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.

Rattle those pots and pans

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Here’s an interesting read from Michael Pollan on the transformation of cooking from meal preparation to spectator sport. Writing for The New York Times, Pollan says the average American spends 27 minutes daily on food preparation and another four minutes cleaning up — “less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.”

Adds Pollan: “What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for. What is wrong with this picture?”

Plenty, says Pollan, whose piece touches favorably on Julia Child and less so on the rise to dominance of industrially prepared “food” and “cooking” that consists largely of opening packages. He also brings up Erica Gruen, the cable exec who shifted the Food Network’s target audience from people who like to cook to people who like to eat — to wit, men. Hence the rise of gastronomic gladiator shows like “Iron Chef.”

“People don’t watch television to learn things,” Pollan quotes her as having told a journalist. Truer words, etc.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we’re all working more — since 1967, Pollan says, Americans have added “the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor” to the total amount of time we spend at work each year.

“Not surprisingly,” he adds, “in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.”

And don’t expect an American gastronomic renaissance anytime soon, if food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer’s pessimistic view of our culinary future is accurate. Discussing the dream of Americans returning to their own drab kitchens from their glitzy televised counterparts, he tells Pollan:

“Not going to happen. Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I don’t see it.

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket.”

Now, before you bellow, “That’s bullshit! I cook!”, take a look around you. Sure, you cook, and so do I. But the only thing eating into McDonalds’ profits is unfavorable currency trading — it’s considered bad news that the burger giant’s same-store sales rose only 2.6 percent from June 2008 to June 2009. Analysts had expected twice that.

That’s not a summit, that’s a valley

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

OK, I promise this is the last sniveling post for a while about how the weather sucks, but it’s either that or weigh in on the beer summit, and I think that if I did that, my head would explode. I mean, c’mon. Bud Light? Sam Adams Light? Blue Moon? If I had to choose between total sobriety or drinking this swill, I’d start shooting smack.

And Buckler? That’s a fake beer, f’chrissakes! A Heineken with even less balls than an actual Heineken! If you’re gonna pretend to drink, you might as well pretend to eat, and then see what happens to you.

Aw, goddamnit, now see what you’ve done? My head has exploded. And I haven’t even gotten around to bitching about the weather yet.

Outside ♥ Bibleburg

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Part of the stellar trails network praised by Outside magazine after a summer of torrential rain and minimal maintenance.
Part of the stellar trails network praised by Outside magazine after a summer of torrential rain and minimal maintenance.

The city fathers must be frantically pulling their withered puds over the news that Outside magazine has dubbed Bibleburg No. 1 in its “America’s Best Cities” spooge-fest. I myself prefer Outside‘s hometown of Santa Fe, N.M., but Herself and I can barely afford to visit there, much less own a piece of its preposterously pricey property.

If we’d had any brains (and a bunch of money), Herself and I would have bought a place when we lived there 20 years ago, right about where the Railyard clusterplex is now. Then we could visit all the damn’ time and on the cheap, too. But we had neither brains nor money in abundance, and thus we live here, where a couple can buy a small house without selling Don Rumsfeld to Al-Qaeda.

Bibleburg has much to recommend it, as Outside notes. We’re five minutes by bike from a trail that stretches from Fountain on the south to Palmer Lake on the north, and 10 minutes from the 730-acre Palmer Park, which contains some 25 miles of trails (most of which are in pretty wretched condition from our insanely wet summer). And you can ride from downtown straight into the Rocky Mountains without spending too much time on an actual city street (which is good because they are in a terrible state of repair and packed curb to crumbling curb with insane people driving with neither skill nor mercy).

True, there is no downtown to speak of, barring a two-block strip of grog shops, alehouses and toilets whose last calls often lead to street fights, but at least the parking fees are world-class. And the stranglehold that chain eateries have on the local appetite, thanks to a transient population and abysmally low wages, means that fine dining is mostly a thing that takes place in one’s home, if one knows how to cook.

We did finally land a Whole Foods about 10 years after the rest of the country had grown bored with it, and it’s not uncommon to see some of the more colorful locals skulking about the place like retarded coyotes, filling up on free samples of exotic tidbits they don’t recognize because they are made of actual food.

When you get tired of watching them there are the neo-libertards and Elmer Gantrys for entertainment. The first lot wants government drowned in a bathtub but won’t pay for the tub or the water, while the second wants to stop the rest of us from having as much fun as they do until the hooker rats them out on “Oprah.”

And the newspaper sucks, the local TV news is worse and even our local NPR affiliate could do with a vigorous shaking from time to time.

But y’know? It could be worse.

We could be living in Pueblo.

Don’t touch that dial

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

In the never-ending quest to determine Just Exactly What the Fuck Is It That You People Want, NPR.org will be potting down the audio and ramping up the written reportage.

Instead of short paragraphs that direct users to click on links to audio reports taken from NPR’s programs, the Web site will now offer fully reported text versions of articles, so users can click from their cubicles.

Says Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, in a chat with The New York Times: “We think the midday experience is much more text-driven.”

He may be onto something there. The cube farmers turn in by the jillions at VeloNews.com to catch Charles Pelkey’s text-based live updates during major events, such as the recently concluded Astana-Saxo Bank training ride around France. But our new corporate management is headed in the other direction, emphasizing VN.com’s first tentative steps into video, called VeloCenter.

I appreciate the work that goes into VeloCenter, but I don’t watch it. I’m not the prototypical sports fan — I can’t watch an event, then read about it, then watch a bunch of people talking about it. It’s a bike race, f’chrissakes. But then we don’t even have cable. Our primary video-delivery system is a rabbit-ears antenna from (wait for it) RadioShack.

And that’s the way it is. For now, anyway. Just what the fuck is it that you people want? When we find out, we’ll let you know.

In-Tour-minable

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Seems the Tour didn’t quite settle all those little rivalries in the Astana camp. ‘Berto Contador spouted off about Radio Shackstrong today, and while he described him (in my own poor translation) as “a great champion (who) has made a great Tour,” he also said their relationship was “zero,” adding, “On a personal level, I have never had a great admiration, nor will I, but as a racer he is a champion.”

Which sounds about right to me. Great Tour racer? Hard to argue with that, based on the stats. Cuddly as a bunny? Nuh-uh. Dude takes a giant shit on Super Spaniard’s ITT victory on stage 18 by announcing his new team for 2010; skips ‘Berto’s Saturday-night victory party to yuk it up with his new posse; and finally, during the big shindig on the Champs-Élysées, treats the newly crowned champ like a smelly in-law who owes him money.

Now Texus Maximus is barking back via Twitter. I’ll spare you the link, but will say that this back and forth makes me glad that Herself and I never had kids. With the right doctor, they could’ve become Tour champs, and then we’d have to take this bullshit personally.

I guess we can look forward to more of this sort of bad noise as we start the countdown to the 2010 Tour de France. But it kind of reminds me of the 1980 Ali-Holmes fight. Nobody really wins and everyone looks bad.