The Wolf Moon, peeking through the clouds over the Sandias.
I was a little late to moonrise last night, but managed to catch a glimpse of the Wolf Moon despite the heavy cloud cover.
The Duck! City has been gray and damp the past few days, with 0.13 inch of precip’ in the past 48 hours. On Wednesday I just beat a short downpour home as I wrapped up a run, and yesterday I caught a little sleet in the chops while cycling through the foothills.
Climbing into the Elena Gallegos Open Space I saw a couple of Albuquerque Police Department vehicles in the parking lot. The officers waved at me, and I waved back. If they thought I must have been drunk to be cycling in January — rain jacket, tuque, tights, winter shoes — they didn’t oblige me to perform the Stupid Human Tricks or empty the wallet I wasn’t carrying. (I had a $20 in the Ziploc bag that keeps my phone dry, but shh, that’s top secret.)
Mayor Tim Keller addresses the crowd at Sunday’s ward meeting.
It’s been a few days since we hosted the Donk ward meeting and El Rancho Pendejo remains in a state of disarray.
We had to shift the furniture around to accommodate the throng and speakers, and the plan was to put everything back in its proper place on Monday. Until Herself had to go in to the old job site to piss out a number of fires, that is. Ordinarily Monday is a work-from-home day with a little leeway built into the schedule.
So here it is Wednesday, and if I were the sort of geezer who wanders around the house at night, leaving his eyeglasses back on the nightstand while hunting the source of some strange noise and/or peeing on the floor instead of in the toilet, I’d be doctoring a number of lacerations, contusions, and abrasions from stumbling into this and that instead of entertaining you lot over the second cup of joe.
Meanwhile, I see our national house remains out of order as well. We are shocked — shocked! — to learn anew that barring some random act of god or man we’re looking at a Joe-NotJoe contest come the fall. This, after a thundering herd of 410,000 Republicans in two states has expressed its preference. That’s about 151,000 people less than live in The Duck! City, according to the latest U.S. Census estimate, from 2022.
Well, cultists gotta cult, y’know?
Nobody else in the cult was actually running against The Leader. They were pitching themselves as The New and Improved Him. And doing a piss-poor job of it too. It was like watching a bunch of home-schooled thumb-suckers auditioning to play the Joker with Joaquin Phoenix standing right there, smirking. “Aren’t they just darling?”
One by one they bend the knee, kiss the ring, and wander off to seek some other role better suited to their talents, or lack thereof. All the world’s a stage, y’know.
Image lifted from the City of Albuquerque website.
O, Lord, it must be fun around the ol’ cop shop these days.
Take two steps forward toward getting out from under a Justice Department consent decree, take one back over some nonspecific fishiness involving DUIs, at least one local attorney, and an FBI investigation.
Online reports are light on details — more than 150 pending DUI cases dismissed, a number of Albuquerque Police Department officers placed on paid leave or reassigned, a lawyer’s office raided, etc. — and long on speculation. The Albuquerque Journal‘s print edition is a tad more specific, but it seems nobody feels very chatty in the early days of whatever this turns out to be.
APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos told the Journal that APD had been working with the FBI “for the past several months on an investigation involving members of the department” and that “several” officers have been placed on paid administrative leave while the inquiry continues.
Of the 152 pending DWI cases dismissed, 136, or nearly 90%, were filed by three Albuquerque police officers, according to court records. One officer was responsible for 67 of the cases; another had 41; and the third was listed as the arresting officer on 28.
The Albuquerque Journal
Attorney Kari Morrissey, who has one client whose case was dismissed, told City Desk ABQ, “I will say that as a lawyer who has been practicing criminal defense in Albuquerque for almost 25 years, I am not surprised as to these developments.”
John D’Amato, an attorney with the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association, told City Desk ABQ he was aware of a pending criminal investigation, adding: “No comment is the word of the day. It’s developing and the facts are unclear.”
One thing is clear. We have statues of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman here in The Duck! City. But not of Frank Serpico. Or Saul Goodman, now that I think of it. That dude couldn’t even get an Emmy.
Seasonable weather may have returned for the moment, but The Duck! City remains a sandy, salty, gooey mess, and thus the Soma Double Cross now sports mudguards because hey: Sometimes a fella doesn’t feel like taking his exercise on a 32-pound touring bike just because it has fenders.
The DC is another of those absurdly versatile sport-utility bikes, suitable for cyclocross, light touring, or simply trying to keep the muscle memory alive in January, when its lesser poundage — just under 26 elbees with a saddlebag and handlebar bell — makes a real difference on the hills.
