Black Irish, or ‘Who’s Your Paddy?’

Guinness is good for you. So is Bushmills. They both make the sidewalk softer.

A very happy St. Patrick’s Day to you and yours. Herself and I cycled downtown to catch a bit of the annual parade, and the video clip above represents our unanimous pick for Dudes Having the Most Fun.

This particular parade entry was sponsored by a pub, Tony’s Downtown Bar. And while it could easily be construed as racist, I’m gonna give ‘em a pass, because I almost always find dudes in gorilla suits funny for some unknown reason. It’s a weakness.

Now I’m back at the ranch and fueling up for a bit of holiday cookery — a simple Irish stew involving lamb, potatoes and other tasty bits. Herself is sipping a Smithwick’s and fiddling with some video of her own.

The evening’s entertainment will consist of The Pogues, The Chieftains and “The Commitments,” with a little Frank O’Connor for bedtime reading. And tomorrow, we suffer — not just from having a drop taken, but from the return of March in its traditional form, which is to say windy and chilly. Saints preserve us.

Happy birthday to Herself

All hail Herself, who today celebrates her … um, well, a birthday. No need to mention which one. You wouldn’t believe it anyway, as she still appears to be around 19.

"How do you like your birthday gift, honey? Whaddaya mean, you already have one of these?"

We celebrated early with dinner at The Blue Star last night, and as always it was damn’ fine eating. The joint was jumpin’, too, which was nice to see. Maybe all that jabber about the Great Recession having ended is true after all, because The Blue Star ain’t exactly Mickey D’s, yo. No drive-up windows there, is what.

We started with appetizers — stuffed poblano with chipotle orange sauce and flash-fried calamari with sweet Thai chili sauce — then settled into the serious eating. Herself dug into some roasted lamb leg ragout with pappardelle and brown-butter peas, while I went for the ahi crusted with Italian breadcrumbs, cream-of-mushroom beurre, sweet-pea pasta and crispy leeks.

For dessert, we shared The Corleone — vanilla-bean ice cream rolled in graham-cracker crumbs, white and dark chocolate, roasted walnuts, pecans and almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg, drizzled with honey.

Ordinarily we hit some high-end bottle of wine with dinner, as Sunday is half-price night at The Blue Star. But we’ve both been into beer lately, so instead we had a couple drafts of Colorado hop squeezin’s from Boulder’s Avery Brewing — Joe’s American Pilsner and IPA.

This constitutes treason, as Bristol Brewing sits right next door to The Blue Star, and several of their excellent beers are on the menu. But I’ll make up for it this week. We’re looking at a stretch of sunny days with temps in the 60s and 70s, and if that ain’t Red Rocket Pale Ale-drinking weather, I’ve never seen it.

Beans ‘n’ booze

Herself and I dined out this evening with a neighbor and some of her out-of-town family, with whom we have become friendly over the years.

There was wine afterward on our back deck, and as it was getting dark nobody noticed (I hope) the half-assed mowing job I did yesterday. Miss Mia Sopaipilla and Buddy the Wonder Dog made brief appearances to rave reviews, but Turkish refused to leave his dressing room, citing obscure union regs about dogs and cats and never the twain shall meet outside the Thunderdome, and certainly not while the party of the first part is wearing a ridiculous purple harness and leash, which is the only way the big galoot gets outside since collecting a nasty and expensive abscess while at large and unfettered.

All in all, it was a pleasant way to end a day of making bricks without straw at PharaohNews. A casual glance at the interwebs at midshift unearthed a few small-helmet types aghast at our lack of investigative journalism. This is not unlike complaining that the free blowjob you just got from the unemployed barmaid didn’t include a free shot of top-shelf tequila with an artisan-beer back.

Out of surgery and into a good Bordeaux

My man Charles Pelkey says he is out of surgery and drinking a nice French red while awaiting the pathology report.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to my wisdom via RSS, drill deeply into comments or follow Charles on Facebook or Twitter, he posted on Facebook as follows:

“Well, I guess I can quote one of my favorite Python flicks: ‘I’m not dead yet.’ Surgery went well. Pathology reports pending. Thank you to all of you who sent kind messages of support and good karma. You guys are the greatest.”

