Phantom 309 gets a phantom Big Joe.
Oh, good. Waymo is bringing its self-driving minivans and trucks to New Mexico.
The Duke City’s drivers can’t wait to take their hands off the wheel for real. Then they won’t have to steer with their knees while texting, smoking meth, swigging hooch, spitting out the fire in their laps (spilled hooch and pipe sparks), and shooting at the punk-ass bitch who gave them the side-eye at the last stop light they ran.
Grandpa John whiled away his retirement making miniature pianos, replicas of JFK’s rocker, and other lovely bits of woodwork instead of riding a bicycle. For transportation he preferred a stately maroon Cadillac with a cream interior.
I don’t care to live in Copenhagen. The climate seems ill-suited to a worshipper of Tonatiuh who knows why his bog-trotting, ring-kissing, pub-crawling ancestors invented the uisce beatha.
My stepgrandfather on my mother’s side was a Dane, but he didn’t want to live in Copenhagen either. He lived in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was retired from the railroad and whiled away the hours drinking beer and smoking cigars, maintaining a medium-heavy vegetable garden in the back yard, and making lovely bits of this and that in a basement full of woodworking tools.
I don’t recall ever seeing Grandpa John aboard a bicycle, though he certainly had the leisure time for cycling. He drove a stately maroon Cadillac with a cream interior, because that’s what a fella did in America.
Which is a shame, really. Because if we hadn’t built our cities around Grandpa John’s stately maroon Cadillac with cream interior, The New York Times might be writing stories about Albuquerque, the cycling capital of the Southwest, where the residents neither own cars nor care to, because the bicycle “is typically the easiest way to get around.”
Albuquerque probably has Copenhagen beat when it comes to cycling weather. Today, for example, we’re looking at mostly sunny conditions with a high in the low 60s, and more than 10 hours of daylight, while Copenhagen can expect a high in the low 40s, rain, and less than nine hours of daylight.
But if you think I’m gonna ride my cargo bike to the Sunport to fetch Herself home when she jets in from Florida, well, think again, Jens old scout.
First, the Sunport is a 25-mile round trip from El Rancho Pendejo, with a thousand feet of vertical gain. Second, Herself travels about as lightly as Hannibal crossing the Alps. And third, the roads seem to be full of cars for some reason. Not stately maroon Cadillacs with cream interiors, mind you, but suburban tanks about the size of Hannibal’s elephants. And their mahouts are all inattentive, impaired, or insane.
Anyway, I don’t have a cargo bike. Because for better or for worse, Albuquerque isn’t fucking Copenhagen.
And until we rethink our cities and how we get around and about in them, we’ll have to settle for reading about Paradise from our parking lots.
The operator of this gas-powered scooter was appallingly sober.
In less than a week after rentable electric scooters hit the mean streets of Albuquerque, we’ve collected our first e-DWI. ¡Salud!
I suppose we could look on the bright side here. Had our early adopter not gotten popped for allegedly e-scooting under the influence — the cops say she got all beered up at Marble Brewery and had planned to hit at least one more grog shop downtown — she probably would’ve clambered into her land yacht and driven home to Belen, an hour or so to the south, depending on how many ditches and medians one inspects en route.
Or tried to, anyway. ¿Quien sabes? Having had some small experience in these matters I expect it’s a lot easier to hide one’s impairment from the John Laws behind the tinted windows of a four-wheeled Ford than on one of their two-wheeled throwaways.
I’ve lived in all three of these cities. I didn’t ride much in Tucson, because I lived way out north on Orange Grove Road, and it was hotter than hell. Swimming was my primary activity down there. Well, to be strictly accurate, swimming was tertiary, behind drinking beer and eating Mexican food.
People for Bikes has released its annual list of the best U.S. cities and towns for cycling, and once again Colorado leads the way, taking the top two steps on the podium (Boulder and Fort Collins). Eugene, Ore., snagged the bronze.
My old hometown of Bibleburg managed 12th, while the Duke City rolled in with the laughing group at … 240th?
I’m not a data nerd, but speaking as someone who has logged a few thousand miles per annum in both Bibleburg and ’Burque, I can’t say that I see such a vast cycling-quality chasm between the two. Your mileage may vary, of course.
The kicker may be that these city ratings reward “rapid progress.” Sayeth the People for Bikes: “We recognize hardworking cities that are implementing quick-building techniques to improve biking in their city.”
I haven’t hit the streets in Bibleburg lately to gauge their progress toward velo-nirvana, and maybe ’Burque is stuck on New Mexico Standard Time. We’ve been kind of busy being unemployed and killing each other lately.
But my admittedly casual observation is that we have about four times as many bike paths and trails, a metric shit-ton of cyclists of all types, more bike shops than you can shake a pedal wrench at, plus a considerably larger number of people commuting by bicycle and better weather to do it in.
And the annual BikeABQ bike swap crushes it. Two of Herself’s friends bought bikes there over the weekend, we sold one, and former BRAIN tech editor and first-time seller Matt Wiebe said the swap was bigger than he had expected.
