If this doesn’t brighten your Thursday… well… I hope something else does. But this really oughta do it.

Don’t thank me, thank Dennis Perrin.

Awesome:

The story is told of a Australian whose favorite hobby is ballooning who decided to practice her favourite sport one Sunday afternoon. She miscalculates the wind and gets blown across the Pacific Ocean and lands in a field someplace in America. As she is lying there half-stunned in the basket, an American rushes up and says, “What happened?” The Australian woman says, “Where am I?” The American replies, Why, you are in a basket in the middle of a field.” To which the Aussie woman asks, “Are you an economist?” “Yes I am, how did you know?” said the American. “Because the information you have given me is completely accurate and totally useless.”

My fast commute route takes me down southwest on Michigan Ave towards Washington Hospital Center, where I pick up some brick alleys that hug the stonewalls of historic Glenwood Cemetery. I cut west at Channing, turn south for a block on First NW, and then, if the light’s green, lean into the turn west onto Bryant St, which winds downhill below McMillan Reservoir towards Howard University. That little stretch is a real pleasure.

I followed that route this morning, the air was cool and misty, the streets wet from last night’s rain. I came down First, slowed substantially given the wetness of the streets, and I remember thinking as I approached the corner of Bryant, “Oh, neat, they repainted the crosswa–” That was right before my tires got quiet, then made the very quiet hiss of rubber squeegeeing water off glass.

I’d only been going about 10mph or so, but I probably dived 15 to 20 degrees into the off-camber turn, and that little bit of rain on fresh crosswalk paint wasn’t going to hold me at any speed with any significant lean. Fortunately, The transition from upright to laid-down was pretty smooth and not very dramatic.

My right shin’s got a nice strawberry patch, and I can feel the bruise on my hip growing, but otherwise I came out fine. I gotta say, the Trucker’s a well built piece of steel, it’s in fine shape. My two-day-old Nitto Noodle bars (graciously discounted by City Bikes since the old ones got bent in a wreck*) picked up some gouges on the outside of the drops. Certainly annoying, but I haven’t taped them yet, and a little wet-dry sandpaper will take the rough parts off okay. At least they’re still straight. Also: Dickie’s shorts, though they occasionally grab tall water bottles when you get out of the saddle, are indestructible. Mine show no damage, not so much as a frayed cuff.

The rest of the commute was uneventful, slow, and as uniformly upright as I can remember being on a bike. I rode the whole rest of the way like I was on icy steel construction plates. It also got me thinking about road racing, in that I have no idea how people come down mountain descents doing 40-50 mph, in the rain, on 23c tires, with 50-100 other people packed in tightly around them.

Score for this week: one crash, one wipeout. Neither resulted in serious injury or damage, and I was thankfully wearing my helmet for both. Nevertheless, I gotta say, only 6 days into August, and it’s got a commanding lead for 2009’s coveted “Month I Hated The Most This Year” award.

Incidentally, is there a reason crosswalk paint doesn’t have non-skid material mixed into it?

*It’s true! Saul at the downtown store told me they just instituted a policy by which you get a 5-10% discount on parts you’re replacing because of a collision or wreck! Another reason to love City Bikes, folks.

Via MinusCar, a group of Iowans have started an online petition, seeking to put a measure on the ballot to make bicycling on farm-to-market roads illegal. Because, you know, when you’re driving along on a back country road in your minivan, just trying to send a text message to your husband or pastor, and you accidentally kill a cyclist, it really makes you feel bad. And not just for a little while! Sometimes you feel really, really bad about killing someone with your car for a long time! Plus, just like hitting a deer, it can cost a lot of money to fix the car.

A commenter notes that there is now a counter-petition to have motor vehicles removed from Iowa’s rural roads:

Over the past ten years the number of motorists using these farm-to-market roads has increased dramatically, as have the number of preventable accidents and fatalities.

Traditional rural methods of commerce are significantly impacted when forced to share the farm-to-market roadways with motorists. Because of the growth of today’s commerce and agricultural business, shared roadways are no longer safe or practical in today’s society.

Operators of automobiles routinely disobey speed limits, spook horses and raise clouds of dust. They zip about, and act as though they own the public road itself!

So please if you are a resident of the world join us and help make our roadways safe for both people and livestock. Thanks for your time and your support.

My favorite comment so far:

These 4 wheeled horseless carriges have gone too far, besides creating useless wars for rubber, oil, steel they create a place for youths to experiment with sex and liquor! Time to ban them from all our roads!

Sex and liquor? Really? Hm. Maybe I should drive a car more often.

I know that saying this may result in some gnashed teeth and rent garments, but I’m going to state, unequivocally, that I think this is going too far. I’m reasonably certain that Iowa’s rural roads can accomodate bicycles, tractors, buckboards, and motor vehicles, and that people can share the road safely and responsibly.

Maybe the folks on opposite sides of this debate need to get together, and experiment with sex and liquor (maybe even in a car, so long as they’re not driving on a rural road at the time). I mean, it couldn’t hurt?

I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

I hadn’t meant to take a vacation from blogging last week, but events came in waves and it was all I could do to keep my head above the surface.

