Category: Bibleburg

The white and gold

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Whiskey on the ... snow?
Whack for the daddy-o, there's whiskey in the jar.

Well, we knew it was coming, but that didn’t mean we were ready for it — our first snow of the 2010 multiple-car-pileup season.

Naturally, I seized on last night’s weather event as the perfect excuse for a beaker of Gaelic brain eraser to forestall croup, pneumonia and whooping cough. Herself even had a wee drop.

That was the fun part. The sucky bits commenced this morning, when we had to take Herself’s 2002 Subie to one mechanic and my 1983 Toyota truck to another on roads that were glazed like a copper’s donut. For my trip I dumped six tubes of traction sand in the bed, locked the hubs, slammed it into 4WD and stayed in second gear the whole way.

The good thing about having a 27-year-old rust-bucket like this, of course, is that people in nice cars get the hell out of your way. It fairly screams, “What makes you think I won’t hit you?” And “Hell, no, I ain’t got no god-damn insurance.” Possibly “I’m still half-hammered from the whiskey I was guzzling last night.”

Anyway, it works. Everybody waited to tailgate me until I was behind the wheel of my Forester, inching home from the Toyota mechanic. Some mighty small hat sizes here in Bibleburg, and the body shops love ’em.

Stop the presses (or better yet, sell ’em)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

The equity-group vampires running Freedumb Communications, owner of the Gazette here in scenic cosmopolitan Bibleburg, are said to be entertaining offers to buy its newspapers and TV stations.

“Who gives a shit?” you may inquire, and it’s not an unreasonable question. I worked there briefly in the Seventies and ran away like a Tea Bagger from a meaningful deed. Plus we canceled our subscription quite some time ago, reasoning that it was not in our community’s best interest to keep feeding the retarded, right-wing Rottweiler shitting all over the Gazette‘s Opinion pages.

Still, a daily paper’s sale is almost always bad news, especially for the people who work there, and believe it or not, there are owners both meaner and more inept than the Freedumb libertards.

Take Gannett (please). Gannett is one of the unindicted co-conspirators behind the MacPaperization of the American daily. Thanks to this soulless information-homogenization device — the nation’s biggest publisher in terms of circulation — it’s become impossible to tell one town’s paper from another.

There are rare exceptions; The New Mexican in Santa Fe may be one such, with its recent attempts to focus on local content instead of the redistribution of canned, flavorless generic bullshit. (The New Mexican also kicked Gannett’s fat ass when its 1975 sale to the chain went sideways and returned to local control in 1980.) If you’re not cursed with a Gannett paper in your hometown, as is my sister in Fort Collins, you can learn more than you care to know about the outfit at the Gannett Blog.

Then there’s MediaNews, a nut-cutting outfit that has presided over the miniaturization of The Denver Post, a once-proud regional publication. Like Gannett, MediaNews thins the newsroom herd, sharing staffers among its papers the way dopers pass a bong. And the Post is already sharing content with the Gazette, as you can see here.

It would be in character for MediaNews to snap up first the Gazette, then The Pueblo Chieftain, a privately held typo distributor that should be rechristened Bob Rawlings’ Water Law Newsletter. Slash the staffs to a position or two below bare minimum and share content, ad sales and printing facilities up and down the Front Strange like a truck-stop pimp turning out a couple of new girls.

Who knows? The readers might not even notice. They’ve become accustomed to having their low expectations met, after all. Just don’t mess with the horoscope, the funny pages and the TV listings.

Mmm, beer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Ivywild School
Ah, remember those glorious fall school days, when Teach' would pour you a nice pint of porter before getting down to the Three Rs. ...

Here’s something you don’t see every day: The fine folks at Bristol Brewing and the Blue Star want to turn a shuttered school into a brew house, bakery and community center.

I got wind of this a while ago and my only complaint is that this project isn’t happening in my neighborhood. We got schools out the wazoo around here — surely we can afford to shut at least one of them down, make a happenin’ hangout out of it. One is an easy two-block stagger along a bike path from Chez Dog.

God knows what passes for education in this country these days lacks a certain value. We might as well get drunk and enjoy the decline and fall.

Meanwhile, early returns indicate that this WordPress blog is at least acceptable to the literati (which is to say that while it remains largely content-free, at least it will load on both Macs and Windoze boxes). More as it develops. Any Linux weenies out there? Leave your thoughts in comments, please.

Videocy

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

http://player.vimeo.com/video/16549877

Quiznos Pro Challenge: One prologue possibility from Patrick O'Grady on Vimeo.

More fun with technology. This time it’s an old Flip Video camera that spits out .avi files, one of which I converted using Evom and then fiddled with in iMovie 9. The video sucks, and my editing is worse (first time out of the chute with iMovie 9), but it’ll give you a blurry, jittery peek at one proposed course for the prologue to the 2011 Quiznos Pro Challenge (my bike for this shoot was a Vespa, and the Flip rode along in a jacket pocket).