The Mad Dog Media nerve center at the Homewood Suites in Duke City.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (MDM) — It is done. Money has changed hands, and Quicken Loans has graciously allowed us to add a third property to our collection.
The Detroit-based outfit is said to be the third biggest mortgage lender in the country. How they got there by granting 30-year fixed-rate home loans to 60-year-old freelancers remains a mystery.
Yet grant it they have, and we’re good to go pending bankruptcy or death, whichever comes first. In the meantime, they let us live in the place for a small monthly consideration. We get to pay the taxes, handle the upkeep, and whatnot, too. It’s a lot like house-sitting, only more expensive.
But do I get to live there right now? I do not. What I get to do is drive at high speed to Las Vegas for Interbike. Torrential rains are forecast along the route. Good times. Do Subaru Foresters float like VW Beetles? We’re about to find out. Stay tuned.
The Old Guy got a radical kit makeover for the Giro.
You ever get the feeling someone hit the fast-forward button on your own personal reality? Lately it seems as though I’m stuck in a high-speed loop — wake up, snag a cup of mud, plunk down before the iMac, and then suddenly it’s bedtime. Repeat ad infinitum.
For instance, how the hell did it get to be June already? The Giro just wrapped, and the Dauphiné starts next Sunday? What is it, racing season or something? Next you’ll be telling me the Tour’s just around the corner.
Consigliere Pelkey and I had a high ol’ time calling the Giro over at Live Update Guy. He solved the never-ending software problem by getting a colleague to build him some, and it worked just swell. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you don’t need many of those for the sort of one-ring circus we run.
That tent folded this morning. Tomorrow I have an Adventure Cyclist deadline, and Thursday my Bicycle Retailer contributions are due. In between we have Herself’s mother and sisters in residence at The House Back East™, so, yes, my dance card is all filled up for a while yet, thanks for asking.
I’m hoping the elves of Cupertino have been busy stomping bugs in Mavericks, because the old iBeast has been acting out now and then since I pulled the trigger on the OS upgrade (our fourth, after Herself’s MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini we use to stream video, and my MacBook Air). Those newish machines are all ticking along without incident, but with the 2009 iToad I’ve seen hard crashes that can’t be force-quit away; mystery reboots not ordered by Your Humble Narrator; and other oddball ailments that have me spending way too much off-the-clock time discussing diagnoses with kindly old Doc Google.
Right this moment all is well, but boy, does Mavericks ever use a metric shit-ton of whatever memory you have installed. I have 12 GB in the iThing, and more than once over the weekend Activity Monitor reported that 11 of it was in use.
Meanwhile, the 2006 MacBook limps along just fine with Snow Leopard and 2 GB of memory. Go figure.
The cover of VeloNews, Vol. 18, No. 3, March 10, 1989, the first issue to contain an O’Grady cartoon.
As I was dozing off last night it struck me that I missed an anniversary of sorts last month.
On March 10, 1989, I drew my first cartoon for VeloNews.
Good God awmighty. Have I really been cracking lame bike jokes for more than 25 years?
Yup.
And my, how times have changed.
In 1989, I was still a real journalist (kinda, sorta) instead of a free-lance rumormonger, flailing away in a series of unsung editorial capacities for The New Mexican in Santa Fe, periodically shifting to a new desk in the newsroom as I wore out my welcome at the old one.
The VeloNews thing was my first real free-lance gig. I had applied for a job there, as managing editor, and happily for everyone concerned, I didn’t get it. But management liked the cartoons, and you know the rest.
Himself, in all his (ahem) glory.
Then as now, I drew in pencil, pen and ink, on Bristol board. But the ’toons were in black and white, and the originals FedExed from Santa Fe to Boulder.
At some point I scored a Mac SE, a 2400-baud Hayes modem, and an AOL account. But the early Innertubes were ill-equipped for transmitting the Old Guy Who Gets Fat In Winter from Santa Fe to Boulder, even in black and white, though VeloNews soon set up a BBS for catching incoming stories and was one of the early pioneers homesteading the World Wide Web.
I don’t draw for Velo, the slick successor to VeloNews. But I still do my “Shop Talk” strip for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. And those bad boys are digitized, colorized and shot through the Innertubes like ICBMs (Intercontinental Burlesque Missiles) to Laguna Hills, California, along with my “Mad Dog Unleashed” column.
All of which means I can have an editor mumbling, “Aw, f’chrissakes, lookit this fuggin’ thing,” in seconds instead of days.
“Shop Talk,” the strip I do for BRAIN. Mostly it features the Mud Stud and Dude; occasionally, the Fat Guy and other characters appear.
Wandering around the Innertubes this morning I stumbled across a Slate piece about how the first story on Monday’s earthquake in Los Angeles was written by a robot — specifically, an algorithm called “Quakebot.”
Quakebot isn’t exactly H.L. Machina. It’s merely intended to “get the basic information out,” says journo-programmer Ken Schwencke of the Los Angeles Times.
There may be a few bugs yet. For example, Narrative Science’s Quill may or may not know the preferred spelling for “judgment.” But chances are a harried reporter or editor might miss that one, too. Somebody at Narrative Science certainly did.
However, for first word on some item that doesn’t require the immediate attention of a MeatBot — an earthquake, a ballgame, where (or if) Andy Schleck placed in a bike race — it sounds like just the ticket for cash-strapped publishers trying to get a hammerlock on the cost of that notoriously hard-to-control human element.
They’ll probably have to keep relying on us for snark, though. For a little while yet, anyway. Beep.
The last time one of these things was parked outside my house, I was fixin’ to trade it in on a Toyota.
Some class of awards show was hogging all the bandwidth last night, I understand.
We freelance cycling rumormongers never get to put on the Ritz and walk the red carpet, even those of us who dabble in the cinema. When we open the envelope, our prize for a job well done is a few wrinkly pictures of dead presidents (if we’re lucky).
I was able to skip the big show last night, Herself being on the road for bidness purposes. She had to motor through the mountains to Dysfunction Junction for a library conclave, and it being March in Colorado, rather than rent the usual half-pint fuel-sipper she settled on a big-ass Ford F-150 crew cab with a 26-gallon tank and four-wheel drive.
Holy shit, that thing looked like the USS George Washington, speaking of dead presidents. I asked Herself if she’d need a stepladder to chisel the ice off the windshield and she gave me the rough edge of her tongue, being less than fond of driving in conditions that lead to 104-car pileups.
I wasn’t exactly sanguine about the mission, either. I owned an F-150 once, a bare-bones 1996 4WD model, and it was without a doubt the biggest hunk of junk I’ve ever owned, a real Motor City garbage scow. Everything that could go wrong with it did, and by the time I finally determined to trade the devil-possessed sonofabitch in on a 1998 Toyota Tacoma I was expecting any minute to hear the voice of Terry Jones saying, “And now it’s time for the F-150 in your driveway to explode.”
But she made it to DJ without incident and is bounding merrily about the place with her fellow librarians. Last night they took over a brewery and spent the night putting their hair up in buns, peering over the tops of their glasses and telling everyone, “Shh!”
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