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.

Pyrénéezzzzzzzzzzz . . . .

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

What a travesty, turning the Col d’Aspin and the Col du Tourmalet into a couple of speed bumps en route to a two-up sprint that barely beat an 80-man dash to the line. Bor-ring. A la chingada con el Pyrénées, in this format, anyway. More Roberto Duran, less Gary Kasparov, please.

Meanwhile, Big Tex has transformed himself from The Great Stone Face to Chatty Cathy, briskly dispensing wisdom to fans and foes alike. Contador? Ambitious. Evans? Gutsy. Race radios? Stupid. The ’10 Tour? Maybe. We could change the name of the site to “VeloLance: The Journal of Competitive Lanceness” based on the volume of copy we got on him today, f’chrissakes.

I think I liked him better when he was stiff-arming the press. Sheeyit, a guy could get tired of Mozart if he heard too much of him.

No ride for Your Humble Narrator today. First it was too busy, then it was too hot, and finally it was too rainy. This is the weirdest Colorado summer I can recall, and I’ve seen plenty of ’em. We have three fans going on in the bedroom now, and I could still test a Cervélo P666 and a prototype asbestos Assos skinsuit in there. I want heat and humidity, I’ll move back to San Antone.

When pigs have wings

~ Patrick O'Grady

The swine flu comes to the Air Force Academy. Jeez, like it isn’t already tough enough to be a doolie at the Zoomie Zoo.

Downtown, it was a bear scaring the berries out of the civilians.

In Frogland, meanwhile, the Schleck brothers came out to play, briefly dragging most of the other contenders away from yellow jersey Rinaldo Nocentini on the Col d’Agnes. It seemed a pointless exercise at 8 a.m. Bibleburg time, the course being downhill all the way to the finish, but hey, what do I know? You can count my stage-racing wins on the toes of a peg leg.

Cool dinner, hot descent

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
This corn-tomato salsa is not only tasty, it's pretty.
This corn-tomato salsa is not only tasty, it's pretty.

Summertime always calls for some bitchin’ in the kitchen, ’cause this place with its six south-facing windows gets hot. Deciding what to prepare for dinner is something of a struggle — cranking up the oven for enchiladas, oven-fried chicken or baked salmon is only adding fuel to the fire. But being a man of some appetite (as in “great fat bastard”), I generally want something more than a simple salad.

Whenever I’m stumped I turn to Martha Rose Shulman’s “Recipes for Health” feature in The New York Times. She focuses on fairly simple, seasonal dishes — as she puts it, “food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat” — and when I checked in on her yesterday she had posted a recipe for soft tacos with chicken and tomato-corn salsa whose cooking demanded only a single saucepan for poaching the bird and a skillet for warming the tortillas. No sweat, to coin a phrase.

“These light, fresh tacos make a wonderful summer meal,” Shulman wrote, and she did not lie. Happily, we have enough leftovers for a repeat performance tonight.

Meanwhile, Le Tour hits its first real mountain today. Astana is running the bunch as if they had the yellow jersey, while the guy who actually does, Fabian Cancellara, double-flatted on a descent and had to chase back on at speeds approaching 60 mph. Dude went around the corners like he was on rails. I wasn’t scared at all, but somebody shit in my seat.

• Late update: Once again, Big Tex did not get the yellow jersey, and there is much chin music among my colleagues as to just how he feels about Alberto Contador hitting the afterburners on the final klicks of the climb to Arcalis. The two of them probably split a sixer of Shiner Bock in the Astana bus and cackled at the befuddled chamois-sniffers, professional and amateur alike.

Hot time, summer in the city

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

… back of my neck getting burned and gritty. It finally quit raining here in Bibleburg and zango! Just like that we’re in the 90s. You know it’s hot when you ask Turkish whether he wants to go outside and he gives you that blue-eyed are-you-fucking-kidding-me look and stalks off for a daylong nap in our bed, under the ceiling fan. I had to run the sprinklers for an hour this morning to keep the lawn from catching fire.

The two or three of you who follow the action here at Mad Blog Media may recall that a sawbones clipped a seborrheic keratosis off my mug a while back and sent it off to the wizards for processing. Word is that the booger was non-cancerous and thus the only physical ailment afflicting Your Humble Narrator is a wicked case of butt-ugly, which as we all know goes from the skin right down to the bone.

No rubber bracelets for that one; sorry. Maybe I should contract with a Chinese outfit to crank out a few jillion LiveUgly® bracelets and sell the sumbitches through Wal-Mart. Talk about your target market.

McNamara dies, goes to Hell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

It’s an old National Lampoon gag, originally concerning Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but it seems appropriate in this instance. Robert McNamara was the Donald Rumsfeld of his generation, a whiz kid who was too smart for his own good (and ours).

Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones notes that Salon.com founder David Talbot wrote a 1984 cover story for the magazine on “the transformation of McNamara, former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and ex-CIA chief William Colby from Vietnam-era hawks to advocates of a nuclear weapons freeze.”

Talbot, Schulman said, described McNamara as “the cost-control wizard who thought the war could be run like a Ford assembly line: body counts, kill ratios, bombing raids. And when he saw that it wasn’t adding up, that it did not compute, he repeatedly lied — to Congress, to the press, to the American public.”

What a shame Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around to piss a quart of filtered Wild Turkey on this warmonger’s grave, the way he did on a ceremony for the unveiling of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s portrait at the University of Georgia Law School (see “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” from “The Great Shark Hunt”).

“They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels,” Thompson wrote.

In his absence, we have war correspondent Joe Galloway, author of “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” who seems pleased that “the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell” and eulogizes him as a serial liar, a distorter of history and “the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”

Here’s hoping Bob, Dick and LBJ save Don a seat by the fire — or better yet, in it, since it seems that unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld will never have any fleeting doubts about the countless graves he has filled, with our people and theirs.

Oh, yeah. There was a bike race today, too. Somebody won. Nobody died.