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.

Glory Road

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments

Oh, bugger. Snowing again. These pissant “storms” that merely grease the trails and glaze the streets are slipping the proverbial tube steak to my carefully cultivated serenity.

Herself certainly picked the right time to hightail it out of Dodge. She and a couple of girlfriends are on the lam from winter this weekend, hiding out in a Palm Springs condo, eating, drinking and watching it not snow, not even a little bitty bit. They just called with the culinary rundown as I was whipping up a spartan meal of tacos, rice and salad. This is like telling a creekside wino all about your latest gourmet feast.

Speaking of things one does not wish to hear about, I understand Tiger Woods finally performed the obligatory mea culpa before the cameras and mics today. What a load of ice-cold horseshit. First off, if you’re gonna cop a plea, get ’er done while the dew is still on the lily. Second, rehab is for wankers. Show Tiger some pussy, then show him his bank balance. Choose one, big guy. Presto, he’s cured. Thanks, I’ll take my fee in cash.

I couldn’t care less about golf, and where Tiger’s putter has been fluttering is even further down the list of things that hold absolutely no interest for me.

“But what about the young people who view Tiger as a role model?” you ask. To which I reply, anyone looking to emulate the morality of the average multimillionaire athlete should also consult swine for advice on table manners.

I’m reminded of a line from Robert A. Heinlein’s “Glory Road,” in which Star tells Oscar: “I have known many heroes and some were such oafs that one would feed them at the back door if their deeds did not claim a place at the table.”

You want to learn how to pop some skinny nerd in the ass with a wet towel, or imprison him in a gym locker, ask a jock. For all other matters, consult a higher authority. Say, a Magic 8-Ball, or even your own conscience.

White ’cross

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Nobilette cyclo-cross bike is ready to roll.
The Nobilette cyclo-cross bike is ready to roll.

Meet the latest edition to the Mad Dog Media bicycle collection — a custom Reynolds 853 Nobilette cyclo-cross bike.

Like pretty much everything else in the garage, it’s a blend of old and new. The wheelset, taken from my oldest Steelman Eurocross, is a well-used Cirrus pair from Excel Sports — Michelin Jets on Mavic Open Pros laced to Dura-Ace hubs with DT 14/15g and Revolution spokes. Likewise the brakes, a used (and mismatched) set from Paul Components — Neo-Retro up front and Touring in the rear, both with Kool-Stop Thinline pads. Whether that grippy Neo-Retro will overwhelm the fork’s one-inch steerer in a panic stop remains to be seen; back in the day I ran lower-profile Dia-Compe 986 cantis, which were basically speed modulators.

An old Salsa Pro Road handlebar sports new Cane Creek brake levers (the traditional non-aero’ sort plus a top-mounted set). The stem is an Origin8, an outfit I’d never heard of before.

The drivetrain is nearly all new — Race Face Cadence compact cranks (50/36), nine-speed Dura-Ace bar-cons, FSA front derailleur, Ultegra rear, 11-28 cassette. The lone exception is a thousand-year-old pair of Time ATAC pedals.

Check out the nifty integrated cable hanger.
Check out the nifty integrated cable hanger.

And finally, the seat post is a new Ritchey WCS, but it holds a used Selle Italia Flite saddle that I got for a six-pack of beer. Assembly by Chris and Randin at Old Town Bike Shop. Thanks, guys.

I asked Mark to add eyelets for fenders and a rear rack in case I want to do a little light touring. If this were a road bike, I’d have sprung for a pump peg, too, but ain’t no pump peg in the world gonna secure a frame pump on a ’cross bike. Not the way I ride it, anyway.

Weather permitting, the Nobilette will undergo its maiden voyage this morning. The weatherman’s calling for snow, but hey — that’s cyclo-cross weather, right?

Winter Games

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.

Another blisteringly cold day. Yesterday neither Herself nor I left the house. But today she bundled up and toddled off to work. I spent the morning processing pixels, then slipped out for a short run around noon after things warmed up a bit.

I probably should’ve ridden — after all, I’m not going to be running around southern Arizona next month — but I like to run, and besides it can’t hurt to mix things up a bit. Yesterday my legs felt like giant sausages full of botulism after three consecutive days of riding hills in the cold, and spending all Sunday sitting at the iMac, posting copy and photos to VeloNews.com, didn’t exactly meet my admittedly loose definition of “active rest.”

