“Stick to cycling!” the critics would howl whenever one of my columns or cartoons drifted off the back of racing or retailing and into the gutter of politics.
But cycling and politics are inextricably linked. With the right people at the helm, if you’re lucky, maybe you get peace and prosperity plus bike paths, open space and crosswalk push-buttons that you can reach from the saddle (and that actually work).
Ever negotiated with The Authorities while promoting a bike race? That’s politics. Sought cyclist-friendly safety improvements at a dangerous intersection? That’s politics too. Ditto dealing over e-bike access to — and speed limits on — bike paths, where most of the motors run on carbohydrates and water.
Thus my retort was inevitably something like: “You don’t like my work? Don’t watch. Plenty of other stuff to read around here. Now stand back and let The Big Dog bark.”
Well. That was then, and this is now.
I still feel as though I should be writing more about politics. But damme if it isn’t a long pull into a stiff wind.
No matter what else is on my mind, it’s always there in the background, ticking away. Could be an old analog clock; could be a time bomb. Only way to find out is to have a little look-see.
Last night it was a three-hour (!) YouTube stream of a school-board policy-committee meeting. Tonight it’s the steel-cage death match between Komrade Kamala and Felonious Punk.
As debates go tonight’s action seems likely to be less lofty than in the word’s modern definition (a regulated discussion of a proposition) and more like its two-fisted past (the Anglo-French debatre, from de- + batre, to beat, from the Latin battuere).
Jaysis wept, etc. Who wouldn’t rather write about cycling, given the choice? In another corner of this little shop of horrors I’m 300 words and counting into a post about Herself’s 2006 Soma Double Cross.
But Charlie Pierce had to go and pull my chain. Actually, he was pulling A.O. Furburger’s chain for not letting The New York Times call a fascist a fascist.
Wrote Chazbo:
He is a mentally unraveling out-and-out fascist and he is within a whisker of the White House again. He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it. To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November is the proper, truthful, and, yes, the objective thing to do.
Talk about a long pull into a stiff wind. ’Tis a flick of the elbow Charlie is giving us so. I don’t propose to make every post about politics, but I feel as though it’s only proper to lay off the wheelsucking and stick my snout in the breeze now and then.
Nothing to see here, folks; move along, move along. I’m just fiddling with the controls to get a handle on how many changes to the posting process WordPress slipped past me whilst I was otherwise occupied.
More as I learn it.
Meanwhile, for any of you who have had comments drift off into the ether, fear not. I’ll begin checking the spam folder a couple-three times a day.
The final update from Mad Blog Media circa 2000. | Screen grab from the Wayback Machine.
Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio throws a bonus bone to his Patreon supporters now and then, and the latest was a podcast about his early adventures in bloggery, with one of his old running mates, Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the podcast We the Fifth.
Back in the Day™, when Layne and Welch were building their online presences, they were basically trying to find a new way to do The Work, have fun, and still get paid. They may still be looking. The experience “left both of us semi-internet famous and broke,” quipped Welch.
Me, I was just looking for a publisher-free zone where I could have the occasional public argument with the Voices in my head without frightening anyone’s advertisers.
“That? Oh, that’s just him being him. No, we’ve looked into it, and the Constitution and the ACLU both say he can do that. It’s kind of like the smellies at the off-ramps waving their cardboard signs, except he spells all the words right and he’s not asking for money.”
I’ve lost track of the precise timeline, but the Wayback Machine shows examples of prehistoric TrogloDogS(h)ites dating back to 1998, when I was but a baby blogger cooing and gurgling at the world via satellite Internet from our hillside hideaway in Crusty County.
But there were even earlier versions, long gone off the back and into the broom wagon. I know this because their URLs are in the copyright notices I attached to everything I wrote for the paying customers back then. The hosting outfits were small-timers in central Colorado, most of them no longer with us, and not even the Wayback Machine can find their bones.
I first mentioned a Mad Dog Media website in a 1997 column:
My very own Mad Dog Media Web site lets me slip the leash of conventional publishing and run at large, watering all and sundry with no regard whatsoever for the dictates of good taste or profit margin. Stuff that no one in his or her right mind would publish finds a home here.
—Patrick O’Grady, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” Bicycle Retailer and Industry News
In addition to wanting my own pot to piss in, there was an issue with boredom. The hours can pass very slowly indeed when you’re perched on a rocky hillside 10 miles from a town with no stop lights, more cows than people, and more churches than bars. I was traveling less than I had been when Herself and I did our first tour of Bibleburg in the early Nineties. Back then I’d dash off to Boulder to help VeloNews and Inside Triathlon with production, or venture further afield to cover races, trade shows, whatever. And the races were a lot closer when we lived on the Front Strange. Moving to Crusty County added about 150 miles to every round trip, so I made fewer of them.
