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.

Rolling on the river (and elsewhere)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The turnaround point, just south of Interstate 40 along the Paseo del Bosque trail.

It was a bit premature, but I rode my age yesterday and then some.

The final tally was 44.6 miles, or 71.8 kilometers; I only needed 43.5 miles to make 70km, but I figure the additional mile and change constituted a punishment tax for being a wuss and riding my age in kilometers instead of miles.

My 70th birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but the forecast was not promising and yesterday’s weather looked (and was) superb, so I took a cue from Janis Joplin and got it while I could.

I’ve been in something of a rut lately, literally as well as figuratively. The drill has been to break out a cyclocross bike and ride a mix of roads and trails, the latter slashed into tire-grabbing ribbons by fatheads who shred (or stir) the gnar-gnar after a wet spell. The ruts they leave behind don’t pose a problem for anyone piloting a double-squishy with plenty of travel and 3-inch tires, but can be a tad jarring on a rigid drop-bar bike with 33mm rubber.

Still, it beats working, especially if I pick a day and hour when the usual suspects are likely to be hoeing a row in the cube farm. I managed 24 miles of that sort of thing on Thursday. But doubling up on that, on a Friday, sounded like a punishment tour, not a birthday celebration. Also, too much of the same-ol’, same-ol’.

What to do; what to do. …

Temps looked to be headed for the 60s, with wind from the west. Coasting down to the bosque would force me to commit to some proper distance while giving me plenty of options in case advancing age or some other wrinkled catastrophe reared its ill-considered comb-over in midride. Off I went.

It’s mostly off-street bike path (Arroyo del Oso) and downhill from the intersection of Tramway and Manitoba to the bike-ped bridge over I-25, barring a short, unpleasant stretch of Osuna between the western end of the Arroyo del Oso golf course and Brentwood.

But once I’m on the bridge it’s all bike path, all the time, depending upon how I choose to head home.

I’m prone to overdo and bad at math, so after following the North Diversion Channel Trail and the Paseo del Norte Trail to the Paseo del Bosque, I refused to be lulled into complacency by the early greenery, stifled various miles-enhancing impulses — Hang a right at I-40 and climb to 98th? Hang a left at Mountain and cruise past Old Town back to the NDCT? Continue south to Rio Bravo? — and pulled a U at Mountain, heading back to the NDCT the way I’d come.

I thought I’d get more vertical than this, but that bosque trail is flatter than a Republican’s head.

The wind was mostly with me, so it felt like the right call, not least because it was all uphill back to El Rancho Pendejo. The question was: Which way back?

Arroyo del Oso is kind of a slog if ridden up from NDCT, with lots of stop and go plus a couple-three evil multiple-lane, median-divided, high-speed baby-highway crossings to negotiate with pale, failing, nearly-70-year-old legs. And my limited math skills seemed to indicate the mileage — kilometerage? — wouldn’t make the nut.

So I hung a left where the Paseo trail met the NDCT and headed northeast through Balloon Fiesta Park, where a few didoes through an underused office/light industrial ghetto connect to the Pan American Freeway, which in turn leads to the climb up Tramway — if you don’t mind riding a short stretch of shoulder alongside Pan American against high-speed, one-way traffic, which I kind of do. There’s been talk for years about extending the NDCT north to Roy, which would spare cyclists this game of chicken, but no action as of yet.

A quick digression: As I was rolling through the balloon park en route to doing battle with Pan American I saw a dude on what looked to be a gravel bike who’d left the official trail to drop down into La Cueva channel, a drainage like NDCT only without a bike path along the edge.

It made me wonder if, rather than risking the short against-traffic dash to Tramway from Balloon Fiesta Parkway, a savvy cyclist might be able to ride La Cueva channel underneath Pan American and I-25 all the way to Louisiana, then climb out somehow and head north to Elena, a less harrowing alternative to the 50-mph traffic of Tramway. Never saw the other dude again, so, maybe? To be continued. …

I took my chances on the Pan American shoulder, cautiously skirting two parked vehicles that may have had some unfortunate interaction — one car, one 18-wheeler — and started the half-hour ascent of Tramway to The County Line Bar-B-Q.

This is where the age thing manifested itself. A couple skinny young pups on them plastic-fantastic whirligigs with the disco brakes and what have you passed me so fast I had to stop to check my pulse, see if I still had one.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and upon hitting the stop sign at the barbecue joint it was clear that if I headed straight home I was going to wind up a couple klicks short of the full megillah. Thus I had to add a couple curlicues, flourishes, and do-si-dos to my little dance party before I could leave the floor and collapse into a medium-heavy lunch.

