He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. …
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.
Mr. Coffee passed away this morning. He left two survivors, one of whom got a cup of marginally drinkable java.
Did Monday come early?
The coffeemaker croaked before I could get my morning fix, compelling me to brew java The Cowboy Way (via pour-over into a Thermos). And our Sunday bike ride looks to be rained out.
Ah, well. They still sell slave-made coffeemakers here in the Land of the Free. And rain is good for the vegetation.
Speaking of vegetables, with any luck at all the rain will continue through tomorrow’s Two Minutes Hate, so Ginger Hitler’s Red Caps can get their bodies washed along with their brains, if any. No amount of rain could wash the dumb off they ass, though.
The old DBR Axis TT still rolls a lot better than I do.
For a change it was the other fella on a cyclocross bike and Your Humble Narrator on a mountain bike.
I was descending a narrow bit of singletrack that he was climbing, so I found a small patch of shoulder and yielded trail.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Great, thanks,” he replied with a grin.
Your cyclocrosser is nothing if not a perfect gent at all times. The rest of you lot could learn something from us.
Though now that I think about it, I suppose he could’ve been a gravel rider. I don’t know a thing about those tossers. A special bike for gravel, is it? D’ye also have ones for road and trail and track so? A cyclocrosser rides his machine where he will and devil take the hindmost.
Now you mention it, his tires did look a little plump for ’cross. Not honest 33mms like the ones on my Steelman.
The cheek of the fuckin’ bastards. Trying to pass themselves off as cyclocrossers on the singletrack. First they take our drop bars, then our knobbies, and before you can say Danny De Bie they’ll be making eyes at our daughters.
Thank God I was on a mountain bike. Now he doesn’t know that I know.
I generally don’t pay much attention to the various Apple announcements. I’ve never been an early adopter, and in any case my basket is always pretty well full up with the old, dried-up fruit of Cupertino’s loins (see G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, circa 1999).
But I watched today’s hoopla from the Steve Jobs Theater, because my man Hal Walter and his boy Harrison got a little screen time in a short video made to pitch the Apple Watch Series 5.
Regulars here will recall that Harrison is on the autism spectrum and uses music to help him focus while running cross country and track for the Custer County Schools. Since Harrison is an Apple Fanboi First Class, it goes without saying that it’s an Apple Watch feeding the earworms to his headphones.
Hal will have something to say about it all directly over at Hardscrabble Times. But speaking for myself, it was pretty damn’ cool to see the kid’s image splashed all over the screen behind Tim Cook after the video ended. Have a peek.
