Gloom and doom

Sure am glad I watered the lawn yesterday.

This is May? What, did the GOP manage to privatize the weather, hand it off to Halliburton or Goldman Sachs? It rained last night, the wind is flat barreling out of the northwest at 24 mph and there is the usual chance of snow “with little to no accumulation,” which means, “Just enough to kill anyone who thinks 4WD helps you stop.”

It’s just as well, I suppose. I had work to do this morning, and were it not so dismal outside I might have said piss on it and gone for a ride instead.

Speaking of rude awakenings, it seems the mainstream media have finally sniffed the java where Punkinhead Boehner is concerned. Bloomberg News reports that the House speaker’s economic “theories” depend upon “several assertions that are contraindicated by market indicators and government reports.” The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus cuts to the chase and calls him a lying sack of runny orange shit.

Careful, now, Ruthie ol’ scout. You’re liable to set off Weepy John’s sprinkler system bringing that kind of heat. Thanks to Steve Benen at Political Animal for the tip.

Tea for two

The tulips popped up the other day, just in time to catch a good old-fashioned spring soaking, our first in many a moon.

Yay! It’s Tax Day, my favoritest holiday ever, just ahead of National Polka Festival Day and George W. Bush’s birthday.

Naturally, I don’t concern myself with taxes, being an arteest rather than an accountant. But Herself, who serves as Mad Dog Media’s Custodian of Records, advises me that the State of Colorado screwed the pooch on our return, sending us a refund check for $199 when in fact we owed $24 and had sent them a check for same.

Goldurned gummint can’t get nothin’ right. Where’s m’tea-bag hat? I feel a protest comin’ on. ‘Specially after reading this Mother Jones piece about how tax-prep outfits scam the poor.

Reading for comprehension

There is at least a partial solution to be found in one Coloradan’s complaint about the rising cost of fuel. See if you can find it:

For drivers such as Robert Wagner, 51, a high school teacher from Thornton, Colo., the higher fuel costs mean cutting back on movies and dinners out for him, his wife and their two children. “We’re very, very frugal right now,” he said as he trickled enough $3.09-per-gallon gasoline into his Chevrolet Suburban to get him to his next pay day.

Now try to figure out who will get the blame for this appalling state of affairs. Will it be (a) auto-motoring Americans who insist on surrounding themselves with more armor plating than a phalanx of Middle Ages knights aboard Percherons, or (2) a Kenyan-born Muslim socialist richly deserving of impeachment?

Laboring day

Turkish, our local version of the IWW Sabo-Cat, takes a Labor Day break from his duties, whatever those might be.

Holiday, schmoliday. I had to work this morning. Not very hard, or for very long, but still.

The prez was working, too, calling for a $50 billion public works plan that seems to have absolutely no hope of coming to fruition before the Congresscritters scurry home, running like rats for re-election, proving yet again that they care more about whether they stay employed than whether we do.

Kevin Drum, another poor sod at the keyboard instead of the grill, is dismissive of the proposal, calling it “too small to be more than a pinprick.” Steve Benen speaks more gently of the plan, saying “it’s good to have lawmakers put on the spot before the election, taking a position on sensible, effective economic proposals like this one.” He also reminds us that Rep. John Boehner (R-Tanning Salon) is an idiot.

And Paul Krugman, drawing parallels with FDR’s situation in 1938, moans that “politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes.”

He adds: “And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.”

True dat, Paul old sock. Buckle up, folks, it’s gonna be a rough ride.

• Late update: To celebrate Labor Day Herself and I attended an Arlo Guthrie concert — yes, that Arlo Guthrie — right here in Bibleburg; in fact, only a few blocks from Chez Dog, in a park behind the Fine Arts Center. He didn’t do “Alice’s Restaurant,” but he did sing the great Steve Goodman tune, “City of New Orleans,” “The Motorcycle Song,” his fabled Woodstock number “Coming Into Los Angeles,” a couple of Leadbelly bits and (of course) his old man’s “This Land Is Your Land.” We sang along, a few thousand elderly hippies plus a few young folks who must have grown weary of their generation’s “stupid fucking tuneless horseshit,” as Thomas McGuane has accurately described it. It was great. “Take a good look around, Toots,” I told Herself as we strolled in. “This is what my nursing home is gonna look like.” Arlo must have been thinking along similar lines. At one point he quipped, “I’m what’s left of me.” Me, too, bruh. And I wasn’t even at Woodstock. At least, I don’t think I was. …

Have you blackened your Friday?

