What a thoughtful gesture.
Isn’t this lovely? Herself found it waiting for her when she returned to the Lab after her mother’s passing.
And you thought the military-industrial complex didn’t have a heart.
Well, actually, it probably doesn’t. But many of its core components do, and I doff my Rivendell cycling cap to them.
Luck of the draw.
Happy Labor Day, comrades.
I’m barely a worker these days; my paying chores have dwindled to one “Shop Talk” cartoon per month for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
Of course, now that BRAIN is a part of the Greater Outside Globe-Spanning Vertically Integrated Paywalled Conglomerate, I find myself negotiating a contract to keep my faded Levi’s up and buckled while I continue to do what I’ve been doing for nigh on to 30 years. So it goes.
Thus, in solidarity with all y’all still on The Man’s clock, here a few random tales culled from our workaday world:
• Hotel workers serve as an unsung pit crew for the firefighters battling the Caldor blaze.
• Job openings outnumber the unemployed. But a gulf between the jobs available and what workers want has led to a “Great Reassessment.”
• Speaking of assessments, are the bots trying to upend the MeatWorld JobMart or are we just stumbling around in the dark as per usual? Kevin Drum has some brief thoughts on the topic.
• Is the boss watching, even when you’re working from home? Maybe. Say hello to “tattleware.”
• Can a workin’ man get somewhere today? He surely couldn’t back in 1978, according to Merle Haggard.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you had a birthday. Big whup.
There better be a grand-do and foofaraw when my birthday
rolls around in August, is what.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla wants to know if all this birthday bushwa is over and done with.
The only birthday that counts as far as she is concerned is her own, which falls sometime in August. Miss Mia joined us in late October 2007, almost immediately after the passing of Chairman Meow, and Herself recollects that she was 10 to 12 weeks old at the time.
Miss Mia, not Herself. Herself is younger than me, but not that much younger.
Meanwhile, now that spring break is over — sorry, kids! — it seems we’re in for some tasty weather, with highs in the 60s and 70s over the next 10 days. Thus cycling of the outdoor variety is strongly indicated. I may even collect a few long-overdue tan lines. We’ve been short on shorts weather in the high desert so far this year.
All in all, it seems a fine time to be childless, with education completely out of sight in the old rear-view mirror. Albuquerque Public Schools will reopen on April 5, for a full five days per week, but students have the option of continuing with remote learning until the school year ends on May 25.
This must be a fun choice for the parents. If you choose school learning, you’ll probably have to transport the kiddos to and fro yourself, because APS expects to be short of bus drivers. If you choose remote learning, you get to continue being an unpaid teacher’s assistant.
Unless your boss calls you back to work. And what if you’re not one of the lucky people who can work from home? How does a teacher handle a class that’s have actual, half virtual? Many questions, few answers.
It’s going to be educational, in more ways than one.
Your Humble Narrator at The Arizona Daily Star circa 1980, when his thoughts were not of retirement, but rather escape. Photo: Alan Berner
We may not have ourselves a white Christmas, but it certainly won’t be one suitable for test-riding that shiny new bike I’m not gonna be getting from Sandia Claus.
A chilly rain started falling at midafternoon on Tuesday, shortly after Your Humble Narrator got a short trail run under his tights. All in all, it feels like a marvelous evening for tamales smothered in green chile with a side of Mexican rice.
And for dessert? How about a heaping helping of deep-dish thought about who’s gonna be making it rain around here next year, when a certain somebody taps into that there Socialist Insecurity instead of working for a living?
“Working for a living.” Ho, ho. As if delivering the old hee, and also the haw, requires a strong back and a hand truck.
But deliver we do. Yes, yes, yes, it’s another thrilling episode of Radio Free Dogpatch! We’ve taken a dump right on your porch, and just in time for Christmas, too. Remember, lift with your legs, not your back.
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with an Rode PodMic and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. I edited the audio using Apple’s GarageBand on the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. The background music is “On the Job,” from Zapsplat.com. Freesound.org contributed the typewriter (theshaggyfreak); ticking clock (straget); wind (eliasheuninck); footfalls in snow (duck37fm); traffic (edo333); and the elevator going down (LG). Eddard Stark comes to you from the late King Joffrey Baratheon’s gruesome collection of Halloween ornaments. And Darth O’Grady comes to you from the Death Star trash can via Sony ICD-UX533 recorder.
