Yankee doodling

Sam hasn’t been keeping the place up. Why, I remember when they used to call it “The White House.”

Uncle Sam has become that neighbor nobody likes.

Mind you, Sam has always been prickly. All over the map politically, and a stickler for the letter of the law as defined by the neighborhood association, though truth be told he’d been known to cut a few corners himself.

But he subscribed to the newspaper, walked the dog morning and evening, and kept up his property. From time to time he might have some pointed advice as to how you might improve your place, too. But Sammy meant well. Plus he was always good for a box or two of Girl Scout cookies.

Now he’s old and querulous, and if there’s a loon campaigning for something, you’ll see his sign in Sam’s yard, which is not nearly so well kept these days. Fox News is on what appears to be an endless loop, with the volume cranked to the max so he can hear it out in the garage, where he’s perpetually working on … something. The dog has likewise gone gray and mean, and stays chained up out back in what’s become more salvage yard than back yard.

And when the Girl Scouts come calling he runs them off, threatening to call the cops, or worse, especially if the kids are Brownies.

His old pals from the war don’t come around anymore. But there’s this new crowd nobody’s too keen on. Loudmouths with attitude, the sort you don’t dare turn your back on, guys who break things because it’s fun, and because nobody cares to stop them.

The neighbors all hope the family takes charge, because property values are dropping like a stone and it’s just plain bad for business. But they have their own problems and don’t seem to much care what goes on in that old white house any more. They’ve got the time to put on this big barbecue, though. It’s a national holiday or something.

Albatross!

The Soma Double Cross in townie configuration.

Lots of bikey stuff going on around here lately. It makes a welcome distraction from the news, which as per usual is mostly bad. And likewise from the weather, which is mostly hot.

Since my Voodoo Wazoo has become a kinda-sorta 700c mountain bike, I decided to turn the Soma Double Cross into a townie for short hops hither and thither, or even long ones.

The Double Cross had been rigged as a light touring bike, with XT triple crank and eight-speed XT rear derailleur, drop bar, bar-end shifters, and aero levers (augmented with top-mounted brake levers) to operate the Paul’s Neo-Retro and Touring cantis. Now it sports an Albatross bar and Dia-Compe SS-6 brake levers from Rivendell, and of course the bar-cons stuck around for the ride.

Albatross!

At 27.2 pounds it’s nearly 5 pounds lighter than either of my Soma Saga touring bikes, so it makes for a sporty little errand boy.

The Bianchi Orso 105, up against The Wall of Science.

Meanwhile, the next bike in the Adventure Cyclist review pipeline is a Bianchi Orso with 11-speed 105 STI, hydraulic stoppers and thru-axles. Quite the technological advance from eight-speed XT with bar-cons, rim brakes and quick-releases, or so the industry would have you believe. Engineers gotta engineer, marketers gotta market. Still, I wonder when we’re going to run out of 50/34 cranks and 11-32 cassettes so a brother can get a touring drivetrain up in this bitch.

All this wrenching and riding and whatnot makes a feller hungry, so last night I whipped up a mess of chicken tacos in salsa verde with a side of Mexican rice. Anybody who thinks I make a shambles as a mechanic should see what I did to the kitchen. It was worth it, though. And now we have leftovers. Huzzah, etc.

The deer hunter

Our new lawn-mowing service.

This little guy materialized in the back yard last evening as Herself and I were enjoying a refreshing beverage on the patio and giving the cats a good airing. Never even saw him hop The Wall.

But Bambi appeared instantly on the radar of Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Force).

His aide-de-camp, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, has always worn a harness when she goes outdoors, and as the interloper arrived she was quartered on the southeast side of the compound, tucked away in the shady remains of the irises, near a favorite scratching stump.

But El Turko was free-ranging it to the northeast, inspecting the perimeter, and he froze, watching the interloper nosh on his lawn, as he had been doing himself just a few moments earlier.

It was something of a moment. We didn’t want to extract His Excellency and risk disturbing the deer at his dinner, the pickings being slim in the foothills. But we didn’t want El Turko to choose the better part of valor, leap The Wall, and beat a strategic retreat to Placitas, either. Until this evening he had only monitored trespassing deer through the stout double-pane windows of the ultra-secure Turkenbunker.

Then abruptly the dilemma resolved itself. The deer turned his back on the Turk — which is almost always a bad idea, as we have learned through bitter and painful experience — and the old soldier charged into battle.

“Santiago!” he may have screamed, but probably not.

Bambi bolted for The Wall, but a heartbeat too late. El Turko gave him a good swat before he cleared it.

Afterward I saw to it that the field marshal had an extra helping of Feline Greenies with the usual spartan rations he permits himself in order to stay in fighting trim. The best defense is a strong offense.

R.I.P., Harlan Ellison

One of the many dispatches from Ellison Wonderland.

The crickets are already chirping merrily by the time I arise at 5:15.

“Won’t be long now,” they sing. “Soon the world will be in the mandibles of its rightful heirs, the insects.”

Harlan Ellison won’t be there to see that day, and write about it. The prolific and famously pissy author of speculative fiction checked out yesterday at 84.

A winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, Ellison may be best known for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which many call the best “Star Trek” episode ever. Gene Roddenberry and his drones took the liberty of editing the mortal shit out of his script and Ellison was very much not amused. Legal action followed, as did a settlement, and he eventually released his own version of the script as a book.

He went after and won a settlement from James Cameron, too, saying “The Terminator” nicked bits from two “Outer Limits” episodes he wrote. I always thought that franchise had roots in “I Have No Mouth, & I Must Scream,” a tale of a globe-spanning supercomputer that became self-aware, even godlike, and wiped out the human race, save for a handful of people it kept alive and immortal to torture throughout eternity for blessing it with sentience to no particular purpose.

“He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could not belong. He could merely be.”

“A Boy and his Dog” was another you might know. And there were more, many, many more.

In the foreword to “I Have No Mouth, & I Must Scream,” he called his stories “assaults,” adding: “And science fiction saved me from a life of crime. Honest.”

I hear you there, Harlan. I may not have become a Writer of Stature the way you did, but even swinging a metaphorical bat in the literary bush leagues beats banging on the jailhouse bars. Thanks for doing so much more than “merely be.”

Yeah, but it’s a dry heat

“Hot enough for ya? Har har har! Hey, that’s a joke, son. What are ya, some sort of pussy? Ho ho ho!”

We’re still waiting on that “early” monsoon season here in the Duke City.

While we wait, pretty much all the forests have been closed for fear of fire, and thus the streets are full of mannerless douchebag fatheads who miss shoulder-checking elderly hikers into the trailside cholla whilst shredding the gnar-gnar.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service advises that today’s temperatures, expected to range from 98 to 105 degrees depending upon where one parks one’s van, “pose an elevated health risk to sensitive people,” of which I am one, as any regular reader of this blog will testify.

No wonder Dougie Lamborn cruised to victory in the GOP primary yesterday. It’s abundantly clear that Hell hasn’t frozen over. It’s just relocated to the Southwest.