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.

Kill your (cable) TV

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
The Pelkey media center: A Dell Inspiron 8130 laptop married to a 46-inch Sharp LC-46SB54U, run via 802.11g wireless and Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse.
The Pelkey media center: A Dell Inspiron 8130 laptop married to a 46-inch Sharp LC-46SB54U, run via 802.11g wireless and Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse.

I bet the cable-TV people weren’t happy to read this in The New York Times, where today it’s the most e-mailed story on the site.

But as usual, the press is a day late and a dollar short as regards the inexorable march of cheapskate technology. My man Charles Pelkey canceled his landline and cable TV six weeks ago — he and the family rely on cell phones and computer-delivered video from Hulu, Freeonlineepisodes.net, Netflix and elsewhere.

Like me, Charles is something of a hoarder, so he didn’t need to buy a Mini like the pioneers profiled in the NYT. He simply hooked up a 4-year-old Dell laptop to the tube via analog RGB cable and instantly saved himself something like $90 per month.

I had tried a variant of this some months back, using Herself’s MacBook and a set of composite video/audio cables, but the results were disappointing, as in heavy wine consumption, much profanity and very little watchable TV. So the other day I invested in a Mini-DVI-to-DVI adapter and a DVI-to-HDMI cable and hey presto! Instant streaming video on the 42-inch Toshiba. Audio comes from the headphone jack via a splitter plugged into red-and-white audio cables attached to the Sony home theater. A simple 3.5mm PC audio cable run straight to the TV works, too.

Like Charles, I’m not hurting for hardware, so our investment is minimal. Buying a new Mac for work will let me dedicate my 3-year-old MacBook to streaming video, so we won’t have to be booting Herself’s ’puter up and shutting it down all the time, connecting and disconnecting cables, so she can manage her various social-media obligations. I would prefer to use one of my retired G3s, either the 500MHz PowerBook or 800MHz iBook, but their video cards ain’t got the stuff.

And we can probably do without the nifty wireless mouse, too. Our living room is so tiny that it’s no trouble to walk the four paces from couch to computer for switching video sources. Besides, I’m a great fat bastard and need the exercise.

Cold comfort indeed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Turkenstein the Large is all puffed up with noplace to go (because I won't let him out).
Turkenstein the Large is all puffed up with nowhere to go (because I won't release him into the frigid wasteland that is Bibleburg).

Eleven below zero. Jesus H. Christ. I just saw an entire squadron of witches’ tits flying south for the winter with ground support from a battalion of nutless brass monkeys.

Posting has been spotty around here lately ’cause it’s the monthly deadline crunch — cartoon for VeloNews on Friday, double-posting on the old and new VeloNews.com sites on Sunday and Monday, ’toon, column and the Grapevine roundup for Bicycle Retailer due by close of business today. Why, it’s almost like having a real job, except for the lack of health insurance, paid vacation, 401(k), and employer-supplied office, phone, Internet service, computer, software and technical support.

At least I don’t have to drive anywhere, wear a tie, piss away the day in pointless meetings. I’m parked at the keyboard in sweatpants and a Mount Taylor Winter Quadrathlon T-shirt from 1990, when I was young and fit and had hair in places other than my shoulders, ears and nose.

I had a real job then, too. My last one, I hope. Boy, did that ever suck. If I were still doing that bullshit I’d have had to edit something about Caribou Barbie instead of drawing a Mud Stud cartoon.

Freezer burn

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

We’re in the deep freeze here in Bibleburg. It reminds me of the bad old days up in Weirdcliffe, where Herself and I passed many a winter day huddled in our bearskins by a blazing woodstove, sipping whisky from CamelBaks with our fingers buried in the ample guts of a freshly killed Republican to prevent frostbite.

Saw a hand surgeon today and the good news is he will not need to rewire my port-side communications network. The bad news is I get to enjoy three weeks of intense physical therapy and am probably looking at three to six months before the left birdie regains full flippage.

Adding insult to injury, as I was leaving my first PT session I set my keys and cell phone on the driver’s seat of the Subaru and commenced to knock ice and snow from its windows. As I let the driver’s-side wiper fall to the windshield the security system hooted once and there I stood, locked out of my ride in 8-degree temps with a light snow and a brisk wind from the east.

As I told a colleague earlier, next time I lay it down I’m gonna see to it that the head hits the deck first. Brain damage is not a handicap in our line of work — it’s a prerequisite.

Riders on the storm

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Man, am I ever glad I bought that Giant Tempo. The temp-o outside never got above 15 today, so I was setting tempo indoors on the stationary bike between bouts of snow-brooming. Yes, brooming. We rarely get enough to shovel anymore, though today’s snowfall pushed the envelope somewhat.

I never would’ve gotten away with installing one of my bikes on a wind trainer in the living room. But since the Tempo can be adjusted to suit the much smaller frame of Herself as well as my own massive carcass, it has won approval at the highest possible level of our local chain of command.

Herself generally sets my 12-inch G4 PowerBook on the Tempo’s time-trial-style handlebars and hoots through an episode of “The Daily Show” while riding. Me, I listen to an iPod. No Allman Brothers today — this time around it was Eric Clapton (“Further On Up the Road”), Les McCann and Eddie Harris (“Compared to What?”), Miles Davis (the entirety of “Birth of the Cool”) and a couple snippets of Ornette Coleman (“Sound Grammar”) and Bill Evans (“Everybody Digs Bill Evans”) to bring the ride to a close.

SRAMta Claus comes early to Bibleburg

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
SRAM's Randy Neufeld (right) brought an early Christmas present to Bibleburg's bicycle advocates.
SRAM's Randy Neufeld (right) brought an early Christmas present to Bibleburg's bicycle advocates.

Bibleburg’s bicycle advocacy got a much-needed assist on Friday as SRAM Cycling Fund director Randy Neufeld presented a $10,000 grant to Bicycle Colorado Springs at the Experience Colorado Springs offices.

The grip-and-grin drew a full house, with representatives from Medicine Wheel, Criterium Bicycles, Left Side Spin, Ground Up Designs, Bicycle Village, Angletech, Colorado Springs Cycling Club, the Trails and Open Space Program and the Bibleburg Metro Rides program. No representatives of the local media were on hand, alas, barring Your Humble Narrator.

Also in the house was Jim Sayer, executive director of the 45,000-member Adventure Cycling Association, who gave a brief rundown on his organization and its mission — “to inspire people of all ages to travel by bicycle.” Jim made a similar presentation later in the evening at Old Town Bike Shop, a show I had to skip as Herself required care and feeding.

Chapeau to longtime local velo-advocate Al Brody, Chamber of Commerce chief Terry Sullivan and everyone else who made this happen.