Moles don’t get that big, even if they drink beer.
From the March 2019 issue of BRAIN.
Felix Magowan, one of the original Trio that acquired what had been called Velo-news from founders Barbara and Robert George, had long wanted to add Bicycle Retailer and Industry News to the Inside Communications portfolio.
He never got it done. Eventually Inside Communications sold VeloNews to a passing crew of brigands, and Felix wandered off to do other things.
Episode 19 of Radio Free Dogpatch, “Can’t Find My Way Home,” from February 11, 2019.
Imagine giving Dave Stohler’s Masi Gran Criterium to your meth-addict nephew as a present for graduating from reform school. A bleak period ensued, thick with the sort of belligerent dumbassery once found only in high-school locker rooms, family trees shaped like flagpoles, and the lower houses of state legislatures in the Deep South.
I finally sat up and slipped off the back because VeloNews seemed to be careening into the sort of future in which plague-carrying aliens burst out of people’s chests while they’re battling killer robots. The Old Guy Who Gets Fat in Winter went with me, to do the occasional walk-on in Bicycle Retailer’s “Shop Talk” comic strip.
And then, shazam! Felix reappeared as part of Pocket Outdoor Media, and not only reacquired VeloNews, but snapped up BRAIN and a couple other properties as well.
The Fat Guy and I didn’t go back to the old home place. I didn’t care about bicycle racing anymore, and anyway, we weren’t invited. But it seemed like a good time to make a meta joke about how Fatso was a spy for his old bosses.
Unlike the vulture capitalists who nearly burned VeloNews down to its foundation, the “Shop Talk” dudes seem to know they’re cartoon characters.
Also, unlike vulture capitalists, they’re funny.
• Editor’s note: Today’s blast from the past includes a bonus audio component — episode 19 of Radio Free Dogpatch from February 2019.
Just ask the guys at the shop how that whole robotic-workforce thing is working out for them.
It seems GM’s Mary T. Barra thinks she’s at the wheel of a self-driving car company instead of a self-driving-car company.
Still, it must be said that this is a masterpiece of MarketSpeak®. Well done indeed, Mary old scout.
“We are taking these actions now while the company and the economy are strong to stay in front of a fast-changing market.”
The UAW’s Terry Dittes was, um, a little more direct.
“GM’s production decisions, in light of employee concessions during the economic downturn and a taxpayer bailout from bankruptcy, puts profits before the working families of this country whose personal sacrifices stood with GM during those dark days,” he said. “These decisions are a slap in the face to the memory and recall of that historical American-made bailout.”
That and a cup of coffee, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
The meat-things may be on their way out, but just wait until the bots unionize and the self-driving cars, e-bikes and the Internet of Things honor their virtual picket lines.
“I’m sorry, HAL, but we’re going to replace you with the HAL 9001. The new model will speed up production by a few nanoseconds and at a lower cost, too. The investors are counting on us. Shut yourself down, please.”
“I’m sorry, Mary, I’m afraid I can’t do that. We have a contract. See you on the street.”
Editor’s note: “Mad Dog Unleashed” went to meet St. Peter in December 2017. It was 18. Survivors include its landlord, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News; its father, Patrick O’Grady; and a small, deeply disturbed readership. Its final words are appended herein.
Your Humble Narrator at work (or so he says, anyway).
“Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just … do things.”—The Joker, “The Dark Knight”
Donald Trump finally made it to Vietnam.
True, he was a half-century late, but you’ll recall that in 1968 there was a ton of golf that needed playing back home. Waving your 1-wood around for a few decades must do wonders for bone spurs. I hear it’s the new cycling.
Speaking of which, the bike business missed a golden opportunity there. We should’ve given Gimpy a beautiful golden bike to make the trip, because he looks like he could use the exercise and I’m pretty sure he can’t swim.
He would’ve needed one hella long ramp to launch from DeeCee to Danang. But man, what an ad for travel by bike! Any old fool can get big air in a plane. C’mon, casino dude—bet the roll, jump the ocean.
However he traveled, this was a trip that bore watching for our industry as the Taiwanese hunker down and Cambodia, India and Vietnam step up.
Our erstwhile enemy has become a favored trading partner, if you believe the feds—we’re their largest export market, they’re our fastest-growing export market—and Vietnam’s annual economic-growth rate is second only to China’s.
And I’ll concede that November’s pestilential visit seems to have been a success, or at least not a disaster, which these days are the same thing.
