Over at Teh Twitters yesterday a gent praised a non-rant I’d written way back in 2002, saying it was one of his “all-time favorites.”
I had forgotten about it — these things vanish from my consciousness about a nanosecond after I hit the “Send” button — so I looked it up, and y’know, I kinda liked it myself. Even an old blind dog finds a tasty Milk-Bone now and then, it seems.
Written when we still lived in Weirdcliffe, it was prompted by a reader’s complaint (one of many, actually) that my stuff was too negative, which it can be. That my VeloNews.com column was christened “Friday’s Foaming Rant” didn’t help. A label like that tends to set a certain tone, and when I wandered off the Rantinista reservation other critics would jeer, “Call that a rant?” You can’t win.
But if two of us liked it, it must not be entirely lame, so here it is, reprinted in all its faded glory for your entertainment.
The Boo wagged his tail at the vet, but she stuck him in it just the same.
It was health care and then some today as Mister Boo, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) and Miss Mia Sopaipilla traveled en masse to the vet for exams and injections.
Turk’ and Mia are not fans of the infernal combustion vehicle, and thus the Subaru rang with yowls of horror and threats of vengeance as we motored swiftly toward our tripartite appointment. Only the unflappable Mister Boo remained at peace (until the vet laid hands upon him, whereupon the mild-mannered little fella promptly transmogrified into the Hound of the Baskervilles).
Back at Chez Dog the cats rebounded quickly, but the Boo — having performed a four-mile walk before his harrowing experience at the hands of veterinary medicine — found himself in need of a power nap. And who can blame him?
I’m feeling a bit stuck myself, but you can’t sleep off a vet bill.
The Bootleg Hobo and I visited one of my former neighborhoods south of downtown today. Turns out my former $75-per-month squat on Mill Street is for sale.
It’s easy to forget how many people ride bikes in this town until we get a sunny, 60-something day in January.
I slipped out for a 90-minute ride at midday and Holy Mary, Mother of God, you’d have thought we’d hit Peak Oil and left it bleeding out at roadside. Everybody and his grandma, from itty-bitty kids to grizzled graybeards, was gaily flogging a two-wheeler from Hither to Yon, no doubt hoping to burn a few calories before ingesting many, many more during the Broncos-Patriots feetsball game.
Despite a short stint as an assistant sports editor at The New Mexican in Santa Fe, I am not a fan of the feetsball, which is the polite way of saying that I don’t give two runny shits about a multibillion-dollar industry that temporarily shifts Americans’ homicidal instincts away from actual warfare and toward commerce by encouraging young gladiators to mutate their bodies with drugs and scramble their brains with high-speed collisions.
Cycling has its own issues in that regard, of course. But not the way I do it.
And at least you can watch televised pro cycling for more than 15 commercial-free seconds at a stretch (on a pirated Belgian feed, anyway). That’s how I spent my morning before throwing a leg over the Bootleg Hobo’s top tube. Plus you can be pretty certain the Organization is selling (and the spectators drinking) a higher-quality beer.
A classic Robert Crumb print, “A Short History of America,” now adorns a wall in the Mad Dog Media nerve center, thanks to the generosity of Herself the Elder.
I’ve shown her this one, but am withholding his (ahem) more outré offerings. Not everybody is ready to get Zapped.
So far, so good. Two more OS updates and we’ll have a casual relationship with the 21st century.
One down, two to go. I forgot we also have a Mac Mini in need of an OS upgrade. But the cute li’l Cupertino doorstop only has 2 GB of memory, which is the bare minimum, so I’ve ordered up some mo’.
The MacBook Air install went smooth like butter. The whole process took a shade over two hours, with a long-ass download, a couple-three restarts and six app’ updates. But that’s my newest machine, a mid-2012 model, so it should be open to new experiences; the Mini dates to mid-2010, and the iMac to 2009.
The Air is for lightweight road trips when an iPad won’t cut the mustard. For heavy duty I haul an old black MacBook, ’cause it has software I don’t care to upgrade, like Word and Photoshop and all the other high-falutin’ gewgaws, thingamajigs and comosellamas a fella likes for professional rumormongery of the finest quality. That beast is too long in the tooth to run Mavericks; it’s pegged at Snow Leopard.
The Mini is for watching TV at Chez Dog, and I back up work-related items to it whenever I get The Fear (I also use SuperDuper and Time Machine with an external Firewire drive for regular clones/backups).
And the iMac is The Main Device. It’s how most of the Mad Dog media is generated, save for the cartoons, which get done the hard way — drawn in pencil, then inked, and finally scanned into a superannuated 1999 G4 “Sawtooth” AGP Graphics Power Mac, where I apply color using Classic mode and a full CMYK version of Photoshop (4!) that I got for free with a scanner about a thousand years ago. Hey, it still works.
I thought I might do the iMac today, too, but wimped out. Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says, and I’d like to fiddle with the Air a bit to make sure it didn’t lose a kidney to Somali pirates or something during the operation.