Oh, the tangled web we weave when spending cuts we first perceive.

Not us. Herself is downstairs working and I’m upstairs goofing off, enjoying the fracas from a distance. My idea of a good time is not playing Australian rules football with a bunch of bargain-hunters in a Best Buy at four o’clock in the morning.

Mind you, I like to shop. It’s often more fun and less disappointing than actually buying something. But I usually root around online for quite a while, checking specs and weighing options, before marching down to some local shop to lay hands on the product and finally slap down the plastic. Or not.

Here’s a case in point. I have authorization from Herself to buy a new Mac, but haven’t done so. How come?

Well, it’s that natural contrariness rearing its ugly head again. The Black Turtleneck Mob in Cupertino isn’t selling exactly what I want to buy, which is an affordable, accessible consumer tower model like my old G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, simple to fix and/or upgrade, but sporting modern hardware and software.

There’s the Mac Pro, but at $2,499 I’d hardly call it affordable, especially since it ships with a measly 3 GB of RAM and no Airport Express card. You want to double the first and add the last, tack on another $200.

OK, how about those nifty iMacs? Not sure I’d like working full time on a glossy screen. My 13.3-inch MacBook has one, and it can be irksome to see my ugly mug staring back at me as I cook up another bouillabaisse of bullshit for fun and profit. Plus all its ports are in the ass-end of the thing. WTF?

New MacBook? Got an old one, thanks, from 2006 and in a manly black (I dislike pasty white computers). MacBook Pro? No separate audio in/out ports on the new 13-incher, which seems to offer the most bang per buck, and no user-removable batteries on any of ‘em. Plus I already have more laptops than Cheney’s closet does skeletons. As daily drivers go, they and the multiplicity of cables to peripherals required eat up a lot of desktop space, which irks the cats, who like to use my desk as a springboard to the window for reasons known only to themselves.

Mini? Another Mac I can’t crack, and it seems underpowered, if nicely priced.

And then there’s that voice, only one of many in my head, but among the most insistent, which keeps whispering, “You work in a subset of journalism, a craft with all the future of a Conestoga repairman in Manhattan.”

So instead of greening up my Black Friday with a new Mac, I’ve gotten myself a tad more computing horsepower by hooking up the MacBook to my 22-inch ViewSonic. The G4 tower now serves mostly as storage space, three drives’ worth, accessible wirelessly through my DSL modem-router combo. But I’ll also use it to scan and color cartoons, since it has an ancient yet serviceable version of Photoshop (another $500 goes unspent).

This probably won’t fly come July, if I’m still helping VeloNews.com push pixels during Le Tour. But it ain’t July.

• Late update: Reading the Gaslight‘s latest coverage of the first official shopping day of the holiday season (suck it, you out-of-Focus fucktards), it’s sad to note that while the G found it worthwhile to report from big boxes on Powers and Academy boulevards, in Woodland Park and in Castle Rock, they didn’t bother to send anyone downtown — which is about a mile away from Gaslight HQ. Maybe they’re afraid of ice falling from the USOC HQ, but I can’t see this lot being scared of a head injury, considering where they keep their brains. And they wonder why both the newspaper and downtown are struggling.

Here comes the King

Lance Armstrong says he's excited about his three-year association with Michelob Ultra, because it complements his active lifestyle by injecting it with a shitload of money.

Just think — if Bristol Brewing made worse beer and more money, they could have Lance Armstrong as their celebrity spokesperson.

Instead, the former Shiner Bock drinker will be pimping Michelob Ultra, one of the jillions of brands belonging to industry titan InBev, and a concoction described as “a great-tasting beer with lower carbohydrates and fewer calories.”

