A goose for the lame duck

Temps took their sweet time about climbing into the reasonable range today, so, being a wanker, I didn’t kit up and go for a ride until 2 p.m. On the way back home I heard a fusillade of honking from above, looked skyward and there they were — two flights of geese in V formations, looking just like a W, headed south.

Dude, where’s my bailout package?

First it was Wall Street, then came Motor City, and now the states are shuffling around the back door of Congress, heads down and hands out, begging for baksheesh. Jesus wept. When do we get some relief for the crucial cheap-joke sector of the economy, is what I’d like to know. Our “portfolio” these days looks like a raggedy-ass sock half full of Icelandic kronur, subway tokens and wooden nickels.

Stews youse can use

Mia Sopaipilla and the Buddha wonder what smells so delicious in the kitchen.

More cookery this morning — this time, an Andean bean stew with winter squash and quinoa from the “Recipes for Health” section of The New York Times. Martha Rose Shulman has been on a kick involving canned tomatoes and whatever’s seasonal lately, and I’ve enjoyed more than a few of her recipes. Particularly tasty is her ragout of red chard, potato and white beans, but I can’t find the bugger archived anywhere.

I had intended to make this last night but ran out of space and time (I could really use a six-burner stove and a kitchen double the size of this one). Thus, since Shulman says this stew is best enjoyed if made a day ahead and reheated, I don’t get immediate gratification here. Maybe I’ll whip up some cheese enchiladas in red chile for dinner. Herself will be off enjoying dinner and a chick flick with one of our foodie pals, Avery, so I can make a wreck of the kitchen without her trailing in my wake, washing up.

Chilly outside, chili inside

A pot of Mom's chili con carne (with a few tweaks) simmers on the stove.

Cold weather makes me think of soups and stews, and today I’m cooking up a batch of Mom’s chili con carne, which dates to the mid-1960s and Randolph AFB, Texas.

My version involves several upgrades to her recipe, which called for ground round, Ro-Tel diced tomatoes with green chilies, tomato paste, chopped onion, garlic powder, chili powder, cumin and pintos. I use ground bison, New Mexico chile (a couple diced green mild, a couple hot and two tablespoons of ground red) and organic onions, garlic, tomatoes, paste and beans.

Sometimes I use a combo of black and navy beans for color, and I always chuck a little Mexican oregano in there, too. Whip up a pot of rice, pour chili over same in a bowl, sprinkle with grated cheddar and serve with either tortillas or tortilla chips. Man, I’m hungry already and this won’t be ready for two hours. . . .

Editor’s note: Gabachos say “chili,” New Mexicans say “chile.” Just in case you think my editing skills have slipped.

Too much technology

In the bad old days, if a guy wanted to get his little message out, it was a matter of patronizing a print shop or standing on a street corner, shouting at passers-by. No longer. Today, thanks to Al Gore and his magnificent Intertubes, I can rattle brains from a safe distance for free.

I have a metric assload of websites, most of them lying fallow, untended. There’s the main DogSite at www.maddogmedia.com; the WordPress setup on the back end of that one; this WordPress setup and another one I’ve never done anything with (it was supposed to be a joint venture with my buddy Hal Walter of Hardscrabble Times, but never got off the ground for some reason); a Blogspot site; and a LiveJournal site. I test-drove TypePad for two weeks, then shut that one down; they wanted money, the swine, and I don’t have any.

It’s always something with these deals. I liked the look of TypePad, but it was far from easy to use. Blogspot sucks. LiveJournal sucks even more. And WordPress — each template has its own little idiosyncrasies. This one has been driving me witless this morning, turning every header image I uploaded into a blurry mess that made me think either my monitor or my eyesight was going. I finally decided WordPress might not like the thousand-year-old copy of Photoshop haunting my desktop, so in desperation I shifted computers and used a more recent iteration to build a new header image. Presto.

White tigers in the trees

The Mighty Turk does fill up a tree, does he not?

It was a fine day for cats in Bibleburg: upper 60s, sunny, with trees bereft of leaves, which make an excellent platform for bird-watching. But it was a tad breezy for cycling, so when I gave the VeloNews.com crowd the slip for an hour around lunchtime I rolled on over to Palmer Park, where a guy can dodge the worst of the wind.

A cyclo-cross bike is not the ideal machine for Palmer Park. Still, riding skinny tires and a rigid fork on rocky, sandy single-track is a Zen-like way to focus the mind on the task at hand, which is getting exercise without getting killed; like riding the road, only with less bad noise and more scenery.

Speaking of which, a fellow slacker is bound for McDowell Mountain Regional Park tomorrow for a couple weeks of riding in that sandy neck of the Arizona woods. He’s looking at 80-something and sunny; I’m looking at 40-something and breezy. I suspect he invested more wisely than I did, if only when it comes to time management.

I should’ve listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. “What did she tell you?” you ask. “Beats me,” I reply. “I wasn’t listening.”

Day 2 of the New Weird Order

Thanks for all of your comments on the new op’. Today will be a busy one in the old VeloNews.com barrel, but over the weekend, I’m going to try to give a little more oomph to this site, if only because Herself is working on a blogging project and requires input, no matter how defective the source (that would be me, not you, for the sensitive among the readership). Meanwhile, anonymous comments on the Blogspot site have been enabled so those of you without Google accounts can send me NastyGrams® (sorry about that oversight).

In other news, Big Brother is indeed watching; the NYT’s Paul Krugman reminds us that not only have we learned nothing from Vietnam, we have forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression; Bill Richardson finally climbs down off the fence and endorses Obama; and Schlock Racing gets the extended middle digit from the Tour de Georgia, just, y’know, ’cause. There’s more than you need to know on VeloNews.com for more on that one today. The barrel beckons.

Late update: Good Lord. If I wanted to work, I’d get a job. I barely managed to sneak out for a short run in Palmer Park between bouts of posting this, that and the other. The park isn’t nearly as gooey as I figured it would be, but there are still plenty of squishy spots in the shade, so all you body-armored boneheads stay the hell away until things dry out. I don’t wanna be tripping over your petrified tire tracks come June. Spread your spoor in Pueblo, where it was spring during winter.

There’s a new dog at large

When my website-hosting company, Hostcentric, inexplicably began functioning about as smoothly and efficiently as the federal government, health care and the mainstream media, I decided to try fiddling around with a couple of alternatives to running my own largely unused communications empire. The first furry toe in the blogging water was this WordPress account, which I can’t get set up quite the way I’d like it; the second can be found at thevelodog.blogspot.com.

Frankly, I really don’t need all the bells and whistles I’d worked into the original DogS(h)ite — and neither do you, because I hardly ever played any tunes on ‘em. Most of the links were rarely updated or outright ignored. Cam, ‘Toons, Mad Dog Unleashed, Radio Free Dogpatch — they all sat there like strays no one was gonna adopt. What’s a dog to do?

Lift his leg on the whole deal, that’s what. All I want to do is bark incessantly, howl at the moon, and leap over the fence (or dig under it). Tip over a few trash cans. Water neocons’ lawns (and maybe their shoes, too).

Consider this the first squirt.