The Truths Uttered in Jest

I resemble this.

Chiefs!

Okay, I get that Alex Smith is too expensive for the Chiefs to keep. And I'm psyched about Patrick Mahomes starting next year, I think he's the most promising thing I've seen in a Chiefs uniform since Dick Vermeil's years coaching here.

So they've traded Smith to the Washington Redskins, frees up umpteen million in cap space they desperately need to shore up an iffy defense (and I hope maybe upgrade their offensive line so the green quarterback doesn't get creamed too often).

But the Eagles this year illustrate how you can have a Super Bowl caliber team, a promising young quarterback and really need an experienced backup QB. Without Nick Foles, they don't go to the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.

I realized today that the perfect solution for the Chiefs would be Colin Kaepernick. He's had a year off to get healthy, he's a big, strong, fast quarterback with plenty of experience (and his talents are very similar to Mahomes' from what I can tell so he'd plug in to a Mahomes-centric system pretty readily), and he's unemployed.

The Chiefs already have a kneeler or two during the anthem, so I don't think that'd be an issue. And as far as reclamation projects, Andy Reid took fucking Michael Vick and gave him another chance, surely wearing idiotic Castro t-shirts isn't as bad as dog fighting.

And I think they could structure the contract in a way that would be hard to resist: say $2 million guaranteed, with incentives like $500,000 for each game he starts and another $500,000 for each game he stars and wins. So if Mahomes goes down in the preseason and Colin leads us to a 16-0 regular season, he would make $18 million, a very respectable salary for him and a very reasonable deal for the Chiefs. If he spends the season watching from the sidelines, he's got his $2 million, still healthy and fresh, and probably has better prospects of getting some team in the league to try him as a starter again.

Honestly, I don't know why the NFL hasn't given me a job making big money. I can figure this shit out on the fly.

Shithole

I've tried my best this past year to avoid blogging political posts. I mean, why bother? If you voted for the Cheeto Benito, I'm not going to change your mind. And if you thought I was sexist for not being fully enthralled with Hillary Clinton, well, I'm probably not going to change your mind either.

I got a response the other day to my comment that Trump calling for an examination of our libel laws, so that someone who makes false and defamatory statements can be held accountable, should be careful lest he be hoist by his own petard. "You're still upset about losing the election?"

I'm like, are you even awake a few hours a day? I'm not upset that Hillary isn't President. In fact, I blame her because in the cockamamy scheme we've created, she was the alternative to an obviously bigoted and ignorant jerk. And she was a shitty candidate. I voted for her, but I puked in my mouth a little bit doing so.

So this week Trump is supposedly negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and he complains about why we can't have more Norwegians and fewer Haitians and refers to African countries as 'shitholes.'

Now calling African countries or Haiti 'shitholes' isn't automatically racist in my view. Good government is unknown in Haiti and honestly most of the African continent too. American and European foreign policy is a lot of the reason why these countries are, to varying degrees, shitholes, but that doesn't change what they are.

You prefer Norway? Well, yeah, those people are mostly white. They also have a robust social safety net and universal healthcare so how exactly do you propose to entice them to emigrate to a country where what little of that they'd have is under fire from you? What is the big force driving Norwegians to emigrate to America?

But even if those African countries are shitholes, leaving aside the fact that a head of state should know better than to talk of his peers that way, are you upset that people want to upgrade from their shitholes? Norwegians might not have much to envy in American life, but folks in Haiti, El Salvador, the Congo, etc, even with Donald Trump as prez we might seem like an upgrade.

The people who come from these places enhance our country, they contribute to our economy. And when we 'chain migrate' their families in, that's a plus, too. If you had to start over in a strange country where you might not even initially speak the language, are you less of a burden for having no family and community links there? Personally, if I had to learn Hungarian and figure out life in Budapest, having a dozen family members who had already navigated this world would make that all seem much, much more doable.

Wanting to emigrate to America to make a better life is not a goddamn crime. Even people who do so 'illegally,' pump your brakes. Betting on NCAA brackets is illegal, speeding is illegal, we don't throw people out of the country for it.

I'm not upset about 'losing the election.' I didn't lose it, but America did. I'm skeptical of Democrats as an alternative, the enemy of your enemy is not automatically your friend. Trump isn't a Republican, he isn't a conservative, he's an existential threat because he doesn't even know what he's gotten into and wouldn't care about anything that matters if he did.

Infinity and Infinite Aggrandizement

When I was coming out of Through the Eyes of Picasso, I wasn't really spending much time on the work that fills the Bloch addition as we made our way up to the Dreams of Kings. But this caught my eye, a neon and mirror affair that has a really cool infinite loopiness to it. I think I need one of these for my house.

I didn't spend much time in the second exhibit actually, I was pretty wore out from the Picasso. The artifacts included a lot of jade, the pale kind the Chinese were into back in the day (the dark green stuff a lot of us think of is a latecomer). The stone is hard to work, and this king's burial suit was made of over 4200 plates of the stuff sewn together with silk and then bound with gold wire.