The official high was 69°, four degrees above normal. If that’s my birthday present, I’ll take it.

• Postscript: Lest anyone consider this even marginally impressive, my man the M-Dogg out in California reports having covered 9,000 feet of vertical and 166 miles in four days, none of which was his birthday.

How many bells for bullshit?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The Associated Press takes up busking to help cover the lost revenue as Gannett and McClatchy say it’s -30- for them. Photo lifted from Jake Wildwood & Co., which looks like a really interesting operation. Plus their shop cat, Kazoo, could be a twin to Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

When I was a sprat learning my trade at the Colorado Springs Sun one of my jobs was to strip and sort the wire-service copy from the newspaper’s various teletypes, which supplied news and features from outfits like United Press International, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.

Mostly they’d just grumble along like everyone else in the newsroom, dutifully punching out bits of this and that. But occasionally they’d go wild, ringing bells like Quasimodo on meth, for big-ticket items like Tricky Dick’s resignation or the Symbionese Liberation Army going up in flames.

The teletypes and their bells are long gone, but the wire services remain. At some outfits, anyway.

But the “newspapers” of Gannett and McClatchy will soon be drastically reducing their use of The Associated Press, according to their corporate overlords via The New York Times.

The reasoning, such as it is, came laid out in the sort of grandiose and spurious bushwa favored by the mouthpieces who speak on behalf of that famous First Amendment advocate, Slander N. DeFame.

“Between USA Today and our incredible network of more than 200 newsrooms, we create more journalism every day than The A.P.” That’s Kristin Roberts, the chief “content” officer of Gannett, in a company memo. Anyone purporting to speak for journalism who frames it as “content” is farting higher than his or her arse.

That also goes for Lark-Marie Antón, a spokescreature for Gannett, who issued a statement proclaiming that ceasing to use AP articles, photos, and videos “enables us to invest further in our newsrooms.” Ho, ho, etc. I looked up “investment” in The AP Stylebook and it said nothing about gutting newsrooms, idling presses, and selling the buildings that once housed them both.

McClatchy, a once-proud news outfit based in Sacramento, was snatched up out of bankruptcy four years ago by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, ending 163 years of family control.

The new owners subsequently were charged with “improper trading of certain fixed income securities” and took a $19 million hit in fines and disgorgement, a story that apparently went uncovered in McClatchy publications.

But they don’t need the AP, either. Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s senior vice president of news and audience, said in an email that the decision means her masters “will no longer pay millions for content that serves less than 1 percent of our readers.”

Like the ones who might like to know whose drawers the hedge fund is pulling down, hey? One doesn’t find piano playing of such quality in any old whorehouse. Bravissimo!

Thus our sources of information about the world outside the corporate boardroom — or inside it, for that matter — continue to dwindle. Back to you, Chet.

Nearly there now. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
The ornamental plum is getting busy in the backyard.

The vernal equinox arrives at 9:06 p.m. Dog time, and while we will probably be in bed by then, thoughts of warmer weather, shorts and T-shirts, and buds a-poppin’ should make for pleasant dreams.

No, not those buds. We abandoned that stuff long before it became legal and all the sissies decided it was finally safe to have a taste.

It’s still not what you’d call toasty out there. I can’t say I’m eager to bare my pale knees to the breeze. Still, 52° with a dearth of 50-mph winds will do for now.

Paddywhacked

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
A wee drink for the ould sod.

’Tis a fine soft St. Patrick’s Day morning so.

After a 24-hour sandblasting — I’m talking wind in the 30-mph area with gusts approaching 50 — we finally got a drop of rain to refresh the greenery without the need to crank up our irrigation system, tapping the invisible water that’s always in such short supply around here.

Now it appears to be snowing. Yay, etc.

Not snowing snowing, mind you. Not like it has been in Colorado or California. Hijo, madre. This borders on too much of a good thing, unless you’re a skier, or a yeti. Or perhaps an overdeveloped and underwatered desert community downstream from ski country.

What we’d like is a nice blanket that soaks into the sod before the wind can blow it to Hell. Water wizard John Fleck calls this “sublimation,” which means “the loss of snow straight to atmospheric drying without [it] ever having a chance to melt and make it to the rivers.”

As we speak, right on cue, here comes the wind again, as reliable as bad news from the campaign trail. We’re all doomed, some say. Proper fucked.

Well, the world ends for someone every day, yeah? A whole bunch of someones, most days. I’m not sure it helps to dwell overlong on when your turn might be coming round. Better, maybe, to spend that time seeing to it that the other guy’s parade is the one that gets rained on.