Thorazine is on my Xmas list

November 29, 2011November 29, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Miss Mia Sopaipilla views with alarm — "You said a bad word," says Mia. "And another. And another. And another. ..."

What’s been going on around here, you ask?

Well, let me think here for a minute. Hmm. …

We had the big Thanksgiving Day U-turn from Bibleburg to Fort Collins and back on Thursday; a full day of VeloNewsery plus dinner with our across-the-street neighbors Larry, Jill and Wendy on Friday; lunch with (and saying adios to) our wonderful next-door neighbor Judy on Saturday, with an extra-large side of work; and work work work on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, culminating in yet another dinner with friends tonight, a northern New Mexican project to which I tended between bouts of pixel-pushing for the Boulder boyos.

Whew. Long week for an old dog. And it ain’t over yet.

As you might imagine, something’s had to give around here, and that something is exercise. My ass is approaching critical mass, and I ain’t talking about the traffic-snarling bicycle parade, either.

I did sneak out for a 20-minute “run” this afternoon before putting the beans on the stove. Folks probably thought they were seeing a particularly ugly, sluggish zombie on the prowl.

And I probably managed to sweat off a couple of grams running around the kitchen, chopping, mincing, slicing, sautéing and stirring bits of this and that until in desperation, running out of time, I finally dialed down the menu from cheese enchiladas in green sauce with one side of beans in chipotle and another of red chile roasted potatoes to a bare-bones platter — bean burritos smothered in green with a side of the aforementioned spuds.

The bad news is, I probably put those lost grams right back on by going back for seconds. Plus pie. Did I mention pie? Oh, Lord.

Meanwhile, we will return to our regularly scheduled snark come Thursday, when I have a day off — and the weatherman is calling for wind-driven snow and a high in the 20s. I foresee much grumbling and the first stationary-trainer ride of the season, not necessarily in that order.

No cash? No problem

November 24, 2011November 24, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Herself and I ordinarily start our Thanksgiving Day drive north to dine with my sis and bro-in-law by listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” and finish the drive home with Sam Kinison’s “Live From Hell.” It’s not exactly your typical family tradition, but then we’re not exactly your typical family.

Alas, this trip we got rooked out of Arlo — KRCC wasn’t playing it until noon, when we were well out of range, and KUNC must have played it before we got in range. *

So we listened to Sam on the way up and Richard Pryor’s “… is it something I said?” on the way back. And thus, since the Comedy Rule of Three is clearly in effect here today, and in order to shine a bit of comedic light on the festival of consumerist idiocy called “Black Friday” that precedes The Greatest Bullshit Story Ever Told, we herewith present a portion of George Carlin’s 10th HBO special, “George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy.”

* Incidentally, we did finally get our Arlo fix around 8:30 p.m. Bibleburg time thanks to the miracle of the streaming internets. There may be a god after all.

That was absurd, let’s eat dead bird

November 23, 2011November 23, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Mia and Turkish watch as Buddy (not pictured) gets a grooming from Herself.

The mighty river of VeloNews finally slowed to a trickle today. I fired off an invoice to Corporate and slipped out for a short ride.

Several impatient motorists seemed in dire need of a brisk hosing down with a fire extinguisher full of tryptophan on this day before Thanksgiving. I tallied exactly 349,392 moving violations intended to kill me before abandoning the count.

Plenty of static violations, too, my favorite being the bulbous land yacht parked smack dab in the middle of the bike lane, right under the “No Parking In Bike Lane” sign. This appalling lack of reading comprehension is not encouraging to those of us who earn our meager livings from wielding the English language.

Oh, well. At least I got my big ass out in the late-November sunshine (this is not strictly accurate, of course; it was wearing bib shorts). Herself and I took the critters out for an airing, too. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein, Miss Mia Sopaipilla and Banzai Buddy the Japanese Wonder Chin all scored themselves a little free vitamin D, which can be hard to come by this time of year.

That’s a little something to be thankful for in trying times when we 99 percenters hear the distant ring of carving knives clashing rhythmically against sharpening steels and wonder if we’re what’s for dinner.

