Category: Bad news

R.I.P., Bruce Gordon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The SOPWAMTOS parade, with Himself in full fez regalia.

Well, goddamnit, I hope the Universe isn’t going to make a habit of this, snatching up all the interesting people before we’re finished with them.

This time it took Bruce Gordon, the acerbic framebuilder and one of the Self-Appointed Benevolent Co-Dictators for Life of the Society of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit (SOPWAMTOS).

My Golden Toiddy
My Golden Toiddy for (what else?) Excellence In Bad Taste.

Back In the Day® Adventure Cyclist honcho Mike Deme and I tried to get Bruce to lay a bike on us for review purposes but we could never make it happen, possibly because Bruce was reluctant to work up a machine for the likes of us when it was tough enough to move product to the actual paying customers. Jagoffs, poseurs and wanna-bes are to be found in abundance, especially among the working press, and their pockets are notoriously shallow.

In the end I had to settle for a couple of SOPWAMTOS T-shirts, a Golden Toiddy from 1995 (I think), and his Rock n’ Road tires, which I still run on the Voodoo Nakisi. I’m pretty sure I paid retail for everything save the Golden Toiddy, too.

The last time I saw Bruce may have been at Interbike 2013.

“We were standing in line at dark-thirty for a cup of Starbutt’s finest and got straight to the kvetching, as a guy will before java is made available in a 20-year-old shopping mall masquerading as a casino-hotel. And afterward, too, come to think of it.

Well, some of us, anyway. One of these years Bruce and I should bring a small square of Astroturf and a couple of patio chairs to the show and while away the hours hollering at people to get the hell off our lawn.

I hope Deme has the Astroturf and patio chairs ready. He’s got company.

• Updated June 13: The hometown paper writes Bruce’s obit.

The wrong Bozos keep getting kicked off the bus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Here’s a golden oldie, from my short stint at The Arizona Daily Star. I didn’t stick around to get the sack; I shot out of that place like a rat out of an aqueduct.

As long as we have a cartoon president, how ’bout drawing him up a cartoon Wall®?

We have the technology. Also, the manpower. Newspapers are shitcanning Pulitzer-winners right, left, and center, among them Steve Benson, who was the editorial cartoonist at the Arizona Republic back in 1980, when I scribbled the occasional ’toon for The Arizona Daily Star.

This is nothing new, of course. A J-school prof warned me in the Seventies that there were maybe a thousand editorial cartoonists, tops, and that I might consider expanding my portfolio a tad. This was excellent advice. Because their numbers kept shrinking like a spider on a hotplate, to hundreds and finally dozens.

It was nearly impossible to even make a start Back in the Day® because what few cartoonists there were could be had for chump change via syndication. So the editor of the Frog Dick (S.C.) Daily Lily Pad & Croaker could have Pat Oliphant every day for the price of a tepid cup of Maxwell House at Lulu’s Lunch Bucket.

I still got to draw cartoons, as you know. But I did it as a reporter, as a copy editor, as an assistant feature editor, and like that there. On the side. Onliest time I ever got hired as an honest-to-God cartoonist was when that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling decided I was too dim to be their managing editor but funny enough to scribble gags about fat masters, dope fiends, and Suits.

In a few short years there won’t be any of us. Robots will be drawing all the cartoons. And you won’t get any of the jokes, because they will be by robots, for robots.

“Ha ha,” they will say. “That’s very logical.”

Dune Meshuga

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
“Fetch me my one-iron.”
“Are you shitting me? Not even
Paul Muad’dib can hit a one-iron.”

Friend of the Blog Pat O’B has been enduring a deluge down in Sierra Vista. But as he notes, this is weather, not climate.

The climate is headed in another direction entirely.

And as Arizona meteorologist Eric Holthaus notes in Grist via Mother Jones, no matter how much water is falling from the sky right this minute in the American Southwest, there is no longer enough to go around.

Writes Holthaus:

To be clear: There is no remaining scenario that does not include mandatory cutbacks in water usage along the Colorado River within the next few years. The long-awaited judgment day for the Southwest is finally here.

Think this means we’ll see bigger sand traps and smaller greens on the Phoenix golf courses? Yeah, me neither. I sure hope Assos is working on a cool stillsuit, one that gives a guy that six-pack look. A six-pack of water, not beer.