Ay, Robot

August 8, 2016August 22, 2016 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

I'm up on the tight wire, linked by life and the funeral pyre, putting on a show for you to see. — I’m up on the tight wire, linked by life and the funeral pyre, putting on a show for you to see.

Electricity is your friend, until it isn’t.

We were watching the finale to season one of “Mr. Robot,” the one in which Eliott awakens in Tyrell’s SUV to discover that his hack has taken down the global financial system and all is chaos, when the lights first hiccuped and then went out altogether.

Bzzzzt. Game over.

The culprit wasn’t FSociety or any other anonymous (har de har har) hacktivist collective. Seems a bolt of lightning drilled a West Side Public Service Company of New Mexico substation, starting a fire and turning out the lights from Santa Fe to Los Lunas — affecting some 135,435 customers, including our little cul-de-sac. PNM said later it was the worst power outage in years.

After a bit, everyone in the ‘hood wandered into the street, exchanging quips about who tripped over the cord, passing out candles to the light-deprived, and generally just catching up on idle chitchat. Nice and dark it was, and cool, with just a soupçon of rain.

About the time we decided we’d better eat all the ice cream before it turned into ice-cream soup, click, the power came back on. Civilization — or the feeble substitute we’ve all agreed to settle for — marches on.

The Bernalillo Triangle

August 4, 2016 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

At the Triangle you can ride up to the Sandia Crest, if that's your idea of a good time. I haven't done it in about a quarter century. — At the Triangle you can ride up to the Sandia Crest, if that’s your idea of a good time. I haven’t done it in about a quarter century.

Remember that training ride I was contemplating, the one based on the old Watermelon Mountain Classic?

I rode the tail end of it yesterday on the Soma Saga (cantilever edition) and remembered one of the reasons I usually did poorly at the ‘Melon: inconsiderate motorists hogging the descent through Sandia Park-Cedar Crest to Tijeras.

There’s not much in the way of shoulder, and what there is is mostly covered with debris, and the traffic lanes are mostly covered with assholes. Plus there’s that one surprise climb just south of the Triangle that I always forgot about. But other than that, yeah, good times. Maybe not.

I did my recon as part of a 36-mile out-and-back from El Rancho Pendejo, and a mighty nice ride it was, too. There’s a sidewalk-slash-bike path on the climb from Interstate 40 to the Triangle, so a cyclist needn’t endure any buzzing on the way up. And since I was rocking 700x38mm Schwalbe Little Big Ben tires with goopy tubes the debris mostly wasn’t a problem. But damn, some folks need to get theyselfs reacquainted with they manners.

Anyway, now all I need to do is scope out the 25-mile section from Bernalillo to the Triangle and I’ll be ready to ride, just as soon as I get a rear-view mirror, a Glock G26, and some climbing legs.

Not the campaign trail

August 2, 2016 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

The Joe Appaloosa enjoying a bit of dirt time north of El Rancho Pendejo.

How’s your August so far?

Mine’s been great. I got 90 minutes of trail time on Rivendell’s Joe Appaloosa today, and two and a half hours on their Sam Hillborne yesterday.

The Sam Hillborne rolls northbound along the Paseo path.

This is loads more fun than waiting for Ronald McDonald McTrump to shit out of his mouth again. Dude erupts more consistently than Old Faithful. But if you keep the iPhone locked away in a Ziploc bag, and stuff the bag into a jersey pocket, you don’t get drenched until you get home.

Speaking of drenched, the weather wizards advise that a “sustained monsoon moisture plume” is working itself into a Trumplike frenzy, which is good news in a place that just wrapped up a scorcher of a July and was seeing its third-driest year ever.

It would be nice to see less rain more often — flash floods are about as much fun as droughts, as the homeless dudes hunting for their belongings along the I-40 trail will tell you — but like the GOP, we’ll take whatever we can get.

Working like a (mad) dog

July 30, 2016July 30, 2016 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Real life — well, “real life” as it is around Chez Slacker, anyway — reared its ugly head yesterday and I never had a chance to comment on the Hilldebeast’s coronation in Philly.

There was critter entertainment and maintenance to perform; brief yet healthful outdoor exercise (a couple hot laps of Trails 365/365A over by Embudo Dam, on the Jones 29er); video to shoot, edit and voice for Adventure Cyclist (the Rivendell Joe Appaloosa); dinner to prepare (orecchiette with cherry tomatoes and arugula); travel arrangements to make for Interbike (already?); technical difficulties (Amazon Prime got sideways somehow and we couldn’t watch episode two of “Mr. Robot”); and a Great and Powerful Ozlike thunderstorm that started out with great sound and fury but in the end signified … eh, not much.

So, yeah. No time for deep thoughts on Hillary’s Big Day.

Looking back, I thought it was a pretty fair speech for someone who’d clearly rather be doing The Work instead of chatting with thee and me. “The service part has always come easier to me than the public part,” she explained, and I can dig it. I’d rather pull off my own head than deliver a speech to a mob like that; as you already know, I have plenty of days when some two-bit bloggery seems unduly onerous.

But she fell short of the mark set by Khizr Khan, father of Capt. Humayan Khan, killed by suicide bombers in Iraq. That dude crushed it, delivering a fierce beatdown to the chickenhawk Ronald McDonald McTrump, and as I understand things, he was speaking from the heart, not from a teleprompter or notes. Well done indeed.

I don’t see the Hilldebeast becoming an inspirational speaker anytime soon, no matter who’s writing the checks, Wall Street or Main Street. But I really don’t care, as long as she’s willing to buckle down and do The Work.

There’s some heavy lifting ahead. As David Corn wrote in Mother Jones, “She is … the only chance to stop Trump’s takeover of America — and her job is to persuade voters that for now she is indeed the last best hope.”

Old race, new race

July 28, 2016 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Looking east at the Sandias from NM 313, en route to Bernalillo.

It sure is nice to spend mornings riding the bike rather than writing the bike.

Yesterday I rode out to Bernalillo on NM 313, inspecting the first leg of what would be a fun training ride — basically an extended version of the old Watermelon Mountain Classic that I used to race back in the Eighties.

That race started in Bernalillo and climbed through Placitas on NM 165 to the Sandia Peak Ski Area, then dropped through Sandia Park and Cedar Crest before finishing on NM 333 just east of Albuquerque.

What made it interesting was a stretch of unimproved dirt Forest Service road — about seven miles of switchbacks, if memory serves — that climbed to the Sandia Crest Road just below the ski area, which used to host an occasional mountain-bike race.

After that it was mostly the old zoom-zoom, down, down, down to the Duke City. I was usually pretty aggressive on the climb, but whatever I gained on the uphill I lost on the downhill, suffering as I did from an overactive imagination and a feeble health-insurance plan.

My version of the Watermelon would start at El Rancho Pendejo, which adds 20 miles to the front end of the ride. The backside would be augmented by a half-dozen miles or thereabouts, from the old finish line back to the rancho. Eating the whole ‘melon would involve about 63 miles, many of them uphill. Good times. Maybe not.

Speaking of races and good times, Ronald McDonald McTrump came in for a vigorous thumping last night at the DNC. Even the prez got in on the act, which MoJo’s Kevin Drum summarized in 17 words:

Michael Bloomberg: Trump is a con man.

Tim Kaine: Trump is a liar.

Joe Biden: Trump is a sociopath

Barack Obama: Trump is an asshole.

Drum qualified that last by noting that it was his translation “from the original Obamish.” Pretty accurate translation, I’d say.