Confidential to NPR: SERIOUSLY?

Driving back from Death Valley to Beatty, Nevada, NPR gave about ten seconds to reporting that Iran is threatening to pull out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and about four minutes to whether sandwiches are better cut diagonally or crosswise.

Vigiling

I was up the ass crack of dawn to help at the vigil, only to find out it was a false alarm. Now preparing for other (real) stuff.

99 miles of road under the bike, 99 miles of road

Rode from atlanta to columbus. On balance a good ride. Scenic, lots of small town and rural Georgia, nice to have the time to breathe and think. Definite down sides: aggressive dogs (especially in the dark) and the stomach upset and runs that made much of the second half, ummmm, complicated.

Tomorrow I go into high gear. As if a century ride isn't high enough. (Yes, I'm calling it a century, notwithstanding the missing 0.8 miles.)

AZ

A lovely weekend in arizona with great people. Busy and tiring, sure, but well worth it. I'll try to get up some images soon.

With one exception, the Sierra Vista police department was uniquely professional. One insecure, chest puffing turd with two little stars on his lapel was an ass, but every other officer I dealt with was just doing their job, calmly and dispassionately.

If only I could say the same for the obnoxious rude bigoted ignorant trash who made up the vast majority of the counterprotesters. From the scumbags on motorcycles who intentionatally tried to make their flapping flags hit us as they drove by (nice job swatting that ocotillo tree, dumbass) to the screeching troglodyte with the megaphone who was out again spewing venom, to the hateful trash with the bizarre anti-priest signs, it was an appallingly ugly display of poisonous human nature.

Sitting on a tiny plane from TUS to SLC, so over halfway done with trip #4 of 6 in three months, with one more to book (might be Barcelona!) Listening to the fantastic tribute album to Springsteen's Nebraska, Badlands.

Now if only there was any good food in the SLC airport. At least the local brews in the Sky Club will ease the pain: last time through, it was Park City Steamer (surprisingly excellent) and Uinta Golden Spike Hefeweizen (mediocre but drinkable.)

Big dudes

The two guys sitting in 7C and 7D on this tiny little regional jet are about 300 and 350 pounds. Have fun, guys!

Hippy?

At the end of today's protest, some kids were riding bmx bikes in a parking lot. I went to put something in the car, and one asked me, "Are you guys hippies?" I said "some of us would probably say yes, but I just like protests. I'm a lawyer, I help with the legal stuff." The kid said "Ohhhh." I think maybe I didn't explain it all that well.

My first mobile blog. Woo.

Sitting in a hotel room in Tucson, testing out mobile blogging, since I've recently joined the mobile generation. Yes, friends, that's right: I no longer have a cell phone that is six years old and reminiscent of a coffin, I have a Droid.

So far, as I told A who waxed enthusiastic about the Droid, I like most everything about it, and love a couple things. I LOVE the GPS navigation. It works vastly better than either of the two standalone GPS units I've owned. Being able to drag the google map around along your route is huge, and the street view photos provide a much better context when you're unclear on something than just a map with streets.

Obligatory flight/airport snark: woman boards the obnoxiously small plane; and I smell her from an aisle away. I immediately think ohhh, I hope the smoker isn't my immediate seatmate. She is. She sits down, drops her stuff on the floor, and starts fishing in her purse. She immediately offers me a mint. I politely decline, and she says okay, and puts them back without taking one herself. She says "Are you the one with the onions?" A little confused, I say, "uhhh, no." She responds "Good, 'cause someone just ate a ton of onions. if you figure out who it is, let me know, so i can offer them a mint." Her cigarettes are visible in her purse, and she smells like the smoking room at SLC. (When will the geniuses that run public health programs realize that if you make it easy for people to kill themselves and the people around them, they will, and it you make it more difficult, they'll be less inclined? Or at least not smell so freshly bad when they sit down next to me?)

That would be the whole story, except for this brief epilogue: she dunked her nasty little biscotti cookies in her diet coke to eat them.

Fortunately, it was a relatively short flight.

Now running around in Arizona, but apparently with plenty of time to blog.

Various & random airport observations

Sitting in a lovely Delta sky club in A: it's the secret one in the center (find the Chili's Too), not the consistently crowded one near A17. Great views but limited electricity in the northernmost part.

Well, this little room was great, if you can ignore the CNN Headline Noise in the adjacent room. Then Team Idiot rolled in and began babbling. Two women, one prattling away into her cell phone, another texting while shoveling in a bagel with cream cheese and trying to ignore guy in his 20s. Guy in his ~60s is visibly and audibly drunk at 8:36am, and working on a(nother) bloody mary and his cell phone.

Just watched a pretty shabby looking MD88 roll out of the nearest gate: from up here on the 2nd/2rd floor, you could see that it's been a while since they re-painted it.

Waiting on a flight to JFK en route to BOS for a some G time. Big times to come!

Delta baggage truck (one of those bizarrely cute Tug vehicles) just ran the baggage trailer over an orange cone and looked back, obviously surprised. (UPDATE: about 10 minutes later: a delta trash truck nailed one of the orange cones that a Delta poop truck (aka "lavatory waste") had just put down, about 50 feet from the first sad cone.)

On the MARTA train coming down here, there were at least three sets of identical twins, two of sets apparently going to the same expensive private school. One girl had both a iPhone/iTouch, and an iPod, and was working both of them while doing some sort of homework balanced on a Chinese language textbook. Her sister was going over some fairly complicated math homework that she had gotten a 34/45 (i.e., a C, at 75%) on. The twin brothers seemed to be mostly concerned with laying all the way out on the benches, shoes up and all, though brother #2 was also interested in repeatedly blowing bubbles and getting them stuck all over his upper lip, the pulling it off with some significant effort and starting the process over again.

Okay, about time to begin packing up for some good times on the plane. Woo!