What’s for breakfast?

October 21, 2025October 21, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

I shouldn’t do any deep reading on a single cup of joe at stupid-thirty on a Tuesday.

Then again, maybe I should do it more often. I might be inspired to compose a new Zen text: “Empty Stomach, Empty Mind.”

If artificial intelligence hasn’t already beaten me to it.

Thus we arrive via the usual scenic route at the first item that got my attention this morning: “A Tool That Crushes Creativity,” by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who fears that generative A.I. slop, once a toxic byproduct of our latest technological Great Leap Forward, has become the shit sandwich du jour.

The second, also from The Atlantic, was “What the Founders Would Say Now,” Fintan O’Toole’s speculation about how the deep thinkers who got our national party started might be surprised that the Republic — as stove-up, surly, and senile as we perceive it to be today — survives at all.

That first one may have been more depressing than the second. The Republic has been in a state of collapse ever since I first took note of it. Maybe even longer. America’s very own Leaning Tower, possibly of pizza, almost certainly from Domino’s. We knew it was wrong, but we ate it anyway.

But creativity — an appeal to hearts and minds with words, sounds, and images — freed me to sing for my supper, the tab paid by all the poor suckers who actually had to work for a living. And now Warzel says that, like made-in-China Marxists, my tools have risen up against me.

Writes Warzel:

The people selling these tools are doing so with a powerful narrative: Generative AI supposedly supercharges all that it touches, democratizing creativity, eliminating friction, increasing productivity, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. … [But] the loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. … It is how we make meaning and move through the world.

I have not consciously employed any form of A.I. as I move through the world, making meaning. If I sniff its spoor in an online search, I tiptoe gingerly around it, trying not to get any on my shoes. WordPress offers a “Generate with A.I.” option when inserting images in a post, but I mostly generate my own images.

Or do I?

I’ve been a scribbler for as long as I can remember, and probably longer. Created my images in crayon on Big Chief tablets; in pencil, pen and ink on Bristol board, augmented with Zip-A-Tone; using Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s Preview; whatever was handy and could enhance my limited skillset.

“Enhance,” you say? Yup. The legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant tipped me to the Zip-A-Tone crosshatching shortcut when I interviewed him in the late Seventies for the Gazette. And I discovered the value of Photoshop a couple decades later when the bicycle magazines I worked for decided they wanted my cartoons in digital form, and in color, too.

I was no artist, as you probably already know. I tried using colored pencils and pens after first penciling an initial sketch and then inking it in. But when I fucked up — as I did, frequently — I had to start over from scratch, penciling and then inking and finally risking everything yet again on the whim of a Prismacolor Premier or Sharpie in my pig-ig’n’ant fingers. Digitizing the original black-and-white ’toons and coloring them in Photoshop let me magically undo what I had done and keep on keepin’ on.

It was so much easier. Frictionless, you might say.

I’ve been writing nearly as long, since George Gladney at the Colorado Springs Sun suggested I start keeping a journal back in 1974. Started with a Bic pen and a Vernon Royal composition book, then shifted to manual typewriter when I became a sure’nough reporter like Gladney, and finally went digital when the newspapers did.

If spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and autocorrection had been available I might have used them, but back then we had angry editors for that sort of thing, and it was either learn or leave. I had bills to pay, so I learned. When I became an angry editor myself word-processing software had made everyone a writer, or so they thought. The software processed their words and I processed what the software shat out.

And yet some people wondered why I was angry.

Well, soon I had company.

I was a terrible photographer and filmmaker when cameras still used film. I had something of an eye — woefully uneducated, in need of vision correction, yet basically operational — but there were so many aspects of the craft to learn if I really wanted to make the magic happen.

Happily for me — and unhappily for pro shooters — digital cameras came along, followed by phone cameras. And before you could say “Ansel Adams” three times fast even I could make an image for a blog post on the cookie-cutter, dot-com version of WordPress (shout-out to the folks at Automattic), with a little help (OK, sometimes a lot) from software (Photoshop early on, and now Apple’s Preview).

I never thought I was a photographer, but plenty of other people thought they were, including one middle-management type who emailed a lame phone-camera snap of a sprint and expected us to use that as “art” for an online race report.

Video got a whole lot easier about the same time, for the same reasons, and I actually made a little money off that, using GoPros and iMovie to assemble bike-review shorts for Adventure Cyclist. Occasionally, and strictly for laughs, I called myself Quentin Ferrentino (h/t to the Grimy Handshake). Meanwhile, podcasting let me walk a few squeaky klicks in the Firesign Theatre’s inflatable clown shoes, with an assist from Zoom, GarageBand, Auphonic, and Libsyn.

So am I a photographer? A moviemaker? A spoken-word artist? Is the driver a car?

The only legit titles I can claim are writer and cartoonist, I think. I can write or draw with a Bic pen on a blank sheet of paper and then staple that shit to a telephone pole if I want to. Less effort than Ben Franklin put into his Pennsylvania Gazette. Nothing between me and you but a little time and sweat equity.

A.I. won’t help me make it, and Google probably won’t help you find it.

But at least we’d know we made the effort while we wait to see whether these new tools become trusted advisers instead of questionable servants — or worse, malevolent masters. That teetering Republic ain’t gonna prop itself up.

The turn of the screw

September 22, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

“When I said ‘I’ll take it black,’ I didn’t mean *this* black. …”

Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?

Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.

Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.

Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.

“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”

Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.

“Assume the position!”

We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.

Falling back

November 5, 2023November 5, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

The low end of the speed spectrum, as George Carlin said.

Welcome to “standard” time.

It’s the time of year when I start thinking of bedtime as a delivery system to that first cup of coffee in the morning.