Uh huh. I haven’t sampled an Anheuser-Busch product in many a moon, since I discovered what actual beer tastes like. But I suppose that given the proper incentive — a Brinks truck full of greenbacks and free Michelob Ultra backing up to the house every Friday — I could learn to lower my standards, too.

As a much younger dog I would drink pretty much anything as long as it was cheap — Falstaff, Buckhorn, longneck Buds. But as it is written in 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things.” Including watery beer.

In my dotage, I favor IPA from Bristol, Lagunitas or Second Street Brewing in Santa Fe, when I happen to be in town. Anchor Steam or Anchor Porter. Guinness, of course. And the Deschutes beers are all excellent, whether you’re talking ale, porter or stout. I’d recommend any of them for free.

In fact, I just did. No wonder I remain so distressingly unwealthy. I will never be smart.

• Extra-credit snark: This is not Anheuser-Busch’s first marketing coup, of course. More Americans can recognize the Budweiser Clydesdales than can find Afghanistan on a map. I recall enjoying a semantic analysis of the original Budweiser jingle in college. Don’t recall if it was in journalism class or semantics, but the gist of it was that the jingle said absolutely nothing about the beer — it was a series of empty statements punctuated with references to Anheuser-Busch trademarks.

Think about it for a second:

“When you say ‘Bud,” you’ve said a lot of things nobody else can say.” (That’s because ‘Bud” is a trademark.)

“When you say ‘Bud,’ you say you care enough to only drink the King of Beers.” (“King of Beers,” another trademark.)

“There is no other one.” (One what?)

“There’s only something less.” (Than what?)

“Because the King of Beers . . .” (That trademark again.)

“. . . is leading all the rest.” (Of what?)

“When you say Budweiser — you’ve said it all.” (The complete name, which is also a trademark.)

Busy, busy, busy

It was curtains — for the blinds. For the yos among you, that's some retro Jimmy Cagney gangster lingo, a'ight?

Between the Giro d’Italia, deadlines and various household chores, I haven’t had much time for politics lately. That said, fuck Dick Cheney. This pustular pestilence is less in need of a soapbox than of the contents therein, though I expect it would take more than Ivory or even Lava to wash the bloodstains off his pudgy pinkies. Perhaps we should try napalm or white phosphorous.

But enough about Evil Dick. How’bout that Giro time trial, hah? Didn’t turn the GC all topsy-turvy the way some pundits had predicted, but it sure was fun to watch — until the Universal Sports feed went black in the final 3km of Denis Menchov’s winning ride.

A certain former Tour champ has ceased speaking with the working press, freeing reporters to actually write about the race for a change. And while my homeboy Danny Pate is not exactly a GC threat, it was nice to see Juliet Macur of The New York Times note the former U-23 world time-trial champ’s performance in this most recent race against the clock — seems he lost it on a descent and shot straight through a hospitality tent.

“I just rode into there, went around some tables and shot back out,” he said. “I didn’t have any time to grab Champagne.”

Oh, snap. Swing on by when you get back to Bibleburg, homes, we’ll pour you a little sumpin’-sumpin’.

Here in Pate country, meanwhile, we’ve been doing our little part to keep the economy humming along. Herself’s mother is coming to visit for a few days, and we have no spare bedroom, so we had to hunt up a love seat that folds out into a single bed. I proposed that Herself v1.0 camp in the back of the ’83 longbed, which isn’t getting any use right now, but that dog didn’t hunt with v2.0, so we’re out a few C’s that could have been spent on bike parts and beer.

Another substantial chunk of change evaporated when Herself decreed that our bedroom needed curtains after a half-dozen years getting by with some cheapo blinds. And those pricey new curtains do indeed look nifty, but not as nifty as, say, a week at the beach, quaffing colorful beverages with little umbrellas shading their ice cubes.

Then the fire blight is nibbling at the trees again, the decks demanded stain as protection against the elements and our basement remains incomplete after someone screwed the pooch on a key measurement, leaving us with a bathroom door that won’t fit; it only took six weeks to build and ship, but the good news is that its replacement should only take four. Yeah, right.

