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.
I’ve seen it twice now, at the NPR website and in the AARP Bulletin, so it must be true: Allergy season is getting worse.
(I’ve also seen it in our Kleenex consumption, if you’re looking for empirical evidence.)
The gist of it is that warmer temperatures mean your sneezing starts earlier in the spring and lasts longer come fall. And the hotter the climate, the bigger the pollen output.
“This is another unintended consequence of climate change that hasn’t been explored that much,” says Allison Steiner, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. “It has a big impact on human health.”
Warmer and drier also means more fires, and we have several going on at the moment, the worst of them down at Ruidoso. The McBride Fire has taken more than 200 homes and at least two lives, and thousands are under evacuation orders. There was zero containment as of last night.
“But it’s not even fire season yet!” you exclaim. You’re looking at last year’s calendar, Hoss.
We have visitors again. At least I don’t have to cook for this lot. Our back yard is their commissary. Also, their latrine.
They finally got on the neighbors’ last nerve the other day, waltzing in through an open gate and noshing on some choice bits of this and that, so we’re beefing up perimeter security here in the cul-de-sac.
This will require blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Also, probably, money. A mule deer can sail over an 8-foot barrier if there’s something to eat on the other side. We don’t have any 9-foot barriers handy, so in hopes of avoiding a pricey trip to Lowe’s we’re trying to dazzle ’em with bullshit. What the hell, it works on people.
Meanwhile, the deer had a high old time, strolling around the neighbors’ terraced gardens, leaping back and forth across our shared wall, and chasing each other around and about like very large hooved puppies. We should’ve shot some video — video cameras we got in spades — but we were having too much fun watching.
Gilbert Gottfried, one of the least predictable comics ever, has left the stage. He was 67.
The family says only that he died “after a long illness,” though his publicist told The Washington Post that the cause was complications of muscular dystrophy. I thought he seemed unwell (or at least ill at ease) in Neil Berkeley’s “Gilbert,” a look at the comic’s other life as a family man circa 2017.
The dude never saw a line he wouldn’t cross, and it cost him occasionally. But he kept crossing them, and at the 2001 Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner, when boos and cries of “Too soon!” spurred Gottfried to pivot from a 9/11 bit to a particularly vile take on the inside joke captured in “The Aristocrats” documentary, it reminded everyone who was in charge here — the little fella with the big voice.
“OK. A talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. …”
“It was arguably the dirtiest roast the Friars had ever done,” said roastmaster Jeff Ross, who knows from filth, believe you me.
But Gottfried’s bit was more than just a dirty joke — OK, so, more like a filthy, grotesque, eye-popping juggernaut of preposterous vulgarity — it was a joyous, raucous reminder that some scumbag may be able to take your life, but only you can let one take your laughter.
I still can’t watch that bit without heehawing like a donkey. What a gift Gilbert Gottfried gave us.
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