The resources that went into this burial suit, the hours of labor to mine the jade, cut it, polish it, fit it together, sew it, I wonder how many poor Chinese people starved to death or went without basic necessities so this cunt could be buried in the most expensive set of pajamas ever conceived. On behalf of the subjects of this 'king' I want to ask, who the hell do you think you are?

Don't show this suit to Donald Trump, he'll want one of his own.

What Happens In Vegas...

I've been on record in these pages as saying the Second Amendment covers your right to not only own guns, but aircraft carriers, nuclear missiles, tanks, Predator drones, etc. It has to in order to fulfill that defense against tyranny part gun nuts love to cite while defending their AR15s with bump-fire stocks that have no legitimate self defense or hunting purpose.

I still think this is true, this country was founded on a violent insurgency, and through a lucky turn of events, it established a regime that was a vast improvement over the one overthrown. That is, historically, anomalous. The French Revolution? Russian Revolution? The Khmer Rouge, Mao, the Islamists who took over Iran in 1979? Pretty much every time people have risen in violence to overthrow a tyrant they've installed a tyrant as bad or worse. So for all the founding fathers got right, they fucked up some too.

Slavery? Women's suffrage? There was lots of stuff the founders encoded into their fledgling republic that was fucked up and while I'm not anti-gun (I enjoy shooting, and I see valid uses), unfettered and unvetted gun ownership and carriage is one of the most problematic legacies that have yet to be addressed. Women vote, we've sort of liberated the slaves, but it's basically illegal to ask someone why they want a 30th semi-auto long gun with a bump-fire stock and another 3,000 rounds of ammo.

The Second Amendment is just an amendment. And there's nothing 'well regulated' about the so-called militia that has all these high capacity magazines, machine gun workarounds and such. It can and should be changed because over 500 people were injured or killed in direct violation of their 'liberty' to listen to terrible music in Las Vegas and go home unharmed by anything other than a country concert.

You gun nuts, God bless you, if you do't want Australian or Japanese style gun control to eventually come to pass, quit pretending like the right to own weapons of indiscriminate mass murder is more important than the right to survive a concert. I don't believe gun control measures by themselves will solve the problem, I think big pharma is as culpable in this as the gun lobby (homicidal/suicidal ideation related to SSRI's is vanishingly rare as a percentage, but it doesn't take much of a fraction of 30 million people to cause big problems). But hearing an ATF official explain that bump-fire stocks are legal because they follow the letter of the law if not the spirit, I have a problem with that. These are tools designed to make the gun an indiscriminate killing device.

I have to show my driver's license to buy cold medicine. Last time I was in Walmart, the Krylon was locked up to prevent huffers from stealing spray paint. Maybe, just maybe, it should be harder to murder and maim a crowd of people than it is to get nasal decongestants or a can of Krylon gold.

Sixteen Years Later

It's been sixteen years since we entered the war that will never end. What happened on 9/11 was not okay, it was not something you should accept. But, and this is going to be hard for you to swallow if you're the sort of small mind that voted for Donald Trump: war will not prevent it from happening again. No matter how much war you bring.



As a friend of mine who's much more of a pacifist than I can be put it, if rockets and bombs were going to fix the problems of the Middle East, those problems would be fucking solved.

Ani's 'Self Evident' bit is my favorite piece about the whole affair. I don't think she gets it all right, for a start trains are not necessarily so much less carbon intensive than cars, they can actually be much more so. You're moving 100 tons of steel before you move a person, so while I'm not immune to the charms of the rails, you need significant density and ridership to make them ecologically better than an oil well fire.

It's become a sort of third rail thing in American politics. A football player sits out the National Anthem and he might not have a gig even if he's demonstrably better at his position than 20 or so of the alternatives. I am not anti-Murica, but why do we even have the national anthem at sporting events? We don't have it at concerts or movies or any other entertainment, and that's all the NFL is, goddamn entertainment. Why should I care if a black man refuses to stand for an annoying song written by a slave owner about how awesome America is? If America is great, and I generally thing it is, why does it need the approbation of an athlete?

What does it say for your great nation if it constantly needs to use the opening of sporting events to remind everyone who's turf they're on?

The Ongoing Crisis

So Comey's testimony in the Senate today, yeah. After seeing the dumpster fires on Facebook and the like, I pulled up McCain's questioning of the traduced FBI director on YouTube. Holy shit.



I mean, I'm not a member of the John McCain Fan Club, but he's normally coherent even when he's wrong. He's one of the guys on Capitol Hill I tend to think have some integrity even when I disagree with them. But watching this, I wondered if he'd braced himself with a few martinis before this session. He keeps hammering on the same basic question, and no matter what Comey does to explain that the Hillary email investigation he (inappropriately) declared closed last July was a separate deal from the current investigation into Russian campaign meddling and the Trump campaign colluding with it are two separate investigations.