I should be drinking a nice French red myself, because it’s pissing down rain and a flash-flood watch has been issued. But I’ve gotten hooked on this Victory Prima Pils, which is one mighty fine summertime sipper. Feel free to join me in hoisting a glass to Charles, to his family and friends, and to good news from the pathology report.

Getaways, groceries and grifters

There’s nothing like that first day after the Tour folds its big yellow tent and life gets back to normal.

I got out early for a two-hour ride northeast on Highway 24 and enjoyed a tailwind to Falcon. The headwind on the homebound leg wasn’t outlandish, and I considered stretching the outing to three hours before remembering that there was nothing to eat in Chez Dog, someone having been a little lackadaisical about grocery-shopping lately.

So I rolled home, made a list and headed north to Whole Paycheck, pissing away a car payment on bits of this and that to keep flesh on the bones. Last night’s “dinner” involved a tin of smoked oysters, cheddar, crackers and a salad, and that’s just not enough to keep a renowned cycling journalist at the top of his game.

Now it’s raining for a second consecutive day, which is excellent. It’s been hotter than the high-flange hubs of Hell around here lately, and this takes the edge off, as does a little effervescent Austrian rosé.

Alas, we may all be reduced to drinking feeble American lager out of red-white-and-blue cans if the “mine is bigger than yours” contest ends badly in DeeCee, as seems increasingly likely.

These overfed, undereducated pustules afflicting the body politic should be compelled at gunpoint to hold their slapfests in small-town bars and beaneries, in the company of the simple folks these rich fucks profess to care about. Maybe after a few vicious beatings administered by work-hardened knuckles they’d realize their cushy gigs are about people, not politics.

• Late update: Kevin Drum sure wasn’t impressed by either Obama or Punkinhead tonight. I listened to the first few minutes of Obama’s bit while cooking dinner and I wasn’t exactly hearing a clarion call to arms. As for Punkinhead, I unplugged his ass before he even had a chance to start lying. My patience has its limits.

Going for the Gold

Bibleburg as seen from the single-track detour over the collapsed tunnel that keeps Gold Camp Road blessedly free of dinosaur-powered tourism.

I was feeling guilty about not riding yesterday (too tired, too hot, too wussified), so today I sacked up and did something I’ve been thinking about for a while — rode from Chez Dog up Old Stage Road to its intersection with Gold Camp Road and then down Gold Camp back home.

It’s been a while since I tackled that ride — 15 years or so — and last time around some friends and I found ourselves climbing through a series of stimulating weather patterns, each worse than the one that preceded it, until we were descending Gold Camp in a full-on snowstorm.

Today I was by myself and glad of it, too, because I ain’t the dog I was then and can no longer bear the howls of derisive laughter. I spent a shameless amount of time in the Voodoo Nakisi’s granny (22×28) and recycled a fair amount of salt because I was sweating all over my downtube water bottle. There were no snowstorms, only dust storms whipped up by passing motorists hellbent on enhancing the washboard on the gravel road.

The descent was big fun, though. I shot past a crowd of casual mountain bikers who had been ferried by van to the intersection of Old Stage and Gold Camp, at 9,000 feet, and were enjoying the leisurely, traffic-free descent back to town (a collapsed tunnel some years back closed the road to motorized traffic). I greeted a few and should have stopped to chat, but I was hot and sweaty and tired and thirsty and I could tell that not one of these folks had an ice-cold beer or an air conditioner on them.

So on I plummeted, and after a quick shower and a semi-massive lunch with lots of water I dropped by McCabe’s Irish Tavern for a couple pints of Bristol Brewing’s Compass IPA. I had a column to write, and they had beer and air conditioning. It seemed the smart thing to do, for a change.

Entering the Twilight zone

There's nothing better than beer for flushing out the headgear on a hot summer day.

Ack. Ninety-something outside and only a little less than that inside. By the time I got done shoveling out the VeloBarrel this afternoon I decided I was not interested in cycling of any sort, especially as practiced by me. So instead I rode the Vespa down to the grog shop for a sixer of Deschutes Brewery’s Twilight Summer Ale.

