Month: May 2011

Voodoo child

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

I had the urge to go Hollywood again yesterday, so I grabbed my Flip Video Ultra HD and the Voodoo Nakisi and rolled over to Palmer Park.

I spent ninth grade through high-school graduation living a stone’s throw from the park, which we called “The Bluffs,” and which played host to all manner of nefarious activities. In my dotage, I’m only about 10 minutes away by bike, and so I’m usually in the park at least once a week — more often if it’s windy, as it has been this spring.

Palmer Park’s 730 acres comprise some 30 miles of trails, some of them absurdly easy to ride, others not so much (think full suspension, body armor and a solid health-insurance policy). Quite a few can be navigated on a cyclo-cross bike, and those get even easier on the Nakisi 29er with its triple chainring and 700×38 WTB Allterrainasauruses; the 700×45 Panaracers I used at first were overkill. It’s not difficult to arrange a couple satisfying hours of riding in the park without too much repetition.

This little video required some repetition, however. The Flip (which Cisco recently discontinued) is no GoPro Hero or Contour HD — it looks like a Hershey bar mounted to a helmet and catches on bits of this and that if you happen to be riding through the trees, as I was. And getting it mounted at the proper angle took three trips down (and back up) the trail.

Plus importing the video into iMovie is fiddly. You can’t just click “Import from Camera” — the clip winds up truncated by about a third. No, you have to hit “Import Movies,” and then fetch the clip from the Flip. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.

As it happened, I stumbled across another videographer during my ride. He had a Contour attached to his helmet and professed to be very happy with it. Naturally, gadget envy seized me at once. So if you suddenly start to see more and better video around here, you can blame him.

GOP to run sack of hammers in 2012?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

It must be depressing to be a Republican these days. When I was a sprout people said Barry Goldwater was crazy, but he looks like Thomas fuckin’ Jefferson next to the asshats, fucktards, pinheads, fleawits and tools fronting the Grand Old Party these days.

All you have to do is pop round to Steve Benen’s Political Animal — be sure to eat breakfast first, or you’ll lose your appetite — to get the 411 on the Fool Factor:

• Paul Ryan can’t count to 10 without taking his shoes off.

• Newt Gingrich will need a separate campaign bus just to carry all the positions he’s taken (four in the past two weeks) on Ryan’s budget “plan.”

• Mitt Romney acknowledges that there’s “a lot of waste” in the defense budget, but says he wouldn’t trim it by a single, solitary rusty steel penny.

• Michele Bachmann, self-professed fiscal conservative, never met a piece of pork on the hoof that she didn’t smooch right on its flabby porcine lips.

Christ, no wonder Huckabee and Trump ran like roaches from the 2012 presidential clusterfuck. The Repugs would be better off running a sack of hammers against Obama. A sack of hammers may be as dumb as — well, as a sack of hammers — but at least you can trust a hammer, in the hands of an experienced operator, to do what it was designed to do. Not so the other tools in the GOP belt.

• Late update: Speaking of fascism, this story about the Supremes giving cops more leeway to kick down your door without (a) probable cause and (2) a warrant isn’t getting much play. I suppose this means that should the SWAT team get the address wrong, overhear you watching a cowboy movie, conclude that gunfire is being exchanged inside, kick down the door and shoot you nine or 10 times, that you will be ineligible for compensation in addition to being severely dead. Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. Good for her. And shame on the rest of you black-robed pussies. Kevin Drum also weighs in on the issue.

Call of the wild

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ Leave a comment

Here’s something you don’t hear every day. I’m rolling the Vespa out of the garage to scoot over to the senior center, drop off our mayoral-runoff ballots, and our neighbor tells me her new dog ate her old bird.

And I ain’t talkin’ a bucket of finger-lickin’ from The Colonel, either — I’m talking a decorative item, a parakeet, which probably wishes it had never seen a long-haired dachshund. As if life isn’t already short enough.

Meanwhile, the smart money is on the wrong guy winning the mayoralty, surprise surprise. This is Bibleburg, after all, wherein reigns Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Well, at least it’s not snowing. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Reflections
Ah, it's the old "trees reflected in the puddle" shot again.

The poor bastards at the Amgen Tour of California are facing weather that the Chamber of Commerce would be cheering — if this were a ski race.

Alas, it’s a bike race, and with cyclo-cross season behind us it’s looking like the lads will face a shortened course. No word whether they’ll be running the Emerald Bay KOM.

Here in Bibleburg, meanwhile, it’s rain with temps just above freezing. Good for the trees, but also bad for cycling, if you’re a sissified geezer like me, anyway. I’m almost jealous of Herself, who is off to my old hometown of Alamosa this morning, where temps should hit the 70s by afternoon. She and a colleague have some work to do with the local biblioteca and plan a visit to the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.

Me, I’m sentenced to rumormongery without parole today, with both the Giro and the AToC going on. Oh, well — it beats shoveling snow. Or racing in it.

• Late update: As you know already, organizers pulled the plug on the Amgen kickoff after the weather got ridiculous. My friend, colleague and fellow Bibleburger Casey B. Gibson, who’s shooting the race for VeloNews, says six motos went down 20 minutes after the race was canceled, so it seems organizers made the right call. So the racers got a day off, but I didn’t. You’d be astounded how much crap there is to post about a race that never was.