Month: June 2013

Give me a break

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Being a newsman of sorts (OK, you can stop laughing now) I like it when actual news occurs.

As Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey and I rambled through today’s coverage of stage 2 it seemed we were in for the classic Tour de France non-event: The Doomed Break Reeled In At the Very Last Minute.

Except it wasn’t. Not all of it. Jan Bakelants (RadioShack-Leopard) made a break from the break and hung on to win by a whisker, the last man standing from a late six-man escape. First Tour, first pro win. And it came with a nifty yellow jersey, too.

People who were supposed to win didn’t; people who were supposed to get the maillot jaune didn’t; and the only impediments to forward motion were gravity, eejits at roadside and a loose mutt who will probably never chase a guy on a bicycle again but came away with a fine tale to tell around the fire hydrant: “Jesus, Lassie, there were a couple hundred of the sonsabitches coming after me at 50 km/h! I ’bout shit my flea collar!”

Eventually all the Right People will take charge, of course. They almost always do. But in the meantime we seem to have an actual sporting-news story on our hands.

Extry, extry, read all about it. …

No Furthur

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Magic Bus
A magic trip, indeed.

Today’s first stage of Le Shew Beeg on Corsica proved once again that comedy is incapable of matching reality pedal stroke for pedal stroke, and indeed may have fallen off in a roundabout somewhere and been run over by a publicity-caravan vehicle, strafed by a French jet or run through by Napoleon’s ghost.

If the poor sod who stuffed the Orica-GreenEdge bus under the finish-line scaffolding didn’t instantly get the ax, he will spend the remainder of the 2013 Tour enduring bus-stop jokes.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be driving the tall bus, you should be riding on the short bus!” That sort of thing.

This is horribly unkind to people who really do suffer from cognitive impairment, like the feckin’ eejits who decided to move the finish line out 3km only to move it back again in less time than it took The Gorilla to decide he’d had enough of that bullshit, rip off his own derailleur and eat it.

Jesus wept. The guys in charge of Ken Kesey’s bus had it more together than this lot, and they were all on acid.

Patriot games

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

The tinfoil-Stetson assclowns in my old stomping grounds of Weirdcliffe are taking a beating in the lib’rul media today over plans by the Southern Colorado Patriots Club to march with unloaded firearms in the annual Fourth of July parade.

The local paper, Jim Little’s Wet Mountain Tribune, has a piece from the firing line, as it were. Seems a ruckus ensued when the “patriots” promised that “as many as 500 marchers, bearing firearms, would be marching in the parade as a show of support for 2nd Amendment rights.”

Ho, ho. I hope they plan on busing a few of these nimrods in. The 2010 Census found only 568 persons total living in Weirdcliffe, with 4,205 in the entirety of Crusty County.

Don’t expect Obamacare to provide you with free oxygen tanks for the hike, peckerwoods. Look to the Invisible Hand of the Free Market to prop you up while you’re lugging that 8-pound AK-47 around in the summer sun at 7,888 feet.

Stumble To Work Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Java stop
The point of getting out of bed in the morning.

It’s Bike To Work Day here in Colorado, but it seemed silly to go out to the garage to fetch a bike for the 27-step slog from bed to coffeemaker to iMac. So I walked instead. Sorry ’bout that.

I don’t see a word about BTWD on either of the websites attached to the newspapers that grace our fair community, surprise, surprise. In fairness, there are other stories to be covered, like the Supremes wiping their black-robed asses with the Voting Rights Act, Fort Cartoon losing a brigade and our summer-tourism piggy bank roasting on a very big spit.

Still, if more of us were encouraged to cycle to work instead of firing up the family battlewagon, maybe we would be less inclined to build our homes 30 miles from the cube farm, up in Yahweh’s kindling pile.

French tickler

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Good Lord, where does the time go? It seems only yesterday that The Cyclist Who Shall Not Be Named was curled up in Soaprah’s expansive lap, singin’ the blues. And now here it is time for that race he was so fond of.

This isn’t just any old dash around Frogland, mind you. It’s the 100th Tour; the defending champion, Brave, Brave, Brave Sir Wiggo’, has bravely run away; and our old friend Andrew Hood says that while everyone has his eye on the final week, that first week could be a doozy.

So, naturally, Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey will be covering the bugger from stem to stern, starting at dark-thirty on Saturday morning. As usual, I’ll be playing Ed to his Johnny, which is to say I will be slouched on the couch, belching besotted witticisms such as, “Hey-yo!” and “You are correct, sir.”

So mark your calendars. And in comments, give us your picks for the final yellow jersey in Paris. Here, I’ll get the ball rolling. Now me, I think Zoom-Zoom Froome has peaked too early. …