This tasty brew, a seasonal beer available from May through September, will take the rabies out of the maddest of dogs beset by Englishmen in the noonday sun. Herself likes one on a hot day, too, so we’ll put a couple in the freezer for 10 minutes and then hit ’em hard, like a hungry Hemingway chugging a distingué at a Parisian café. Well, I do, anyway. She nurses hers as if Prohibition is coming back.

I like the Green Lakes Organic Ale too, though I was not impressed by my first encounter with the brew. My second, however, followed the first leg of the Adventure Cycling Association‘s 2010 Southern Arizona Road Adventure, when a new friend and I had a dram apiece at the Velvet Elvis in Patagonia. Something about 48 miles of cycling and 3,400 feet of vertical through sun-splashed, wind-whipped southern Arizona, I guess. Whatever — I was an instant convert and have remained one.

Not much action in Le Tour today and even less tomorrow, the second rest day. Tuesday brings the Alps, and thus the pain; all the big shots vow to attack without mercy, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Well, that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it? So far it’s the officers doing all the talking and the grunts doing it hand to hand, just like in real life.

Beer me! No? Then wine me!

"Is there an adequate supply of cream? Yes? Then we have no problem."

Forget about that little problem in our nation’s capital, folks — we’ve got a problem right here at home. Seems there are more beer drinkers than there is beer for them to drink.

I’m talking about real beer, of course — Colorado craft beer, not the swill the megabrewers pitch to America’s small hat sizes during televised sporting events. I’d rather drink water. And you know what fish do in water.

Happily, there’s good news on the booze front. The United States has slipped past France to become the world’s biggest consumer of wine. And I helped! We’re No. 1! USA! USA! USA!

Wide-awake drunk

Remember the good old days, when a guy who wanted to achieve the glorious state of “wide-awake drunk” had to horn an eight-ball of the dumb dust and drink a liter of Stoli? Expensive, illegal, yet oh so much fun.

Like, wow. Like, bow wow, man.

Of course, that was when men were still men instead of women, only with testicles and more fashion sense. Popping some orange sunshine, drinking a case of beer and driving downtown to try to tip over a parked boxcar on Larimer Street was our idea of a relaxing Saturday evening with the fellas.

And then America underwent wussification. The old Denver warehouse district became LoDo, a hangout for art fruits, sushi-nibblers and wine-sippers. The Ell-Ess-Dizzy was supplanted by Ecstasy, immortalized by P.J. O’Rourke as “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid.”

And the nose whiskey/gullet whiskey cocktail? It went mainstream in a lamestream fashion with the debut of caffeinated booze-bombs like Four Loko, a pisspot of 12 percent alcohol, 156mg of caffeine and Christ knows what else that sounds like canned dumb-ass to me.

Thank God the FDA and the FTC have the peddlers of this weenie juice by their immature nutsacks with a downhill pull. Maybe the light-hitters who guzzle this swill will grow a hairy pair and sample a manly concoction like windowpane and Jack Daniels,  crystal meth and Schlitz Malt liquor or cocaine and whatever anybody else is buying because we spent all our money on the blow, dude. Really. Seriously.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make myself an Irish coffee.

Mmm, beer

Ah, remember those glorious fall school days, when Teach' would pour you a nice pint of porter before getting down to the Three Rs. ...

Here’s something you don’t see every day: The fine folks at Bristol Brewing and the Blue Star want to turn a shuttered school into a brew house, bakery and community center.

I got wind of this a while ago and my only complaint is that this project isn’t happening in my neighborhood. We got schools out the wazoo around here — surely we can afford to shut at least one of them down, make a happenin’ hangout out of it. One is an easy two-block stagger along a bike path from Chez Dog.

God knows what passes for education in this country these days lacks a certain value. We might as well get drunk and enjoy the decline and fall.

Meanwhile, early returns indicate that this WordPress blog is at least acceptable to the literati (which is to say that while it remains largely content-free, at least it will load on both Macs and Windoze boxes). More as it develops. Any Linux weenies out there? Leave your thoughts in comments, please.