From here to there and back again

Twelve hours after I left home and hearth, sallying forth in the service of bicycle journalism, I found myself back at the ranch, cracking the first of what would be more than one bottle of Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale and speaking in a tone and volume that startled the dog, although the cats are used to it.

It’s all of 85 miles from here to Denver International Airport, a distance I once routinely covered via bicycle, and that’s as far as United Airlines got me today before I finally told them, “Piss on the fire and call in the dogs, I’ve had the course.” Not even bicycle racers can make this many excuses for failure. Call it the Tour of Concourse B.

Had I been flying Air Subaru I’d have made Flagstaff in about the same time as it took to fly from Bibleburg to Mile High and back again (total air time: 40 minutes tops). I could have enjoyed a Hopshot IPA at the Beaver Street Brewing Company, hit the sack, then arisen early and motored to Sacramento for a glass of Thunderhead IPA at Pyramid Breweries. But nooo. …

More tomorrow, once I calm down. We must think of the animals.

Hot times in the old town (for now)

Bibleburg popped a 4-year-old record today, hitting 78 degrees. And the springlike weather had all the eejits  out and about, believe you me.

First, I nearly got right-hooked by an inattentive motorist at a stoplight on the outbound leg of today’s ride; happily, being a lifelong paranoid, I saw her coming. On the homestretch I avoided T-boning a couple of dipshit mountain bikers on a fast descent through Palmer Park. They rolled casually from a parking lot into the road, right in front of me, screened by a phalanx of parked vehicles. Once again, I was lucky to have seen them long before they saw me. Disc brakes helped, too.

There is a particular class of narcissistic nitwit at large these days whose members believe that nothing they do can ever be wrong. It’s thinking on a par with Tricky Dicky’s “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Then again, calling it “thinking” is a bit extravagant. I saw the faces of both motorist and mountain bikers, and they resembled nothing so much as the vacuous mugs of feedlot cows, contentedly chewing their own cuds.

The temptation is to lock up the binders, gesticulate and in general make a spectacle of yourself, offering up loud, detailed and specific instruction delivered mostly in words containing only four letters.  But what kind of crazy bastard shouts at cattle on a beautiful spring day?

The danger of distracted pedestrians

First, they came for Muffy’s iPod, and I said nothing. …

Jesus H. Christ. Do our lawmakers have nothing more pressing to take up than the blistering stupidity of fleawits who fall into fountains or totter into traffic while entranced by their Personal Lobotomy Devices?

I fail to see the problem here. Stupidity should be painful, and if it is occasionally fatal, well, the gene pool appears badly in need of chlorination, does it not? Back to job creation, if you please. Hey, here’s a thought: Hire personal assistants for everyone to keep them from hurting themselves!

‘Look, they got jobs’

Who’s in the valley when the shit rolls downhill? Twenty-five thousand Coloradans. Another 21,000 folks in Kentucky. Some 454,000 Californians.

And that’s just the the tip of the turd-berg. All because the Republicans have no shame and the Democrats have no balls.

Where was all this hand-wringing over the deficit when the Elefinks were running two wars off the budget, flushing buckets of your grandbabies’ money down the loo of the Daffy-Fudd dream of global empire? That this murderous profligacy continues under a Donk administration is doubly abhorrent, but at least it’s in the budget where everyone can get a good, cold, hard look at the cost of being the world’s cop on the beat.

This is not about the deficit. It’s about power, and the little guy is on the short end of that very big stick.

Kentuckian Latoya Collins gets it exactly right. Waiting at the Jobs Center in Lexington, the 27-year-old — who hasn’t been without work since she was 15, until now — says maybe Congress doesn’t notice the working man.

“Look, they got jobs,” she told the Lexington Herald-Leader. More’s the pity. America is laying off all the wrong people.

Scared strait

Zdravstvuĭte, tovarishch Yeti, me love you long time.

Ho, ho. The brownshirts who cuffed one journo’ and tried to intimidate a couple more during a Joe Miller tea party at an Alaskan public school are apparently active-duty soldiers moonlighting without approval from their chain of command.

You’ll notice in the video still that one of these Nazis is giving the sieg heil with the wrong hand. Thirty days close arrest, Heinrich. If you’re lucky. Dis-miss.

What is it with Alaska, anyway? These Arctic Circle assholes suck the public sugar tit drier than a popcorn fart, like Nosferaturu locked onto a fat artery after a few hits of killer bud, then complain that they don’t like the taste.

What say we hire a few of these out-of-work fellas I hear so much about lately in the lower 48 to saw this frozen shithole off the continent and shove it across the Bering Strait to to Siberia, see how these freedom-loving dingbats like it over there? Love it or leave it, beeeyotch. Preferably the latter.

That lame-ass beard surrounding Miller’s smirking yap ought to look like porn-star poontang to some horny Russian yeti. Probably be the first time that mouth of his has been put to good use since his mama whelped him in a Kansas trash can.

Dumb and dumber

Stick a microphone in John McInsane’s face and something mind-numbingly stupid will pop out of his mouth. Guaran-fuckin’-tee. The senator (R-Asylum) is like a jukebox that only plays one tune — the Horst Wessel song.

Chiming in on the arrest of a suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing, this fine legal mind opined on the Don Imus show: “Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about.”

No, Numbnuts, the U.S. Constitution is not merely advisory, like a stop sign in Bibleburg. You don’t get to tear it up every time some dingbat tries to blow a bunch of us up. Not if he’s an American citizen. Not even if he’s a brown American citizen. Jesus. You’d think a guy who spent a few years in a cage getting beaten into a confession would have figured it out by now.

