Month: October 2011

Boo!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
An early Eighties Halloween in Oregon
Che Chihuahua, Fido Castro, take your pick.

I’ve always enjoyed Halloween. You get to be someone else for a day. What’s not to like?

My biggest problem in designing a costume used to be dealing with the limitations of personal appearance (long hair, full beard and earring). Let’s see, there’s hippie, pirate and … and. …

Mom used to make our costumes when we were kids, and for Halloween the year I spent as a college dropout I got her to whip one up based on a cartoon character of mine, Loadedman (don’t ask; it was just about as bad as you can imagine, a half-assed fusion of Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers).

One Halloween a newspaper colleague and I dressed up as the Holy Trinity. He was God, and I was Christ, complete with cross and crown of twist-tie thorns. We couldn’t find a third, so we slapped a happy-face sticker on a white helium balloon and hey presto! The Holy Ghost.

Loadedman
They say smoking that shit makes you smart. Don't believe a word of it. My cartoon character Loadedman proved otherwise in the Seventies.

Another year I was Che Guevara (there’s that hair-and-beard thing again). It was a twofer, as I got to indulge my commie fantasies and firearms fetish at the same time.

Best Halloween of all: the one when Herself and I hooked up for the first time in Santa Fe. Don’t recall my costume for that one; probably hippie, pirate or … or. …

Now, of course, I have an entirely different personal-appearance problem come All Hallows Eve. No hair, neatly trimmed white Van Dyke, earring. Let’s see here: Hippie’s obviously out, so that leaves, uh … uhhhh … arrrrrrrrr.

Sand blast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

These Internets are something, aren’t they? I just got paid to watch streaming video of the Superprestige stop in Zonhoven and was it ever a giggle.

The Zonhoven course features sand — lots and lots of sand — a run-up so steep that most guys pull themselves along using ropes that line the ascent alongside the course tape, and two steep, deep-sand descents, one of which was stacking up the body count faster than the Oakland PD attacking an Occupy encampment.

There were some spectacular get-offs on that bad boy, including one involving Tom Meeusen and Bart Aernouts. Meeusen screwed the pooch and augured in, leaving Aernouts — who was behind him and to the right as Meeusen’s bike catapulted into the course tape — with nowhere to go but right over the bars and into a world of pain.

Amazingly, both men remounted and finished. I would’ve laid there whimpering piteously until someone brought me a frosty Duvel.

The rake’s progress

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

I should have been out smashing the State today, but it was my shift in the VeloBarrel. Plus there were leaves to rake, groceries to fetch, felines to serve — you get the idea. A working-class hero is something to be, sang John Lennon, but then he had a lot of money. And look what happened to him.

I even managed to sneak in a bike ride, and it was delightful. Sixty-five degrees and sunny with Halloween just around the corner. And while it was a bit windy and there were still a few puddles on the deck from the snow earlier in the week, turning the pedals beat the mortal shit out of bagging leaves and waiting for copy.

Cycling also was preferable to going mano a mano with The Man, as some of the Occupy Denver folks apparently did today. The Man had the usual array of top-shelf weaponry at hand — pepper spray, pepper balls, rubber bullets and the real deal — and thus, as in Oakland, the outcome was never in doubt.

From a distance it’s impossible to tell who swung first in this little dust-up. But since the DPD is renowned for its deployment of excessive force, when in their jurisdiction it’s always a good idea to keep your hands (especially that middle digit) to yourself. Stop your mouth from writing a check that your ass can’t cash. Think Martin Luther King, not Malcolm X.

Occupy, si. March, da. But keep it non-violent. That won’t prevent violence, naturally — and when the cops or their goons bring it, they’re going to say you started it. So why not make it impossible to prove in this era of cellphone photos, video and instant online publication?

The worse they look, the better you look.

Occupy … what, exactly?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
OccuPad
OccuPad: The official notepad of OccupyUSA's agitprop troops.

OK, boys and girls, it’s long past time we took up the Occupy movement.

I’m enjoying watching the various occupations coalesce, disperse under pressure and reform, especially as this also involves watching The Man and the media try to figure out just what the hell Occupy is all about.

It seems fairly clear to me: Some folks woke up one morning and realized that the light at the end of the tunnel is the taillight on the gravy train chugging away without them, taking the 1 percent to Fat City and consigning the 99 percent to the hobo jungle.

And it pissed them off. Finally, something pissed them off.

So, as V.I. Lenin famously asked, what is to be done? Voting doesn’t seem to work — I’ve been voting since Nixon-McGovern, never picked a winner until 2008, and if the country is better off today than it was in 1972 the enhancements seem to be eluding me.

And speaking of Lenin, old-school leftist doctrine doesn’t strike a chord with the average American, or even with me — my brief flirtation with communism via the October League and the Communist Party (M-L) taught me that Marxism-Leninism, like representative democracy, looks good on paper but less so in practice.

The whole tea-party tempest was never truly a grass-roots uprising — it was basically an Astroturf op’, financed by the big boys and orchestrated like “Network,” with various mad prophets of the airwaves instructing their audiences to join them in screaming, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

But this Occupy thing kind of takes me back to the Nixon days, when he claimed to speak for a great Silent Majority that wasn’t in the streets agitating against his administration in general and the Vietnam war in particular.

Nixon’s heirs deride Occupy with the usual outdated lingo — get a job, you smelly hippies, dope fiends, and sex-crazed beatnik weirdos — but I’m starting to wonder whether Occupy might be some combination of Marx’s proletariat and Nixon’s Silent Majority, finally clearing its throat and taking to the streets to speak its mind.

Discuss.

There goes the neighborhood

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
First real snow of 2011-12
We finally got our first real measurable snow of the season — just a few inches, but nice to see nonetheless. It'll tamp down the sand on the trails.

It can’t be 70-something and sunny all the time. Still, going from a record high of 78 to snow on the ground is something of a shock to the system.

Happily, the streets and sidewalks retained much of that heat, so I didn’t have to do any shoveling this morning — good news for the ol’ back, since I spent yesterday raking leaves from the huge maple tree that shades Chez Dog. Looks like a bumper crop, too. I’ve already filled six bags and we’re a long ways away from seeing the last leaf on the tree.

Sounds like the cops in Oakland were engaged in a little clean-up operation of their own last night. They went after the Occupy Oakland folks with everything from tear gas to flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, “City officials said they had been forced to clear the encampments because of sanitary and public safety concerns.” Uh huh. Right out of Steinbeck that is, as in “The Grapes of Wrath” and the less-well-known “In Dubious Battle.”

All the stories I’ve read make references to a schism in the Occupy crowd, with some insisting on a non-violent approach and others intent on challenging the cops to a fight. I’d love to know how much of the latter is legit and how much is the work of agents provocateurs. It’s an old trick, and one that keeps working, especially on the media. The Oakland Tribune‘s account of the evening’s festivities could have been written by the PD’s PR flack.

If you’re interested in following the Occupy movement online, bookmark Greg Mitchell’s OccupyUSA blog at The Nation. It’s one of my first stops every morning.