Month: July 2011

A smelly barrel of victory

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Back in that ol’ VeloBarrel again. It is a malodorous hogshead indeed, redolent of unwashed kit, pressroom gin and deadline sweat.

But for Jelle Vanendert and Thomas Voeckler, it smells like … like victory.

Vanendert galloped away from an elite group of GC contenders for the stage win in today’s edition of Le Tour, and Voeckler stuck with them to defend his maillot jaune, which is a win by any standard you care to employ, because not even he expected to be in yellow at day’s end.

If there’s any stink attached to the stage, it comes from the smelly feet of the tap-dancing contenders, who didn’t exactly open a 55-gallon drum of whup-ass in the finale. Oh, sure, Andy Schleck had a few tentative digs, as did brother Fränk, but to hear them talk about it afterwards you’d think they were both double Badgers with a side of Eddy Merckx and that everyone was supposed to fall down stone dead the first time they raised their skinny butts off their saddles.

Cadel Evans, who spent the day chasing down everything with a pulse, found them as exasperating as I did.

“The Schleck brothers are there, they ride all day, they’ve got the yellow jersey to gain and they look at me to pull for them? I feel like saying, ‘Hang on a second, I’m not here to tow you to Paris.’ ”

Riding the tiger

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Longtime friend of the DogSite Jeff Cozad passes on this interesting read from Timothy Egan, a former reporter for turned weekly contributor to The New York Times.

The short story is this: Repugs rode the Tea Baggers to control of the House … or so they thought. Now they find themselves astride a retarded tiger that’s hell-bent on either eating up or pissing on everything in sight, and to dismount is to (a) end up inside the tiger, or (2) get pissed on.

What happens to the rest of us, naturally, is strictly between us and the tiger.

Here’s fish in your eye

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Fisheyed Front Strange
Acid flashback? Nope, just the wizards at Canon messing with our minds again.

I didn’t get out for a ride today until the afternoon thunderclouds were rolling in, and wasn’t but four blocks away from Chez Dog when the first raindrops began to fall.

Summoning my inner Belgian, I pressed on, and atop the Col du Austin Bluffs Parkway, by the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, I stopped to snap this pic of the Front Range using the Canon PowerShot 300HS‘s fisheye-lens feature. This sort of effrontery must make real photographers feel the way I do when some mouth-breather with a netbook and a Twitter account proclaims himself a writer.

Meanwhile, the other day I cycle up to Grandview Overlook in Palmer Park and see another cyclist there. We start chatting, and he mentions that he used to live in California, and I ask why he left, expecting some tale about selling some shitbox condo for a bazillion dollars and buying the Broadmoor as a pied-a-terre until something of quality hits the market.

“Couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” he said. “The bank wouldn’t work with us, so we handed them the keys and said, ‘See you.'”

Now, I don’t know the backstory. But the dude went from “owning” a house in California to ranching the view from an apartment in a tough part of Bibleburg, and that’s got to sting, no matter how nifty the Front Range looks from the saddle of your bicycle.

Speaker of the Hose

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Eric Cantor is either an al-Qaeda sleeper agent hell-bent on destroying the U.S. economy or the dumbest pol to come down the pike in the better part of quite some time.*

He’s up to his tits in a hole and still digging, and Punkinhead is standing on the edge, watching him do it, sipping from a beaker of gin and just waiting for the proper moment to unzip, deploy the wonder worm and piss all over him.

This punk-ass chump will be Speaker of the House when Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin throw a three-way Wesson Oil fling on a giant red-white-and-blue plastic tarp emblazoned with the U.S. Constitution and the Ten Commandments.

* I almost forgot about Louie Gohmert, probably because he’s so forgettable. That numbnuts thinks we can clear up the red ink with a U-nited States of America garage sale. “You have land. You’ve got leases,” he told The Washington Post. “There are all kinds of assets.” Right. Let’s start by selling Gohmert’s bridge and banjo.