“Don’t tread on me … especially with those knobby tires.”
Herself and I were out for our morning constitutional when we rolled up on this lollygagger here.
Gopher snake? Bullsnake? Beats me. I check for rattles, and if I don’t see any, I go all like, “Ooo, cool-lookin’ snake.”
This vagrant wasn’t loitering in a median, soliciting contributions, though the practice retains the usual protections, no matter what (or if) Trudy Jones thinks. And in fairly short order he (or she) had drawn quite a throng of admirers — two cyclists, a roofer, and a gent with two kids in his truck.
After a while, the roofer persuaded the snake — without resort to cops, courts, fines, or confinement — to abandon the right of way for safety’s sake. And we all — cyclists, family, roofer and reptile — went back to enjoying Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Don’t let the clouds fool you. That’s steam boiling off my bald noggin.
Seventy-one at 5 a.m. No, not me, the temperature.
And that’s outside, mind you. In the office, it’s 78.
We have at least three days of the roast-a-rama ahead, so it’s ride early or not at all. Hunker down in the air conditioning like we did as kids at Randolph AFB outside San Antone. You were either marinating in poisons and pee at the O-club pool or camped out in front of the Fedders window unit, playing Monopoly. Venture outside and you’d sink into the tarry streets like a dinosaur at La Brea, later to mystify alien archaeologists.
The God of the Tar People, discovered when a skeleton was unearthed by Vulcan archaeologists sometime in the distant future. Historical note: Like many a cartoonist, F.O. Alexander got stiffed for his work drawing characters for Monopoly.
“Chlorine must have been an essential nutrient for these semiaquatic creatures. And their god appears to have been this fellow with the archaic headgear and outlandish facial hair, who seems possessed of astonishing wealth.”
The Masi Speciale Randonneur review for Adventure Cyclist has been shipped, as has the August cartoon for Bicycle Retailer. I’m been thinking not very hard about an episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, but it seems podcasts are so 15 minutes ago, just like blogs. Or phrases like “so 15 minutes ago.”
In other news, Ginger Hitler has taken his song-and-dance routine to another Nuremberg rally, where he debuted a new three-syllable chant (he’s a man of few words, which is to say he only knows a few). A new low? Not for long, according to Kevin Drum at MoJo.
And finally, Le Shew Bigge is heading into the Pyrenees, just in time for Zoom-Zoom Froome — who is absent while recovering from a nasty pre-Tour get-off — to be named champion of the 2011 Vuelta a España after Juan José Cobo rang the Dope-O-Meter®.
Yes, that’s 2011. We’re not all the way back to 1934 yet, but we certainly seem headed in that direction.
In the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Michael LaPointe muses at some length on “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking,” as performed by the literati.
Following his examination of two recent books arguing for “walking’s invigorating literary power” and capacity for resistance to “the desire of those in power that we should participate in growing the GDP … as well as the corporate desire that we should consume as much as possible and rest whenever we aren’t doing so,” LaPointe wonders whether, for the writer, walking to work is really nothing more than another day at the office, albeit a larger, airier one.
And he poses the question: “What would it mean, for once, simply to walk and say nothing about it?”
What it would mean, Michael old sock, is that you would not get paid.
“Ah, fill the Cup:—what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet. …
Behind the garage the sun is working its leisurely way up the east side of the Sandias.
Otro día, otro dolár.
Bicycle Retailer wants a cartoon, and Adventure Cyclist wants reviews. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. All is well, save for … well, you know.
Swear to God, this pendejo is gonna start strolling around with his little orange dingus hanging out, because why not?
Now, the Secret Service doesn’t have anything to fear from me, because I am renowned as a man of peace. But if some itty bitty brown woman with an interest in MMA were to start slapping all the rabies out of Orange Julius Caesar on CNN at prime time, well, I’d probably watch.
Speaking of spectacles, I am not watching Le Tour, though I check in from time to time via Cyclingnews or The Guardian. However, friends are over in Frogland for a closer look at La Grande Boucle.
One couple recently relocated from ’Burque to Lyon, which enjoyed a ride-by during stage eight, from Mâcon to Saint-Étienne. Another is just visiting, but I forget which stage they get to see. One more than me, I expect.
As far as I know, neither couple is motoring around in a Citroën 2CV. But they could be.
No joke. A couple hours after Monday’s short run and a bit of light resistance training I found myself in the hurt locker, with big pain in the right hip and a limp that would have done credit to a drunken pirate with a poorly made peg leg navigating a wet deck in heavy seas.
IT band? Hip flexor? Psoas? I suspect the latter, because I’d been having some low-grade back issues a couple of days previous. Anyway, being manly, and also stupid, I rode on Tuesday, and felt kinda-sorta OK on the bike, but not so much off it.
So I prescribed myself a couple days of rest, some ibuprofen, and a hefty dose of work on my Masi Speciale Randonneur review for Adventure Cyclist.
Just because I will never be smart doesn’t mean I have to keep being stupid.
The good news is, all this drew my attention away from the news, which is taking on overtones of a Jeffrey Dahmer-Ted Bundy buddy pic scripted by Josef Mengele and directed by the Marquis de Sade. That Dealie McDealio is up to his saggy man-boobs in some of the worst of it should surprise absolutely no one.
The late Jim Harrison noted more than once that politicians are prone to shitting through their mouths. And boy, am I ever glad I’m not paid to catalog every turd that falls from this fool’s face.
Mad Blog Media 