Man, the smoke around here last night was wicked — we had to close all the windows to keep the house from smelling like a Cub Scout campfire.
Now a slurry bomber has crashed, grounding the fleet, and the fire folks are using helicopters instead. Lovely.
And the VeloNews.com website has developed some sort of hiccup just in time for me to clock in. Is this Monday or Sunday?
Today I did something out of the ordinary — I rode my mountain bike. And in an even more startling departure from the norm, I rode it in Cheyenne Mountain State Park.
What can I tell you? I was sick of my usual rides and got all Monty Python on my bad self (“And now for something completely different. …”).
It feels wrong to write about this place again, because this park continues to be largely undiscovered. In two and a half hours of riding I encountered two hikers, four mountain bikers and one extremely hard individual who was running the trails with a large rucksack and ski poles. It ain’t exactly I-25 at rush hour, is what I’m sayin’ here.
My outing took in Zook Loop, Sundance, Talon, North and South Talon and Blackmer Loop, and oh, man, was it ever fun, despite my minimal and rusty skills. I may not be the world’s worst mountain biker, but will do until he (or she) shows up.
I middle-ringed pretty much everything until machismo proved to be stupidissimo — a guy with the right legs and medical plan can ride quite a few of these trails on a cyclo-cross bike — and then I became one with the Tao of the Little Ring. Nobody’s watching, so there was no one to impress.
My park pass ($6 at the gate) is good until noon tomorrow, so I may just dash out there again. After all, I only heard the one rattlesnake, and the bears, bobcats and mountain lions apparently are on vacation.
Anybody have any thoughts on Gen. Stanley McChrystal?
On first glance, the dude seems like a gen-yoo-wine ass-kicking samurai cross-bred with the kind of political general who has the shrunken yellow heart of a REMF but likes to dress up as G.I. Joe. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to fight him, but neither would I care to follow him into anything more dangerous than a briefing room.
A casual Google doesn’t turn up much in the way of a real combat record, and the much-hyped Rolling Stone story sure doesn’t answer many questions. It paints him as some class of Zen archer, if Zen archers also happened to be egomaniacs. Col. Walter E. Kurtz comes to mind, as does Julius Caesar. Maybe George Armstrong Custer.
My shoot-from-the-hip observation is that he’s another one of these ivory-tower dudes who has a theory he’d like to prove if you don’t mind contributing a few of your friends, neighbors and family members to the experiment.
Must be fun to be in the White House right about now, eh? Can him or keep him, it’s gonna be nothing but incoming.
• Late update: The Los Angeles Times has failed to distinguish itself on many occasions in recent years, but this aside in a straight news story about the McChrystal contretemps that should display no bias is particularly appalling:
Obama, who has not served in the military, has sought to solidify his status as commander in chief through frequent appearances with troops. Such appearances have sought to convey that he has the confidence of the American military.
Uh huh. No wonder these cocksuckers declined to hire me as a copy editor back in the Eighties, ’cause I would’ve folded that paragraph into a conical shape and shoved it up someone’s ass.
Well, dipshits, like it or not, he is the CINC, and you don’t have to go back very far to find CINCs who liked to be photographed hanging around with the grunts, feeding them plastic turkeys. Let’s hope that this one is less eager to feed them into the meat grinder.
Well, Herself ran away from home today, bound for New Orleans. She claims to be attending a librarians conference, something called “The SLA 2010 Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO,” but Momma O’Grady didn’t raise no fools. I mean, what kind of library outfit would hire James Carville and Mary Matalin as its keynote speakers? Puh-leeze.
I practically invented that really-honey-I’m-working dodge, telling her for years that I was going to Vegas to spend a week covering a bicycle-industry trade show called “Interbike.” And she bought it. Ho, ho. There’s one born every minute, but I ain’t one of ’em, Toots.
So it’s just me and the cats here, enjoying some of the filthiest June weather in recent memory. If it’s not pissing down rain, it’s blowing 40 mph or thereabouts, and sometimes it’s doing both, causing the furnace to click on.
These conditions are not limited to Colorado, by the way — the poor saps racing the Dauphiné Libéré and the Tour de Suisse have had to break out the rain capes. Happily, I do my little bit of business indoors, where’s it’s dry.
Meanwhile, Herself just rang me up and said she can’t find red beans and rice, jambalaya or gumbo at the restaurant she’s supposedly at. Just sushi. She’s not nearly as good at lying through her teeth as I am. Hell, I bet she’s not even in The Big Easy. She’s probably in Vegas.
• Quick, all you librarians — from which work of popular fiction did I steal the headline on this post?
Oy. Busy, busy, busy. Another too-soon BRAIN deadline, a cartoon due for VeloNews, discussions with various VN.com types about the joys of CSS pre-Giro, chats with Adventure Cyclist management about further crimes against cyclo-tourism journalism — neither the rock nor that mountain is getting any smaller. Oh, the humanity.
And then there’s the god damned wind, which is pelting my snout with tree pollen. My skull feels like an overinflated tire on a very rocky road, and not even white dog helps. My backcracker has supplied me with various curative pills and potions but I’m not interested in experimentation until I get past these deadlines. No funny, no money. And then no backcracker.
The good news is, even with pollen-ravaged sinuses, a belly full of moonshine and a comedy well that has very nearly run dry, I’m not as retarded as Republican Dan Fanelli, who hopes to challenge Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) this year. Dude thinks only brown brings the crazy. He should try looking in the fucking mirror. Props to Steve Benen at Political Animal for the tip and the clip.
Mad Blog Media 