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.

Symphony of pain, scored for clavicle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The Mighty Dog, circa 1990, riding for the Sangre de Cristo Cycling Club in Santa Fe, NM.
The Mighty Dog, circa 1990, riding for the Sangre de Cristos Cycling Club in Santa Fe, NM.

Lance Armstrong and I have something in common, in addition to brains, good looks and wealth — we both waited until our 30s to break a collarbone.

I was 35 and getting set to start my first real season as a bicycle racer when I laid it down on March 7, 1989, on the road to the Puye Cliff Dwellings on Santa Clara Pueblo near Española, N.M. I don’t remember the crash because in addition to snapping my left clavicle I coldcocked myself, totaling my beer-cooler helmet. I decided afterward that I’d probably let my Look cleats wear down a bit too far and unclipped while sprinting up a short rise, going over the bars and then landing on same. I took note of the calamity in my training diary:

“Tore off a hunk of scalp, raspberried both knees and elbows and picked up a Technicolor bruise from left thigh to waist. Doc says I can’t ride the road for a month but can do the trainer if I can stand the pain.”

I could and did, getting on the trainer for a 20-minute spin two days later. Oh, Lord, did that hurt. My heart rate was in six figures, and simply getting out of bed was an exercise in pain management; I had a water bed, and the one quick situp required to get out of the sonofabitch was no fun at all.

But I was religious about a daily trainer workout, and finally got outdoors for a road ride — on a mountain bike — three weeks later. Two months from the crash I rode the Santa Fe Century in under five hours, and on Memorial Day weekend I raced the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, albeit without distinction.

So I wouldn’t bet against Armstrong being able to bounce back in time for the Tour. It isn’t exactly the Iron Horse, true, but a guy needs a goal, no matter how modest.

Late update: The Armstrong kerfuffle sent me to rooting through the cerebral attic, trying to find a tantalizing bit of data I’d misplaced, when all of a sudden it came to me: In 1995, at age 32, Rebecca Twigg won a sixth world title and set a world record for the individual pursuit despite breaking a collarbone less than two weeks earlier. Oh, yeah — she had a cold, too.

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Mondays always remind me of work, a recurring affliction that gives me a painful rash on the frontal lobes. And today was no exception.

First, I had to give up on trying to make a cheap USB 2.0 wireless adapter work with this elderly MacBox, which has been limping along for years with a Bronze Age 802.11b internal Airport card. But the adapter wouldn’t let the old bastard sleep, and at its advanced age, the MacBox needs all the Z’s it can get. This perverse product would let the monitor sleep, but wouldn’t let it wake up. It also crashed me a half-dozen times, just ’cause. So off it went, exchanged for a more upscale PCI adapter that should finally let me crank the wireless connectivity in these parts up to 802.11g. Look out. Nothing can stop me now.

Then Lance Armstrong went and crashed himself out of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, collecting his first broken collarbone in the process (I’ve done ’em both, and yes, it hurts), and nobody had any oh-the-humanity crash pix we could run over at VeloNews.com, where the merest mention of LA draws more eyeballs than Pamela Anderson attending a frat party wearing only Jäger goggles, kneepads and a smile.

And finally, spring and its 70-degree temps waved bye-bye. As we speak, it’s 40 and raining, with a chance of snow. If we’re lucky, we might be back into the 60s by next Monday.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

It must be spring . . .

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
The light at the end of the tunnel.
The light at the end of the tunnel.

. . . the basement has turned green. Six weeks after the shit monsoon, we finally have our basement back. Well, kinda, sorta. We’re still missing the door to the loo — a special-order item, and Pan only knows when that will arrive — and none of Herself’s gear has been moved back downstairs yet. But at least two people can pee simultaneously around here without one of them being outdoors or employing a sink.

That final week was a hectic mother. Herself was mostly out of town, I had work to do for VeloNews.com and Bicycle Retailer, and all of a sudden the big push was on, with construction types trooping in and out at all hours with glues and solvents, pads and carpets, tile and vinyl. Plus I had a house guest due in, an old college roomie and fellow ink-stained wretch, and I didn’t want him to be sleeping on the coffee table and peeing out a living-room window, although we both have done this in the past. Never went over big with the neighbors.

The plumber finally paid a call the morning of the day my buddy was due to arrive. Seating the toilet was no problem, but the pedestal sink took a bit of doing; we had decided to go with tile in the crapper instead of the original vinyl, and the additional height of the floor means the sink now has a slight tilt toward the wall. I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening tilted toward one wall or another, and occasionally a floor or ceiling, so I don’t have a problem with an off-kilter sink.

Especially if I don’t have to pee in it.

Toto, I don’t think we’re on Krypton anymore

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
An AIG employee applies for his share of $165 million in bonuses.
An AIG employee applies for his share of $165 million in bonuses.

In an early episode of the DC Comics feature “Tales of the Bizarro World,” in which the inhabitants do the exact opposite of all Earthly things, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you.”

Ladies and gents, welcome to Bizarro World.

If I recall, the last cash bonus I got was $50 for saving a reporter from being hoodwinked by a school-board wiseass before her story about a fictional candidate for superintendent — Quincy Adams Wagstaff, late of Huxley College — could sneak into the pages of The New Mexican. I certainly never scored a cash payout for introducing libels into stories, throwing monkey wrenches into the presses or setting the newsroom afire.

If we were still on Earth, the 43 fools and/or thieves who run the AIG Financial Products unit — which as Steve Benen notes “was responsible for the company’s mess in the first place” — would be awarded custom-fit tuxedos of tar and feathers and chauffeured off to prison on splintery rails. But we do things backassward here on Bizarro World, and so they will get $165 million in bonuses after AIG soaked up $170 billion in taxpayer dollars.

As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo: “The folks running AIG’s financial products division should be happy to escape this mess without criminal indictments. And that’s not hyperbole. When you look at what they were doing, foolish or high-risk behavior are inadequate descriptors. It really amounts to fraud.”