Author: timmooney

Preparing for my ride

I’m still processing my World Domination Summit experience, so more on that sometime over the weekend I think.

Let’s talk bike tour. I’ll be doing a lot of that soon.

The current insanity plan is as follows:

  • Fly to PDX August 1st. Stay at my brother’s place in NE.
  • On 8/2, take the morning Wave bus to Tilamook, Oregon (“ride the WAVE!”) and meet up with mysterious James (mysterious because he has no social media presence and only reads your stuff. Yes, yours.)
  • Go south a few hundred miles.
  • Stop in San Francisco, because that should be enough.
  • Pack up bike and ship it back to my brother in PDX, where this bike lives.
  • Get on a plane on the 15th from SFO to DC.

Seems easy enough. There’s only like 6 bullet points in there and half are all in one spot!

I bought a used touring bike in Portland this week, mainly because I cannot justify urinating away* $200 to United airlines for the pleasure of potentially damaging my primary bike. Instead, I’ll give a great local Portland bike shop $300 for the used bike and an overhaul, support their business and have a great excuse for returning to Oregon for future rides. It seems classy and recycle-ish too. And I’m nothing if not recycle-ish.

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*Is it classier to say it that way or too clinical?

Origin Tale: why uncommonly silly?

All good superhero comics have origin tales… radioactive spider bite survivors, refugees from long exploded planets…  dudes who talk to fish and that’s their only power…

So too, all blogs (do we still call these blogs?) have origins. My favorite Supreme Court case* is Griswold v. Connecticut. It’s a seminal privacy law case that was the predecesor to Roe v. Wade. Ever hear of that one?

The crux of the case was a law that banned contraception for everyone, even married couples. Yes… married couples. The Court… and I’ll use the technical term here… smacked this law down. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, oddly enough. Some Justices thought the law wasn’t strike-downable (now an actual word). Another, Justice Potter Stewart, thought the law was inane, but nevertheless constitutional. But the best part was how he got there. Justice Stewart began his dissent with one of the all time great dismissive lines ever to grace the Supreme Court:

This is an uncommonly silly law.

So elegant. So perfectly dismissive of a perfectly stupid (and uncommonly silly) law. I love the majority ruling on principle, but this sentence remains a favorite of mine, despite its presence in the dissent with which I disagree.

So… I honor the smack talk of a lesser-known Justice by titling my blog after his words. An homage if you will.

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*{cough cough} nerd!

I have a confession to make…

I don’t tend to stick with blogging. Perhaps it’s a commitment issue… perhaps it’s a boredom issue. But honestly, I feel like I give these things a year, move on and keep the old one up like an 1880s southwestern ghost town.

I remember I published my first blog before they were called blogs. It was a Geocities page (remember them?) and I called it Dark Side of the Moon. Get it? Moon? Mooney? Super clever 90s style stuff I tell you. Then I ran out of patience for my allegedly dark, mysterious, Cobanian thoughts. And I moved on.

Then there were other blogs. Some for work. Some for play. Some serious. Others not. Then I gave up for a while, and now I’m back. But this time, I think it might stick. I’m going to start writing about things that interest me rather than things I think might interest other people.* But we’ll see.

Coming soon… why I call this “an uncommonly silly blog.”

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*Paradoxically, I hope it might interest other people. Otherwise we call these things “journals.”