Your moment of Zen
Ah, Jonny, we hardly knew ye. Even after 16 years.
I saw this coming a while back. His was a fine line to walk with an impossible burden to bear — being both a comedian and a newsman at the same time. He knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway.
And Jon Stewart was very good at it, for a very long time.
But it had become clear that he’d lost his enthusiasm for professional multiple-personality disorder — Am I a comedian? A newsman? Something else entirely? — and the nightly performance anxiety must have been withering, with acolytes and assholes alike hanging on his every word.
The targets of his barbs will be cackling with glee and flinging a few feeble darts of their own in his direction as he departs. That will be irksome, but not as irksome as wondering who — if anyone — can follow Jon Stewart’s act.
What, now we have to start paying attention to the real news? That shit don’t be funny, yo.
• Editor’s note: The video up top may be Jon Stewart’s first interview. It’s a clip from the special “George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy,” which first aired in February 1997. If you’ve never seen it, check Kindly Old Doc Google. You probably won’t find the entire thing in one place, but there are bits here and here and here.
Mister Boo, unplugged
Apple, Samsung and Hanes
Is the Super Bowl finally over? No, I see we’re still second-guessing coaches, lip-syncing sharks and that crucial, botched call — Nationwide’s decision to run that dead-kid ad instead of throwing it into the trash.
We didn’t watch any of it here at Rancho Pendejo, not even the ads. Herself was on a mission from God to clean up the joint, and I was doing a job of work, hammering away at a video review of the Novara Mazama for Adventure Cyclist and trying to troubleshoot ongoing technical glitches with the old iMac.
At 6 years of age, this ‘puter may be nearing the end of its useful existence, though a 15-year-old G3 “Pismo” PowerBook is still ticking right along with all its original equipment. Not so the iMac. Its optical drive croaked a while back, and ever since I “upgraded” to Mavericks I’ve been enjoying occasional and inexplicable freezes that force me into an irksome hard reset that occasionally costs me a bit of work. Kindly old Doc Google tells me I’m not alone in my suffering, and this is one of the reasons I’m dragging my feet on the Yosemite and iOS 8 upgrades.
Last night after a weirdo crash that left both monitors black, but with a moveable cursor, I booted into Safe Mode, which runs a few diagnostics, then said fuck it and booted again, this time into the Recovery HD, and ran Disk Utility.
The hard drive “appears to be OK,” says DU, so I repaired permissions and called it good. This morning nothing was on fire or defunct, which is better.
Now if Samsung will get around to installing a new drain pump in our 5-month-old washing machine, we’ll really have it going on. The goddamn thing has been on the sidelines for a week and I need to upgrade my undies to something a little, um, fresher.
‘Cross purposes
Looking a little cyclo-crossy out there today. Ordinarily I’d be right out in it, but Friday is the day I always braid my nose hair.
You should have heard the wind that blew this stuff in last night. It sounded like Sarah Palin farting through a bugle in a tin washtub full of nitroglycerin and live ferrets. I had to use some cardboard wedges to stop the bedroom kiva screen from rattling like a GoPro HERO3 Black Edition Velcro’d to a chainstay on a Duke City trail.
Speaking of cyclo-cross, the UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships are coming up this weekend in the Czech Republic.
Those of you who have cable TV may be able to watch the race via Universal Sports Network, but the rest of us will have to dance around our computers in bear skins and feathers, shaking rattles and sprinkling chicken blood around and about as we try to make various pirate feeds and VPN dodges work as well as watching the fucker through opera glasses from a Land O’ the Free rooftop.
In the meantime, I’ve filed my print review of the Novara Mazama with the fine folks at Adventure Cyclist and am hard at work pushing pixels around for the video review, a chore that has been complicated more than somewhat by the weather.
Oh, well. I have my nose hair to keep me warm.
• Preview of coming attractions: I have the new Soma Saga Disc touring bike in-house and ready for review. It’s a beaut’, isn’t it?
Mad Blog Media 