In case you're drunk or otherwise intellectually disabled/impaired, here's a handy chart showing the overlap between Hillary's email server and the totally different investigation into how an FSB asset became Commander in Chief. It's only in John McCain's mind. He seems like an old, demented idiot who's confused by the information that maybe a new, even worse, version of Nixon might be guilty of obstructing justice when his term hasn't even lost its New President Smell.

Cats

So we have an oil executive taking over a State Department that has been stripped of its senior career leadership at a time when the President picks fights with, of all people, the prime minister of fucking Australia. A President who strands green card holders at foreign airports on the pretense that he's making us safe, safe from the most vetted people who ever come into America. So, to play off a popular meme, here are some pictures of cats.

In this case, my cats. The black one here is Gonzo, he likes dogs. People, eh, if you've got a dog near you he might be cool. He purrs really loudly, louder than any cat I've ever had but he has about a four stroke limit most of the time when it comes to attention from people. Loves the dogs. Loves them. Makes kitty-biscuits on their tummies and pets himself on their legs.

Then there's Zippy, the big orange. Corinna says he's a Republican cat because he's a fat cat who only cares about his own pleasure. I think that selfish aspect is pretty universal to felines, and I'm pretty sure Zippy is smarter than to vote for Donald Trump if for no other reason than that Trump would obviously wage a war on catnip and offer to send federal troops to otherwise friendly countries where catnip is grown.

Then there's Bulldog. He's a non-voter if ever there was one. All he cares about is sitting on Mama and making sure the food bowl is never less than half full. He's into protest, too. If that food level gets to low, he will absolutely walk slowly in front of you and sing We Will Overcome until the Iamb's is forthcoming.

I'm sure this post will draw the ire of Republican types who don't like being called fat cats and who think Trump is doing good things. Though the things he's doing are mostly athwart of what the Republican Party has stood for since World War II. A Mexican border wall beyond FDR's wildest dreams that not only is impotent to prevent the migrants it's meant to keep out (because over half of them arrive by airplane)? That border wall, just to build it we'd have to build access roads to ship material and workers into what are now impassably rugged mountains. A smuggler (of people, narcotics, arms, terrorists, take your pick) will have little difficulty scaling or tunneling past the wall, and now you've given them turnkey infrastructure on the other side. Thanks for the handy road, there's a mate!

But I'm trying hard to restrain the amount of political ranting I do here. I know I won't convince anyone they're wrong, even when they're appallingly and if they gave it a moment's thought, obviously wrong. I won't even say Trump can't get anything right, he apparently delegated picking a Supreme Court nominee for the stolen seat (and whether you like Obama or not, appointing Scalia's replacement was his to do and Mitch McConnell can smoke a turd in hell for not even giving Garland a hearing). And as far as the balance of the court, Gorsuch is probably as good a replacement for Scalia as we're going to get, especially with a Republican President filling a stolen seat.

I was very, very skeptical of Obama when he took office. And despite my libertarian tendencies, he largely won me over. He used executive authority way too much, as did W., and if your guy is making the moves maybe it seems okay. Then comes the time you have to turn the keys to the Cheeto Benito. But overall, Obama was articulate, even tempered, didn't start any new wars (though he was unable to finish the old ones off really or to close Gitmo, or to quit the drone attacks). So maybe Trump can win me over in the end but don't wait under water.

Post Election Blues

Bear with me here, I felt the need for a bit of preamble but this is actually a post about a guy named Nick. A Trump supporter with the guts to go to an anti-Trump post-election protest to try and win converts.

I was a bit astonished by the election of Donald Trump, but then so many of my friends are liberals. I know a few people who were openly supporting Trump in the lead up, mainly gun nuts. One evangelical I've known since my days in the right wing yellow press blogged about how he was voting for Trump even though he considered the man 'a jerk' because he saw it as the only way to stop the progressive tide, put a conservative in Scalia's vacant seat and so on.

I won't cop to living in an echo chamber, I was as reluctant a Hillary voter as you'll get. I'm a long time libertarian (lowercase now because I changed my registration when I caucused for Bernie—an astonishing turn of events itself, I disagree with Sanders about almost as many things as with Trump, but I'll take a socialist with integrity over a pussy-grabbing, race-baiting, disability mocking, protectionist piece of shit).





I know, don't hold back on how I really feel, right? Going into the election, the conventional wisdom had it that Trump had maybe a 28% shot at winning. But then, I know people in 'the media' who deny that media bias is a real thing, but that's because they're socialists themselves (their term, not mine). They're good people, fine human beings, but if they could vote in European style socialism in America, Bernie would be borderline right wing.

Fox News is biased the opposite way of course, but I gave up my television years ago and last time I checked in on that network it was Megyn Kelly doing some legit journalism surrounded mostly by a bunch of shouting assholes. But anyway, those of us who weren't Trump fans had been lead to believe that he was actually bringing down the whole Republican party with his failed campaign and so disappointment was compounded by surprise.

