Food for thought

November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

1, 2, 3, 4. ... — Whose peppers? OUR peppers!

There may be an upside to working five days a week, in addition to the obvious (a heftier paycheck): I spend more time reading cycling news and less time reading real news.

That’s got to be good for the blood pressure.

For example, today I got up at 7, grabbed a cup of Joe, assumed the position before the iMac and began the process of rerouting the contents of my in-box toward the sprawling server farm in Spaminacanistan that hosts the VeloNews.com website. This took the better part of quite some time but upon reflection seems very little like working for a living when compared to covering the interminable GOP “debates.”

The day’s chores included rewriting a press release; editing, augmenting and posting a few Agence France Presse wire-service stories; uploading a couple tech pieces; editing and posting a half-dozen bits from staffers and contributors; finding art to illustrate all of this; changing the marquee pic; and putting the finishing touches on a weekly e-mail newsletter The Company sends out.

I also managed to communicate electronically with distant colleagues in San Diego, Boulder, Laguna Hills, Brussels and Leon, Spain, without once using the word “fuck,” which may be a first.

So I didn’t get around to noticing that our friends at Fox News had decreed pepper spray to be “a food product, essentially,” until pretty late in the day, as I was self-administering a mild sedative that the French supply in liquid form without a prescription.

Pepper spray. A “food product.”

Well, shit. Don’t tell her momma, but it appears that I stealth-sprayed Herself last night. Slipped four dried red New Mexican chile pods into the posole I whipped up for dinner.

She never knew what hit her, the little commie.

Forward, into the past

November 20, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

It’s been 20 years since I had the traditional five-day, 40-hours-per-week job, and as those of you still manacled to same at wrists and ankles might expect I don’t miss it.

I quit for a reason. More than one, actually. Walking out of The New Mexican for the final time felt like taking one of those endless beer leaks after a long ride in an old truck on a bumpy road. Total relief.

O'Grady at The New Mexican — I don't recall which job I held at The New Mexican when this mugshot was taken — I went from copy editor to assistant sports editor to assistant feature editor to feature editor in less time than it takes to say, "Why the hell am I still working here?"

To be sure, there are (or were) perks — health insurance, 401(k), two days a week off, sick leave, paid vacation and The Company buys your gear and puts a roof over your workaday head. But otherwise it pretty much sucks. I know, because during most of my 15 years as a newspaperman I was keeping a journal — you know, sort of an analog blog that nobody else gets to read.

So, having hard evidence that doing journalism eight hours a day, five days a week is like volunteering to get a daily pepper-spraying from Lt. John Pike, why in hell would I agree to go back to it? Especially considering that this time around, I don’t even get the perks because I’m an independent contractor and hellbent on remaining one?

Larry’s wife knows the answer. As for me, I’ll just note that when VeloNews.com lost both senior editor Charles Pelkey (involuntary retirement) and web editor Steve Frothingham (fled like a rat out of an aqueduct back to a former employer, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News), there was nobody left to ladle sludge out of the old VeloBarrel and onto the readers’ titanium-and-carbon-fiber plates save Your Humble Narrator (and Lennard Zinn’s daughter Emily, who recently clambered aboard as a part-timer).

So when The Company came a-callin’, I picked up the phone, even though we have Caller ID.

Call it equal parts stupidity (“Well, shit, someone has to do it,” a knee-jerk reaction common to journalists) and avidity (“There’s a pink slip out there somewhere with my name on it and I’d better start stockpiling fiat currency if only to save money on toilet paper.”)

All this is the long way around to telling you that if you see anything outrageously defective on VeloNews.com from Saturday morning to Wednesday afternoon during the next month or so, while The Company shops for iEditor 4.0, you’ll know whom to blame.

And if the bloggery gets a little thin around here, well — you’ll know whom to blame for that, too.

Charles Pelkey has some ‘splainin’ to do

November 18, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

A beautiful friendship — "There are many exit visas sold in this café. ...

My friend and colleague Charles Pelkey has a couple reasons to celebrate today.

First, he’s over the hump as far as his chemotherapy treatments go — just nine rounds left.

