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.
Disclaimer from the legal department at Live Update Guy: Patrick O’Grady, senior executive junior assistant vice president for answering reader questions for free at LUG, attempted a tasteless “joke” about the Italian people during our most recent Live Update (previously recorded).
The elderly, self-described “humorist” managed to deliver the setup, but hyper-vigilant producer Turkish von Turkenstein saw to it that the punchline never aired, and going forward O’Grady has been warned to restrict his japes to the French.
The senior management at Live Update Guy would like to apologize to all Italians everywhere, particularly any Romans concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture and any other Romans contributing to the welfare of LUG Nuts of both sexes and hermaphrodites. Thank you.
Oh, lawd, the old tee-hees are proving elusive these days around El Rancho Pendejo.
Mister Boo’s post-surgical recuperation from bladder surgery last Wednesday has been both messier and noisier than I anticipated, and it has not helped that Herself has pissed off to New Orleans for a week on a work junket that just happens to occur in the middle of Jazz Fest.
The Big Easy, this place she is not, cher. Les bon temps, they do not rouler.
There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. This morning The Boo took the last of his antibiotics and pain meds, and tomorrow the Cone of Shame comes off. The peeing and pooping is occurring mostly outdoors, which is nice. But I laid in another 50-pack of Boots & Barkley extra-large training pads anyway, just in case the flood returns to Katrinaesque proportions.
Well, I wish I was in New Orleans … I can see it in my dreams. …
Mister Boo has had surgery to remove a bladder stone, his second trip down this surgical path, and the stone was apparently so rara an avis that the medicos have shipped it off to a university for further study.
Perhaps through their labors Boos of the future will not suffer from this malady, and the subsequent isolation it requires.
I’ve tried consoling him by noting that he, unlike Prince, is at least on the proper side of the lawn. But The Boo was never much of a “Purple Rain” kind of guy. Right now he’s happy to be making yellow rain.
Me, I’ve been fooling around with a Rivendell Joe Appaloosa, and a very nice machine it is, too. No down-tube shifters, but thumbshifters, and a handlebar so upright and swept back that you can see yourself coming from miles away.
None of them devilish discs, neither. Tektro V-brakes, thank you very much. In point of fact, the José is so retro I had to buy myself a hipsterish red-plaid shirt to ride around in (the baggy shorts I already own). When aboard the USS José Appaloosa the uniform of the day is very much not the skintight Lycra.
Riding a bike with nice grippy V-brakes reminded me of how much I still dislike the Shimano cantilevers on my Soma Double Cross, and in a fit of pique I pulled them off, planning to replace them with the Paul’s Neo-Retro and Touring cantis on a Steelman Eurocross that I haven’t been riding much.
I forget how old these Spookys are … probably nearly as old as the bike they now adorn.
Alas, it turned out that the Paul’s are in need of maintenance … a missing O-ring here, a scored brake pivot there, and some really old pads — and thus I found myself staring at two brakeless bikes to no particular purpose.
Then, eureka! I remembered having an old set of barely used Spooky cantis with Kool-Stop pads squirreled away in a box somewhere in the garage. And soon, hey presto! They were on the Steelman, because black and red are the key components of the Mad Dog livery. And off I went for another installment of Ride Your Own Damn Bike Day.
