Race you to the tar pits

November 30, 2008November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

oregondawg2 — Your Humble Narrator uses a loupe to examine a contact sheet in the bad old days of newspapering, circa 1981, at the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

The biggest difference between the auto industry and journalism right now is that nobody thinks journalism is worth the trouble and expense of a taxpayer-funded bailout.

At The New York Times, Maureen Dowd discusses a preposterous idea that nonetheless has come to fruition — the outsourcing of newspaper work to India, a survival tactic that Denver Post honcho Dean Singleton finds appealing and Mo’ clearly does not.

Closer to home, Ralph Routon of the Colorado Springs Independent opines about the decline of the Gazette, the Bibleburg daily we both slaved for back in the Seventies. This is something of the pot calling the kettle black — the Indy isn’t what it once was, either, and it never approached the muckraking quality of Westword or New Times, preferring instead to concentrate on its annual “best of” issues and making snarky comments about the competition. But I still pick up an Indy come Thursday, if I happen to be out and about. We croaked our subscription to the G quite some time ago.

These days I get my news online, from a variety of sources, some better than others. A few are extensions of traditional, high-powered news outlets, like The Times, which is still just about the only place you can find a story like this one about retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the one-man military-industrial complex. Others are lefty blogs and online magazines, a few of which I still get delivered in hard-copy form. I even check the Gazette‘s website from time to time, because it’s free, which is about what it’s worth most days.

If I’m on the road, I usually buy a copy of the local paper and thumb through it over breakfast. It’s almost always a depressing experience. There are a few local bits scattered here and there, but your “local” paper these days is mostly a collection of canned features and wire-service news that was hot online the day before, but is as cold as last year’s horseshit by the time it sits unfolded next to your oatmeal and OJ. TV fashioned the newspaper’s casket and the Internet is busily nailing down the lid. Reporters and editors are following Linotype operators and printer’s devils into the hellbox of history.

Any of you still take a local paper? And if so, are you still driving that ’64 Bel-Air, writing letters on a Smith-Corona portable and waiting for The Beatles to get back together?

A harbinger of the season

November 30, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

The trees are alive, with the sound of weasels.

You know the holidays are upon us when the Wonder Weasels take up residence in the trees. We got another little dusting last night, giving me enough to actually shovel after three straight days of “snow,” but it wasn’t enough to keep Turkish (a.k.a. Turkenstein, The Turkinator, Big Pussy, Mighty Whitey the Wonder Weasel, et al) indoors, where it’s warm and dry.

I myself am having trouble cranking up the required motivation to engage in healthy outdoor exercise, like climbing trees, running or cycling. There’s a brisk wind out of the northeast, it’s still spitting snow, and I don’t sport a thick, furry coat like some of the other creatures inhabiting the DogHaus.

Incidentally, last night’s black bean vegetable soup was edible, but unspectacular, even with a hefty salad and some fresh wheat rolls. What it needed was largish chunks of defunct fellow earth creature: chorizo, Italian sausage, ham, bacon, dark turkey meat, anything along those lines. Vegetables are what food eats.

From Black Friday to White Saturday

November 29, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

We got another little dusting overnight, just enough to help the body shops keep up to date with their boat payments. It’s a fine day for making a giant cauldron of soup or stew, and I plan to test drive a new recipe this afternoon, one taken from an old issue of Cooking Light magazine.

Mmm, green chile stew. It burns going in, and it burns going out.

My sis bought me a subscription some years back, but I let it lapse; most of the recipes proved too bland for my taste, and the stories were heavily targeted at women, though men do all the cooking around these parts. But I held onto this recipe for some reason, and stumbled across it the other day while hunting for something I haven’t already cooked a jillion times. It’s for a black bean and vegetable soup, with plenty of cumin, garlic, oregano and chile, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Speaking of chile, if it’s cold outside and you’re already sick of turkey this and that, take a whang at this simple green chile stew from the Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook:

3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1.5 pounds pork butt, cut in 1-inch cubes
1.5 cups diced onion
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 pound red or white potatoes, cut in 1-inch cubes
2-3 teaspoons salt, to taste
3 cups roasted, peeled, chopped green chiles
3 tablespoons diced red bell pepper
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, or to taste

1. Heat the oil in a 6-quart pot over high heat and brown the meat in batches. Set aside.

2. In the same oil, sauté the onions until golden. Add the garlic and sauté 1 minute. Return the meat to the pan along with any juices that have accumulated.