Predictably, in my Facebook feed the day after the election there was a protest at the J.C. Nichols fountain on the Plaza. I stopped by on my way home from work, mostly to say hi to whatever of my friends were there. I saw a few, but mostly I saw kids about my own offspring's age, taking turns at a megaphone to talk about how scared they were. There was a large trans element to the crowd, though the crowd wasn't huge, maybe 50 to 75 people at a guess. And these were pretty far left kids, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a third of the crowd voted for Stein. And, sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if half of them didn't vote at all.

I almost asked for a turn with the megaphone to just tell them, look, standing around in a park the day after the election can't change the result. If you wanted it to go the other way, you needed to go to the polls yesterday and actually vote the other way. Just like with Brexit, we may be proven wrong in the end, but the vote only happens once and elections have fucking consequences.

And maybe I'm being unfair and all these kids voted. And anyway, this is about Nick.

Nick had a Trump-Pence t-shirt and an FBI ball cap. Nick is 19 years old. I wish I had a picture of the guy, I had my Nikon but no speed lights and it was black dark in the park. Nick's opening line to me, without any trace of hostility, was 'Who'd you vote for?'

I told him I'm a longtime libertarian but I voted for Hillary, the first time I'd voted for a Dem at the top of the ticket since 1988. He asked me why, and I said in a nutshell because the one thing the President can do on his own say so is launch missiles and deploy troops, and to give that power to someone who's motto is when they hit you, hit back 100 times as hard, that's a recipe for war without end.

And normally, the Republican would be the one I'd agree with about more things if you held Armageddon to my head and told me I had to vote for one of the two major party candidates. Low taxes, minimal regulation, free trade, gun rights, these are things I'm generally for. But Trump is against almost everything I'd normally agree with a Republican about, then compounds that by being in favor of all the things I hate about Republicans. Bottom line, he's an authoritarian and I'm an anti-authoritarian. You say jump, I say go fuck yourself in the ass with a big rubber dick.

Nick tells us he thinks Trump will bring peace to the Middle East, end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and I'm thinking, huh? I told him, Trump never promised to end those wars. The guy who did make that promise, and accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for doing so, hasn't really managed to bring that off in eight years. Come January, I think you're in for a rude awakening.

Nick said what about the illegals?

And I said, Dude, immigration is what built this country and continues to do so. We don't need a wall across the Mexican border, we need a bridge. There's only two ways an economy can grow, and that's through productivity gains and population growth. Industrialized countries can only gain in productivity at a tiny pace, practically a rounding error. So unless you can convince a lot of people to suddenly have five babies, you better keep that border porous.

Nick seemed to think that Trump didn't really mean we should keep out workers, only criminals. He also said he didn't take the Muslim ban seriously. Nick had his hands full with a lesbian couple who engaged him for a while, one of whom was a veteran who'd been sexually assaulted while serving in Iraq. She, understandably, didn't think pussy grabbing was just locker room talk. But Nick had an answer, of sorts, for everything and clearly no animosity towards anyone.

One of the protestors lit a cigarette and Nick pulled one out of his own pack and asked for a light. The answer was no, and I stuck up for Nick (though I don't smoke and both of their cigarettes were pretty annoying given proximity and still air). I was like, dude, he hasn't been disruptive, he's been nothing but respectful. If we can't have this conversation, what the hell?

So they stunk up the Plaza and irritated my nose with their tobacco as the conversation went on. Nick even made a point of stepping away when the megaphone came out and the official speakers took the stage.

The subject of gay marriage came up and Nick said something predictable about lifestyle and the way the family unit is the basis of civilization and I asked him, 'So when did you decide to be straight?'

He said he'd kissed a guy before but felt that homosexuality was wrong. He also said he was Roman Catholic, had been raised that way, went atheist for three years and Muslim for one.

And I'm like, Damn Nick. Nick was the most interesting guy in the park. He is also, to my view, ripe for recruitment into either a cult or a terrorist cell and I hope the cult gets to him first.

And I sincerely hope his candidate proves me wrong on many fronts. I resent Hillary for being such a shitty candidate. Maybe President shouldn't be a job that has charisma as a bonafide job qualification, but it does. Reagan had it. Clinton had it. W. had it in his folksy, can't pronounce 'nuclear' way. Obama has it big time. George H.W. Bush didn't really have it, and if the Dems had someone less like a Muppet in 1988, he couldn't have ridden Reagan's coat tails to office—and he was a one term wonder. So where Sanders shone bright in that department, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary insisted on a candidate less charismatic than a stinky pair of socks. Who transparently adjusts her message to whatever she thinks the audience is. Who just gave us President Trump.

Some of my liberal friends have said that it was sexism that cost Hillary the office, but I call bullshit on that. Ted Cruz was the smartest, most qualified person on the Republican debate stage and he didn't stand a chance, for the exact same reason. You can maybe amend the Constitution so the President is somehow decided on merit, but as of now it's mostly showbiz.

'Twas the Night Before...

This election cycle has been good to me, it really has. We do a lot of election related printing where I work and when you have to rent an extra large dumpster for your paper trimmings, you know it's rocking. When your main supplier for 100# gloss cover sells out nationwide the first week of October, yeah, that's a heavy ass election cycle. That's like KFC running out of chicken.

