The hummers and quail are lightening the mood around here.
The hummingbirds are back. And this looks just like an Audubon photo of one, the same way I look just like Jason Statham if you see me backlit at sunset, from the other side of a four-lane street with a sizable median. It’s possible that you left your specs in the pub after a half-dozen boilermakers, a vicious beating, and perhaps a stroke.
The grasses in Elena Gallegos Open Space are an ominous shade of tan.
It’s been a quiet week around El Rancho Pendejo. Herself just got her second Plague-B-Gon booster and is recovering nicely after enduring a sore arm and some drowsiness.
As for Your Humble Narrator, despite relentless seasonal allergies exacerbated by smoke-laden afternoon breezes I found the weather stellar for cycling. Actual tan lines are in evidence. I managed 105 miles last week and would be on track to repeat that this week if I hadn’t veered off road three times, twice on the bike and once on foot.
When riding trail I strive mightily to avoid nicking any trailside rocks with a pedal. One good spark in these dry, windy conditions and we’ll be grabbing the go-bags and cat carrier and hightailing it for … for … for where? Is there anyplace that isn’t on fire and/or out of water?
My final tweet, from New Year’s Eve 2017. Didn’t cost me shit.
OK, pop quiz. if you had $44 billion lying around doing not very much you would:
Feed the hungry.
House the homeless.
Buy Twitter.
I guess I get it, kinda, sorta. I mean, I like toys. I just bought a canister stove for my occasional camping adventures; MSR said they didn’t have the bits to modernize my Bronze Age RapidFire, then offered me 30 percent off on a new burner. So, ’ray for MSR and for me.
But Twitter? Maybe Elon has the bits to fix that hot mess, and maybe he doesn’t. He can certainly throw bales of cash at it until he tears a rotator cuff or finds some other shiny object to money-whip until boredom sets in once again.
You’d never know it from this pic, but the whole state of New Mexico seems to be on fire.
Meanwhile, Hal reports snow up to Weirdcliffe. Go figure.
The air has been a little chewy here the past couple of days with 20 or so fires doing the business. But the temps and winds have dipped a tad, and if we could only get just a little bitty bit of what Hal’s getting up north the firefighters (and asthmatics like Your Humble Narrator) might get some breathing room.
Meanwhile, the gov’ has hollered emergency, fires are banned, and fireworks may be next. Sayeth the gov’:
“It’s going to be a tough summer. So that’s why we are banning fires. And that is why on Monday I will be asking every local government to be thinking about ways to ban the sales of fireworks.”
Good luck with that. The Stupid is strong among our people, and if they can’t get fireworks, well, they’ll just break out the smokepoles and try to shoot down the moon.
On yesterday’s ride I noticed an electronic billboard cycling between judgments: “It’s Miller Time” and “You’re too drive to high.”
Ohhhhhkay. So, it’s fine to pop the top on a(nother) can of watery industrial lager while happily motoring through The Duck! City, but burning one is right out?
In any case, I suspect that if I’d been beered up or baked, I’d have crashed trying to decode that second one. Stone cold sober I nearly careened off the bike path and into the weeds.
Good fences make good neighbors, they say. (Hint: Fences work best if the neighbors keep their gates closed.)
Fences, walls, and gates seem to be keeping deer and Russians out of the yard. But how do we keep the Russians — along with Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, and the Kardashians, this last a species more invasive than deer, Russians, or kudzu — out of our heads?
A few of us were discussing this via email recently, and I chimed in thusly:
As a lifelong news junkie I hate to say it, but we should all try to pay a little less attention to what they call “news” these days.
Fully half of it is nonsense, and a quarter of it is something we can’t do anything about. The final 25 percent may have some bearing on you and yours, concerning something you can actually get a handle on. It will probably be local news. If you can find any.
What people like me used to call news 40 years ago was still pretty overwhelming on the supply side. We whittled it down and sold it in 24-hour doses, like allergy meds. It could boggle the mind at times, but most folks could take it, learn a little something, form a few defensible opinions.
Now anyone trying to keep up feels like a dog with his head out the window of a hopped-up Honda Civic doing 110 mph coming into the Big I at drunk-thirty on Friday. There’s just too much going on out there for one poor mutt to take in
Imagine my surprise when an industry bigwig agreed with me. Ken Doctor, a media analyst and consultant who is a longtime contributor to Nieman Lab, wrote that he too is trying to fence out the wider world with all its horrors while he focuses on nurturing a startup local news outfit in Santa Cruz, Calif.
I recently talked to an old friend about a project we were working on together. He could hardly engage, so troubled was he by the news from Ukraine. What’s going on in the broader world is bleak, more than enough to depress and deflate us. I’ve put all that in the back of my head because I have little time or room to address national or global issues on which I can have little impact. I’ve been working on Lookout now for more than three years, and it’s the hardest, most consuming thing I’ve done in a 47-year career. But as I, and my peers, focus fiercely on rebuilding our little parts of the planet, we focus on what we can change.
Well. Just goes to show you even a dumb dog can dig up a moldy Milk-Bone now and then, if he can just keep the deer and the Kardashians out of his yard.
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