Welcome to the new DogHaus. Please park your fleas at the door and pee only in the designated corner. No, not that one.
I got the Hostcentric weenies to cut my monthly fee in half for the digital injuries I’ve suffered while tap-dancing through their virtual minefields, but they still piss me off. So I’m gonna try playing in this virtual sandbox for a while, maybe test-drive a few features WordPress 2.6 doesn’t have while I try to drag maddogmedia.com/wordpress into the 21st century.
Until then, please leave your critiques in comments. And seriously, not that corner. Christ, where’d I leave the mop?
OK, boys and girls, we’re gonna try a software update bright and early tomorrow morning, see if we can flush a few of the gremlins out of this here WordPress blog, which lately seems to demand optimization and/or repair of its tables on a disturbingly regular basis.
If worse comes to worst, you can get a terminal dose of profanity sometime tomorrow at the backup DogS(h)ite, maddogmedia.wordpress.com. The original site, maddogmedia.com, will be unaffected as well. Bookmark both those bad boys. My faith in the upgrade process is matched only by my respect for the Democratic Party.
It wasn’t especially massive — only 34 vehicles, including four semis, and 12 people hospitalized, just two of them in serious condition. Still, way to go, guys. Keep speeding and hugging that bumper in front of you, regardless of road and weather conditions. Hell ain’t half full.
Monday is ordinarily one of Herself’s days in the Denver office, so I had to ring her up to make sure she wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere. Happily, she wasn’t. It took me 36 years to get her installed, and I’m not looking forward to auditioning any replacements.
Judas Priest. Today’s Superprestige cyclo-cross in Hamme-Zogge looked like a cross-country run through an open sewer in Hell.
If you missed the live streaming video, you can catch an edited recap at the series website. It’s worth watching, believe me. One of the running sections took a minute-fifteen to cover, and there was more than one running bit. Eight-and-a-half-minute laps. Filth everywhere. My kind of race.
World champ Zdenek Stybar looked like someone had stuffed him head-first down a septic tank, and Niels Albert wore a pained, muck-slathered expression that said, “Fuck this noise, I’m going to get a job in a nice dry factory somewhere.”
• Late update:Katie Compton and Tim Johnson both crushed it today in Fort Fun. It looked like a fun course, a little tackier than yesterday’s, which you’d think would favor a powerful dude like Ryan Trebon, as it clearly did KfC. But after a fast start the big guy popped like a nickel rubber and that was all she wrote. Meanwhile, Todd Wells screwed the pooch while bunny-hopping a barrier and was hauled away on a stretcher, which is rarely a fun way to leave a race. You get to be an old duffer like me, you git off an’ run them sumbitches.
Some of those tasty middle-class gigs that went away during The Great Recession aren’t coming back, says Kevin G. Hall at McClatchy.
It’s not exactly news — the author of the report cited, MIT economist David Autor, says the trend has been under way for more than a decade. But it got worse during the latest installment of hard times, with zero job growth for professionals and an 8 percent decline in office and administrative employment.
But wait, there’s more! Writes Hall: “This loss of middle-skill jobs — what Autor calls polarization of the job market — intersects with another discouraging trend, the concentration of wealth at the highest rungs of the wealth ladder.”
Another study, this one from UC-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, suggests “that the top 1 percent of earners in the nation captured almost half of the growth in income over a period of stellar growth in the U.S. economy.”
“And this,” Hall writes, “came against the backdrop of disappearing good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, and what now appears to be an escalating departure of well-paying middle-skill jobs.”
Like I said, hardly news — the rich getting richer is right up there with “Dog Bites Man,” headline-wise. But still, is it any wonder that Miss Mia Sopaipilla is checking under the range for loose change? She has no idea where her next bowl of kitty chow is coming from.