Of course, what they spend on print is nothing compared to what they spend on TV. Not owning a television, I'm generally sheltered from the mayhem. But the World Series, I was really enjoying that whole thing with the way overdue Cubs (normally not a team I can root for being a Pirates fan), and the almost as overdue Indians. So I found myself at the bar watching a few...political commercials.

Holy shit. I mean, leave aside the onslaught of negativity at the top of the ticket, that's probably inevitable when one of the worlds biggest assholes is the Republican nominee and opposite him is a woman who is basically Kryptonite to your average Fox News/Breitbart consumer. But it struck me, I don't live in Missouri but through my work I've met and had dealings with a couple of Democratic candidates there. They're not close friends of mine or anything, but I've done business with them and interacted with them. Honestly, they're way more liberal than I am, there's some issues where I disagree with them wholeheartedly.

But they're good people. Sorry if you just blew Coke out your nose at me, of all people, describing politicians as good people. I'm not prone to that kind of talk, but it's true. The guys they're running against, I bet if I knew them I'd say the same thing. They're probably pretty okay people if you know them a little. They might be trying to advance policies that are disastrous, but they're not doing this out of malice, they're doing this because for whatever reasons they're convinced that this is the answer.

And the shadowy characters who finance their campaigns? Probably not antichrists either. Powerful interests have a way of looking out for their interests. And there are definitely situations where people do bad things even if they can come up with a narrative to spin the harm they're doing, just ask a tobacco executive. Or the oil industry types making Oklahoma more seismically active than California, none of those guys are actually comic book arch-villains, even if they do maybe need to be stopped.

I'm not sure I can go so far as accept Donald Trump as a good guy who's just misguided. But I suppose it might be true, except for his being a sexual predator and narcissist. Normally I can find a bit more common ground with a Republican. Free trade, I'm for it (though I'm also a union guy so not digging the 'right to work for less money' angle Republicans tend to favor. I like taxes to be as low as possible, though the 'supply side' theory advanced by Reagan and his disciples is the same bullshit as the stimulus spending deal, just look at Kansas: Brownback rolls back these taxes on the theory that the economic activity that will spur will balance the books in the end. Turns out, yeah, it's a slow, unimpressive ROI. But Dems shouldn't get too smug, if he'd just upped spending and left taxes alone, he'd still be the architect of a fiscal disaster. I think not only should weed be legal, but cocaine, heroin, psychedelic mushrooms, whatever you got. Like smoking cigarettes, some of these drugs are best avoided, but using them does not constitute a crime. It's your body, shoot, smoke or ingest what you will, don't come crying to me if your life sucks. And immigration: dude, the only way an economy grows is with more population or increased productivity. Once you're fully industrialized, the latter gets to be almost a rounding error, so if you want to grow you need immigrants. That's the problem Japan has grappled unsuccessfully with for decades now, they have very restrictive immigration policies, so they have slow growth in productivity and despite following Robert Reich's advice thoroughly they still can't grow their economy much. Eventually we'll need to embrace an economic model that's not so growth dependent (which means we can't just keep deficit spending at the federal level), but for now bring me your Mexicans, Gautemalans, Syrian refugees, whatever you got. There are problems that come with mass migrations but none of them are solved by trying to slam the door on the migrants.

So a Trump supporter I went to high school with, today she was saying on Facebook that the choice is between the 'continued destruction of America' and Trump, and I'm like, can you hear yourself? It's become so common it doesn't even sound remarkable, but disagree with him all you want, Barrack Obama has not been 'destroying' America these eight years, and Hillary isn't looking to destroy it either. We have a country that is far from perfect but never stopped being great. And this libertarian is voting for a Democrat at the top of the ticket tomorrow, first time since 1988 that's happened. I'm not super thrilled with Hillary and don't ask me to defend her beyond not being Donald Trump, but in this toxic mix I've come to the conclusion that not being Donald Trump is enough.

Now can we go back to the days when Tip O'Neill had drinks with Reagan at the White House? When the likes of Dole and Eagleton figured out what the hell they could actually agree on and what just had to be tabled? This whole Wrestlemania thing has been fun and all but maybe we should aim for good government rather than entertainment.

An Important Public Service Announcement

I'll say this: Republicans are an odious group, at least as far as elected officials go. Calm down, before you go claiming I'm a Democrat.

Democrats are an odious group when they get elected to office, too. I'm a libertarian. I don't want the government to do much, but what it must do I'd like it to do with a modicum of sense and civility, two things which got off the bus a long time ago. I've said (and meant it) that I might vote for Hillary because I see Trump as an existential threat. In a way I never saw Romney, McCain (or even Sarah Palin), W. etc.

Palin is the closest thing to Trump of the recent years nominees. Utterly out of her depth, charming in her way, but as soon as she spoke she showed you what you get when you hire 'em for their looks. And she'd been a mayor and governor, she wasn't a complete newcomer to politics. Besides his explosive temperament, Donald Trump is essentially walking into the Heavy Constructors union hall and saying, 'Yeah, I can run that enormous crane. It's yuge, I got this. I have the best crane operating ideas.' Which is fine until you consider there's people in buildings around that construction site and driving down the street who don't deserve to have an enormous I-Beam dropped on them.

