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.
Feh. Forty-something and sunny and what am I doing? The Tour to Nowhere in the living room on our Giant Tempo trainer. An hour and 10 minutes’ worth.
Lord, I woke up this mornin', had them Statesboro Blues.
Thank God for my iPod, the Allman Brothers Band and their compilation “A Decade of Hits: 1969-1979.” It’s the best indoor cycling music ever recorded and has seen me through many a grim living-room sweat-fest since its release in 1991.
I wrote a column about it once, if memory serves. I’ll see if I can dig the sumbitch up from the archives, as that will be easier than typing something original with one of my birdies grounded.
• Late update: Well, whaddaya know. Even a dumb dog digs up a bone now and then. But the Allman Brothers album was only one part of the column, not the entire topic. Here it is — a blast from the past, going all the way back to 2002, when we lived on a rocky outcropping in the Wet Mountains, 10 snowy miles from Weirdcliffe.
I really stuck the dismount this time. Even the East German judge gave me a 10.
Hm. Been a little quiet around here lately, no? A couple shifts in the old VeloBarrel, some snow-shoveling, a bit of trying to learn my way around the new WordPress-based beta site, and a crash on the ’cross bike, and all of a sudden it’s five days later. How time does fly when you’re having fun.
For some reason yesterday I thought it would be smart to go for a short ride in the icy goo. Not so much, as it turns out, especially with a deadline looming. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it can be to dispense the wit and wisdom with only one functional hand. The other, as you can see, is sporting a splint to support its dislocated birdie finger, which I popped back into place as I was lying there in the puddle, the one masking the sheet of ice.
Road-raging motorists will get little in the way of obscene gestures from me over the next month, unless they park curbside to peek in through a living-room window and shout at me for riding an exercise bike.
Since VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham let the cat out of the bag on Twitter, I’ll follow his lead and post a link to the latest iteration of the website, velonews.competitor.com.
The latest redesign is a WordPress model, like my own humble site, only much more complex. And frankly, it’s gonna be something of a pain in the ass to administer until we get comfortable with the additional steps it demands of an editor trying to post a story with pictures. But that was the case with the changeover to the present site, too. We got used to it. Kinda. Sorta.
The new site remains a work in progress, but it’s nearly ready to launch. So if you have any thoughts, please send them to me and I’ll pass ’em along to Steve.
I’ve lived in Bibleburg off and on since 1967, so I’m rarely surprised when one of our wingnut asshats takes his clown act to the national stage. Everyone’s familiar with our most recent Three Stooges revival — Ted Haggard, Jimmy Dobson and Doug Bruce — but I can remember when there was a John Birch Society bookstore downtown, right about where Tony’s is now. And when the Ku Klux Klan attempted a comeback here in the Seventies, I interviewed the local hood-and-sheet club as well as national Kluxer David Duke for the Bibleburg Gaslight.
So color me unsurprised that state Sen. David Schultheis (R-Hyperbole) has used his Twitter account to fart higher than his ass. According to Talking Points Memo, citing Colorado Pols, Schultheis tweeted thusly:
“Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.”
As TPM notes, “Let’s roll” were the final words of Todd Beamer, a passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93, one of four aircraft hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001. It crashed before reaching its intended target after a passenger rebellion.
What I don’t understand is, why do we have to import nitwits like this? Schultheis is a transplant from California who didn’t start fucking up in my back yard until 1992. Don’t we have enough of our own homegrown fools to fill key positions in the state Legislature? Where are the Minutemen when we need them?
What Bibleburg needs is immigration reform, the sooner the better. Let’s save these high-paying jobs for our own dummies.
• Late update: The Denver Post has noted Schultheis’ chirpy churlishness, but as of wine-thirty, the Gaslight has not. Another non-surprise.
• Even later update: Racist fool and Birther Lou Dobbs is out at CNN. This does not mean that CNN has suddenly stopped sucking. It only means that henceforth, it will suck a little less.
It was a tad warm — 50-something, and in November — to wear my brand-new VeloNews coat in Winter Park.
Saw a beautiful sunrise yesterday. I’d have taken a picture, but I was northbound at 80 mph surrounded by people who were hellbent on maiming and/or killing me, so I kept my attention focused on the task at hand, which was making it safely to Winter Park for day two of the annual VeloNews retreat.
This required me to get up at 4 a.m., which was not pleasant. Picture the monster arising from Dr. Frankenstein’s table, red murder in his freshly undead eyes. During an unpleasant spell in the early Eighties, when I worked for an afternoon daily in Oregon, I had to be on the job at this miserable hour, and I never got used to it.
But at least there was work to be done. Meetings prevent the doing of work. While you’re sitting there around the big table, giving your tonsils a good airing, the work is waiting patiently for you to get back to it. Unlike you, work has plenty of time. Meetings also provide the illusion of democracy when in fact business is dictatorial. Sooner or later someone in authority will tell everyone to shut the fuck up and get back to work. But never soon enough.
To be sure, the occasional nugget of intelligence glistens in the dungheap: stats on what is selling, what is growing dusty on the shelves and who is buying; hints about where The Company will direct money and resources, and where it will withhold same; the sort of news a guy can get electronically these days, without the need for a six-hour round trip via Subaru.
But one thing a guy can’t get electronically is a free lunch and a nifty official VeloNews jacket from Descente. So I’ve got that going for me.
• Extra-credit reading:VeloNews.com has a sister site devoted to mountain biking, Singletrack.com. It’s relatively new, and doesn’t have a related magazine to drive eyeballs its way, so I’m pitching you this link to get your opinions about the site. Gimme your thoughts on VeloNews.com too. Think of it as a meeting that you won’t get paid for, but don’t have to drive to.
