Thanks to His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered, Despoiler of Poorboxes and Underage Girls, it is now possible for a 71-year-old cyclist with zero upper body to grip $150 worth of groceries in the left hand — yes, the one with the two dislocated digits — while opening the hatch of the Forester with the right.
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
This is the first thing one learns in law school. Or so it seems to me, anyway.
And it dollars up on the hoof right smart, too.
You may think of Jeffrey as just another wrinkled weenie on the roller grill in the Devil’s 7-Eleven, but lawyers have been dining out on him for years, and the feast ain’t over yet.
The lawyers in Congress have demanded that his files be released, and the lawyers in the Justice Department have been (and still are) cherry-picking them with a liberal application of the black Magic Marker, which means the elected ambulance-chasers may bring obstruction-of-justice charges, contempt charges, or even impeachments, which would cause the executive shysters to hire top-shelf mouthpieces of their own, and you didn’t exactly have to be brilliant to see this bullshit coming, though you do have to foot the bill.
Merry Christmas. No, don’t unwrap that box. We’ve got the receipts, but they won’t take it back.
Joe Ely has driven off from Taos, headed west, because of course he was. He was 78.
Pneumonia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson’s did for him, according to The New York Times. It took all three to finally drag the old troubadour off the road.
He was always going places: riding a motorcycle through the halls of his high school; hitching and riding the rails around Texas and the Southwest; covering the earth like a spilt can of Sherwin-Williams. In the photo on his website he’s behind the wheel of a convertible. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.
As Mother Times noted:
He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West. “There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Now and again Ely would hook up with two of his old high-school pals from Lubbock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, performing as The Flatlanders. That on-and-off gig lasted from 1972 until the mid-2000s. He opened for the Clash, becoming friends with Joe Strummer, and wrangled llamas for the Ringling Bros. circus.
Jaysis H., what a life. Other people got famous. Joe Ely lived. Somebody give this boy a ride to heaven.