The Wife’s Big Birthday Bash week crescendoed and crashed through the President’s Day weekend, featuring dozens of munchkins, their parents, a couple pecks of oysters, several bottles of wine, leg of lamb roasted on a spit, a whole grilled salmon, and major reconstructive surgery on the house.

Thursday I woke up solemn and prepared to serve jury duty by blasting Screaming for Vengeance, showering in ice cold water and slapping my grim, squinty, clenched face in the mirror.

“Don’t you have jury duty today?” Rebbie hollered from downstairs.

“I do,” I yelled back, then growled to myself, “and this time… it’s personal.”

“Don’t forget to take a book!” she called back.

I rode down to the courthouse on Nigel. It was a cold morning, colder than the pans hanging from the Scales of Justice. And windy, windier than the… Winds of… it was really windy. Pretty morning though, if I hadn’t been committed to holding some poor sap’s fate in my hands I totally would’ve taken the long way through Rock Creek Park.

I arrived at the courthouse early, passed through the metal detector and wanding without incident, and headed for the Juror’s Office. Once there, an extremely polite young man took my summons and returned with my Juror’s Badge. I don’t think that the badge officially deputized me, but I sure felt like one of the fingers at the end of the long arm of the law! And I was itchin’ to point that finger at the first evil-doer I saw.

But first, they directed me to the Juror’s Lounge where I was to wait until they called my name and number. The Juror’s Lounge was cavernous, and had several large flat-screen televisions. National Treasure was playing when I came in, and, I must admit, I was annoyed at the distraction from my meditation on Justice. But I studied the film, the looks of virtue on the Good Guys’ faces, the phrenology of Bad Guys, dramatic recreations of scenes in which the Good Guys seemed to be doing something illegal (stealing the Declaration of Independence), but which they clearly should be forgiven for (they needed the map, they were going to give it back, and if they hadn’t taken it first then the Bad Guys would have gotten it and probably used it for toilet paper!). Also, the presence of a virtuous hot chick with moxie totally cancels out whatever’s wrong about breaking into places and stealing documents… if you can convince her that your quest is righteous (after you’ve kidnapped her). Also, Bad Guys will not hesitate to fire pistols with silencers in crowds.

It was a lot to take in, but after an hour or so, I was pumped up and ready to serve up a hot platter of fiery, delicious Justice to one of my Bad Guy fellow citizens, and I was pretty sure I could tell whether they were Good or Bad by what they looked like, or their accent if it came down to it. As luck would have it, they called 72 names, each with a badge number, and mine was among them.

They pulled us out into the hall, and the enthusiastic young man who’d deputized me in the Juror’s Office came out and told us to meet outside of a courtroom on the second floor. Upon our arrival, another gentleman came out of the courtroom and started calling our names and numbers again, this time to put us in lines of six, and to lead each line, four lines at a time, into the courtroom to be seated. We were told the barest facts of the case by the Judge (who didn’t seem the least bit wrathful now that I think about it), and then he asked some very general questions to the whole room. Once we’d all weighed in on the general questions, he told us he’d be bringing each of us up to answer a few questions from him and then from the attorneys. I was in the last group, so we were told to go to lunch and to return in two hours to answer questions.

Two hours! How was I to keep my burning desire to administer justice to the fullest extent of the law at full boil for two hours? But then, thinking more about it, I realized that they knew what they were doing. We’d come out of the Juror’s Lounge as bright, glowing irons, but could not be strong, sharp, balanced instruments of Justice until we’d been pounded on the Anvil of Boredom, and finally dunked repeatedly in the cold waters of a very long lunch.

So I went to a little local burger joint called Hooter’s, had a burger and a root beer, and read my book. I returned to the courthouse feeling a little off from the burger. Hooter’s food was not very good, I imagine they must’ve had an off day, otherwise I don’t see how they could have been as crowded as they were. I was concerned about that, since I figured I was going to have to ascertain the guilt or innocence of an evil-doer with gut instinct, and my guts weren’t going to be able to bring their A-game, but one of the other Fists of Justice sitting next to me assured me that there’d be evidence. They think of everything.

At last the judge started bringing potential jurors from our section up to the bench to ask them questions. I’m sure they were asking things like, “What if you have to pass judgment really, really hard, think you can do that? Think you have the guts to give this guy what’s comin’ to him?” And I was ready to answer “fuckin’ A!” But then, halfway through the row in front of me, the judge announced that they thought they’d gotten a big enough pool, and the rest of us could return to the Juror’s Lounge.

Upon returning, I saw that they’d been screening Flight Plan, in which Jodie Foster demonstrates that Good Guys are sometimes Bad Guys, Sean Bean is not always bad, and that you should never sleep on an airplane. Evidently, this was considered too advanced for beginning jurors, so it was stuck on the menu screen before they finally turned it off and left us with a bouncing “DVD” icon. After another half an hour they started calling a panel, and I prepared, again, to deliver swift, terrible justice. About halfway through the roster, another woman announced over the PA system that the judge did not need a panel after all. Apparently the defendant could just feel the swiftness and terribility of the coming justice, and decided to beg for mercy like a wussy. Either that, or the judge had gotten a Mushroom and Swiss Burger at Hooter’s and was busy sustaining his digestive system’s objections.

