Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

Satisfaction

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

You gotta love a guy who’d give Mick Jagger a puck in the gob.

I don’t know much about drumming, but I know what I like. And Charlie Watts had plenty of it. He was a kind of anti-Mick who just plunked down behind his minimalist kit and did his maximalist thing, without a lick of showboating.

But at least once he came unplugged. From Rolling Stone:

For all of his low-key skill behind the kit, Watts seemed well aware that he was an irreplaceable element of the Stones’ sound. As one famous story from the band’s heyday goes, Jagger once phoned Watts’ hotel room in the midst of an all-night party, asking, “Where’s my drummer?” Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs, and punched Jagger in the face, saying, “Don’t ever call me your drummer again. You’re my fucking singer!”

Ho ho ho. When I read that I immediately wondered whether Roddy Doyle had poached the bit for his novella “The Commitments,” in which the full-of-himself singer Deco Cuffe tells an audience,  “I hope yis like me group.” Drummer Billy Mooney takes exception — “It’s not your fuckin’ group,” he says — and after another miscue in which Deco botches his bandmates’ introductions Billy flogs the frontman with a drumstick and subsequently quits The Commitments.

It’s left to Billy’s replacement, Mickah Wallace, to punch Deco’s lights out.

So fair play to Charlie Watts. Total pro. Stuck it out with the Rolling Stones for a half-century. And as far as I know, he only clocked Mick once.

It’s the little things

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Running a tab (that little black gizmo between the derailleur and its hanger).

For a while I’ve been considering various ways to make my single-ring Voodoo Wazoo a little less gravity-challenged.

The bike has been through some changes over the years, but it eventually settled down as a flat-bar, single-ring, 7-speed trail bike with 700×42 rubber.

One thing it’s kept throughout its various incarnations is some old-school-cyclocross gearing. The ancient Shimano 600 crank can handle a 38T inner ring, and the Shimano 105 rear derailleur a 12-28T cassette. This yields a low end just short of 38 gear inches, which is a tall order in some neighborhoods.

So I wanted to change it on the cheap. But how? Especially during The Great Parts Drought.

The only derailleurs in the parts bin are Shimano road, so no joy there. And I’m fresh out of square-taper 110×74 BCD cranksets, or I could pull four teeth out of my chainring like a crazy dentist. But then I wouldn’t have a guard to replace the outer ring. O buggah.

Rivendell has this nice Clipper double that would be just the ticket. Reasonably priced, but still a few bucks past “on the cheap,” and anyway it’s out of stock. Plus I like the simplicity of my single-ring setup.

But while I was nosing around over there I stumbled across this $10 doodad, a SunRace SP570 extender link to put a bit more daylight between that old derailleur and its hanger.

Now, the wiseguys have been using items like this for a good long while to retrofit wide-range cassettes to older bikes. The boyos at Wolf Tooth make a couple of them, the RoadLink and and GoatLink. Being an indifferent mechanic, I went with Riv’s bargain SunRace model to mitigate my shame should I achieve failure, as is often the case. Bought a nice KMC X8 chain while I was there, and then noodled on over to Soma Fabrications for a 7-speed S-Ride cassette (11-34T).

The SunRace link included exactly zero instructions, but installation seemed as straightforward as it gets. Replace old cassette with new; remove old chain and derailleur; attach link to hanger and derailleur to link; and finally size, cut, thread, and close chain.

Well, hell. A bit of fine-tuning with the limit screws and I was off and rolling. I believe I could’ve gotten a 36T to work with this rig, but I’ll settle for 34. Sixty bucks equals 30 gear inches, more or less. If you’re looking for an easier ride on an old beater, the SunRace SP570 is a cheap ticket.

What a difference a day makes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments
“Say, does anyone else hear gunfire and sirens?”

If this shit had gone down 24 hours earlier Miss Mia Sopapilla and I would’ve been right in the thick of it.

Miss Mia had an appointment with the veterinarian, and the only thing between her clinic and this firefight is a Valvoline Instant Oil Change shop.

I imagine it’s slightly anaerobic to low-crawl through a fusillade with a cat carrier in one hand and a mask on your mug and only a few barrels of flammable liquids for cover.

Especially if someone has pooped in your pantalones. A fresh set of drawers is not the sort of instant change Valvoline provides.

Meanwhile, a word to the wise: Shooting the John Laws is exceptionally stupid, even for Duke City pistoleros. It only makes them mad. Plus it scares the cats.

Here’s hoping the injured officers recover quickly. I’m very much not looking forward to reading about what swell fellas their assailants were and how their grammies just can’t understand what got into them.

Iron Man is dead*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 38 Comments
Sometimes you do the boom, and sometimes the boom does you.

Another superhero adventure is coming to a messy ending.

The Military-Industrial Complex’s Cinematic Universe isn’t as orderly as Marvel’s, probably because the writers aren’t as good. Neither are the reviews. But hey, that’s show business for you.

It seemed like such a simple story, too. United States is attacked. United States fights back. Boffo box office!

But some nimrod thinking sequels, spinoffs, and merchandise resurrected an old character called “Mission Creep.” The story went sideways but we kept buying the tickets, taking the ride.

“Look, there’s Stan Lee!”

“No, that’s Robert McNamara.”

Remember the old joke about the driver heading up an off ramp by mistake? “What the hell, you’ve come this far. …”

Well, 20 years later, here we are, upside down in the ditch, watching Mission Creep, Captain REMF, and The Incredible Schmuck posturing for the cameras in an endgame that isn’t one. Avengers Dissemble!

* Of course he’s not dead. We’ll keep trotting him out as long as there’s a buck in it.