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.
At left, the 2012 MacBook Air. At right, the 2006 MacBook.
Well, shit. After railing against Apple in comments for relentlessly driving us toward machines we can’t repair, upgrade or otherwise alter without a visit to the Genius Bar and/or the Devil, I’ve gone and bought myself a 2012 MacBook Air, the top-shelf 11-inch model.
So, yes, I’m a hypocrite. But I’m also the new owner of a pretty cool mini-laptop.
Longtime consumers of the DogS(h)ite will know that I manage a road trip about as often as does Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Still, I do manage to slip the leash from time to time, and when I do, my companion generally is my most “modern” laptop — a 6-year-old, 13.3-inch Intel MacBook that has already blown one hard drive, smells worse than Mister Boo on a hot day and weighs as much as a WorldTour pro’s bike (with the WorldTour pro sitting on it).
I can wrench a bit on this old black MacBook. Change batteries, upgrade RAM, swap hard drives and perform other basic tasks. But it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology.
And as the road test dude for Adventure Cyclist (harumph), with Interbike looming on the horizon like a carbon-fiber meteor from Hell, I do have a certain responsibility to embrace new technology, no matter how ridiculous and/or expensive. Right? Right.
Plus I had the money and Herself said OK.
So, yeah. I have a new laptop. It’s bound to make me smarter, funnier, thinner. Ask anyone in Cupertino.
The weather wizards were calling for rain yesterday but we got only a wee dribble, just enough to leave visible craters in the dust coating everything.
Whatever, I thought, and scheduled an oil change at the nearby Brakes Plus for bright and early in the morning. Drop off the rice rocket, stroll home, enjoy a leisurely breakfast.
Or not. I awoke to a pissing-down rain, gutters running like creeks, sidewalks like rivers. A full summer’s worth of rain in one day, is what.
Mind you, I’m not complaining. There’s free wifi at the Brakes Plus, and as breakfasts go coffee and yogurt isn’t so bad.
There is nothing about which Mitt Romney will not lie. Not even the murder of a U.S. ambassador and the current president’s response to the crime.
Kevin Drum has the nuts and bolts of it (heavy on the nuts). Read it and weep, because this asshole could be the next resident of the Oval Office if we’re not careful.
Consider the firestorm of outrage had it been a Democratic candidate who had the effrontery to cobble together this shameless political attack out of whole cloth after four of our ambassadors were killed while serving the nation abroad. Home Depot would sell out of pitchforks, torches and rope before Denny’s served its first Grand Slam of the morning.
The All-City Space Horse, ready to ride. I went for a 58cm this time, following a run of mostly too-short bikes, just to see what’s what.
There’s another new cayuse in the stable, albeit temporarily — an All-City Cycles Space Horse. I only have the one short ride on it so far, for all the usual reasons, but I hope to enjoy some extended saddle time next week before toddling off to Interbike to slobber over all the rest of the new toys.
All-City is one of the brands clustered under the umbrella of Quality Bicycle Products, which also covers Surly, Salsa, Foundry and Civia, among others. I stumbled across the outfit at last year’s Interbike, after a four-year absence from the show, and I liked the retro look of the Space Horse. Hey, who doesn’t pause to glance at a bike called “Space Horse?”
The bike is another one of those sturdy utilitarian steel machines I’ve grown to appreciate, like the Soma Double Cross or Surly Cross-Check. With eyelets for racks and fenders fore and aft and clearance for 700×42 rubber, it can serve as a commuter, a grocery-getter or a lightly loaded touring bike. You can also just ride the damn’ thing for the pure pleasure of riding, if that’s what blows your skirt up. But don’t expect to see any dopers riding it, penitent or otherwise, because it’s made of 4130 chromoly and a 58cm model weighs nearly 25 pounds without pedals.
The Space Horse can be had as either a complete bike or a frameset, for those of us who, like Your Humble Narrator, always seem to have at least one bike’s worth of parts cluttering up the garage, where the car wants to be. Mine arrived as a ready-to-ride bike, and beyond noting that Shimano is making the ugliest friggin’ cranksets in this universe or any other, I’ll keep my big yap shut until it’s review time.
Anybody else riding new machinery? Let us know about it in comments.
Life lately seems like an extended intervals session. I could really go for some LSD. And some long, steady distance, too.
Thing is, I’ve soured on all my usual rides. Like a lot of folks, I regularly retrace a number of short, well-worn paths dictated by time constraints. And familiarity, as usual, breeds contempt. There is a road not taken. I’m certain of it. And it’s out there, waiting.
By this time last year I already had one bike overnight under my bibs.
It would be refreshing to hop on a bike and just go somewhere. Ride until the legs complain, then stop for a while. Eat a meal prepared by someone else, sleep in a strange bed, take a bite of breakfast and the morning’s news in some java shop and then get right back after it.
Can you tell that “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” were among the first books I took to heart? Subsequent readings and re-readings of “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Travels With Charley,” “On the Road,” “The Dharma Bums,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Blue Highways” have only fertilized my tinkerish tendencies, rooted in a military brat’s peripatetic upbringing and a perpetual short-timer’s attitude as regards traditional employment.
I had hoped to squeeze in a short cycle tour this summer. Nothing ridiculous, no cross-country excursions, just a few days spent rolling Colorado roads and trails to flush out the headgear, hit the reset button, reboot. But one thing or another kept getting in the damn’ way. Exploding toilets. Spousal travel. Veterinary issues. And No. 1 on the hit parade? Work.
As a professional paranoid I try to keep a number of revenue streams flowing — writing, editing, website wrangling, cartooning — knowing that the slightest change in the journalistic climate could transform one or more of them into a bone-dry arroyo. Thus, though I don’t have a job per se, free time is surprisingly hard to come by. It seems something always needs doing.
So between extended bouts of doing, I finally dialed the deal down to what the Adventure Cycling Association calls a “bike overnight.” Ride somewhere, spend the night, and ride home. I did one last year, right around this time, to Pueblo and back. The upcoming week or two seemed perfect. The Vuelta a España remains ongoing, but the Colorado State Fair is history, Labor Day will be done and dusted and I don’t have a print deadline until after Interbike.
Alas, as the Yiddish proverb has it, “Man plans, God laughs.” The last item in our downstairs-bathroom restoration is supposed to arrive on Wednesday, followed by the plumber on Thursday, and I have to work on Saturday and Sunday. Plus Herself has another professional road trip queued up that will require someone to assume responsibility for critter management. Guess who.
Ah, well. It seems I also have another bike inbound for review, an All-City Cycles Space Horse, so duty calls. The two of us may not see as much new country as Captain Call and the Hell Bitch, but I’m hoping to get bucked off and bitten less often.