Hillary is bad news. The enemy of your enemy isn't necessarily your friend. But I'll give her this: she actually knows what the job entails, and she'll only be as shitty as what we've had for the past 30 years or so. She's the center-right candidate representing the status quo. She'll make appalling Supreme Court nominations (though she won't nominate Paula Abdul or Judge Judy, and I wouldn't put those past Trump). She's got a lot of big government policy wonk in her makeup and I think that sucks. But compared to a guy who doesn't understand why you can't just launch nukes, who thinks its okay to disrespect veterans, women, Muslims, Mexicans and anyone not ignorant enough to vote for him? I want to vote for Gary Johnson, but I'm in a state that goes reliably red and Trump isn't just another Republican. We don't jail our political opposition in America, that's for South American banana republics a half century ago.

And no tears from me for the GOP. When Paul Ryan had the choice between staying in charge of the convention and telling Trump to go back to Hell from whence he came, he made a Faustian bargain with a TV reality star who had no business even being in the debates, let alone at the convention. The fact that Ted Cruz was the best you could come up with shows that maybe we don't even need your party anymore.

I'm not thrilled at the prospect of all the state houses and governorships and Congress all shifting blue this year the way they did in 2010 to the red side in reaction to Obamacare. But if you're going to let a bag of mummified foreskins and cotton candy who hates everything except his own reflection be your flag bearer, you get what you get.

Picture Shows

Been a bit under the weather of late, I guess hanging out at Kelly's waiting for nobody to show up for the Post Modern Pentathlon might have exposed me to a bug, then the stress of getting ready for the thing and dragging that trailer full of goodies to Westport and back might have lowered my defenses. Or maybe it was just coincidence. But yeah, I've felt better than I have the first half of this week.



I'm not a big one for calling in sick. I only missed a week for a heart attack. I know, I probably shouldn't go to work some of the times I do because I potentially make my coworkers sick, but I'm a one man department, the only person who can cover my desk is my boss and I generally hate the way he does things—when someone comes looking to reorder something, I know where to find stuff in editable form as long as I did it.

Plus, a lot of times getting busy at work is enough to distract me from my misery. But it wasn't that busy today and by 2:00 I had my desk caught up and still felt like death warmed over. So I went to the movies. I like movies generally, and they tend to distract one from misery, and when you're at a low energy level what's better than sitting in the dark receiving a story?

Suicide Squad was, well, it was DC. A lot like Bat-meh vs. Super-meh, Suicide Squad takes great characters from great comic books and makes a mediocre hash of a movie out of it. The last DC movie that really impressed me was Heath Ledger's Dark Knight. And folks, that's been a day or two. Marvel adaptations aren't always super awesome, but they are generally solid (X-Men Apocalypse, Captain America Civil War) and often divine (Deadpool, the Iron Man franchise, etc.)



But anyway, in my zombie state I decided to make it a double feature. And the second movie I saw, Sausage Party, is fucking awesome. Like the best of science fiction, Sausage Party asks the important questions. And while it definitely goes a bit blue, it's also hilarious.

And unlike Suicide Squad, Sausage Party actually made me forget I was sick for quite a while. Hopefully I'm on the mend, not sure I plan to bike to work tomorrow but hopefully Friday anyway. Call it the healing power of seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved by animated food products while the Meaning of Life is probed by a hot dog and a wheelchair bound piece of gum.

July Critical Mass (Don't Blame Me)

I keep getting asked if I'm in charge at Critical Mass. It's because I'm always taking lots of pictures and for seven months running I've made and handed out spoke cards commemorating each one.

According to Wikipedia, which knows all and is never wrong, Critical Mass is a xerocracy. According to me, and I consider this one of its virtues, its anarchy. I realize a lot of people don't see anarchy as benign or even noble, but it's beautiful when the real thing (which is not a bunch of violence, as enemies of freedom try to make it out to be) manifests itself.

And it manifests itself on the last Friday of the month whether it's a pleasant 80 degrees or a nasty six degrees. Critical Mass goes where the rider out front goes unless the rider behind decides not to follow. In some instances, this causes a schism, though a peaceful one. Sometimes when the weather is foul, a contingent stands around at Scumfresh until around 7:00, then rides to Buzzard Beach, effectively tailgating a ride across the street.

The ethos varies widely from city to city. I hear when Daley was mayor of Chicago, he rode it, and they'd get like 700 riders, and there was a police escort corking the intersections because the goddamn mayor was riding. I'll bet whiffs of reefer were pretty scarce on those masses. And I've heard of cities where the cops got a hard on to make it go away and effectively killed the party. Kansas City's Critical Mass has tendencies to the wild side but not so much that people don't bring their kids, and I mean young, young, kids. I can't remember a fair weather mass that didn't include some diaper changes.