Second, the former VeloNewser — who got his cancer diagnosis and a pink slip on the same day — is taking his popular “Explainer” column to Red Kite Prayer, an online project by another friend and colleague, my dopplegänger Patrick Brady (you have no idea how many Patrick Bradys and O’Gradys there are in the journalism biz).

In welcoming Charles aboard, Patrick called his decision in part “a protest against MBAs who focus on the bottom line above all other considerations.” But he added: “The greater truth here is that I love his work and I believe by bringing him into our fold I increase the value of this blog to both you our readers and our advertisers.”

Truer words, etc. Where Charles goes, eyeballs will follow. Congrats to both Charles and Patrick. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Buh-bye, bunga bunga

November 14, 2011November 14, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Buffalo bolognese — A guy can't eat Mexican 24/7, f'chrissakes. One must think of the neighbors. Leave the gas attacks to the coppers at Occupy Denver.

In honor of Silvio Berlusconi’s departure and Larry T’s extended Giro d’Italia — and because we’ve had an overlong run of beans, green and red chile, and posole around the DogHaus lately — I whipped up a skillet of buffalo bolognese tonight and laid it out over spaghettini.

Herself assembled a green salad and tackled post-dinner KP, while as per usual the cats and dog contributed exactly jack shit to the common good. Why we let all these critters Occupy Caramillo Street free of charge remains a mystery. Oh, yeah, they’re cute. Mystery solved. You know my methods, Watson.

Bloggery was nonexistent this weekend thanks to an unusually large pile of VeloNews, which caused me to mumble many words of four letters and one syllable as I shoveled away.

I wrote five race reports thanks to the miracle of streaming video; fielded quotes, updates and wisdom from Brian Holcombe, our man on the ground at USGP Louisville; posted a mess of results and bits of this, that and the other from Euro’ scribe Andy Hood and other contributors — and yet, when I look at the homepage, somehow it doesn’t look like there was much going on. It just took a long time to get it up there.

Meanwhile, for some reason I’ve decided to resume “running,” if your idea of “running” involves five minutes of same sandwiched between two 10-minute segments of walking. My knees were bugging me earlier this year, so I 86ed the ground-pounding in hopes that a respite might spare me a trip to the doc. Bad news I can get right here in the office for pennies via the Innertubes.

But on Saturday I did the walk-run-walk thing, and I repeated it today — ramping the “running” segment up to seven and a half minutes — and while I can’t say that it feels as pleasant as getting a hot-oil rubdown from Elle MacPherson and Tyra Banks after a double Talisker, it’s not as painful as watching Rick Perry or Herman Cain demonstrate how woefully unqualified they are to hold any position loftier than that of Wal-Mart greeter in Undescended Testicle, North Dakota.

Slow news day

October 23, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Turkish bags some rays — Turkish has almost come to terms with the New World Order, which requires him to wear a leash outdoors. Almost.

Seems like it’s either feast or famine in the ol’ VeloBarrel. Last week it was nothing but heartache; today, it’s been mostly nothing. I wrote up the men’s World Cup in Tabor (having overslept and missed the women’s race), posted some results and an Andrew Hood piece, and … well, that’s about it. Bor-ing.

There are things going on, of course. There are cyclo-crosses from coast to coast, the Pan American Games, the Japan Cycle Cup Road Race, but because we are short on staff, free-lancers and travel money my in-box remains appallingly free of dispatches from the front. Only Agence France Presse chimes in from time to time, and that lot mostly speaks Frog: Le Belge s’est imposé en solitaire lors de la seconde épreuve dimanche, à Tabor (République Tchèque). Parti très tôt, dès le quatrième tour, il a laissé derrière lui un groupe incapable de s’entendre pour refaire son retard.

C’mon — we saved you guys from the Nazis and you can’t give us a race report in U-nited States American? And who are you callin’ a retard? Merde. Where’s my big ol’ Google translation hammer?

Between bouts of doing not much Herself shaved my dome, Turkish got some quality time in the sun and I whipped up some tuna salad for lunch. And if my in-box doesn’t go ping! real soon I’m gonna grab a bike and enjoy what looks to be one of our last few really nice days before a winter storm blows in.