3. Add the broth, potatoes and salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 1 hour, until the potatoes are tender.

4. Add the green chiles and bell pepper, and cook 15-20 minutes more. Add the cilantro, stir and serve.

You can substitute beef sirloin and beef broth for the pork and chicken broth. But that would be wrong. Ditto using canned green chile. If you didn’t score some freshly roasted New Mexican chile this fall, buy some poblanos and Anaheims from the local grocery, blacken them on the grill or under the broiler, put them in a Ziploc bag and chuck them into the freezer for 15 minutes. Remove, peel, seed and chop. A 50-50 mix of poblanos and Anaheims should work nicely.

It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s aliiiiive!

November 28, 2008November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

SuperTurk melts the snow with his X-ray vision.

Once again Zombie Mad Dog Media (Hosted WordPress Edition) walks the earth in search of fresh brains.

The shamans of Waxedstringandacanistan resurrected the evil dead sometime on Thanksgiving Day, while Herself and I were in Fort Collins eating a defunct bird and related items with my sister, her husband and his brother. I should probably sacrifice a laptop to the XHTML gods to show my gratitude.

The drive home was the real party, as the first actual wintry weather we’ve seen so far swept in and glazed Interstate 25 like a cop’s doughnut. We were in second gear for most of the way from Larkspur to Bibleburg, but oddly enough saw only one leadfoot knucklehead backasswards in the ditch, at the south entrance to the Air Force Academy. Last year, in dry conditions, we saw a half-dozen or so.

The local nitwits are making up for lost time today, though, bashing into one another with a will as they race from mall to mall hunting Black Friday bargains. And in New York, one poor bastard, a Wal-Mart temp, got stomped to death by an unruly mob of cheapskates who broke down the doors and piled into the store, devil take the hindmost. Reports The New York Times:

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

Now that’s what I call a “door-buster.” The coppers should confiscate every single one of these yahoos’ credit cards, take the maximum cash advance from each, and hand the whole pile over to this poor sod’s survivors. I wouldn’t walk into a big-box store today if they were giving away eternal life with the Victoria’s Secret angels in a giant snow globe full of cocaine.

More holiday-shopping news:

Late update: OK, I confess, I surrendered to the siren song of consumerism, went out and bought … $125 worth of various groceries that over the next week will be magically transformed into chicken stew Provençal, chicken quesadillas, breaded pork chops with brown rice and braised kale, spaghetti alla puttanesca with Brussels sprouts, and black bean vegetable soup, along with various salads, breakfasts and lunches, the latter to be composed mostly of leftover dinners. Also a couple moderately priced bottles of Frog tonsil polish. And I didn’t have to trample anyone to get ’em, either.

Mmm, stimulus

November 25, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

OK, who feels economically stimulated? Raise your hands, please. Eeeyeww, put ’em back in your laps, you filthy bastards, they’re all sticky.

The notion of going further into debt — credit cards, auto loans, what have you — leaves me feeling fiscally flaccid, frankly. I just don’t think I can get it up for buying a bunch of crap, no matter how shiny it is, if it means that in six months when VeloNews gets sold to Condé Nasty and Bicycle Retailer becomes a quarterly online newsletter some repo’ man name of Guido is gonna kick in the door of my refrigerator box down by Fountain Creek and take it all back.

Maybe I can get a job running off thousand-dollar bills at the Denver Mint. That seems to be where all the action is these days:

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

Oh, goody. Make that a bicycle box down by Shook’s Run.

Meanwhile, my buddy Matt reminds me that the bailout so far amounts to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, according to Bloomberg. That’s enough money to pay off half the mortgages in the country, conduct nine times the warfare we’ve already laid on Iraq and Afghanistan, and build a gold-plated escalator to the International Space Station.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it sounds about as sensible as propping up an elite class of paper-hangers so they can hose us all over again once we dummy up and resume buying shit on credit.

But enough about our crumbling economy. We’ve got a real crisis right here — cops rousting body Nazis from Santa Monica’s medians. Oh, the humanity.