Congrats to Taylor Phinney for crushing the prologue at the 2012 Giro d’Italia. Dude sure picked his parents right. All I got was the bald-fat-guy gene.
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.
Bikes, beers and bummers
Somebody has a new toy. And no, it’s not you.
Meet the Cyfac Vintage, a steel bike hand-built in France. It’s a wee bit short — a 54cm instead of the 56cm I usually ride — but it seems to roll along just fine nonetheless. It’s up for review in the July edition of Adventure Cyclist.
Speaking of which, cycling was something of an adventure around here today. The high reached at least 85 degrees, according to the weather wizards and confirmed by the Subaru thermometer, edging the record of 84 set in 2000. “Climate normal” is somewhere around 66, so this was something of a shock to the system, enough to make a guy buy a white Igloo helmet with a swamp cooler attached.
I couldn’t find one of those, so I bought two six-packs of beer instead: Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale, which has become Herself’s favorite beer, and Victory’s Prima Pils, which is an excellent heat repellent when applied internally.
A man who sounds as though he could use a drink is Charles P. Pierce, who posits in a very grumpy blog post that Obama has left it too late to crank up the outrage machine. Writes Charles: “Personally, at this moment, I think he’s probably going to lose.”
If he’s right, then we should all start stockpiling strong drink while we still can. A nation that would elect Mitt Romney president is not one I can abide in sobriety.
May Day
It’s International Workers Day, kids! When you’re out there on the barricades, smashing the State, don’t forget to keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart (preferably this one).
Meanwhile, from The Nation, here’s your Guide to May Day.
Prince of fools
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been … well, actually, since I’m neither Catholic nor a fink, I’ve never confessed. Ever. You want to pin something on me, you better have three eyeball witnesses, videotape and my prints on whatever.
But I digress.
So I’m in this Bibleburg record-and-video store, which shall remain nameless — hey, I told you, I’m no stool pigeon, OK? — and I’m browsing the stacks, trying to find something to watch in the absence of Herself, who is living la vida loca with a girlfriend in Santa Fe whilst I ride herd on the menagerie and rassle various velo-gators for bicycle magazines.
Anyway, I’m scanning the science-fiction section and what do I come across? “The Ten Commandments.” As in the Cecil B. DeMille classic about Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. The Ten Fuckin’ Commandments. In the science-fiction section.
So, Father, what I want to know is this:
Am I going to Hell for laughing my ass off?
Individual pursuit
Floyd Landis, the gift that keeps on giving. Now a federal grand jury has become interested in his fabled Floyd Fairness Fund, which can’t be good news for anyone save his lawyers.
Seems the head of the fraud division in San Diego, assistant U.S. Attorney Phil Halpern, is himself a bike racer, so he may have a little more staying power than that Novitzky fella, who plays hoops.
You can’t get blood out of a turnip, but you can sure fuck up the turnip in the process.