Where does your hometown land on the list, and how does its ranking fit with your own observations? Sound off in comments.
We have here some pictures of cute kitty-cats. …
A couple items no chamber of commerce likes to see cuddled up together on the front page:
“Tourism sector’s impact expanding.”
“2017 homicide total leads three-year spike.”
… because pictures of cute kitty-cats are proven to take the sting out of bad news. I read it on the Internet.
Headlines like these are among the reasons why I’m glad I don’t work in tourism or law enforcement. It must be a bitch, coaxing the rubes here for a visit only to mop them up later somewhere along the Mother Road.
It’s gonna be tough for the Duke City to become a “world-class community,” whatever the hell that is, if the locals keep croaking the visitors and everybody can read all about it in the daily blat.
Maybe the city can contract with Sandia National Labs to develop some sort of nuclear street sweeper, a disintegration beam to erase the corpus delicti before the scribes can tally a body count.
“Bob who?” replies the desk sergeant with a quizzical expression. “Nope, nobody by that name in the blotter. We haven’t had a homicide reported all year. Maybe he moseyed on through and up to Bibleburg. They’re killing ’em like crazy up there.”
A snapshot from the cul-de-sac last evening, at the conclusion of The Boo’s walk.
Albuquerque has its problems, to be sure. Joblessness, crime, drivers who should not be permitted to operate grocery-store scooters … but it flat brings the sunset.
* The headline is from Ed Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” which featured another elderly, bearded weirdo from Albuquerque.
God damn. Another long shift in the barrel, including three-plus hours of Live Update Guy, one “Shop Talk” cartoon, and one “Mad Dog Unleashed” column.
Still, some people had worse days.
• The House GOP managed to fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking its thumb.
• Der Trumpenführer invaded Washington and it went over about as well as the Russian thing did for that other guy.
• Roger Ailes seems badly in need of a lock on his zipper (the filthy old shitbag may find that it’s better to keep rubbing his little weenie all over the news business than trying to stick it into actual, you know, like, women, an’ stuff).
• Albuquerque seems to be a giant open-air, free-range prison populated entirely by killers, thieves, firebugs, rapists and burglars.
• And don’t get me started on cops killing people just because they can.
Jeez, another dude merging without using his turn signal.
Interesting read here, and a “big idea” indeed.
The author opines that removing vehicles from the nation’s streets “would make urban life cheaper, safer, quieter and more pleasant,” and that good public transportation “coupled with fast, safe, pleasant walking and bicycling can easily meet the need for movement within our cities.”
As a bicyclist who just drove a couple thousand miles to the Phoenix clusterplex and back, and as a resident of the Duke City, where driving like a deranged asshole is the official city sport, I can dig it. The recent trend toward cheap gas has not made motoring any happier, either, unless you’re one of the overpowered, underbrained sociopaths who thinks “Max Max: Fury Road” was a documentary.
But I’d sure like to see some numbers on the up-front cost of shifting urban hellholes like Phoenix, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas to auto-free — or even auto-limited — human-friendly habitats. Somehow the word “cheaper” is not the first descriptive to leap to mind.
Nope, no snow up there.
Thirty-six inches: That’s the final tally from Maryland, where the digging out has commenced.
“It snowed how much? Where? Let’s never go there.”
Adding insult to inundation, the gut rumble that started working its way through the kinfolk beginning with the brother-in-law has so far claimed 75 percent of the clan, with only Herself spared (so far).
Meanwhile, the mom-in-law’s flight back to Tennessee got croaked by the storm, so Herself the Elder is enjoying a little extra recovery time before clambering into an aluminum tube full of fresh viruses for the trip home.
This whole clusterfuck was intended to give her the chance to inspect a couple of properties with an eye toward relocating somewhere down the road.
I bet the trip made Albuquerque look like the Garden of Eden. The place has its warts like any other, but the snow rarely arrives three feet at a time and the only time anyone ever shits themselves is at the thought of living in Maryland.
“‘Maryland,’ you say? Sounds like Hell to me.”
Pax capsicum.
2016 has begun as 2015 ended, with a bit of fresh snow on the deck and temps in the mid-20s. And they call this a “new year.” Harumph, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
Last year was the wettest in a decade for Albuquerque and New Mexico, according to the Albuquerque Journal. A quarter of the state remains abnormally dry, but the National Weather Service says there is no drought for the first time in five years.
As to 2016, quien sabe?
“It’s hard to say what short-term drought will be like next summer,” says Chuck Jones, a meteorologist with the Albuquerque office of the NWS. “But we are getting off to a good start for 2016.”
Of course, opinions vary wildly as regards what constitutes “a good start for 2016.” All the four-legged O’Gradys are curled up in their various beds trying to stay warm, while the two-legged types are pouring cups of hot tea over last night’s tinga poblana, which proved a stunning success. If you’re feeling the January chill, I urge you to make it at once, if not sooner.
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