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.

Have you blackened your Friday?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Oh, the tangled web we weave when spending cuts we first perceive.
Oh, the tangled web we weave when spending cuts we first perceive.

Not us. Herself is downstairs working and I’m upstairs goofing off, enjoying the fracas from a distance. My idea of a good time is not playing Australian rules football with a bunch of bargain-hunters in a Best Buy at four o’clock in the morning.

Mind you, I like to shop. It’s often more fun and less disappointing than actually buying something. But I usually root around online for quite a while, checking specs and weighing options, before marching down to some local shop to lay hands on the product and finally slap down the plastic. Or not.

Here’s a case in point. I have authorization from Herself to buy a new Mac, but haven’t done so. How come?

Well, it’s that natural contrariness rearing its ugly head again. The Black Turtleneck Mob in Cupertino isn’t selling exactly what I want to buy, which is an affordable, accessible consumer tower model like my old G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, simple to fix and/or upgrade, but sporting modern hardware and software.

There’s the Mac Pro, but at $2,499 I’d hardly call it affordable, especially since it ships with a measly 3 GB of RAM and no Airport Express card. You want to double the first and add the last, tack on another $200.

OK, how about those nifty iMacs? Not sure I’d like working full time on a glossy screen. My 13.3-inch MacBook has one, and it can be irksome to see my ugly mug staring back at me as I cook up another bouillabaisse of bullshit for fun and profit. Plus all its ports are in the ass-end of the thing. WTF?

New MacBook? Got an old one, thanks, from 2006 and in a manly black (I dislike pasty white computers). MacBook Pro? No separate audio in/out ports on the new 13-incher, which seems to offer the most bang per buck, and no user-removable batteries on any of ’em. Plus I already have more laptops than Cheney’s closet does skeletons. As daily drivers go, they and the multiplicity of cables to peripherals required eat up a lot of desktop space, which irks the cats, who like to use my desk as a springboard to the window for reasons known only to themselves.

Mini? Another Mac I can’t crack, and it seems underpowered, if nicely priced.

And then there’s that voice, only one of many in my head, but among the most insistent, which keeps whispering, “You work in a subset of journalism, a craft with all the future of a Conestoga repairman in Manhattan.”

So instead of greening up my Black Friday with a new Mac, I’ve gotten myself a tad more computing horsepower by hooking up the MacBook to my 22-inch ViewSonic. The G4 tower now serves mostly as storage space, three drives’ worth, accessible wirelessly through my DSL modem-router combo. But I’ll also use it to scan and color cartoons, since it has an ancient yet serviceable version of Photoshop (another $500 goes unspent).

This probably won’t fly come July, if I’m still helping VeloNews.com push pixels during Le Tour. But it ain’t July.

• Late update: Reading the Gaslight‘s latest coverage of the first official shopping day of the holiday season (suck it, you out-of-Focus fucktards), it’s sad to note that while the G found it worthwhile to report from big boxes on Powers and Academy boulevards, in Woodland Park and in Castle Rock, they didn’t bother to send anyone downtown — which is about a mile away from Gaslight HQ. Maybe they’re afraid of ice falling from the USOC HQ, but I can’t see this lot being scared of a head injury, considering where they keep their brains. And they wonder why both the newspaper and downtown are struggling.

Vidiots

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

From our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Dept.: A pair of polo-playing, stretch-Hummer-driving asshats who hope to get their 15 minutes with the Bravo reality-TV show “The Real Housewives of D.C.” crashed Adolf Obama’s first state dinner and subsequently posted pix of their top-shelf grip-‘n’-grins on Facebook.

A publicist named Mahogany Jones, an unavailable Hollywood shyster called Paul W. Gardner Esq., and a Secret Service with egg all over its face — hey, what’s not to like? Especially if you’re a writer for Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or SNL.

Happy Thanksgiving (hold the turkey, please)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla's no turkey — when it's chilly, she likes to toast her po-po on the DSL modem.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla's no turkey — when it's chilly, she likes to toast her po-po on the DSL modem.

Thanksgiving is always a tad offbeat around the DogHaus. Turkey is rarely on the menu, though as an omnivore I have nothing against consuming them. As Freewheeling Franklin once said during an argument between Phineas and Fat Freddy, “Naw, it’s okay to eat turkeys. That’s just God’s way of punishing them for being so stupid.”

I’m just naturally contrary, I suppose. If everyone else is going that way, well, I’m going this way. Nothing personal. It just looks less crowded over there.

So today Herself and I, joined by the Sis and Bro’-in Law, will enjoy chicken cacciatore over fettuccine with sides of arugula with roasted red pepper, green beans in a soy-sesame seed-garlic sauce, and ciabatta with dipping oil. Raspberry cobbler for dessert.

And wine, of course. Not Italian (there he goes again).  We have a French white (Domaine du Tariquet 2008), a Spanish rosé (Protocolo 2007) and a couple of French reds (Domaine des Rozets Coteaux du Tricastin 2007 and Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2009).

Here’s hoping you and yours have lots to be thankful for today. Miss Mia Sopaipilla certainly does. For starters, she’s thankful to have a fine Motorola DSL modem to sit upon on chilly November mornings.

Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.
Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.

We haven’t even sat down to Thanksgiving Day dinner and the pulpiteers at Focus on the Fambly are already trotting out their annual Christmas In Peril fantasy. Focus Action spokescreature Carrie Gordon Earll breaks it down for us in Palinesque style (and I’m not talking Michael here):

“The eradication of Christmas is a politically correct idea that we can’t have sacred ideas in our culture.”

Uh huh. Can someone please ask Spock to pop round with his Universal Translator? I assume it handles Cretinese.

The more I see of industrial Christianity, Bibleburg style, the more I like Zen. You never see a mob from the local sangha berating the manager of a Best Buy because he won’t hang banners inscribed with the Four Noble Truths on Shakyamuni’s birthday. George Carlin had this crowd nailed, you should pardon the expression.

Meanwhile, thanks for all the music recommendations. I’d forgotten how much I like some of your suggestions, especially The Band’s “The Last Waltz.” Wouldn’t you know the sumbitch isn’t available on iTunes? Yo, Carrie, forget about that eradication-of-Christmas bullshit — we got a real problem right here.

Giant steps

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

OK, I’m a week into my disfigurement (disfingerment?) and I can see it’s gonna be a long healing process, just like the time I dislocated the thumb — which, ironically, shares a hand with the splinted middle finger and met its fate a long stone’s throw from where the birdie bit the dust, on a technical bit of trail near Lazy Land in Palmer Park.

My choice of stationary-trainer tunes has come in for some light criticism, so I’m turning to you, my small, deeply disturbed following, for your advice on a soundtrack for an extended Tour de Living Room. I did 70 minutes on the Giant Tempo yesterday and will probably be ramping that up to two hours, so I need a shitload of music and it can’t all be redneck rock, though I have some Charlie Daniels in reserve for emergencies.

Meanwhile, the wizards at VeloNews.com are still stomping bugs at the new digs. Seems IE6 doesn’t like the new site’s calendar and we have a significant number of prehistoric readers who insist on logging on via abacus, smoke signal or log drum. Christ, what’s next? “Optimized for Mosaic?”