And there is an alcoholocaust element to be sure, there's a bit of Animal House to all the Critical Mass rides I've enjoyed. And that's where I get a little antsy when someone mistakes me for being 'in charge.'

I'm like, dude, this was not my idea. I barely take responsibility for my own choices this evening, let alone the rest of these clowns.

So no, I'm not in charge. I make spoke cards because I like spoke cards (just look at my bike, it's like aero discs at this point), I like Critical Mass, and I'm a graphic designer who works in a print shop. Spoke cards are a snap. And the back side is an easy way to promote the upcoming Post Modern Pentathlon, an event I regrettably must claim responsibility for since it was my idea, but if you're competing I'm making you sign a waiver—coffee is hot, ice is slippery, drivers are maniacs, it's not my fault or the fault of our sponsors.

Speaking of which, the whole Pentathlon thing is coming together. B-Cycle is letting us use their rental bikes gratis, and I think there's a beauty to racing these things: the Olympic Pentathlon makes you ride a horse that's not known to you, B-Cycle fulfills that, plus the bike is totally unsuited to racing. It's just a matter of who knows the city well enough to route smartly and who can generate watts, if you can mash pedals you're in it, no matter what you can afford in the way of a bike. And there's four other events you can win points in even if your slow old ass can't compete at bike racing. Velo+, Family Bicycles and Midwest Cyclery (three of my favorite bike shops) have all ponied up generous prizes, so there will be prizes for men's and women's divisions, and for winners of the five sports as well as the overall.

x`

And as usual I had fun taking pictures of the folks I'm so not even remotely in charge of at Critical Mass.

And that's not me being in charge, that's just me documenting the beauty of these people, the gorgeous anarchy.

Might Have to Get a Bumper Sticker Done

When the Trump-Pence logo was unleashed today, FB started going with the Cornholio jokes: TP for my bungole. Which is, I guess, apt, if ever a presidential ticket was for wiping your ass on, it's this one. But what jumped out at me when I first glanced at it was the swastika-ish impression I got from the blue inter-locking T and P (I guess depicting Donald penetrating the jerk from Indiana).

So I whipped this up. Might have to get a run of bumper stickers made, the question is whether to sell them, give them away, or covertly cover over Trump bumper stickers I find out in the world. Because Hillary is bad news, but she's basically the same bad news as Obama, maybe not quite as bad as W., probably about on par with her husband and the elder George Bush. Which is to say, she sucks. But while she's been raked over the coals for supposedly flaunting the law, Trump has actually said that if he gives an illegal order, he expects it to be followed because once he gives the order, it becomes legal. I know, he's said a lot of things, but that's not an attitude we can have in national politics, that's Nixon all over again.

I'm a little surprised at the choice of Pence. Pretty vanilla, not quite as shitty as Sam Brownback, probably a little shittier than Chris Christie (who, being a third rate gangster at heart, was actually the most logical choice). The biggest worry I have is not so much that I'll miss the Republican Party once it's been utterly destroyed by Trump and his shenanigans, the GOP is awful. But Democrats are pretty odious, too, especially when they don't face competitive elections that make them at least lie about what they're all about.

The White Train

I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, but to me a $100+ million street car to serve a couple of miles that were already thoroughly served by bus is just silly. If it takes more dollars, that means it uses more resources, so you're not doing the planet any favors, either.

I know, when there's federal dollars to be had, a city would be crazy not to take them, but for the local resources put up we could expand the rubber on pavement type of transit substantially and market it.

One of the pro streetcar arguments I hear is that middle class (read white) people won't ride the bus. Well, I'm middle class and white, and I ride the bus more than I should (it's made me soft in terms of bike miles this year). But unlike me, most people they mean when they say 'middle class' own televisions and have cable. There is no demographic more susceptible to advertising than these people, they actually sit down for hours at a stretch and beg for you to market to them.

Get Don Draper on the case, tell him to make the bus sexy, the transportation of choice for people who are unrealistically beautiful or wish they were. The 'love affair with the automobile' was a Madison Avenue invention commissioned by the Big Three auto makers roughly a half century ago, and if they can make people believe they love a rapidly depreciating total liability, this should be a piece of cake.

People ask me what I did with my bike. I took it on the tram with me, of course. This is allowed, explicitly by signage that rightly gives priority to wheelchairs but recognizes that strollers and bikes are part of how people get around.

I will give the White Train this: it's a smoother ride than the bus. I barely had to old on to my bike, in fact, or the straps. The bus is a rattletrap by comparison, though except when I was so recently post-op on my bypass surgery that I wasn't allowed to drive, the bus has never been a problem for me.

It's sleek, it's comfortable, and it's overwhelmingly popular right now. Most of the riders were just there to check it out, it didn't connect the with anything in real life (pretty true of me, actually). Though I did hear a woman ask a guy what he was doing there, and he said he lived a block away, was on his way to get groceries. My former boss and mentor Rich Nadler (RIP), made a comment once that nobody would ever want to live in downtown Kansas City, and sorry Rich but you missed on that one. There may not be enough of them to make the White Train legit but they are there, more and more all the time.

