Steven Spielberg with his trademark boiling clouds ain’t got nothin’ on the real deal.
I’m glad I saw this before Darth Cheeto’s “press conference” yesterday. Otherwise I might have thought it was God coming down to dick-punch us all for putting this two-bit totalitarian in the Oval Office.
Sure puts the “dick” in “dictator,” doesn’t he?
• Editor’s note: As the year winds down, I’m taking a page from the mainstream-media playbook and reprinting a handful of this year’s “Mad Dog Unleashed” columns from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. Today’s final finger was published in December, the last issue of 2016.
The gang views with alarm in cinematic fashion.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
— “Stuck In the Middle,” by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan
By Patrick O’Grady
The day after the election a young reader emailed to say he hoped I would have a safe trip to New Zealand, adding, “With any luck we will not hear from you or the Clinton’s ever again.”
I feel confident calling him “young” because we olds know the difference between the plural and the possessive. Public school vs. home school, don’t you know.
As to whether he’s a “reader,” that’s an educated guess. I suppose his mom could have read him my column down in the basement, if he had one. A mom, I mean. Trailers don’t have basements.
But I digress.
Anyway, I’m not moving to New Zealand. Who wants a job herding hobbits? (Apologies to Hurben.) I’ll stay here, brush the fur on my own toes, and wait for the next wizard to pop round.
Mars is out, too. I’ve seen “The Martian” since that last column and I am definitely not into farming with my own poo. Better to sell it to some publisher and spend the proceeds at the Whole Paycheck, where everything is grown in unicorn milk and honey.
OK, for anyone out there who still thinks I’m smart, despite my regular protests to the contrary, here’s something that’s certain to clear up any and all confusion on that topic.
Herself bounds in from the garage the other day to announce that the overhead lights are not coming on when she pulls into her side of the two-car garage. Now, mind you, this is a brand-spankin’-new garage-door system, freshly installed back in May, and it does everything for you save park the car, open the driver’s-side door, and fetch in the groceries.
The hardware includes motion sensors and heat detectors, thermometers and clocks, the works. It’ll even text your smartphone to let you know if a garage door opens without your permission in case you’re worried about evildoers making off with your potting soil.
No more darkness, no more night.
But now the damn’ lights don’t come on. I don’t remember them ever coming on, truth be told, but I rarely drive, and when I do it’s always during daylight hours.
So I go out there and punch a few buttons on the control panel, like a curious hominid casually swatting a few rocks with a thigh bone, and nothing happens.
Next I start thumbing through the owner’s manual, which like most owner’s manuals is stupendously useless.
Finally I go online to find that the customer-support side of the company’s website is even more useless than the owner’s manual.
By this point I’m working up a pretty stout sense of having been poked in the peaches, and so I grab my smartphone and dial the handy 800 number, thinking I might ameliorate the swelling pain in my ass by sharing it with an unsuspecting technical-support representative.
Ho, ho, etc.
After 10 minutes on hold I’m at full boil. Steam is fountaining out of my ears. Herself has retreated to her office with an adult beverage, and the other critters have all scrambled to safety under various large pieces of furniture.
“Fuck this shit!” I announce to the nobody who is listening, hang up, grab a flashlight, and march back out into the now-totally-dark garage to see if I can break something.
Both cars are parked inside, naturally, it being nighttime, so I open the passenger door in my Subaru and use the rocker panel as an impromptu stepladder in order to get a closer look at my garage-door opener.
Neither the owner’s manual nor the customer-support site tells you how to crack the door-opener’s case to inspect its innards for bum sockets or failed logic boards, and I don’t see any screws to unscrew or clips to unclip, so I’m looking around for a fucking thigh bone or a goddamn rock with which to get prehistoric on the sonofabitch when through the ventilation slots I spot … what appears to be a light socket with no bulb in it.
Ditto for the other side.
And for the two sockets on the other opener.
Four 60-watt bulbs later the garage lights come on, just like when you open the door to a Samsung refrigerator and it catches fire.
Now repeat after me: I will never be smart.
The weatherman expects welcome moisture through the weekend before the inevitable warming and drying trend resumes.
The so-called monsoons have been washing away the memory of a too-hot July as August heads for the barn.
Mornings are nice and cool — just 61 at the moment — and the afternoon highs have been topping out in the upper 70s, with the rains rolling in around dinnertime. This is hard to beat, I don’t mind telling you.
