Category: Dollars and nonsense

The eagle has landed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

The snowman lives. And the traditional O’Grady-family Christmas flick — Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” — is queued up for viewing just as soon as a certain wine-sipping hash-slinger finishes his pre-holiday cookery.

The posole is done, as are the Anasazi beans with chipotle chile and the pico de gallo, and the green-chile sauce is on deck. That leaves only the chicken breast to cook and shred, the corn tortillas to fry, the cheese to grate and the enchiladas to assemble and cook. Oh, yeah, and the potatoes to dice, toss with Chimayo red chile and chopped onion, and roast. And jeez, the chicken quesadillas. Can’t forget the appetizers.

Back in the kitchen. There’s chicken to cook and shred. If I wait to do the green chile until tomorrow, the house will smell like Santa Fe, but without all the silver and turquoise. Happy holidays to you and yours from the Zen Druid, who hugs the tree, even though he knows that it is an illusion.

Didja get any onya?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

The Decider has finally turned the money hose on Detroit, and don’t I wish I were standing nearby with a bucket. One of my paychecks has mysteriously gone walkabout again and Visa would like nothing better than to get me by the plums with a downhill pull.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the holiday season, there’s a fresh rant up at VeloNews.com. No charge. Think of it as my little gift to you this Zappadan.

Interesting concept, eh? I get paid (or don’t, as the case may be) to dash off my little online japes. The editors get paid to read and post it. And the publisher has to write the check (or not). But you, you lucky devils — you get off scot-free. Except for having to notice all those bloody ads for this and that in your peripheral vision, which does tax the eyeballs, does it not?

Not only is my stuff free to you, it’s easily accessible. Couple clicks of the mouse and there I am in all my pointless, content-free glory. It’s a pretty specialized delivery system, when you think about it. If all you care about is reading me, or Lennard Zinn, or Bob Mionske, you don’t have to thumb through a wad of other stuff to get to us. Click, click and off you go.

(More on this later. Herself is screeching that I look like a coconut and am in dire need of a haircut.)

OK, I’m freshly shaven and back to deep thought. I click the mouse for my national and international news, coverage of fringe sports like cycling, leftist political commentary and expert advice I can use to make my life richer (investment advice, recipes from elite chefs, and so on). I know where to go and how to get there.

I would like to read local news, too, and plenty of it, without having to wade through a wad of other stuff that is more easily available online: the aforementioned national and international news; pointless coverage of mainstream professional sports already covered to excess by TV; and the endless smelly pile of treacly features keyed to days of the week (Food, Life, Money, et al). But I can’t get local and regional news — not a lot of it, anyway, and certainly not reliably — with a click of the mouse.

If the Gazette were to do without all the trappings that defined the Newspaper v1.0 and become a strictly local news source, I might subscribe again. But if it keeps trying to be all things to all people, I’ll continue to withhold my pennies and watch it die a slow, lingering death.

Late update: Incidentally, if this post seems even more scatter-brained than usual, it may be because the cats were dancing on my head at 4 a.m. and set me to thinking creakily about some of the excellent comments in an earlier post.

Mmm, stimulus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

OK, who feels economically stimulated? Raise your hands, please. Eeeyeww, put ’em back in your laps, you filthy bastards, they’re all sticky.

The notion of going further into debt — credit cards, auto loans, what have you — leaves me feeling fiscally flaccid, frankly. I just don’t think I can get it up for buying a bunch of crap, no matter how shiny it is, if it means that in six months when VeloNews gets sold to Condé Nasty and Bicycle Retailer becomes a quarterly online newsletter some repo’ man name of Guido is gonna kick in the door of my refrigerator box down by Fountain Creek and take it all back.

Maybe I can get a job running off thousand-dollar bills at the Denver Mint. That seems to be where all the action is these days:

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

Oh, goody. Make that a bicycle box down by Shook’s Run.

Meanwhile, my buddy Matt reminds me that the bailout so far amounts to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, according to Bloomberg. That’s enough money to pay off half the mortgages in the country, conduct nine times the warfare we’ve already laid on Iraq and Afghanistan, and build a gold-plated escalator to the International Space Station.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it sounds about as sensible as propping up an elite class of paper-hangers so they can hose us all over again once we dummy up and resume buying shit on credit.

But enough about our crumbling economy. We’ve got a real crisis right here — cops rousting body Nazis from Santa Monica’s medians. Oh, the humanity.

Couldn’t these guys have carpooled?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

If you’re bound for Congress to sing the poverty blues, it helps if you’re not traveling by multimillion-dollar corporate jet. Good God. No wonder the U.S. auto industry has the collective net worth of a roach coach in East LA. Thanks and a wink through the aviator goggles to Steve Benen at Political Animal.

The Mad Dog Forester, with Steelman attached, in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Ariz.
The Mad Dog Forester, with Steelman attached, in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Ariz.

Late update: I’m no economist, as Herself will be only too happy to confirm. I don’t even play one on TV. But I’m having a hard time feeling any sympathy for the Big Three automakers, who seem likely to ride their private jets back to Motor City without fat wads of the taxpayers’ cash tucked neatly away in their vest pockets.

I’ve owned exactly two American-made cars — a ’64 Chevy Biscayne, which I loved, right up to point at which I drove it into a train, and a 1996 Ford F-150, which proved so evil a vehicle that an exasperated mechanic told me, “Mr. O’Grady, you don’t need a mechanic, you need an exorcist.”

Something happened in the three decades between Biscayne and Beelzebub, and it wasn’t good. That’s why Herself drives a 2002 Subaru Outback and I drive an ’05 Subaru Forester. My ’83 Toyota 4WD is still functional, but in need of repair, which it will not get anytime soon. Even so, I’d rather push it than drive that piece-of-shit Ford.

Sure, if one, two or all three of Motor City’s titans collapse, a lot of people will be going ass-first into the blades. But they’ll have plenty of company. My own line of work, journalism, is shedding workers like a dead dog sheds fleas, and for the same reason — the folks running the show have been too busy cashing checks to come to terms with a changing world. I don’t see anyone trying to money-whip us back to solvency.