Finally, the Crusty County cycling community was basically me, myself, and I. The Voices needed more of an audience than that.
So, yeah: Blogging. My toolkit included (in addition to the attitude and analog-publication experience): PageSpinner, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, and Fetch; a series of analog and early digital cameras from Pentax, Canon, Sony and Epson; and Macs of various shapes and sizes, among them one of the ill-considered MacClones, a Power Computing PowerBase 200 that I described as “possessed by devils,” because it was.
I taught myself some extremely basic HTML and bounced the blog around those bush-league ISPs before killing off that model in February 2000 (bloggery from the remainder of that year and all of 2001 has gone walkabout); sampled just about every free prefab blogging package available; even tried a self-hosted WordPress build for a while. Then you lot decided you wanted to be able to comment on posts, and on comments, and on comments about the comments, and the simplest way to get all that was to hand the whole shebang over to WordPress.com.
So here we are.
It’s been a fair amount of labor just to run my mouth to no particular purpose for 26 years. But unlike a lot of other refugees from straight journalism, I never thought about trying to make it pay, not really. That would’ve added a whole new degree of difficulty: charging a membership fee; selling advertising; signing up with (and giving a cut to) Patreon, Medium, or Substack; doing some tip-jar beggary like Charles Pelkey and I did for Live Update Guy; and relentlessly self-promoting on social media (“Hey, lookit me, lookit me, LOOKIT ME!!!”).
Anyway, I was already earning something resembling a living by acting the fool for VeloNews, BRAIN, Adventure Cyclist, and anyone else who could stand the gaff and write a check that wouldn’t bounce. And some days that could really feel like work. I felt that if I started to charge admission to the blog, it would turn into a job, and I already knew how that sort of thing ended. Badly.
I may not get paid for this, but I derive other benefits from the work. It keeps me engaged with the world, however distasteful that may be at times. Some people like it, and even say so, in public. And it keeps the rust off this old pen that some folks think is mightier than the sword, possibly because they’ve never fallen afoul of an angry dude with a sword.
At times blogging feels like a training ride on the bike, taking photos that never make it out of the iPhone, or thumb-fingering my way around some John Prine tune on the guitar. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, or anywhere else? Practice, practice, practice.
I’ve been practicing bloggery for a quarter-century now. Who knows? One of these years I might just get it right.
If it’s rolling downhill, why, this must be the valley.
The weather wizards have been spot on lately. When they say “a quarter inch of rain,” they do not lie.
In fact, if anything they seem to be hedging their bets a bit, because our widget reports we got something like .39 inch overnight. And it’s still raining.
I will never be smart. But at least I was not stupid yesterday when I decided to go for my first bike ride in 10 days instead of settling for another plodding hike or p’raps daring to risk a short jog.
As I said, the wizards have been batting a thou’ lately, and when yesterday started looking like my only option to ride without mudguards and rain kit for the foreseeable future, I got right after it.
Before the Snotlocker Surprise paid me a visit I’d been planning to check out some upgrades I and the Two Wheel Drive boyos had made to my old Soma Double Cross. After replacing its chain, chainrings, and cassette while trying (and failing) to accurately diagnose and resolve an annoying skipping issue that occurred under load, I finally discovered the actual cause, which was that its ancient Dura-Ace freehub had gone to its ancestors.
Resurrecting the freehub was beyond my limited skillset, and even the pros at TWD shook their heads in disbelief, as though I’d dragged in a pennyfarthing and asked whether they stocked a 53-inch tubeless-ready carbon disc wheel.
While it was possible that some eBay velo-troll might be squatting on a stash of eight-speed D-A hubs, they mused, it might be simpler (and quicker) to rebuild Captain Retro’s wheel with something, uh, newer? Given the choice between cheap and handsome I went with the latter, a stylish Velo-Orange, which goes nicely with the other shiny bits.
What the hell, it’s my second-oldest wheelset, an Excel Sports Cirrus with Mavic Open Pro rims and DT spokes, and it’s been a faithful companion. So we gave it a new heart and it ticked along nicely for a gentle hour in yesterday’s dwindling sunshine.
Speaking of shiny new bits, you may notice that I pulled the ol’ presto-change-o on the blog this morning. I took down the custom header, a scenic photo with the “Mad Dog Media” moniker, and replaced it with a smaller logo and a text header, which makes it possible for me to add a small additional overlay of snark without having to deploy any fancy-schmancy photo-editing software.
I launched the new theme and the Block Editor (curse its name, yes) because like any good test pilot (and many more bad ones) I got tired of kicking the tires and decided to light the fires.
I expect we will find a few bugs in the bird as we tumble along, but here’s hoping we wind up with the cockpit on top and the wheels on the bottom.
Mad Blog Media 