Speaking of high technology, we’ve finally debugged our Rube Goldberg TV hookup (streaming video via laptop, Blu-ray player, rabbit ears) and have been watching bits of the Winter Olympics. My God, how does anyone get through an evening of American television without the skull exploding like a Pfalzgraff piggy bank zotzed by a .40-caliber hollow-point? The drug ads provide some amusing irony, and there’s no denying the improved sports coverage possible with digital video, but still, damn.

It’s not enough that an athlete kicks ass. No, he or she has to have a touching backstory: grew up living in the trunk of a Chevy Caprice in the Appalachian hills; has a one-eyed half-brother with the yaws and 13 toes: plays the uilleann pipes professionally when not doing something insane involving ice and/or snow.

Speaking of which, it’s gonna be cold again tomorrow. Tonight’s low should bottom out around 11, and NOAA says we’re looking at a high in the mid-30s tomorrow. But a man must ride, and so I’ll be out there, me and my three long-sleeved jerseys, the neoprene leg warmers and pretty much everything else in the kit kloset.

And maybe — just maybe — with my just-completed Nobilette cyclo-cross bike, too. Stand by for fresh bike porn.

Head for the hills

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
Your roving reporter captures a shot of a socialist deer dining for free upon a taxpayer's shrubbery.
Your roving reporter captures a shot of a socialist deer dining for free upon a taxpayer's shrubbery.

It hasn’t exactly been cycling weather around Bibleburg of late — nevertheless, I sucked it up yesterday, pulled on about half the clothes in my closet and got out for two and a half hours of hills.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Despite sitting in the shadow of Pikes Peak, the road riding around Bibleburg is less than stellar, and the one long, sustained paved climb into the high country — Highway 24 west — is just plain dangerous, going up and coming down.

So a guy has to improvise. Though I was going to be mostly on pavement, I broke out my red Steelman Eurocross (fatter rubber, lower gearing) and rode west through a moderately gooey Monument Valley Park to Mesa Road, then started climbing.

Mesa is a nice warmup, a steady-state ascent that dumps you out on North 30th Street by the Garden of the Gods. From there I hung a right on Garden of the Gods Road and descended to Centennial Boulevard for another short climb to Fillmore Street, then hung a right and returned to Mesa.

I was thinking about doing laps of this short circuit to minimize my exposure to a nasty south wind, then said screw it and headed north on 30th to Flying W Ranch Road (hey, if you have a tailwind, why not take advantage of it?). Flying W is a steeper climb than Mesa, and a short 40-mph descent dumps you out at Centennial and Vindicator Drive for the pièce de résistance, the ascent of Centennial Boulevard/West Woodmen Road.

Centennial-Woodmen is steeper than any of its predecessors and something of a challenge for the average fat bastard. It’s one of those pain-in-the-ass climbs that flattens out every now and then, even throws in a couple of short descents, just to fuck with your head. It’s why I rode the Steelman with its low gear of 34×28.

Anyway, I made it up without throwing a rod or blowing a seal, and on the way down the other side I saw this pretty little buck with a couple of his cousins, so I stopped to take a snap with the iPhone. It reminded me of living outside Weirdcliffe, where we always had a few mule deer camping out under our deck. We used to say that they were so dumb you could hunt them with a Twinkie and a ball-peen hammer.

But we never saw one stupid enough to be riding a ’cross bike on the roads in the dead of winter.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Bathtub

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Bibleburg has become a laboratory for neotard Grover Frankenquist’s dream experiment — shrinking government to the point where it can be drowned in a Hilton bathtub by a skinny chickenhawk — and wouldn’t you know it? That darned left-wing commniss media has done took notice.

Naturally, the story in the local cage-liner is about the darned left-wing commniss media taking notice rather than the appalling state of the local body politic, which seems to think that one digs potatoes from gravy and that God will water the parks, if He’s not too dehydrated from pissing on the fags.

This dim viewpoint may have its roots in our economic base, an unholy trinity of the industrial Christian, military and tourism complexes. As another Gaslight story notes, while we enjoy a low cost of living — 7.7 percent below the national average in 2009 — we also make shit for wages, a realization that first drove me out of town in the late Seventies:

“Colorado Springs may seem like a bargain area in which to live, but we are no better off living here because our average wages are 8 to 10 percent below the national average,” said Fred Crowley, senior economist for the Southern Colorado Economic Forum. “There is no prize for this race to the bottom.”

Aw, c’mon, Fred — haven’t you ever heard of the lanterne rouge?