Either way, that was my last chance. They thanked us all for our vigilance and dedication to punishment, and sent us home. I was still pretty pumped, it was hard not to let the U-Lock of Justice soar through the windows of a few evil-doing motorists on the way home, but I held my wrath in check.

Friday, I woke up sick. Saturday, I woke up sicker. Sunday, I woke up sick but not as sick as Saturday. Administering sweet, sweet retribution on behalf of the state is stressful to the immune system, such is the price of fulfilling one’s civil duty.

But I’m feeling much better now. How was your week?

On Thursday, we were supposed to pack up and head to New York for some overdue visits and foodering. But Huck was uncharacteristically lethargic and threw up a few times in the morning, so we decided to hold off a day and cuddle the boy. After all, I’d taken Friday off, we still had a 3 day weekend and we were all packed. So we chilled.

Friday morning we were on the road shortly after 7 a.m. and headed north on 95. We were about 20 minutes north of Baltimore when Huck threw up for the fourth time. It was clear he wasn’t ready for this, we couldn’t justify bringing plague-baby into our friends’ homes, and then it occurred to us that we might be next, and we didn’t want to be visiting 5 hours from home if that happened, so we headed back.

Saturday morning I threw up. Rebbie tried, but didn’t. Both of us came down with it, Huck still had it. Ruby was the only person in the family not dragging their pathetic carcass around the house feeling like death, so she got a full free pass on as many movies as she wanted to watch. She kept asking us if we felt better, asking if we could go to Nyark City tomorrow. She took it pretty well when we explained that the weekend was shot, and we promised to take another shot at it soon. She’s a trooper.

Yesterday, we all felt a lot better, so we piled onto the longtails and headed down to the Dupont Farmers’ Market, then stopped by Big Bear Cafe on the way home, a little over 10 miles, which extrapolates to about 912 miles for the year.

We better pick up the pace.

This morning I looked out the window and saw nothing but sun and clear blue sky, a little too clear in fact.

Downstairs, kettle on, coffee ground, fire started and then I remembered to check the forecast. Eighteen degrees, wind chill to four degrees. At first I thought, “Good lord it’s freezing out there.” Then I remembered that freezing would be somewhere between fourteen and 28 degrees warmer than that.

For the first time in almost a year I thought about taking the Metro.

But then I thought about all the days I’ve spent on mountains in similar temperatures, being a little cold but mostly having a ball, and it seemed like the main ingredients for success in that environment were the right clothing and a flask of Irish whiskey. In this case though, instead of a lodge full of friends and booze at the other end of the trip, I was heading into work, and we’re still several days off from Christmas, so the flask had to stay home.

I added a pair of snowpants and a balaclava to my cold-weather gear and that pretty much did the trick. The ride was a little slower, very warm, pleasant, and I was glad not to have taken the train within 5 minutes. On the way in, I thought to myself, “Cold. Deep, too.” This deserves some explanation, or perhaps it doesn’t, but you’re here already so why not waste just a few minutes more?

There are jokes shared with friends and family that don’t split sides in their first telling, but whose punchlines gain value on their own later on, performing a sort of rope-a-dope on the target. Years ago, I told, to my aunt, uncle, cousins, and grandmother, the joke about the pirate with the ship’s wheel coming out of his pants. (If you’re the only one who hasn’t heard it, the bartender says, “Hey pirate, what’s with the wheel.” Pirate says, “Arrrrrrrrrgh! I don’t know but it’s drivin’ me nuts!”) It’s definitely on the fluffy, cute side of blue humor, but nevertheless blue enough to elicit some eye-widening and nervous laughter.

Seems like a dud, right? Until about half an hour later, when my cousin starts talking about her evil boss, and the impossible, unfeasible situation he was putting her in. She says, with an exasperated sigh, “That man is driving me nuts!” I immediately cried, “ARRRRRRRRGH!!!” A moment passes and then bam, everyone in the room’s guffawing, and Pirate Joke is off the ropes and hittin’ ‘em hard!

My Dad and I share a dumb joke, a dick joke naturally, that’s become funnier by reference than it was in telling. Two guys are peein’ off of a bridge, one says to the other, “Man, that water’s cold.” The other guy replies, “Yep, deep too.”

Ya get it? See, the one guy says something that indicates that he has a freakishly, impossibly long penis! But then the other guy indicates that his is even more freakishly, even more impossibly long! Woo! Funneh!

Okay, so not especially funny the first time you tell it, seems like a throw-away one-liner, right?. Oh ho, not so fast. This joke’s true value lies in its ability to keep giving long after the joke itself has been forgotten. Because at some point, folks with whom you’ve shared this dumb joke will rub their hands together, cup and blow into them, and say to you, “Man, it’s cold out here!” And you’ll look ‘em in the eye and say with perfect deadpan delivery, “Yep, deep too.” The light of recognition will flicker in their eyes, and if their inner 5th-grader yet survives they’ll start laughing.

How’s your holiday preparations comin’?