Month: March 2011

Back in the saddle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Palms at the Place of Refuge
Pu'uhonua O Honaunau ("Place of Refuge") was one of the spots that took a beating from the tsunami. Hunter S. Thompson wrote of it in "The Curse of Lono," describing another of his "Fear and Loathing" outings.

With vacation a thing of the past it’s back to business as usual in the DogHaus, and that means a fresh rant has been posted at VeloNews.com. I fear the Pulitzer committee will give it a miss, as I suffered from a touch of the old post-St. Paddy’s Day brain scramble whilst composing it. Plus it contains the word “dick,” which always makes the judges queasy.

The whole race-radio thing is taking on Wisconsinian dimensions, with Paddy McQuaid as Scott Walker and the riders as the pissed-off working stiffs, albeit without the dubious and transitory benefits of collective bargaining. When last I looked the VN homepage had four stories on the topic. And here you thought we were all about bike racing. Maybe tomorrow, when Milan-San Remo takes the stage.

McQuaid’s open letter to the riders on the UCI website is a real piece of work, a Dale Carnegie moment guaranteed to win him many friends in the peloton. He says he has plenty of pals sending him love notes from the bunch, but names no names, while basically calling the others pussies, tools and dopers. One of his BFFs will not be Jens Voigt, who would probably like to gouge out one of Paddy’s eyes, eat it, and then skull-fuck him through the empty socket.

Ah, the joys of velo-journalism. The party never stops. To give your mind a brief respite from the rancor, here’s another shot from our vacation on the Big Island, taken at Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, otherwise known as Place of Refuge. No dicks were harmed in the making of this picture, not even Paddy McQuaid.

Na Gaeil abú

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Up the Irish, and no, not like that, ye feckin’ pervert. After 13 hours of sleep it’s time to listen to The Pogues — who are at present enjoying a farewell tour of the United States — and contemplate a pint or two or three of the black and perhaps just a wee drop of the uísque beatha on St. Patrick’s Day.

KRCC was playing “Dirty Old Town” when I arose this morning, so here it is for you and yours. Sláinte!

• Late update: Speaking of NPR, Doug Lamborn is a feckin’ eejit. And Anthony Weiner is not.

Aloha

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
The view from the Sheraton
The view from the Sheraton, where we most assuredly did not stay. We got a nice shiatsu massage there, though, thanks to one of Herself's co-workers.

Boy, can we pick a vacation time and place or what? Herself and I celebrated her birthday this past week by jetting across the water to the Big Island just in time for Kilauea to erupt, the tsunami to strike and Hawaii to achieve the dubious honor of becoming the first state to see its gas prices top $4 per gallon, according to The Los Angeles Times. (Yeah, we had a rental car, a robin’s-egg-blue Mustang that was not exactly a fuel-sipper, and we were buying go-juice in the four-and-a-quarter range.)

Aside from that, the trip barely registered on the Suck-O-Meter®. Deep blue water, beaches in your choice of black, white or green sand, and good eats — what’s to bitch about?

Besides the friggin’ chickens, that is. Sonsabitches never button their beaks. Sunrise to sunset and all points in between it’s “Err err err err ERRRR!” Repeat until the vacationing haoles go batshit.

More words and pictures later, if I can remember where I packed my head. We’ve been up for about 30 hours straight, flying from the Big Island to San Francisco to Denver to Bibleburg. Don’t even ask where that left the needle on the Suck-O-Meter®, especially the final 15-minute leg.

But for a change the Vomit Comet was dialed down to minimal fear factor, so even that wasn’t as bad as I’ve seen it. We don’t call it the Vomit Comet for nothin’, Bubba.

• Late update: Happy trails to Owsley Stanley, who died Sunday at age 76. I never sampled his five-star product, but word on the street was that it made the shit we were eating in the late Sixties/early Seventies look like a short dog of Thunderbird in a crumpled paper bag parked next to a dusty bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1929.

Nighthawks at the diner

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Tom Waits shambles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and your ears twitch at the sandpapered quote he lays on the Old Gray Lady as he accepts the honor:

“They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with, and they say that like it’s a bad thing. Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air.”

I wish I had something to give him other than praise and respect, but maybe that’s enough.

From Rich to poor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Frank Rich moves on and there is one less reason to visit The New York Times website.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see what he does with the new gig. And I understand where he’s coming from when he says that after 17 years he didn’t like “what the relentless production of a newspaper column was doing to my writing.”

“That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion. Believe it or not, an opinion writer can sometimes get sick of his own voice.”

Preach it, brother, preach it. There are days — many, many of them — when I long to shut the fuck up but a deadline insists otherwise.