I was a skeptic about transit in general until a few years ago. My friend Roj (who drew the Midwest Rock Lobster logo actually), described transit in Prague as 'like having a friend who would take you wherever you wanted to go.' I thought he was out of his goddamn mind, then my friend Karl hosted me in New York and it was true. I had budgeted $100 a day for cabs, instead bought an MTA pass for $21 (for the week), and spent that cab fare doing a second set at the Village Vanguard, eating soul food at Sylvia's in Harlem, etc.

My slightly more recent visit to Chicago, bus and train trips made that whole thing possible, and if I'd had a bike to pair with them (found a bike rental right around time to go home), it would have been perfect. So yeah, I would have spent the money differently, but it's not a bowl of suck, it's a somewhat overpriced transit option that might get more people to think seriously about transit than they do now.

Westbound Coyote String Band / Why I Ride

Bike commuting is so social. I drove home this evening, and the only interaction I had the whole way was a cunt in a white crew cab pickup truck who tailgated me all the way up 18th Street Expressway (even though I was doing 10 over), who then passed both lanes of traffic on the shoulder and aggressively inserted himself a whole three cars further forward and started riding someone else's bumper.

But yesterday I got up early enough to bike to work, and while the occasional jerk with a crew cab or SUV* can spice up a ride in a bad way every now and again, it doesn't happen often.

But anyway, on the way home yesterday, first I stumbled on a group ride that invited me to join them. I recognized the guy who invited me, I took him to be their leader and recognized him from a human interest piece about a guy in his eighties who lives car free out in the burbs, bikes everywhere. I declined as they proposed to take me several miles in the opposite direction of home and (I was already two hours later than usual) I'd have had a hard time getting home early enough to get up to ride back to work the next day.

Full disclosure, I made a series of bad choices** after meeting up with a friend and my wife, then resuming a storyline on Mad Men*** that I'd gotten hooked on, so I'd have been better off riding out into JoCo with the geezer and his entourage, I'd have gotten more miles in to offset my, it turns out, inevitable car commute today.

Anyway, then I'm riding through Westport, my usual route, and there's street musicians. Which isn't that unusual, but this pair was exceptionally cute and entertaining. Westbound Coyote String Band, and I was like, is it okay if I shoot you? I had my Nikon out before I asked, which is a good idea since gun laws in these parts have gotten so Nineteenth Century that the question could be taken wrong.

Then after I'd shot a bunch with a couple of lenses, and they'd performed a fun song, Selene (don't you just want to put her in your pocket?) thanked me. Which I thought was sweet since they'd just been my unpaid street photography models. Well, okay, I did put a dollar in their case, but that only gets 30 seconds with some models I know.

That wasn't all the social interaction this commute turned out to offer. I passed up meeting Pablo and his friends at the Scout, then ran into Patrick, who helps me with the bees here in Lobsterland, then ran into Dustin who's helping me with the Post Modern Pentathlon, and then into Richard and finally my wife.

I'll give you this: the car is faster. But no way do you ever have the kind of adventures, fun meet ups and so on that you do on the bike. For all the people who think bike (or for that matter transit) commuters are only out there because they can't afford to drive, dude, I'd pay extra to bike commute.

*...or Prius, but the tendency is the bigger the vehicle, the bigger the asshole behind the wheel. I'm not casting aspersions on the millions of perfectly decent drivers who happen to drive Suburbans and F350 XLTs. Not all gays are nelly queens, but all nelly queens are gay, as the song goes.

** As far as bad choices go, staying up a bit to watch Mad Men pales by comparison to some bad choices. As an example, Donald Trump is apparently going to be the Republican nominee for President in 2016. Every element of GOP politics that is even remotely defensible, he is against. Apparently the GOP establishment has come to the conclusion that they have to work with him, but that's like thinking Hitler will settle for Poland. I'm a Libertarian of long standing, haven't voted for a Republican or a Democrat since 1988, but if I can keep this motherfucker out of the White House, I swear I will vote for Hillary. I'm not joking, Bernie. Vermin Supreme. I would vote for goddamn Johnny Dare to be President before I would let The Donald have a finger on the nuclear button. He makes me nostalgic for W. And for conservatives to want to defund education at the state level, I'd like to point out that the only way Donald Trump is your nominee is if a majority of people in your party can be so badly educated they'll pull the lever for this piece of shit. We don't need voter ID laws, we need voter IQ laws, if you'll vote for Trump, you're not even allowed to drive a car, let alone elect a President.

*** Mad Men is my latest Netflix fixation. I generally only watch during my fortnightly apheresis therapy, but then sometimes I get sucked in and end up trying that trick of 'I'll just watch as I fall asleep' which doesn't happen until two or three hours later when I shut the fucking laptop. I don't have regular TV, just streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime, and believe you me, that's as much trouble as I can handle plus a little. I don't know how you people with cable and satellite dishes even hold down jobs.