Have you ever noticed that whenever it’s a beautiful day, you have chores that need doing?
Happily, a fair amount of my chores today involved being outside with someone else’s bicycle.
I was dicking around with a video project yesterday, and it was not going at all well, when it struck me that I hadn’t nailed down a video review of the Jamis Aurora Elite for Adventure Cyclist. The print review will be in April’s edition.
Oopsie.
So out I went, me and my GoPro, and you would not believe how long it takes some people to come up with two minutes of footage. I certainly didn’t believe it. Jaysis. The Universe and everything in it were in cahoots against me. Allergies certainly didn’t help. They had me by the brain stem with a downhill pull.
Still, I was riding a bike in the sunshine for a couple hours, kinda, sorta, so I have nothing to complain about. Hah. As if that ever stopped me.
“We have yourself, Vice President Pence, Sen. Graham, Ms. Sanders, Mr. Kushner, Ms. Conway, House Minority Leader McCarthy, Mr. Hannity, and the entire White House janitorial staff. What I want to know is this: Just how many of you does it take to help the crooked sonofabitch screw his pants on in the morning?”
• Monday Morning Update: Meanwhile, winning! He’s even managing to top himself when it comes to prevarication, obfuscation and outright bullshit, according to The Washington Post.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla performs her cover of “All Along the Watchtower.”
My supervisors noted in a recent performance review that I hadn’t posted any cat pix since January 31.
The Turk has blue eyes, but you hardly ever get to see ’em.
This obviously could not stand, man. So I got busy with the Sony RX100 III.
I think that pay raise I’d been counting on is right out, though.
However, the temps are coming up right smart, and if that continues, I’m out of here for a ride of some sort.
I know that this is a finger in the eye for those of you sentenced to the upper deck of the Benighted States, but at least all that cold and snow is probably tamping down the pollen.
Not so much here, especially with the wind stirring things up. Sunscreen on the outside, Claritin-D on the inside.
The headline is from Robert Heinlein, whose immortal protagonist Lazarus Long frequently employed the phrase when he wanted some yapper to cut to the chase.
So, marching on. …
• I met my new primary-care doc this week and am delighted to report that she is a pleasant young African-American who recently bought a Co-op bicycle from REI. There may be hope for the bike biz, ladies and gentlemen.
• Our lawn guy collars me while prepping our sprawling estate for spring and he sez to me, he sez: “I’m finding all these little rocks in the yard …” I sez to him, I sez: “Oh, that would be from me shoveling snow off the roof.” Look for my forthcoming science-fiction novel, “Flat Roofs Are Stupid,” about a man who travels back in time to teach the Anasazi about peaked roofs.
• Always wear your glasses when scouring the refrigerator for a toothsome tidbit. The other day I was rooting around in there like a blind hog hunting truffles and somehow managed to shoulder a door shelf out of the sonofabitch. Two glass jars hit the brick floor — one containing soy sauce, the other maple syrup — and exploded like cluster bombs. It took both of us to mop up that mess and for about 24 hours the house smelled like someone simmering barbecue sauce in a nursing home.
• And finally, Elon Musk got some press for doing something other than being a douchebag. The SpaceX Crew Dragon rode a Falcon 9 rocket into space and toward the International Space Station. The only passenger was a dummy. No, not that one.
I had four of them once, up in Weirdcliffe, all Toyotas — two 1983 longbeds, a 1998 Tacoma and a 1978 Chinook pop-top camper.
But I gradually untrucked myself and now my only four-wheeler is the Fearsome Furster, a 2005 Subaru Forester XS with 134,000 miles on the odometer.
It’s a midget SUV, reliable, unremarkable, anonymous. Decent fuel economy. Easy to lose in a parking lot full of trucks. Hard to sleep in.
That’s why the Honda Element caught my eye, and kept it. It’s a car, it’s a truck, it’s an RV for people who don’t like RVs (even a 1978 Toyota Chinook pop-top).
And I almost bought one once. OK, twice.
I talk about this and other things on this week’s edition of Radio Free Dogpatch. A tip of the Mad Dog trucker’s cap goes out to Ursa Minor Vehicles and Ralph Spoilsport Motors, the world’s largest new used and used new automobile dealership, Ralph Spoilsport Motors, here in the City of Emphysema. I can’t wait to get away from it all.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with an Audio-Technica AT2035 microphone and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. I edited using Apple’s GarageBand on a 2014 MacBook Pro, adding audio acquired via Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack (no profit was taken in a casual approach to copyright). Speaking of which, that’s the late Chris Farley as motivational speaker Matt Foley saving some kids from winding up 35 years old, thrice divorced, and streaming “Saturday Night Live” in a van down by the river. The barking dog, speeding auto and background music were liberated from Apple’s iMovie audio library. The atomic wedgie is courtesy of cognitu perceptu at Freesound.org. That car starting is the Fearsome Furster its own bad self; the radio is tuned to KUNM-FM and “Performance Today,” specifically “The Lark Ascending,” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, as performed by Nurit Bar-Josef. And finally, “Ka-Ching” is performed by the one and only Herself.
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