Also hard to beat is Ronald McDonald McTrump, mostly because he has that pesky Secret Service detail frisking everyone for blackjacks, ax handles and baseball bats. Agent Orange just keeps bouncing around the country from rally to rally, not so much campaigning as entertaining, which makes me wonder whether he’s really after the presidency. Could he instead be pursuing some sort of honky media empire based on the WWF/WWE model of raising a fine crop of money in a carefully tended bed of fresh bullshit?
Think about it. As Stephen K. Miller noted over at National Review back in April, “Pro wrestling’s biggest stage was where Donald Trump the political populist was born.”
In pro wrestling you have good guys, bad guys and crooked referees. Nicknames abound (Little Marco, Macho Man, Lyin’ Ted, Jake the Snake). Everyone knows the game is rigged, but who cares? It’s showtime, baby!
God knows there’s not much to watch down at Konrad’s Kountry Klavern these days. They could use a little uplifting Christian entertainment. The teevee’s full to bustin’ with mud people, Jews, homos, trannies and smarties (they’re the worstest). Where are Joe Friday and Bill Gannon, Ozzie and Harriet, Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio? (OK, so that was just a little gay.)
You’ll know I was right if at the first debate El Trumpo body-slams the Hilldebeast, Megyn Kelly smacks Gwen Ifill with a folding chair, and money rains down from the ceiling. Katie bar the door!
The 2016 pestilential election is turning into one of the less-than-hilarious Monty Python sketches.
“You’ve got a nice representative democracy here, citizen.”
“Yes.”
“We wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. …”
“What?”
Even the dumbest casino guy knows a Smith & Wesson beats four aces.
What indeed. Ronald McDonald McTrump has clearly let the fat in his fast-food diet go straight to his head, where a .25-caliber brain struggles to govern a .50-caliber mouth.
I wonder what his Secret Service detail thinks about his quip about a Second Amendment solution to a president’s constitutionally derived authority (Article 2, Section 2) to nominate judges, given that their colleagues protect the other candidate for the job.
The candidate whose back Der Trumpenführer just decorated with a red-white-and-blue bullseye.
Yes, I shot it through the windshield. No cyclists were harmed in the making of this image,
“Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse.” — Jim Harrison, “Going Places”
We had a rest day in Le Tour on Monday, and Tuesday’s stage looked like a snoozer, so I abruptly decided to get the hell out of the scorching Duke City for a short road trip, the idea being to scout out a post-Interbike tour.
Mister Boo requires a bit of oversight, and I don’t like to impose on the neighbors, who have other things to do besides baby-sit a geriatric dog, so I wanted to keep my excursion short and sweet. Salida, I thought. Good cycling town, serviceable eats, haven’t visited in a while, not too far away.
Naturally, as soon as I pulled the trigger on the hotel room, the Hayden Pass fire erupted.
I will never be smart.
Not exactly the Battle of the Bulge, was it? Unless you count the bulges at the portly patriots’ American-flag belt buckles.
Could the Battle of the Budgies be coming to a peaceful resolution?
The Oregonian reports that the last holdouts at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are ready to give themselves up, and that their patron saint, Cliven Bundy, was snatched up in Portland and faces charges from the 2014 debacle that triggered this whole clusterfuck.
Perhaps as they continue to enjoy the hospitality of the State at another venue these small fellows can take solace from a Longfellow, translating Friedrich von Logau:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.
Well, it’s morning in Albuquerque, anyway.
“Morning in America?” Maybe not.
Ed Kilgore at Political Animal sure wasn’t impressed by last night’s GOP beauty pageant (examine his six-part LiveBlog series).
Charles P. Pierce opines that the “debates” were a further demonstration that the field has gone full hotpants-and-pushup-bra and now they’re just haggling over the price. The GOP “should be torn down and replaced by a good, honest brothel,” notes Brother Pierce.
The New York Times has a “How the Candidates Fared” lowlights piece, adding that Trump stole the show with “an antic performance.”
Steve Benen at The MaddowBlog calls Hillary the big winner.
And me? In the end, I decided not to try to watch the thing. It would have required some shenanigans, since we don’t have cable, and I didn’t want to give Fox the eyeballs.
But I’m considering ringing up Queen Elizabeth and asking whether it’s too late for us to say we’re sorry and can we come home please? If it weren’t for the whole potato-famine thing I’d have been on the phone first thing this morning.
Jeebus. I bet you’d get a bigger crowd for a pig roast at a PETA rally.
Drink the Kool-Aid
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