrie — right here in Bibleburg; in fact, only a few blocks from Chez Dog, in a park behind the Fine Arts Center. He didn’t do “Alice’s Restaurant,” but he did sing the great Steve Goodman tune, “City of New Orleans,” “The Motorcycle Song,” his fabled Woodstock number “Coming Into Los Angeles,” a couple of Leadbelly bits and (of course) his old man’s“This Land Is Your Land.” We sang along, a few thousand elderly hippies plus a few young folks who must have grown weary of their generation’s “stupid fucking tuneless horseshit,” as Thomas McGuane has accurately described it. It was great. “Take a good look around, Toots,” I told Herself as we strolled in. “This is what my nursing home is gonna look like.” Arlo must have been thinking along similar lines. At one point he quipped, “I’m what’s left of me.” Me, too, bruh. And I wasn’t even at Woodstock. At least, I don’t think I was. …
Oh, the tangled web we weave when spending cuts we first perceive.
Not us. Herself is downstairs working and I’m upstairs goofing off, enjoying the fracas from a distance. My idea of a good time is not playing Australian rules football with a bunch of bargain-hunters in a Best Buy at four o’clock in the morning.
Mind you, I like to shop. It’s often more fun and less disappointing than actually buying something. But I usually root around online for quite a while, checking specs and weighing options, before marching down to some local shop to lay hands on the product and finally slap down the plastic. Or not.
Here’s a case in point. I have authorization from Herself to buy a new Mac, but haven’t done so. How come?
Well, it’s that natural contrariness rearing its ugly head again. The Black Turtleneck Mob in Cupertino isn’t selling exactly what I want to buy, which is an affordable, accessible consumer tower model like my old G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, simple to fix and/or upgrade, but sporting modern hardware and software.
There’s the Mac Pro, but at $2,499 I’d hardly call it affordable, especially since it ships with a measly 3 GB of RAM and no Airport Express card. You want to double the first and add the last, tack on another $200.
OK, how about those nifty iMacs? Not sure I’d like working full time on a glossy screen. My 13.3-inch MacBook has one, and it can be irksome to see my ugly mug staring back at me as I cook up another bouillabaisse of bullshit for fun and profit. Plus all its ports are in the ass-end of the thing. WTF?
New MacBook? Got an old one, thanks, from 2006 and in a manly black (I dislike pasty white computers). MacBook Pro? No separate audio in/out ports on the new 13-incher, which seems to offer the most bang per buck, and no user-removable batteries on any of ’em. Plus I already have more laptops than Cheney’s closet does skeletons. As daily drivers go, they and the multiplicity of cables to peripherals required eat up a lot of desktop space, which irks the cats, who like to use my desk as a springboard to the window for reasons known only to themselves.
Mini? Another Mac I can’t crack, and it seems underpowered, if nicely priced.
And then there’s that voice, only one of many in my head, but among the most insistent, which keeps whispering, “You work in a subset of journalism, a craft with all the future of a Conestoga repairman in Manhattan.”
So instead of greening up my Black Friday with a new Mac, I’ve gotten myself a tad more computing horsepower by hooking up the MacBook to my 22-inch ViewSonic. The G4 tower now serves mostly as storage space, three drives’ worth, accessible wirelessly through my DSL modem-router combo. But I’ll also use it to scan and color cartoons, since it has an ancient yet serviceable version of Photoshop (another $500 goes unspent).
This probably won’t fly come July, if I’m still helping VeloNews.com push pixels during Le Tour. But it ain’t July.
• Late update: Reading the Gaslight‘s latest coverage of the first official shopping day of the holiday season (suck it, you out-of-Focus fucktards), it’s sad to note that while the G found it worthwhile to report from big boxes on Powers and Academy boulevards, in Woodland Park and in Castle Rock, they didn’t bother to send anyone downtown — which is about a mile away from Gaslight HQ. Maybe they’re afraid of ice falling from the USOC HQ, but I can’t see this lot being scared of a head injury, considering where they keep their brains. And they wonder why both the newspaper and downtown are struggling.
Lance Armstrong says he's excited about his three-year association with Michelob Ultra, because it complements his active lifestyle by injecting it with a shitload of money.
Just think — if Bristol Brewing made worse beer and more money, they could have Lance Armstrong as their celebrity spokesperson.
Instead, the former Shiner Bock drinker will be pimping Michelob Ultra, one of the jillions of brands belonging to industry titan InBev, and a concoction described as “a great-tasting beer with lower carbohydrates and fewer calories.”
Uh huh. I haven’t sampled an Anheuser-Busch product in many a moon, since I discovered what actual beer tastes like. But I suppose that given the proper incentive — a Brinks truck full of greenbacks and free Michelob Ultra backing up to the house every Friday — I could learn to lower my standards, too.
As a much younger dog I would drink pretty much anything as long as it was cheap — Falstaff, Buckhorn, longneck Buds. But as it is written in 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Including watery beer.
In my dotage, I favor IPA from Bristol, Lagunitas or Second Street Brewing in Santa Fe, when I happen to be in town. Anchor Steam or Anchor Porter. Guinness, of course. And the Deschutes beers are all excellent, whether you’re talking ale, porter or stout. I’d recommend any of them for free.
In fact, I just did. No wonder I remain so distressingly unwealthy. I will never be smart.
• Extra-credit snark: This is not Anheuser-Busch’s first marketing coup, of course. More Americans can recognize the Budweiser Clydesdales than can find Afghanistan on a map. I recall enjoying a semantic analysis of the original Budweiser jingle in college. Don’t recall if it was in journalism class or semantics, but the gist of it was that the jingle said absolutely nothing about the beer — it was a series of empty statements punctuated with references to Anheuser-Busch trademarks.
Think about it for a second:
“When you say ‘Bud,” you’ve said a lot of things nobody else can say.” (That’s because ‘Bud” is a trademark.)
“When you say ‘Bud,’ you say you care enough to only drink the King of Beers.” (“King of Beers,” another trademark.)
“There is no other one.” (One what?)
“There’s only something less.” (Than what?)
“Because the King of Beers . . .” (That trademark again.)
“. . . is leading all the rest.” (Of what?)
“When you say Budweiser — you’ve said it all.” (The complete name, which is also a trademark.)
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