And Traitor Joe Liederkrantz (I-Cheesedick) is no better. This tool wants to strip Americans of their citizenship and constitutional rights should they “choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations.”

Who gets to decide what constitutes a “foreign terrorist organization,” Joe? Let’s hope it’s not you, you sanctimonious sack of shit. Listening to you and of the GOPers you pal around with, I get the idea that being a member of the Democrat Party might qualify.

Remember when these tinhorns squeak that the U.S. Senate was once considered the greatest deliberative body in the world.

Flying fish gets wings clipped

When people learn that I detest flying, they generally ask, “Why?” Here’s part of the answer.

I mean, shit, c’mon. Osama bin Laden probably saw this directive before Flying With Fish did. It’s like having the FBI kick down your door for for ripping off a Matt Groening cartoon (see previous post).

And what could the bloggers do but bend over and take it? If the TSA tried this sort of stunt with The New York Times it would be wearing a thick coat of lawyers the way a dead hog wears flies. A free-lance travel writer with a kid in his arms is going to be a good deal less aggro’ than a hungover editor with three bitchy ex-wives, ’roids and a bleak professional future without some best-selling book to pitch to Random House — say, about how he stood tall while having his nuts squeezed by some brownshirts from the Department of Open Your Duffel, Take Off Your Shoes and Shut the Fuck Up.

Jesus. This is why I drive everywhere. I don’t have to get to the Subaru two hours before departure, I can carry on everything from bikes to guns to jumbo bottles of booze, and nobody is ever setting his boxers ablaze in the seat next to me.

Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus!

Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.

We haven’t even sat down to Thanksgiving Day dinner and the pulpiteers at Focus on the Fambly are already trotting out their annual Christmas In Peril fantasy. Focus Action spokescreature Carrie Gordon Earll breaks it down for us in Palinesque style (and I’m not talking Michael here):

“The eradication of Christmas is a politically correct idea that we can’t have sacred ideas in our culture.”

Uh huh. Can someone please ask Spock to pop round with his Universal Translator? I assume it handles Cretinese.

The more I see of industrial Christianity, Bibleburg style, the more I like Zen. You never see a mob from the local sangha berating the manager of a Best Buy because he won’t hang banners inscribed with the Four Noble Truths on Shakyamuni’s birthday. George Carlin had this crowd nailed, you should pardon the expression.

Meanwhile, thanks for all the music recommendations. I’d forgotten how much I like some of your suggestions, especially The Band’s “The Last Waltz.” Wouldn’t you know the sumbitch isn’t available on iTunes? Yo, Carrie, forget about that eradication-of-Christmas bullshit — we got a real problem right here.

McNamara dies, goes to Hell

It’s an old National Lampoon gag, originally concerning Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but it seems appropriate in this instance. Robert McNamara was the Donald Rumsfeld of his generation, a whiz kid who was too smart for his own good (and ours).

Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones notes that Salon.com founder David Talbot wrote a 1984 cover story for the magazine on “the transformation of McNamara, former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and ex-CIA chief William Colby from Vietnam-era hawks to advocates of a nuclear weapons freeze.”

Talbot, Schulman said, described McNamara as “the cost-control wizard who thought the war could be run like a Ford assembly line: body counts, kill ratios, bombing raids. And when he saw that it wasn’t adding up, that it did not compute, he repeatedly lied — to Congress, to the press, to the American public.”

What a shame Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around to piss a quart of filtered Wild Turkey on this warmonger’s grave, the way he did on a ceremony for the unveiling of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s portrait at the University of Georgia Law School (see “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” from “The Great Shark Hunt”).

“They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels,” Thompson wrote.

In his absence, we have war correspondent Joe Galloway, author of “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” who seems pleased that “the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell” and eulogizes him as a serial liar, a distorter of history and “the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”

Here’s hoping Bob, Dick and LBJ save Don a seat by the fire — or better yet, in it, since it seems that unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld will never have any fleeting doubts about the countless graves he has filled, with our people and theirs.

Oh, yeah. There was a bike race today, too. Somebody won. Nobody died.

Oh, help me, please doctor, I’m damaged

So I’m engaged in another little office cleanup project, getting a deal on a new APC Back-UPS surge protector/battery backup in return for recycling the old one, and when I haul the previous edition to the UPS Store to ship it off, the manager is tending to an elderly gent who is having some class of episode.

He’s sprawled out in an office chair, not particularly responsive, and has lost control of his bladder. The manager is taking his pulse and talking quietly to him, one hand with a damp cloth on the back of his neck, as her assistant speaks with 911. We can hear the sirens, and as the fire truck and an ambulance pull up outside, he mumbles that he doesn’t want any ambulance ride because it will cost him $50. The small shop fills up quickly with firefighters, paramedics and their gear.

Eighty-eight years old, fades out in a UPS store and can’t afford a $50 ambulance ride. Sports a POW-MIA  cap. A son, maybe? Who knows? I conduct my little bit of business and roll out the door.

On the way home I hit the radio and Terry Gross is chatting with doctor, bioethicist and author Robert Martensen about the U.S. health-care system. They agree it has a couple of hitches in its gitalong. No fucking shit. Y’think?

I come home to a voice mail from our accountant. Seems we owe Uncle Sugar a couple thou’ to keep Wall Street from taking an infarction. Thank God the money isn’t going for any of that socialized medicine this new crowd in Washington, D.C., is on about. I’d sure hate to see The State tinker with a private enterprise that’s ticking along so smoothly.