Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus!

November 25, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.

We haven’t even sat down to Thanksgiving Day dinner and the pulpiteers at Focus on the Fambly are already trotting out their annual Christmas In Peril fantasy. Focus Action spokescreature Carrie Gordon Earll breaks it down for us in Palinesque style (and I’m not talking Michael here):

“The eradication of Christmas is a politically correct idea that we can’t have sacred ideas in our culture.”

Uh huh. Can someone please ask Spock to pop round with his Universal Translator? I assume it handles Cretinese.

The more I see of industrial Christianity, Bibleburg style, the more I like Zen. You never see a mob from the local sangha berating the manager of a Best Buy because he won’t hang banners inscribed with the Four Noble Truths on Shakyamuni’s birthday. George Carlin had this crowd nailed, you should pardon the expression.

Meanwhile, thanks for all the music recommendations. I’d forgotten how much I like some of your suggestions, especially The Band’s “The Last Waltz.” Wouldn’t you know the sumbitch isn’t available on iTunes? Yo, Carrie, forget about that eradication-of-Christmas bullshit — we got a real problem right here.

Giant steps

November 23, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

OK, I’m a week into my disfigurement (disfingerment?) and I can see it’s gonna be a long healing process, just like the time I dislocated the thumb — which, ironically, shares a hand with the splinted middle finger and met its fate a long stone’s throw from where the birdie bit the dust, on a technical bit of trail near Lazy Land in Palmer Park.

My choice of stationary-trainer tunes has come in for some light criticism, so I’m turning to you, my small, deeply disturbed following, for your advice on a soundtrack for an extended Tour de Living Room. I did 70 minutes on the Giant Tempo yesterday and will probably be ramping that up to two hours, so I need a shitload of music and it can’t all be redneck rock, though I have some Charlie Daniels in reserve for emergencies.

Meanwhile, the wizards at VeloNews.com are still stomping bugs at the new digs. Seems IE6 doesn’t like the new site’s calendar and we have a significant number of prehistoric readers who insist on logging on via abacus, smoke signal or log drum. Christ, what’s next? “Optimized for Mosaic?”

A Giant pain in the ass

November 22, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Feh. Forty-something and sunny and what am I doing? The Tour to Nowhere in the living room on our Giant Tempo trainer. An hour and 10 minutes’ worth.

Lord, I woke up this mornin', had them Statesboro Blues.

Thank God for my iPod, the Allman Brothers Band and their compilation “A Decade of Hits: 1969-1979.” It’s the best indoor cycling music ever recorded and has seen me through many a grim living-room sweat-fest since its release in 1991.

I wrote a column about it once, if memory serves. I’ll see if I can dig the sumbitch up from the archives, as that will be easier than typing something original with one of my birdies grounded.

• Late update: Well, whaddaya know. Even a dumb dog digs up a bone now and then. But the Allman Brothers album was only one part of the column, not the entire topic. Here it is — a blast from the past, going all the way back to 2002, when we lived on a rocky outcropping in the Wet Mountains, 10 snowy miles from Weirdcliffe.

Blue bird

November 18, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments

I really stuck the dismount this time. Even the East German judge gave me a 10.

Hm. Been a little quiet around here lately, no? A couple shifts in the old VeloBarrel, some snow-shoveling, a bit of trying to learn my way around the new WordPress-based beta site, and a crash on the ’cross bike, and all of a sudden it’s five days later. How time does fly when you’re having fun.

For some reason yesterday I thought it would be smart to go for a short ride in the icy goo. Not so much, as it turns out, especially with a deadline looming. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be to dispense the wit and wisdom with only one functional hand. The other, as you can see, is sporting a splint to support its dislocated birdie finger, which I popped back into place as I was lying there in the puddle, the one masking the sheet of ice.

Road-raging motorists will get little in the way of obscene gestures from me over the next month, unless they park curbside to peek in through a living-room window and shout at me for riding an exercise bike.

The new VeloNews.com

November 13, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Since VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham let the cat out of the bag on Twitter, I’ll follow his lead and post a link to the latest iteration of the website, velonews.competitor.com.

The latest redesign is a WordPress model, like my own humble site, only much more complex. And frankly, it’s gonna be something of a pain in the ass to administer until we get comfortable with the additional steps it demands of an editor trying to post a story with pictures. But that was the case with the changeover to the present site, too. We got used to it. Kinda. Sorta.

The new site remains a work in progress, but it’s nearly ready to launch. So if you have any thoughts, please send them to me and I’ll pass ’em along to Steve.