In a continuation of its on-going strategy to become the global innovation leader in the bicycle-comedy market, Mad Dog Media (BIT: EM, E) today announced that its Biting the Hand That Feeds Us/Inside Jokes segment has launched a multi-faceted Worldwide Centers of Obfuscation program.

“Our vision is to create the most innovative and admired company in the bicycle-comedy marketplace, and to become a global leader, which is why the Mad Dog Media segment was established in the first place,” said Patrick O’Grady, Chief Cur and Head Hound of MDM’s Relentlessly Lampooning MarketSpeak® segment. “The strategy for transforming that vision into reality requires a unified, collaborative, and highly engaged workforce, relentlessly committed to innovation and supported by management in rapidly advancing the quality of the products and services we deliver.”

Toward that end, O’Grady said, he would be laying himself off effectively immediately and offshoring all cycling cartoons and commentary to a one-eyed goatherder with a closed head injury in Waxedstringandatincaninstan.

“I mean, hell, why not?” added O’Grady. “I’m too expensive. I need a whole bunch of shiny stuff and a roof to keep the rain off it, three hots and a cot, and top-shelf liquor. Plus I’ve spent the past three decades trying to learn how to write, but I just can’t make this sort of shit up — not sober, anyway. Maybe Abu bin Popeye can.”

The news is too depressing to merit comment, so I shut down the MacBox briefly to install a new-used AGP video card to deliver the evil tidings faster, and on two monitors at once. I will never be smart.

Truth to tell, this is part of the reason I’m reluctant to pull the trigger on a new Mac — this old G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac is absurdly easy and cheap to expand. I scored it for the cost of shipping from the offices of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News in California some years back, and since have added a 1.1GHz processor upgrade, a DVD burner, an Airport wireless card, a second internal hard drive, a four-port USB 2.0 card, 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video card, which replaces an ATI Rage 128 Pro and thus brings my video capabilities up to, oh, 2002 or thereabouts.

The old beast even has a Zip drive, in case I need to tap some of my archived wisdom from the previous millennium, and a brand-new 250GB external HD for saving the latest and greatest brain droppings — including the entire boot volume, which gets copied over every week using SuperDuper!

Maybe tinkering with this dinosaur is my penance for being a complete retard in junior-high shop, where I couldn’t even forge a suitable cold chisel. Or for skipping auto shop in high school. Or for buying that 1978 Toyota Chinook pop-top camper, which had all the positive qualities of being trapped in an elevator with Glenn Beck.

Whatever. All I know is this hot-rodded Sawtooth from 1999 is still running on the original drive, unlike a certain newish MacBook I could mention. A guy could get a hernia fetching the 10-ton sonofabitch around from coffee shop to Internet café, but as Boris the Bullet Dodger once noted in the Guy Ritchie film “Snatch”: “Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn’t work you can always hit them with it.”

Late update: Good God, it’s snowing again. I am so moving to Arizona. Maybe I can get a gig chauffeuring Big Jonny from barstool to law school.

. . . there’s no intelligent life down here. Scotty? Scotty. …

Well, dammit, it can’t be Indian summer forever, I guess. Never got much above the upper 30s today, with a light rain tamping down the dust under a sky as gray as a Repuglican’s face on Election Day 2008.

I hung around indoors, taking care of a few electronic chores, then finally said to hell with it around 3 p.m. and went out for a short run into a cold wind out of the north. This reminded me that Herself had pulled our old-school storm doors out of their basement hideaway and I had not yet put them up, nor had I removed our rattly $99 Sears air conditioner from the north-facing bedroom window and replaced it with the storm window.

The storm doors are a breeze — five minutes with a flathead screwdriver is all it takes to replace screens with glass. The air conditioner was another thing altogether. I couldn’t remember how I installed the damn’ thing (badly), so uninstalling it was an exercise in feline entertainment as the sun began to set. As the cats watched with great interest (“What the hell is he doing now?“) I managed to drop the air conditioner straight out of the window and onto the back deck, bam, cutting the shit out of my right wrist as I tried, unsuccessfully, to save the worthless piece of crap from the death it so richly deserved for waking me up night after night during summertime with its burbling, farting and keening.

I will never be smart. But at least I’ll be warm.

Editor’s note: Don’t forget the old site. It’s still numero uno around here until I decide whether this is the Wave of the Future or merely a ripple on the stagnant pond of my mind. You wrote today’s post, about how to deal with the wolf at the door during the Great Recession.