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.

Hot plate

October 4, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

There's a heart attack on a plate for you.

A light dinner last night called for a medium-heavy breakfast this morning. I’m talking eggs scrambled with chopped green chile and minced garlic, diced spuds with green chile, red bell pepper, scallions, garlic and cilantro, shredded lettuce and sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, and a hunk of leftover grilled flatiron steak. Plus coffee, of course. A day without the velvety black goodness is a day without sunshine.

Speaking of beef, here’s a story you don’t want to read if you’re big on mystery meat. It’s straight out of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” I forwarded it to my man Hal, a meat-eater who is intensely interested in eating well and locally, and he replied, “This is why we raise our own.”

Hal was cooking for a couple dozen folks at a neighbor’s birthday party last night and drank wine with the gent who owns the plant that processes his beef, which when still on the hoof meanders around the neighborhood eating grass at 8,800 feet. Not many of us live this close to our grub, which goes a long way toward explaining how a young girl can wind up paralyzed from the waist down by eating a shitburger.

Interestingly, Hal also claims that there are “many more cases of food-borne illness from produce than from meat, fish, chicken and eggs combined.” I don’t know whether he’s right, but I do recall the salmonella-tainted jalapeños of 2008 and E. coli-contaminated spinach of 2006, clear indications that vegetarianism does not guarantee one a clean bill of health.

Didn’t I say this on the other side of the record?

October 3, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Here’s an interesting article in The New York Times about a pending reunion of the five surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which will kick off a six-hour IFC documentary titled “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).”

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love the Pythons. I started watching them in college and have a closet packed with DVDs of their TV show and movies. But when I read a line like this — “To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place.” — I feel badly for Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, Peter Bergman and David Ossman, a.k.a. The Firesign Theatre, a homegrown outfit I first encountered in high school. I have a second closet full of their vinyl and a pretty substantial collection of CDs.

The Firesign Theatre took to the airwaves on Radio Free Oz at KPFK in 1967, two years before the Pythons cranked up their BBC act, and were regulars on KRLA a year later. Anyone who enjoys wordplay and punning could do much, much worse than listen to Firesign classics such as “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus,” “Everything You Know Is Wrong” or “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra” — which has its roots in, of all things, the British author Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series (a tale for which the world is not yet prepared).

And therein lies the rub. You pretty much had to listen to the Firesigns, which requires more imagination than watching TV, the same way reading does. They were never as good as the Pythons in front of a camera, but then again the Pythons were never any great shakes as an audio act. At least half of what makes the Pythons funny is their physical, visual comedy.

I never saw the Pythons live, but I saw the Firesigns in Denver once, and it was a memorable experience, with a great deal of (and perhaps too much) audience participation, especially from me and my pals. They’re still performing today. But drop a Firesign Theatre reference into a casual conversation and someone will probably suggest you pop in to the local ER for regrooving. Do a dead-parrot quip and you’re the life of the party.

We may not all be bozos on this bus, but at least some of us are.

One Gran Fondue, hold the napalm

October 3, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

A glimpse of the changing colors in Dog Country.

Legolas Leipheimer is leading a Gran Fondue through Sonoma County today, accompanied by some 3,500 of his closest friends, and embedded in the merry band is my old pal Chris Coursey, formerly a columnist for The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa.

Via e-mail, Chris notes that he is doing the 65-mile Medio Fondue, which features only 3,500 feet of climbing, as opposed to the full kettle of cheese — 110 miles with 6,500 feet of up, including the dread Coleman Valley Road. Going up is plenty tough — and don’t forget, what goes up must also come down.

Writes Chris: “The descent on the other side is hairpinned and potholed in some places, smooth and screaming in others. It demands a bit of skill, discretion and common sense. And I’m going to be sharing it with 3,499 other humanoids. When is the last time you saw 3,500 skilled, discreet and sensible people together in the same crowd?”

Uh, that would be never, which is only one of the many reasons I will go out for a short, solo ’cross-bike ride here as soon as the temps reach the knee-warmer stage.

Still, it could be worse — instead of cycling alone or in a crowd, we could be pounding ground along the Arghandab River in Afghanistan, a garden spot that the grunts of Bravo Company describe as “Vietnam without the napalm.” Sounds lovely. I’d rather do the backside of Coleman drunk on a unicycle with a rucksack full of nitroglycerin.