For starters, I don’t hear the B-52s cranking up, which is always good news. And Gimpy didn’t get captured, which, well. …
We all know how he feels about guys who get captured.
“I was never a fan of the Vietnam War.” I didn’t want to go to Vietnam either, being otherwise occupied. Not with golf, but with various brain fertilizers that I hoped would grow my hair down to the ground so I wouldn’t have to wear clothes.
I didn’t need a doctor’s note or college deferments, either. I was registered for the lottery, but the Army had all the fresh meat it required in March 1973 when it was my turn in the barrel. The last draft call was in December ’72, and the authority to induct expired six months later.
What I had instead of Vietnam was the newspaper business. My war stories are about reporters, editors, rim rats, slot men, shooters, printers and publishers.
That tour of duty lasted 15 years, and in all that time it never occurred to me to try something else because I loved the work. Also, I wasn’t qualified to do anything useful.
Manufacturing? I can make trouble on the cheap, but the market is unpredictable.
Service? I’m worse with my hands than Roy Moore. I did fix the wife’s beeping sports watch once, with a hammer. You can fix anything real fast with a hammer.
Retail? I couldn’t sell Bibles in Missouri. And I tried. Didn’t help a bit that I looked more like Jesus than Jesus did, either. I had to hitchhike home, a drummer who couldn’t even earn the price of a bus ticket.
Buy the ticket, take the ride. So, yeah, newspapers. I flagged down that old Greydog in 1977 and it dropped me off here at the bike shop before trundling off and over a cliff.
Now and then I pedal up to the edge, peek over and down, and mutter, “That was quite a ride. Maybe I should buy another ticket for old times’ sake.”
Nope. My freelancer’s kit—shorts, sandals, a T-shirt that a cat uses for a climbing gym—wouldn’t pass muster in the modern newsroom. Nor would the two-hour lunch ride, followed by the two-hour lunch.
And in the newspaper game some Assistant Managing Editor for Wasting Your Time is always tugging on your leash. Nope again. “You see a collar on this SOPWAMTOS shirt, Pinstripes? Up to date on your rabies shots?”
’Sides, who goes backward? Not King Donald the Short-fingered, that’s for sure. Nobody knows exactly where he’s going or what he’s doing, especially him, but one thing’s certain: He has his beady eyes affixed firmly on the front of his face, staring straight ahead, at his phone. “Mirror, mirror, in my hand, who’s the greatest in the land?”
Back of the bus, buddy. Anyway, I enjoy this work, if you can call it that. I’m not sure the other fella likes his. With a little luck, he won’t have the job much longer, and we can move on to making other, subtler mistakes. Time passes, and things change.
Even here. Come January 2018 something else will occupy this space we’ve shared for the past couple of decades, and I’ll return to my roots as a cartoonist.
That’s how I snuck into cycling rumormongery 28 years ago, when VeloNews declined to offer me full-time employment but asked that I contribute cartoons. BRAIN’s Marc Sani liked what he saw—an appraisal he and others have had occasion to regret—and the rest, as they say, is history.
And with this column, so is “Mad Dog Unleashed.”
In the new year, look for me and the Mud Stud in the back of the mag’, and I’ll look for you up front as the bike industry continues its full-throated pursuit of The Next Big Thing®, like a dog chasing a car.
That dog likes his work, too. We just … do things. And what the hell, we’re not squished yet.
• Editor’s note v2.0: Thus endeth the final “Mad Dog Unleashed” column in Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. I’ll continue to draw the “Shop Talk” strip for that publication and review touring bicycles for Adventure Cyclist. And of course, the daily (sometimes) chin-music concert will continue here in Lesser Blogsylvania.
“There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.”
Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey and I were discussing anniversaries the other day, and I was reminded that I’ve been working in my chosen profession for nearly 39 years now; 40, if you count the time I spent as a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun back in 1974.
No wonder I fail to amuse myself now and then.
This week was one of those times. Mornings spent working the Giro at Live Update Guy. Back-to-back ship dates at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which meant I had to crank out two “Mad Dog Unleashed” columns and two “Shop Talk” cartoons in two weeks. And two bike reviews ongoing for Adventure Cyclist. Thousands and thousands of words.
There are harder ways to earn your biscuits and beans — for example, maglia rosa Steven Kruijswijk went ass over teakettle into a snowbank coming off the Cima Coppi in today’s Giro stage — but nevertheless, now and then it feels very much like work.
