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.
Tattoo shops? Sure. Massage parlors? No prob’. Adult bookstores? You betcha. Predatory lenders, pawn shops and payday-loan outfits? Why not? Grog shops, alehouses and “smoker friendly” death merchants? Damn’ straight.
But retail marijuana sales?Hell, no. Are you nuts? That’s a jobs-killer, man!
No, sir. What we need here is a downtown baseball stadium, an Olympic museum, a new Air Force Academy visitors center, a shitload more Kum & Gos and. …
Uh, Mr. Mayor? Can we have a hit off whatever it is that you’re smoking? We’re gonna need an appetite to choke down all this pie in the sky you and your developer pals are pushing on us.
It’s Monday. Know how I can tell? There’s a plumber in the driveway and my Visa card just spontaneously combusted.
One of the few downsides to living in an old neighborhood like ours is that the plumbing is even older than the residents. I think Hammurabi laid the original pipe, and the Romans handled most of the maintenance (But other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?) until the Vandals came along and ensured that the pumps would no longer work by appropriating the handles.
Anyway, the lone bathtub at The House Back East™ has become something of a wading pond, and a plumber is over there panning for gold as we speak. I expect he’ll find some.
Smiling into the cameras and dedicating his victory to his late mother, Zoom-Zoom Froome collected his final yellow jersey — and then the gendarmes leapt upon him, pinioning his arms and forcing him into a brisk perp-walk toward a jet-black Citroen 2CV, which whisked him away to a windowless concrete bunker where. …
Naw. Nothing like that happened. The Big Three duked it out at the line and Mad Manx found himself staring up the heavily muscled arses of a couple really fast Krauts. Not for the last time, either.
Meanwhile, Zoom-Zoom pissed away nearly a minute coasting home on the Champs-Élysées but still won the 100th Tour de France by 4:20 (ahem) over Nairo “That Creep Can Roll” Quintana, who must buy his kit in the Junior Girls section. Joaquim “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” Rodriguez finished third overall, 5:04 down, and was already talking about bringing some fresh pain at the Vuelta.
I don’t know how the big finish looked on TV, but it looked pretty feeble on an iMac, I can tell you that. Pro journos in attendance who shall remain anonymous were deploying phrases like “complete and total clusterfuck,” “totally overrun with VIPs and cellphones,” and “they turned the Arc de Triomphe into a video game that no one could understand.”
And the game has only just begun. Zoom-Zoom is all of 28 years old. Says St. Eddy: “I don’t see who can beat him in the coming years, unless Quintana significantly improves his time trialing.”
The other day I rode my old Steelman Eurocross for the first time in a long while. It was a nice change from watching other folks ride.
Well, the Tour is sort of ambling toward the barn, and I guess I’ve officially lost interest.
Zoom-Zoom has more than five minutes on everyone now, and boy, wouldn’t this be an interesting race if he were not in it, with second through fifth separated by 47 seconds?
Not even a double helping of L’Alpe d’Huez and a bit of the bonk, exacerbated by a smallish fine and even smaller time penalty, could rattle Zoom-Zoom and his merry men.
Nor could today’s tough-on-paper stage, made tougher by a heavy rain that may have dampened the blue touchpaper back in the GC group as Rui Costa timed his attack perfectly and won his second stage. Saxo-Tinkoff is said to be focused on team GC now, since Super Spaniard apparently left his cape and tights in his other phone booth. This is right up there with kissing one’s sister.
Tomorrow brings a 125km hump from Annecy to Semnoz, the final summit finish of this Tour, and Sunday serves up the traditional Who Gives a Shit? parade stage, a festival of jackoffery that this time around will conclude in the evening, a brainstorm cursed roundly by the photographers who must shoot the race in the Parisian twilight and then try to file, eat, drink and sleep in a timely fashion.
Ah, well. Come Monday we will have our own bikes and (God willing) the time and legs to ride them. My ass is taking on the shape of this office chair, and it is an unfortunate combination, as neither has ever been a thing of beauty.
Charles Pelkey and I will be calling the final weekend of the 100th Tour over at Live Update Guy. Pop round and get your minimum daily requirement of snark while it’s hot.
I thought Super Spaniard had this one in the bag. He was flat railing those downhill corners. Bobsledders, skydivers and fighter pilots were getting motion sickness just watching him.
And then Zoom-Zoom ambles on in after an ill-timed bike swap in the rain and croaks him by nine seconds.
You could read Super Spaniard’s face like a marked deck: “Hijo de la gran puta.” He shook his head ruefully and smiled with the lower half of his face, the way one does upon being cheated at five-card stud in a strange town while unarmed.
I don’t know what to think, myself. I’m deeply suspicious of this sort of dominance — call me irresponsible — and I don’t like it one bit that Zoom-Zoom is already trying to play the patrón without even having won the fucking race yet.
Bjarne Riis called him a pussy, but he sure doesn’t ride like one. In fact, I’m starting to think Zoom-Zoom can take Mr. 60% in a straight-up Huffy toss.