Whoops, here come the love-seat-delivery dudes. Anyone want to place a bet on whether the sumbitch will fit through the back door?

• Late update: It fit. Barely. Like an H2 on a sidewalk. Sucker sure looked smaller on the showroom floor than it did going down the basement stairs.

It never rains, but it snows

Actually, yesterday it did both for a while. We could see the lawn and trees greening up like Bruce Banner in “The Incredible Hulk.” It was heavy, wet stuff that kept me indoors, moving pixels around VeloNews.com and furniture around my office, which had begun to resemble a rummage sale at a crack house run by a retired newspaperman. I was starting to feel crowded, like a Republican asked for a fact. Thus, a bunch of books I never read are headed for the library system, and some furniture is bound for the thrift store. Only I remain to tell the tale.

If there was a downside to the precip’, it was that our roof sprung a leak again yesterday. I was headed for my rocker with a largish bowl of Mom’s chile con carne when I noticed a couple of wet spots on my sweats. “You spastic tosspot,” I thought. “You’ve either pissed yourself or spilt perfectly drinkable wine on your drawers.” Then a third drop drilled me in the bald spot, which is pretty easy to hit in that it starts around my upper lip. Oh, shit. Straight down out of the ceiling fan this time.

Into the attic I go with a bucket and a headlamp as Herself makes a terse call to the roofers who plugged the holes around our solar array the last time we had a decent snowfall. The bucket proved more useful, although the roofers are certainly a pleasant outfit, if one has a hurricane and an insurance company close at hand.

With that in mind, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a tornado, hailstorm or falling satellite, as Uncle Sugar has announced his plans to jam both forepaws and one cloven hoof in our pockets come Wednesday. Happily, it’s a small roof, and we already have the bucket.

Toto, I don’t think we’re on Krypton anymore

An AIG employee applies for his share of $165 million in bonuses.

In an early episode of the DC Comics feature “Tales of the Bizarro World,” in which the inhabitants do the exact opposite of all Earthly things, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you.”

Ladies and gents, welcome to Bizarro World.

If I recall, the last cash bonus I got was $50 for saving a reporter from being hoodwinked by a school-board wiseass before her story about a fictional candidate for superintendent — Quincy Adams Wagstaff, late of Huxley College — could sneak into the pages of The New Mexican. I certainly never scored a cash payout for introducing libels into stories, throwing monkey wrenches into the presses or setting the newsroom afire.

If we were still on Earth, the 43 fools and/or thieves who run the AIG Financial Products unit — which as Steve Benen notes “was responsible for the company’s mess in the first place” — would be awarded custom-fit tuxedos of tar and feathers and chauffeured off to prison on splintery rails. But we do things backassward here on Bizarro World, and so they will get $165 million in bonuses after AIG soaked up $170 billion in taxpayer dollars.

As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo: “The folks running AIG’s financial products division should be happy to escape this mess without criminal indictments. And that’s not hyperbole. When you look at what they were doing, foolish or high-risk behavior are inadequate descriptors. It really amounts to fraud.”

Tom Sawyer lives

Must ... not ... buy ... new ... iMac ... ngggh.

Many things demanded my attention today, but it was 70-something outdoors and so I showed them all a clean pair of heels. I went for a longish run-hike in Palmer Park, took the cats outdoors for an airing and in general wasted the day in creative loafing. Judge not lest ye be judged. You’re lucky I didn’t con you into whitewashing the fence.

If the economy perks up it’s because I bought some light groceries from Vitamin Cottage-Natural Grocers, not because I raced out to grab one of the updated iMacs or Mac Minis announced today. It’s just like the Black Turtleneck Mob to tempt me with shiny baubles after a week of herding dented and stained G4 and G3 relics from the digital tar pits. Get thee behind me, Apple.

It would be the height of stupidity for me to buy a new computer in these troubled times, working as I do in the publications industry, a career path with all the stability and longevity of a gig delivering nitroglycerin via pogo stick. So, naturally, I’ll probably do it. What the hell, it’s only money. Take out a loan, everybody does it. Dude, where’s my bailout? Surely I’m too big to fail. Just ask anyone who’s seen me in Lycra lately.