I used it for a three-day credit-card tour of central Colorado in 2012, and it’s logged plenty of hours on roads and trails in New Mexico, too.
The DC is just a little small for me, which is fine, especially if you suddenly happen to straddle it on some sketchy stretch of singletrack. When I first got back into cycling in the mid-Eighties I started with a 60cm bike, then downsized to 58, and again to 56, before finally inching back up to 58 for pretty much everything save the cyclocross bikes.
The Steelman Eurocrosses, Bianchi Zurigo Disc, and Soma DC are all 55cm, while the Voodoo Wazoo is a 56cm. I should turn the Wazoo back into a drop-bar bike one of these days, but I kind of like it as a flat-bar, single-ring deal. It’s also less welcoming to fenders and a rear rack, should I want them.
Ordinarily when the weather goes sideways I turn to trail running. But we’ve had enough moisture lately to turn crucial segments of the foothills trails into skating rinks, peat bogs, and tar pits, which makes running nearly as much of an exercise in staying upright as cycling.
“Well, at least the motorists can’t nail you on the trail,” you quip. Ho ho, etc. Wrong-o, sport. Lately they’ve been hitting everything from traffic-light stanchions to tattoo parlors, restaurants, and private homes. Stationary objects, easy to avoid, unless you’re ripped to the tits on your reality-management substance of choice.
The wiseguys used to say that you’re taking your life in your hands just by getting out of bed in the morning. Now you can wake up to find yourself sharing the old king-size with a Ford Expedition.
Not even fenders will keep the road grime off your ass then.
This sunset actually happened. It was not predictive of anything other than the sun setting.
I was wandering idly along the trashy shoulders of the Infobahn this morning, trying to not step in or trip over any particularly toxic bits of debris, when I noticed a newsletter from veteran scribe James Fallows that had gone overlooked in my in-box.
In it, Fallows proposes that cash-poor news organizations invest their limited resources in what’s actually happening now in politics instead of what might happen, “which the reporters can’t know when they’re writing the stories, and which readers will eventually find out anyway.”
For readers, he cites three types of stories that suggest you’ve been lured out of the newsroom and into the fortune-teller’s tent:
A story based on polls, which are manufactured “news” for those sponsoring them but only shakily connected to reality;
A story based on framing any development in terms of “how this will play” politically, which is the reporter’s guess about what voters will think, and;
A story on which candidate has “momentum” or traction” based on the vibe at events.
Predictive stories like these, Fallows says, “are like stock-market picks or the point spread on football games, but with less consequence for being wrong. And if news organizations had limitless time, space, and budgets, you could perhaps say, “What’s the harm?”
Alas, stories like these are also easy and cheap. Any half-bright wordslinger with Internet access and a comfortable chair can shower dubious wisdom upon you from a considerable height, like a buzzard with the runs. Be deeply suspicious of anything slugged “Commentary,” “Analysis,” or “Opinion.” Also, items headlined “Five takeaways from [insert actual news event here].”
However, sometimes the “takeaways” story can contain an actual glimmer of enlightenment. In one such at The New York Times this morning we have the concession — in this case, the fifth of five takeaways — that “Iowa doesn’t mean much for the fall.” This, after wall-to-wall coverage for Christ only knows how long of a non-event that saw 15 percent of registered Republicans (about 110,000 people) turn out to caucus. Thanks for sharing, Lisa, Maggie, and Jonathan.
For my part, I tip my fedora to Fallows and add a prescription of my own: Just because the Internet is endless doesn’t mean a story should be.
I read two things this morning that I knew would piss me off, mostly because I like being pissed off in the morning. That, and two cups of strong black coffee, are the jumper cables that get my heart started.
The first, from The New York Times Magazine, headlined “How Group Chats Rule the World,” was tagged “12 MIN READ.” I won’t link to it. Just because I enjoy spitting coffee into my keyboard and screaming “What the actual fuck?” doesn’t mean everyone does. We must consider the children. Also, cats, houseplants, and the homeowners’ association.
The second, from The Guardian, didn’t give me an ETA. But it was slugged, “The Long Read,” so I knew I was in for it. Headlined, “The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same,” this 4,200-word slog should’ve been headlined “I spend far too much time in coffee shops.”
I won’t link to that one, either. If that’s your idea of a good read you can chase it down yourself, or buy Kyle Chayka’s book, “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” from which it was adapted.
But can you lift this mighty tome to read it? There may not be enough coffee in the shop. Or the world.
Mad Blog Media 