And if that doesn’t get your drumstick throbbing, raise a glass to longtime Friend of the DogS(h)ite Boz, who notes in comments that he’s back to working for The Man.

From our family to yours, happy Thanksgiving.

Food for thought

November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

1, 2, 3, 4. ... — Whose peppers? OUR peppers!

There may be an upside to working five days a week, in addition to the obvious (a heftier paycheck): I spend more time reading cycling news and less time reading real news.

That’s got to be good for the blood pressure.

For example, today I got up at 7, grabbed a cup of Joe, assumed the position before the iMac and began the process of rerouting the contents of my in-box toward the sprawling server farm in Spaminacanistan that hosts the VeloNews.com website. This took the better part of quite some time but upon reflection seems very little like working for a living when compared to covering the interminable GOP “debates.”

The day’s chores included rewriting a press release; editing, augmenting and posting a few Agence France Presse wire-service stories; uploading a couple tech pieces; editing and posting a half-dozen bits from staffers and contributors; finding art to illustrate all of this; changing the marquee pic; and putting the finishing touches on a weekly e-mail newsletter The Company sends out.

I also managed to communicate electronically with distant colleagues in San Diego, Boulder, Laguna Hills, Brussels and Leon, Spain, without once using the word “fuck,” which may be a first.

So I didn’t get around to noticing that our friends at Fox News had decreed pepper spray to be “a food product, essentially,” until pretty late in the day, as I was self-administering a mild sedative that the French supply in liquid form without a prescription.

Pepper spray. A “food product.”

Well, shit. Don’t tell her momma, but it appears that I stealth-sprayed Herself last night. Slipped four dried red New Mexican chile pods into the posole I whipped up for dinner.

She never knew what hit her, the little commie.

Forward, into the past

November 20, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

It’s been 20 years since I had the traditional five-day, 40-hours-per-week job, and as those of you still manacled to same at wrists and ankles might expect I don’t miss it.

I quit for a reason. More than one, actually. Walking out of The New Mexican for the final time felt like taking one of those endless beer leaks after a long ride in an old truck on a bumpy road. Total relief.

O'Grady at The New Mexican — I don't recall which job I held at The New Mexican when this mugshot was taken — I went from copy editor to assistant sports editor to assistant feature editor to feature editor in less time than it takes to say, "Why the hell am I still working here?"

To be sure, there are (or were) perks — health insurance, 401(k), two days a week off, sick leave, paid vacation and The Company buys your gear and puts a roof over your workaday head. But otherwise it pretty much sucks. I know, because during most of my 15 years as a newspaperman I was keeping a journal — you know, sort of an analog blog that nobody else gets to read.

So, having hard evidence that doing journalism eight hours a day, five days a week is like volunteering to get a daily pepper-spraying from Lt. John Pike, why in hell would I agree to go back to it? Especially considering that this time around, I don’t even get the perks because I’m an independent contractor and hellbent on remaining one?

Larry’s wife knows the answer. As for me, I’ll just note that when VeloNews.com lost both senior editor Charles Pelkey (involuntary retirement) and web editor Steve Frothingham (fled like a rat out of an aqueduct back to a former employer, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News), there was nobody left to ladle sludge out of the old VeloBarrel and onto the readers’ titanium-and-carbon-fiber plates save Your Humble Narrator (and Lennard Zinn’s daughter Emily, who recently clambered aboard as a part-timer).

So when The Company came a-callin’, I picked up the phone, even though we have Caller ID.

Call it equal parts stupidity (“Well, shit, someone has to do it,” a knee-jerk reaction common to journalists) and avidity (“There’s a pink slip out there somewhere with my name on it and I’d better start stockpiling fiat currency if only to save money on toilet paper.”)

All this is the long way around to telling you that if you see anything outrageously defective on VeloNews.com from Saturday morning to Wednesday afternoon during the next month or so, while The Company shops for iEditor 4.0, you’ll know whom to blame.

And if the bloggery gets a little thin around here, well — you’ll know whom to blame for that, too.