Month: July 2010

Uncorking the Vino’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Updating the DogSite from the back deck — and yes, that is a fan working away back there. I told you it was hot. ...
Updating the DogSite from the back deck — and yes, that is a fan working away back there. I told you it was hot. ...

Watching all these dudes riding their bikes across France kinda makes me want to get out there, too. But by the time I’m through with my labors for VeloNews.com, it’s hotter than the hubs of Hell and I tend to lose interest in anything other than cold beverages.

I used to work the site with a laptop at a table on the back deck, which at least got me outdoors in the cool of the morning, but the “advance” of technology has made this impossible. Now I need two 22-inch monitors so I can follow the stage via video and have quick and easy access to e-mail, instant messaging and about a jillion browser windows.

To tell the truth, I could use a third monitor, like my colleague Charles Pelkey, but I haven’t got enough desk for it. So sometimes I power up the MacBook and leave it sitting atop the drawing board next to the desk.

All this, mind you, so I can follow and chronicle a stage that pretty much sucked ass. About the last 10km of today’s 196km stage were interesting, thanks to Alexander Vinokourov. Whatever else you can say about him — and you can say plenty — the dude loves to bring the pain.

Now that he has a stage win under his belt, Vino’ has vowed once again to work for Super Spaniard. And the defending champ will need all the help he can get. The next four stages are some bad mamma-jammas, and his main tow truck Dani Navarro hit the deck today, as did Jesus Hernandez, who seems to be having an even worse Tour than Radio Shackstrong.

Renshaw gives lousy head

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The Big Hook came for HTC’s Mark Renshaw today. He head-butted Garmin’s Julian Dean — not once, not twice, but thrice as Dean tried to bring Tyler Farrar to the line in stage 11 — and then once Mark Cavendish had safely launched off his wheel, Renshaw took a quick peek over his shoulder, saw Farrar coming and tried to ride him into the barriers.

“Right, off you go,” said race officials. “Good,” says I. That was a mean, dangerous and totally unnecessary bit of aggro’ bullshit in a Tour that has already seen way too many dudes on the deck with broken bones.

Dean had it exactly right afterward, saying: “What we do is very dangerous and we don’t need behavior like that to make it even more dangerous.”

The Mobius turd

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Scott McIsn’t is full of shit. Sharron Angle is full of shit. Jon Kyl is full of shit. John Boehner is full of shit. Sue Myrick is full of shit. I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. … and it looks like a pachyderm’s footprint.

While we’re speaking about shit, Texus Maximus appears to have stepped in some. It’s tough to keep knocking ’em out of the park when the press has finally benched the fat teenager slow-pitching the softballs and brought up the major leaguer with the rocket-propelled arm. Am I an owner? A rider? Christ, ask me something about cancer, can’t you?

Hell, I can’t remember what I was doing 15 minutes ago, much less in 2004, and nobody from The New York Times is asking me about it, something that tends to peg the Fear needle at redline. I immediately channel the late Richard Pryor berating a fanboy snapping pix of him during a standup. “What you taking my picture for? Who you gonna show it to?” he demanded.

Call me cynical, but I expect that RadioShack’s PR flacks will be the ones dodging the beanballs going forward. “Ms. Macur? Hello, I’m Fullo Schidt, Mr. Armstrong’s intern for Media Ax-Grinding and Agendas … how may I be of assistance?”

Boom, Schleckaleckalecka. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Another day, another detonation — that’s life at the 2010 Tour.

Yellow-jersey-for-a-day Cadel Evans went boom after breaking his left elbow in a crash on Sunday; he and management decided to keep it a secret, the team worked like draft horses for him, and it ended badly.

“We decided not to tell anybody because we didn’t want anybody hitting us on the first climb,” BMC team manager Jim Ochowicz told VeloNews. “We controlled the race and we were going to see what the outcome was … you saw the outcome.”

Indeed I did, and I felt badly for Evans, who really has done the world champion’s jersey proud this year only to get a steel-toed Sidi in the ’nads from Fate. And given the carnage thus far, I wonder whether Andy Schleck — the latest in a series of yellow jerseys — might be tempting fate by saying that the race has boiled down to a two-man race between him and Super Spaniard.

Don’t let your mouth write no checks your ass can’t cash, son. I don’t see no Champs-Elysees yet.

Meanwhile, speaking of mouths, asses and checks, it seems that Scott McLobbyist, the Repuglican candidate for governor of Colorado (The Slightly Less Grotesquely Fat Than the Rest of the States State), has been accused of lifting bits for his series of “Musings on Water” pieces from the works of Gregory J. Dobbs (no relation to Fred C. Dobbs), now a justice on the state Supreme Court.

According to The Denver Post, the Hasan Family Foundation paid McInnis $300,000 to do speaking engagements and “research and write a monthly article on water issues that can be distributed to media and organizations as well as be available on the Internet.”

Instead, McLobbyist took a gig at a law firm, jobbed the research out and now blames the researcher for the alleged plagiarism, which he says is “a non-issue.”

“Voters don’t really care about this issue,” he told a Denver TV station. “They care about jobs, getting back to work.”

I’ll bet they do. Hell, I’d like to find a job like that myself after three decades trying to draw some sustenance from the dusty, withered teat of journalism. Getting paid $300,000 for two years to steal someone else’s words when they’re just sitting there waiting for you in a corral? Sheeyit, that’s about as sporting as shooting puppies at the pound. My words are all free-range, and take some hunting down.