Category: Comrades

In which various turkeys come home to roost

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
No, I haven’t started cooking yet. But this is what it should look like.

Must be Thanksgiving or something.

Many a comrade has been checking in with Your Humble Narrator. There’s Charles Pelkey, who is now (a) a retired shyster and (2) with wife Diana, an empty nester; their kids, Philip and Annika, have fled Wyoming for the libtard swamps of Oregon. And Matt Wiebe, the renowned former tech editor, university-professor emeritus, and boat-breaking salmon fisherman, whose offspring are scattered far and wide; at least two of them, Willie and Esti, will be spending the holiday in Fanta Se with their ould fella and mom Lori.

Also billing in were Chris Coursey and Merrill Oliver, two of my oldest bros (oy, are they ever old). Especially Chris, a.k.a. The Supervisor, who yesterday in the Sonoma Whine Country marked the latest in a long string of birthdays. I expect he gummed down a little strawberry Jell-O with some chocolate frosting on top, wet himself, and fell asleep in the puddle as Merrill took a few snaps for posterity and/or The New York Times (“Notorious Santa Rosa Supervisor Drunk On Job (Again)”).

Actually, Chris, Merrill, and a few thousand of their closest friends plan a “birthday units” ride on Friday. Could be miles, could be millimeters. More as I hear it.

Bike-industry refugee Tim Campen chimed in from South Carolina with a few piquant observations about the good times in Gaza. He and wife Jill recently welcomed their Blue Zoomie son Ellis home after a tour in Saudi Arabia, and they must be relieved to have him back in the Land of The Big BX.

And Hal Walter filed a dispatch from Weirdcliffe, where some psycho was exercising his Second Amendment and Castle Doctrine rights just a few miles as the crow flies from our old hillside fortress off Brush Hollow Road.

Hal was trying to track developments as he, Mary, and Harrison prepared for their traditional Thanksgiving trip to Taos, where other people will do the cooking and washing up for a small (well, maybe not so small) consideration.

Alas, while there is said to be a “newspaper war” raging in Weirdcliffe, neither “newspaper” was engaging with the story, and Hal and his neighbors were getting most of their “information” from Facebutt.

We spent a little time nosing around on the Innertubes, and learned that shortly after being spotted in Salida the suspect was found to be hightailing it through — wait for it — New Mexico.

With three in the bag and one in the hospital I can only assume our man felt he was ready to step up from the farm club to The Show, where middle-schoolers routinely cap their classmates over a bit of the old side-eye.

But our Juan Laws said nope, thanks all the same, we got all the local talent we can handle. And they took him into custody just outside The Duck! City. So near, and yet, so far. Will he have to pay $50 and pick up the garbage? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the gendarmes have not popped round to invite me to assist them with their inquiries. I met a few psychos during our stint in Weirdcliffe but this dude wasn’t one of them. In my day property disputes were generally restricted to questions like: “Shit, was this your beer? Sorry, thought it was mine. Get another’n from the cooler. Whaddaya mean we’re out?”

Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.

Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.

It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.

Screenwriters?

Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.

Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.

And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:

Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.

“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Marching forward, looking backward

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Calm down, ye amadáin, I’ve not a drop taken: That’s a Guinness 0 so.

Birthdays. Some of us get overserved, others get 86’d with the cork barely out of the bottle.

Whoever’s in charge of this party seems a bit random. Can’t tell the top shelf from the well, the class from the dross. Proper ladies and gents given the shove while the most appalling tossers have the run o’ the place.

Take me, if you can bear to. Here I sit, roaring up on an age at which I had fully expected to have been stone dead for at least 39 years. Upended many an office pool I did.

“Who picked 69? 69? Well, doesn’t matter, because the bugger is still alive!”

Turn your radio on.

Meanwhile, there’s many an empty stool in this shabby shebeen. Where’d everybody go? They were all here just a minute ago. …

Herself is back east with family and friends to raise a belated parting glass to a lifelong friend carried off by COVID last fall.

I’m right here, having charge of the cat. But recently I spoke with one of my old pals, the former Live Update Guy Charles Pelkey, who has taken a few sucker punches since a cancer diagnosis a dozen years ago but is still on his feet in Laramie, all bouncers be damned.

It may be my birthday that’s on tap come Monday, but I’d buy Charles a round to celebrate his most recent lap around the sun, may it not be his last. Lucky for me and my 401(k) I don’t drink anymore; I don’t think he does, either. ’Tis unknown the amount of money our younger selves could piss away in a proper pub.

At the publisher’s expense, of course.

But that’s neither here nor there.

And anyway, it’s the thought that counts.

So belly up to the bar — unbeknownst to the landlord, who is manhandling another tray of industrial lager to the hoops-watching gobshites glued to the TV in the back of the pub, we’re uncorking an 18-year-old, double-cask, single-malt episode of — yes, yes, yes —  Radio Free Dogpatch. And sláinte to yis.

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: There was an inordinate amount of racket in and around El Rancho Pendejo this week, but after a series of false starts I was finally able to nail something down using my trusty Shure SM58 mic and the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Music and sound effects are courtesy of Zapsplat, Freesound, and Your Humble Narrator.

A Charles Pelkey live update

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

The GoFundMe that David Stanley set up to help our old pal Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey is ticking along nicely, which is more than I can say for the “classic” LUG video up above.

As of 2 p.m. Dog time the fund was at $24,410 — a tip jar that we never could’ve imagined when we were begging for nickels to run Live Update Guy. A thousand thank-yous to everyone who has contributed and/or spread the word about the fundraiser.

Now, give a listen to another old pal, Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Jenks, who interviewed David for the most recent episode of her long-running podcast.* You’ll get a better idea of how all this good fellowship came about.

If you haven’t joined the party, here’s a link to CP’s GoFundMe page.

* One minor correction: The cartoon of Charles that accompanies the GoFundMe news Diane and I spread around is not by Your Humble Narrator. It’s by David Brinton, a.k.a. Brintoni, who did such great work illustrating “At the Back” in VeloNews while I was up front pissing on people’s shoes.®

Son of a beach

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
“We are not amused.”

Miss Mia Sopaipilla is doing her Queen Victoria impression again, so you know it’s not going to be sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ today in The Duck! City.

Happily, it was sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ the past couple of days, so I was able to get out and about on a two-wheeler, in this case the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff.

My man Chris Coursey, a beach bum and journo who rose from his humble origins to become Santa Rosa’s mayor and then a Sonoma County supervisor, probably longs for the days when he had to drive to the California coast to see a few gajillion tons of water in motion.

Friday and Saturday marked my first off-road rides of 2023, and they were a nice change from running, which I will probably return to today, if I can pull myself together in time to beat the rain to the punch.

Yes, the wizards are predicting rain, and even a small chance of snow, so I guess we’re getting a little spillover from the atmospheric rivers that have been drenching the West Coast.

I’ve never had to contend with weather like that, and I hope to keep that lucky streak unbroken. It makes the occasional four-foot Colorado snowstorm look like a day at the beach with a cold sixer and a hot girl.