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.
Freedumb Communications, which owns the Bibleburg Gaslight, is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week, according to the Wall Street Journal. Freedumb’s flagship rag, the Orange County Cash Register, popped up a story yesterday saying that discussions with lenders about restructuring $770 million in debt are “ongoing.”
Some people must be pooping in their pantalones over there on Prospect Street. G staffers have already enjoyed five unpaid days off this year, and the Cash Register has laid some folks off. A quick check of JournalismJobs.com finds, um, not much in the way of gainful employment for rumormongers. So it goes.
I don’t like Freedumb’s editorial philosophy, which is somewhere to the right of the John Birch Society, and quit subscribing to the G years ago. But an ink-stained wretch has to feel for his colleagues when the deal goes down. The ones who don’t write the editorials, anyway.
How is it that respectable news organizations keep giving Darth Cheney a soapbox? I will be interested in his oinkings when they emanate from between the bars of a jail cell.
And while we’re on the topic of mistaking bullshit for a more nourishing substance, Steve Benen at Political Animal notes that The Washington Post ombudsman writes (surprise, surprise) that most of the health-care “journalism” to date has been of the smelly, stick-to-your-boots variety.
Notes Benen: “For the media in general, I think there’s a reliance on horse-race and he-said-she-said journalism because it’s easy — and because all of their colleagues and competitors are doing the same thing.”
‘Tis a fine soft day, as my bog-trotting ancestors said, before they wised up and hopped a boat for Americay. The calendar read August 30, but when I slipped out for a quick ride between bouts of journalism it wasn’t sunscreen I was wearing, but a long-sleeved jersey and undershirt, bibs, knee warmers and long-fingered gloves. I even had a rain jacket stuffed in one pocket, and I needed it, too.
But I’ll tell you this: An hour of soggy cycling beat the mortal shit out of slouching in the office chair, watching the VeloNews.com server farm stumble along, slower than a drunk Repuglican congressman reading health-care legislation. I could get the day’s cycling news out faster with an arthritic carrier pigeon.
• Late update: Someone finally broke out the Bravo Foxtrot Hotel and gave the VN server hamster a good swat upside his pointy little head, waking his dumb ass up just in time for the finale of the U.S. pro road race in Greenville, S.C. Chapeau to George Hincapie for his third stars and stripes jersey. Now if that goddamn limp-winged pigeon will just flutter back here with a race report and some pix, I can post the sonsabitches and get about the serious business of drinking a little Spanish red and eating posole.
Turkish is a creature of ritual. Every morning when I drag ass out of the sack he leaps from the couch and joins me in the bathroom, where he launches into a clockwise series of bows and stretches, getting back rubs twice a lap.
After a few go-rounds, he curls up in the sink or on the carpet; if he picks the latter, one is permitted to scratch his chin and belly without the need for disinfectants and stitches afterward.
After a few minutes of what for the Turk’ is fairly lovey-dovey behavior he suddenly remembers who he really is — Mighty Whitey, the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Turkenstein, The Turkinator, et al. — and he commences stalking about the house from door to door, demanding his freedom in a keening sound like helium leaking from a balloon, or maybe Glenn Beck with his teensy nuts in a vise.
Let him out and my schedule is in his large, massively clawed paws. The sonofabitch is harder to catch than bin Laden, and should I manage to lay hands on him, there will be blood. Not his. The good news is, once he’s fined me a pint or two, he has no objection to taking a bracing nap in a window, or perhaps our bed, under the ceiling fan.
Every now and then Turk’ wants the lap, generally while I’m working, and if I don’t give it up he sets about turning the office carpet into confetti. Once aboard, he becomes a critic — not of my writing, but of my typing, which interrupts his carnivorous dreams. He also enjoys supervising my situps from a perch atop my navel.
Come bedtime, Turk’ briefly becomes cuddly again, until Herself plucks him off the bed to take him downstairs for the night. A guy going to the gas chamber complains less, and he’s not gonna be coming back tomorrow.
Maybe that’s why he’s so cheery in the mornings. “Hey, cool, you didn’t take me to the pound again! Dude, scratch my belly!”
In comments we’ve been discussing touring bikes and the proper setup thereof. My interest stems from an e-mail chat with Michael Deme, editor of Adventure Cyclist magazine, about maybe banging out some word count for his unsuspecting readers. Never having toured, I set about doing a little research (thank Buddha for Al Gore’s Ethertubes) and discovered a whole new world of gear and guidelines for turning a retired racer into a two-wheeled tortoise.
Seems nearly every major manufacturer makes a “touring bike” these days, though some are clearly cynical attempts to be all things to all market segments (“It’s a ‘cross bike, a touring bike and a sporty club racer!”). Kona, Cannondale, Trek, Raleigh, Fuji, Rocky Mountain, REI — I’m tellin’ ya, practically everybody makes one, and somebody must be buying ’em, because the Adventure Cycling Association has 45,000 members.
Lots of steel out there (mostly Reynolds); some disc-brake models (just one more thing to go wrong between here and there); and some overly optimistic gearing options (like 50/39/30 chainrings and 11-32 cassettes). Some of these product managers either have legs like tree trunks or live in Nebraska. I have a low end of 34×28 on my Soma Double Cross, and it feels like the granny of all grannies when it’s just me and the bike going uphill, but add 15-20 pounds of this and that and I expect I’d want something a lot more like 24×32 or even 22×32.
If I decide to dip a toe in the touring pond, I can probably get by with the Double Cross after a little velo-surgery (granny ring, triple front derailleur and maybe a long-cage rear with an 11-32 cassette). But if I were to get serious, I wouldn’t want to start swapping parts straight out of the box — it seems smarter to go with the small outfits that specialize in touring machinery. Bruce Gordon builds some nifty bikes; so do the folks at Co-Motion, though they hit you a little harder in the wallet pocket. And of course Rivendell is another class act, targeting the deep-pockets retro-grouch.
Oh, goody, says Herself, just what we need; another bike in the garage. And that ain’t the worst of it, toots — I think we’re gonna need a bigger garage.