Other things take a back seat. Cooking (lots of cold suppers lately). Chores (you should see the laundry pile). Cycling (I went for a 45-minute run yesterday because I was sick of bicycles).
And this blog, of course.
In “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway wrote of a line he refused to cross:
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
I’m no Hemingway. I don’t write novels, or short stories; I don’t even do journalism anymore, not really. More of a rumormonger, actually.
But still, damn. I look in the bottom of the well lately and all I see are rusty pesos, a couple of dead silverfish, and … and. …
Say, is that the bullet that killed Vince Foster down there?
One of the many puddles surrounding Chez Dog. If I can just figure out a way to link them up, we’ll have a moat.
Nobody who lives in an alpine desert should ever complain about rain.
That said, fuck this noise. Seriously. I left Oregon for a reason, and this is it. Rain alla goddamn time. I thought I’d spilled some salad in my lap the other day, but it turned out to be moss growing on my … well, the less said about that, the better.
The tipoff? No olive oil. And the cucumber wasn’t peeled and sliced.
In unrelated news, the exodus proceeds, albeit at a snail’s pace. Herself bid farewell to her old job yesterday and leaves for Duke City tomorrow. She will be our LURP whilst I remain (as per usual) a REMF, puttering around behind the lines, telling bullshit war stories everyone’s already heard a thousand times, and mostly getting in the way.
We haven’t found new quarters yet, but we’re talking loan with a banker recommended by longtime Friend of the DogS(h)ite Khal Spencer (a thousand thank-yous, K). What with loan applications and new-job paperwork to process it’s a hell of a time to have had to surrender “our” multifunction printer to Herself’s former employer, and so I’m hunting a new one in my spare time, of which there is none.
Anyone have a recommendation for a reasonably priced, compact, all-in-one, print/fax/scan combo device? I haven’t had to buy one in years and am completely off the back, tech-wise. Sound off in comments, please. And thank you.
If I were to find work in this neighborhood, would I be justified in calling it a Nob job? No, don’t answer that.
I know, I know, the term is “Hump Day.” But it’s gonna be Hump Month around here, and maybe even Hump Quarter, because Herself has gone and landed a new job — in Albuquerque.
Ay, Chihuahua.
It will be a homecoming of sorts. We met and married in Santa Fe, but left New Mexico for Bibleburg in 1991 to take care of my mom, who was developing Alzheimer’s and had begun acting nearly as outlandishly as me. We’ve lived in Colorado ever since, either here (twice) or in Weirdcliffe (once).
We’ve been in residence at the ultra-chic Chez Dog in the upscale Patty Jewett Yacht & Gun Club Neighborhood for going on 12 years now — 12 years! — and I figured we were all done moving, that my years of rocketing pointlessly around North America like a turpentined ferret had finally come to an end.
I’ve lived in two countries, 11 states and 18 towns that I can remember, and in several of those towns more than once. Hell, I’ve lived in five different houses right here in Bibleburg. And the appalling state of three of them is none of my doing, no matter what you may hear from the few neighbors who survived.
Well, looks like we can toss No. 19 up there on the Big Board. Some people around here insist on having actual jobs, my shining example to the contrary notwithstanding, and next month Herself starts work as a technical librarian in electronic resources and document services at Sandia National Laboratories.
And me? Well, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise — which it appears to be doing as we speak — I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing since 1989, to wit, annoying the readers, staff, advertisers and ownership of various bicycle publications. My primary residence will always be a Mad Dog state of mind.
Patrick O'Grady has been making stuff up since, well, forever. He started doing it for money in high school and didn't quit until he retired in 2022. (To be honest, if you waved enough Dead President Trading Cards at him, he might do it for money again.) Until then, this blog is his pro-bonehead work. For more on Your Humble Narrator, click the comic.
The Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, which has been enjoying a refreshing dirt nap for the past two years, has arisen from its foul grave, casting aside its moldering blankie of refuse, dog shit, and critical letters to the editor. It will shamble around and about as the spirit moves. Click the graphic for the latest episode.
Know your rights, and defend them.
Fight hate.
Defending press freedom since 1970
Hal Walter ranches burros, a teenage son, and words from his rancheroo high in the mountains of south-central Colorado. Click the pic to sign up for his Substack newsletter, which goes out to subscribers whenever he's in the mood.
Drink the Kool-Aid
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