And mind you, I thought they were plenty fuckin’ dumb.
So, former FBI director James Comey posts a pix of seashells on a beach arranged to spell “86 47,” the first two digits of which any old retired copy editor knows mean “refuse to serve” and/or “eject or ban.”
And Kristi Kreme, Tulsi Gobshite and Cash Patel get their tactical boxers in a Kevlar bunch and screech that he’s calling for Beelzebozo’s assassination and/or “issuing a hit” on him.
It’s like an unfunny reboot of “Get Smart,” with Mel Gibson at the helm instead of Mel Brooks. Linus had a better security blanket than this.
It’s not the infamous “writer’s block.” The problem is that the only thing I want to write about is all the you-know-what coming from you-know-where.
And isn’t there enough of that sort of thing available pretty much everywhere? Every day? Every second?
I find myself belatedly having some sympathy for the mouth-breathers who squealed like maladjusted brakes whenever my columns would veer off the course laid out in the race bible and careen into the real world. Which, if we’re being brutally honest here, was pretty much all the time.
“Stick to cycling!” they’d wail.
“Everything is political!” I’d bark.
Now I’m just a blogger and don’t have to meet a regular deadline or wrestle with nervous editors, penny-pinching publishers, and illiterate critics.
Too harsh? Hey, I read the letters.
“Go back to waxing your chain, Spanky,” I’d grumble. “Leave writing to the pros.”
These days I write for free, because I like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is likewise free, to fuck off.
Still, I’m not entirely sociopathic. I have you hardcores, my small, deeply disturbed audience, to consider. And I don’t want every single brain-dump here to be of the rancid, greasy, orange variety. There are only so many different ways to say ‘BOHICA!'”
Thing is, to write about anything else feels vaguely criminal. Borderline treasonous. Anyone with a voice, however small, should be sounding off like they have a pair.
What’s a poor mad dog to do?
Well, you may imagine my delight when I stumbled across another scribbler in similar straits. Chuck Wendig is a published author — like, of actual books, an’ shit — and he has a new one due out April 29, “The Staircase in the Woods.”
I first noticed him when The New York Times included “Staircase” in a roundup of 24 new works of fiction to read. Then his name came up again over at Daring Fireball, the free-ranging blog by John Gruber, who promoted this “crackerjack essay” Wendig had written while trying to write about other stuff and promote the new book and basically just live his fucking life.
It’s titled “What It Feels Like, Right Now.” Here’s a sample:
Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.
Top-shelf stuff here, folks. Rage and comedy, despair and hope, the whole ball of wax. Writing as an escape and an act of resistance. Inspirational.
In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately ordered up his new book from my favorite local bookstore, Page 1 Books.
Shit, I’d have given him the $32.29 just for the essay.
Hoo-lawd. Anybody’s portfolio turn into a postcard yet?
In case you’ve missed Paul Krugman, he’s speculating over at Substack that Elon’s Hitler Youth may have cobbled together the tariff scheme using ChatGPT and/or other A.I. models.
In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.
Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.
Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?
Good time to be heavily invested in the knee- and elbow-pad markets.
The ghost bike installed by the Duke City Wheelmen in remembrance of Scott Dwight Habermehl.
“Just bump him, bruh.”
Sounds better than “Gonna hit him hella fast,” doesn’t it?
But the difference was no difference at all to cyclist Scott Dwight Habermehl, who last May was sent flying over the passenger side of a vehicle with three giggling kids in it — ages 15, 13, and 11 — and left fatally injured on the side of the road.
He was 63. Father of two. A Sandia National Labs engineer who was just cycling to work, as he had done for years.
Two of the three kids said to have been in the vehicle that hit him have been arrested, charged with an open count of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, leaving the scene of an accident involving great bodily harm or death, and unlawful possession of a handgun, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The eldest remains at large.
We’ve all been in this neighborhood. I’ve been right-hooked into a parked car; tumbled over the hood of an SUV whose driver passed me only to start executing a leisurely U-turn; narrowly escaped a homicidal trucker on a wide highway shoulder; had a full bottle of beer thrown at me from a speeding vehicle; been threatened with a gun.
The joke among longtime cyclists with a dark streak of humor is that if you want to murder someone without suffering any consequences, wait until your target gets on a bicycle and then hit him with your car.
But it doesn’t seem all that funny when you consider that two of these three suspects were charged — within days of the crash that killed Habermehl — in connection with what the Journal called “a weekslong crime spree that included a smash-and-grab burglary, shootings and auto theft.”
And yet nothing came of it.
The case against the 13-year-old was dismissed in August 2024 “when prosecutors failed to meet court requirements,” the Journal added. It’s not clear what happened to the charges against the 11-year-old.
Maybe prosecutors will “meet court requirements” in this instance, since (a) Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham have weighed in, and (2) we’re not talking about property crime now — this time, a man was sentenced to death by three children for the crime of riding his bicycle to work.
• Video:The Albuquerque Police Department provided this clip from a video said to have been uploaded to the Internets by those involved. APD says this triggered an anonymous tip, a homicide investigation, and what we can only hope will be justice for Scott Dwight Habermehl. Thank Dog for the stupidity of many of our 21st-century criminals. Back in the Day® we knew better than to rat ourselves out.
It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Timesfor its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”
Mad Blog Media 