October surprises

October 2, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

It got good and chilly here last night — when I arose, it was exactly freezing outside. Now it’s 50-something, like me, and like me it took a long time to get there.

Last night I made another Martha Rose Shulman recipe, pasta with walnut sauce and broccoli raab, except I used broccoli florets. I had planned to do her stir-fried pork and greens, but Herself intervened on behalf of broccoli, and while I was surprised at her choice we were both pleased with the results. Plus there were enough leftovers for today’s lunch.

Tonight it’s back to caveman chow — a grilled flatiron steak from Ranch Foods Direct, some spuds and a vegetable to be determined by Herself, who is on a rare grocery-shopping excursion as part of a series of errands. I generally fetch the grub, since I do all the cooking around the DogHaus, but lacking any sort of work ethic I’m easily persuaded to sit on my ass and let someone else do the heavy lifting.

Outside the kitchen, meanwhile, Repuglican asshats and their enablers in the MSM are spastically jacking off over Barack Adolf Hitler Saddam Hussein Pol Pot “Uncle Joe” Stalin Mao Zedong Obama’s failure to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago and Steve Benen at Political Animal is predictably snarky.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about, frankly — Colorado voters told the International Olympic Committee to go fuck itself back in 1972, when a Denver group wanted to bring the Winter Olympics here, and we’re still on the map, albeit for all of the wrong reasons (Focus on the Family, Doug Bruce, Doug Lamborn — the list goes on and on). But at least we didn’t piss away 13 times the original estimate to host that frozen clusterfuck, the way California did in 1960.

Why, the Winter Games don’t even include cyclo-cross. That right there’s a deal-breaker as far as I’m concerned.

A flash, in the pan

October 1, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

One of the benefits of going back to a regular schedule is that I get to pay more attention to cooking instead of simply throwing something together in a rush and then jumping back in the barrel.

Martha Rose Shulman has offered a couple of interesting dishes recently in her “Recipes for Health” column in The New York Times. I whipped up her stir-fried tofu and peppers night before last, and it was a hit; it’s an easy bit of cookery, based on a Chinese dish called rainbow beef, and reminds me slightly of an old favorite, kung pao beef, from (of all things) a tattered Betty Crocker cookbook I bought on impulse at some grocery checkout years ago.

Tonight I’m going to tackle her stir-fried pork and greens with noodles, which is just a little more elaborate but packs more punch, including as it does a half-pound of swine instead of soybean curd (Shulman says the vegetarians among you may substitute tofu for the pork).

While we’re discussing mindful cookery, you might enjoy this article from Tricycle, the Buddhist quarterly. Author Laura Fraser rattles the pots and pans with Dale and Melissa Kent, who spent seven years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness. Dale did a two-year stint as tenzo, head of the kitchen; Melissa was ino, or head of the meditation hall.

Zen priest and cook Edward Brown tells Fraser that mindfulness in cooking “is much more about receiving your experience than dictating it. Most people’s habits of mind and activity, when it comes to cooking, are about making it come out the way it’s supposed to, rather than receiving and appreciating it the way it is.”

With that in mind (pun intended), I set about making breakfast this morning. It’s a meal that has been haphazard here lately, generally a fruit smoothie, some oatmeal, occasionally just a container of yogurt and some juice. Herself had mentioned a hankering for scrambled eggs with green chile, but was otherwise unspecific, so I winged it. Improvisation. A couple bars of jazz in the kitchen.

Locating some roasted Hatch mild chile in the bottom of the ’fridge, I peeled and diced a large one, then sautéed it in butter and olive oil for a few minutes, adding a small minced glove of garlic about 20 seconds before pouring the eggs — whipped with sea salt, freshly ground pepper and a dash of green chile powder from the Santa Fe School of Cooking — into the skillet.

Then, with one eye on the cooking eggs I assembled two basic side salads — just a few leaves of lettuce and some sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil — and toasted some fresh bread from a local bakery. Then I shoveled the eggs onto the plates and served ’em up.

Simple stuff, I know. But it sure did taste good.