My man Hal Walter chats on camera with The New York Times about the great outdoors, racing burros, and raising an autistic child.
Hal is also working on an expanded edition of his book “Endurance,” and I’ll post a link to that when it goes live.
Looks like I picked a good day to ignore the news in favor of fiddling with the dark corners of GarageBand (yeah, take cover, you might have to endure another podcast before much longer).
The homepage of The New York Times looks like the mounts of all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse shat on it in a driving rain, which oddly enough is what we’re experiencing at the moment here in Duke City. The rain, not the horseshit, though that can be had aplenty too, if I am not otherwise occupied, which I am.
Even Charles P. Pierce is starting to make me nervous. When the headline is “Saddened, Angry, Sickened, Defeated,” it’s a solid tip that the guffaws will be few and far between.
Me, I’m just glad I don’t have any pressing deadlines. It was tough to bring the funny for the final Bicycle Retailer of 2016, and while delving into the mysteries of GarageBand is giving me a headache, it is in a largely unused corner of what remains of my brain.
First, the good news: Julia Moskin at The New York Times serves up a modern recipe for chicken pot pie that looks absolutely scrumptious.
The bad news, also from the NYT: Whatever you weigh right this minute, you’re only gonna get fatter as 2016 and its various holiday seasons waddle to their belt-loosening denouement. I blame Obama. Also, the chicken pot pie.
The worse news: “Anything that happens in these next 10 weeks, on average, takes about five months to come off,” says professor Brian Wansink of Cornell University’s business school.
Does that include the election? Oh, God, no. I need some comfort food. And I think we all know what it might be. …
It seems Iowa Republicans would rather be poisoned than shot.
As for their Democratic counterparts, they split right down the middle between Billary of Wall Street and Groucho Sanders, The Last Marx Brother. Kindly Father Martin O’Malley won the third stool from the door at the Red Rooster Grill in Iowa Falls and decided to call it a campaign.
The editorial board at The New York Times appears to be about two martinis away from jumping out a window over the GOP clusterfuck. As for the Donks, the board opines that the contest has become one between head and heart. Guess which candidate is which body part. There will be a prize.
“With a few of the weakest candidates starting to drop out, weary voters can only hope that the campaign will further clarify itself and become more substantive in coming weeks as it moves to New Hampshire and beyond,” mutters The Times.
Ah, yes, that ol’ hopey-changey thing. Hope in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up fastest.
I don’t envy the folks who have to make sense of today’s politics for the rest of us.
Maybe I’m just suffering a bit of tummy upset after having sipped from this poisoned well for way too many years, but I’m really getting sick of watching our “leaders” flail and squeal like over-sugared kindergartners who aren’t getting their way right this second.
When was the last time you saw a speaker of the House invite a foreign official to call the president a deluded pussy, for his own political purposes, before that august deliberative body?
When will the Clintons — and the Bushes — learn they’re not royalty, or even poor imitations of the Kennedys, and they don’t get to hide the family skeletons in an ermine closet in the Black Tower?
When will faux-populist, cash-hoovering whores like America Rising and Correct the Record be fed into shredders, or better yet, to the IRS, instead of being treated as authoritative sources and quoted in The New York Times? Incidentally, I notice that The Times’ love for false equivalency does not extend to mentioning that the Bush administration hid its emails too. Though they did get around to mentioning Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.
When should intent trump ambiguity? Stop preening for the cameras, bozos, and give the bill another critical read before passing it. And don’t I wish the Second Amendment had enjoyed the tender attentions of a copy editor. We would have fewer, poorer lawyers.
It’s gonna be a long haul to 2016, folks. And you already know what the roads are like. So buckle up.
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