This is also the time of year when Miss Mia Sopaipilla starts yowling outside the bedroom door at stupid-thirty, singing me out of the bed so she can get into it. Miss Mia doesn’t know from clocks, daylight saving or standard time. And she wouldn’t care if she did.

“Sounds like a personal problem to me,” she’d say. “Now get out of my bed.”

On Sundays I strip the bed of sheets and pillowcases for washing. This is easier said than done with a cat in the middle of things.

See, once the brisk fall mornings arrive Miss Mia insists on a daily sojourn in the Winter Palace — the comforter folded over like the corn tortilla in a quesadilla, with Miss Mia as the filling — and preparing it for occupancy is one of my chores as cat wrangler, second shift. It takes priority over everything else, even that first cup of coffee.

Ordinarily, no problem. Unless it’s fall-back Sunday, the bed needs stripping, and suddenly it’s full of cat.

At this point your hardcore java junkie, nonplussed by a clock that displays a time of day inconsistent with a dopamine-serotonin-caffeine mixture optimized for basic functionality, might spiral into a twitching, hissing fit, not unlike a cat abruptly evicted from a warm bed on a chilly morning.

Not so Your Humble Narrator. I am, after all, a Professional Dope Fiend who has learned through bitter and painful experience to avoid scenes in the pale gloom of morning, before the first fix of the day. One must swiftly overcome all obstacles between one’s habit and its solution without invoking some vile keening that draws the lazy eye of the constables.

Happily, one of the voices in my head is a prestidigitator, The Amazing Doggini, a wizard of legerdemain with the supple fingers of a Marseilles pickpocket and the desperate focus of a Hell’s Kitchen smackhead.

You’ve seen a magician whisk a tablecloth from underneath a full dinner setting for four without a single crack in the crockery? Stripping a bed of its sheets while a cat naps under the comforter requires similar dexterity, but less velocity.

Also, patience. If at any point the purring stops you risk acquiring an enraged cat attached via all five pointy bits to some tender part of your anatomy, like one of the face-huggers in “Alien.”

Fortunately, this wasn’t The Amazing Doggini’s first rodeo. In a previous life he jerked a throw rug out from under the Hound of the Baskervilles and escaped unmarked to tell the tale. Thus the sheets slid slowly from beneath Miss Mia and into the washing machine.

And I finally got to have my cup of coffee. I needed it, too. Because I still had a litter box to clean out. The Amazing Doggini doesn’t do litter boxes.

No!vember

November 2, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Here it is November, from the Old Norse for “I’m freezing my nuts off, pass the akvavit.”

Sacred to Capilene, god of baselayers, November is the month in which one expends more time and energy unearthing long-buried sport-specific garments than actually engaging in the sport to which they are specific.

It’s a triathlon of sorts, and sportswear is not required for the first leg: finding the toilet in the dark.

“Whoops, nope, that’s not it. …”

Next leg: Not scaring the cat. This means putting on some clothes before heading to the kitchen to make coffee, because nobody, not even a cat, wants to see some wrinkly sack of snot, spasms, and bad ideas hobbling around in the dark with his leaky bidness hanging out, especially if he just peed in the bathroom trash can.

“Hm. Wool socks don’t slide smoove like butta through the old polyester jogging pants, do they? More like trying to shove overcooked spaghetti through shifter-cable housing. Shit, forgot underwear. (Do the Dance of the Sugar Plum Geezers, trying to pull the pants off over the wool socks, after which it’s time to pee again, this time in the toilet.) Goddamnit, did the little woman eBay all my long-sleeved pullovers? Nope, here they are, underneath the cat.”

And finally, after coffee, toast, and oatmeal: “The hell are my leg warmers? It’s too cold for knee warmers, but not cold enough for tights, and I can’t find those either. The wool socks stay on, if only because once I’m kitted up with winter bibs, leg warmers, and three long-sleeved jerseys I can’t bend over.”

This, of course, is when the toilet sings its siren song once again, with a tad more urgency. Flailing transpires. Superman never got out of a Clark Kent suit so fast. If this were an Olympic event I’d be on a Wheaties box for sure.

Oh, well. “Drit skjer (Shit happens)”, as the Vikings say. Pass the akvavit.

Java jive

July 17, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

No matter how hot it gets — and it’s getting plenty hot! — I refuse to surrender my two cups of steaming black coffee in the morning.

Remember the old Folger’s jingle? “The best part of wakin’ up,” and so on? Well, the best part of waking up is not “Folger’s in your cup” — it’s waking up, because this means you didn’t snuff it during the night, which in turn means you can now get out of bed and make yourself a proper cup of actual coffee.

I’m not a coffee Nazi, but at home — and whenever possible on the road — I have my rituals.

I start with Santa Fe’s Aroma Coffee, roughly a 60-40 mix of their Blacklightning and French Roast beans, hand-ground either that morning or the night before. I used to rely upon an ancient Braun espresso maker that I’ve dragged all over Creation, but finally decided that an AeroPress and an OXO electric pour-over kettle were a whole lot less likely to explode on me before achieving coffee. I’m not afraid to die unless it happens before coffee.

If I’m car camping, I grind my beans before leaving El Rancho Pendejo and use an elderly Coleman two-burner and a battered blue-enamel coffee pot to boil water for the AeroPress.

Camping camping? Downsize the cooking gear to a Soto OD-1R stove, a Snow Peak titanium pot, and an AeroPress Go.

And if I’m lording it in some motel … goddamn it, I hate to admit this, but if there’s a Starbuck’s within walking distance I’m likely to just stagger over there and slam a couple Americanos. If I moteled it more often I’d acquire some small electric kettle and do it up right.

Because the second-best part of waking up is that first cup of coffee.