How long can you tread water?

May 17, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Jeez, what’s with the rain? Has God decided He’s had enough of these filthy, shaven-legged dope fiends flogging 16-pound bikes around His pretty globe? Stage nine of the Giro looked like a triathlon that required participants to swim with their bikes, and stage two of the Amgen Tour was not much drier. Guys were hitting the California asphalt like discarded bidons, and it will be a miracle if the peloton remains intact going into stage three.

I was running the live updates at VeloNews.com and it was a real picnic with no TV and a satellite phone that got hooked up about as often as a nursing-home dick. I nearly typed “Burma!” at one point. It was that bad.

My phone would ring and I’d hear something like, “Yack ninck fzzt Cav’ byinng yoicks Hincapie honk poot squeet Lance.” Shee-yit. As delivery systems go it lacked a certain something. If a guy is gonna deliver a pizza they generally give him the fuckin’ pizza before sending him out the door.

But that’s the way it goes when Captain Video is grounded by evil weather and the reporter at the scene is careening around Northern California in a SRAM neutral-service Volvo, trying to ID riders in the ditch while shouting into an expensive and useless communications device. “Can you hear me now? How about now? Now?”

But we got it done, kinda, sorta, and we get to do it all over again tomorrow. You’re welcome. Right now I’m doing a glass of wine. That I can handle.

Here’s mud in your eye

May 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Saturday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia looked like a cyclo-cross designed by the Batley Townswomen’s Guild with an assist from Timothy Leary and the Marquis de Sade. Angelo Zomegnan must have a deep-pockets coin-laundry sponsor. And I bet the mechanics were cursing late into the night as they washed, lubed and repaired mud-caked machinery, guzzling vino rosso.

Today brings stage 1 of the Amgen Tour of California. No prologue this year — instead we have a road stage from Nevada City to Sacramento. The VeloNews mob is all over California, seeing as Texus Maximus is there (eyeballs! eyeballs! eyeballs!) while the Giro makes do with Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood. Something seems awry there, but what do I know? I am merely a lowly scribe, and a part-timer at that.

But I know which race I’d rather be watching it. And I’m watching it right now, with Italian commentary.

• Late update: Whew, that was one long day in the barrel. Thanks to all the VeloNews.com live-update followers who didn’t call me a retard (I had my critics, and justifiably). In my own defense, I will say only that stage 1 of the 2010 Amgen Tour of California was not exactly the most exciting bike race I’ve ever watched, except for that bell lap, when a whole bunch of guys decided to fall over en masse. Tom Boonen looked like he’d been run through an industrial meat grinder afterward. Cav’ won after J.J. Haedo went into slow-mo a few meters short of the line. Imagine my surprise.

Tour de farce

April 2, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Editor of a new touring magazine? No, just another April fool. Photo: Herself

It was April Fool’s Day at VeloNews.com yesterday, and as usual we managed to snooker a few people.

My contribution — an entirely bogus item about VeloNews launching a touring magazine, headed by yours truly, with accompanying website and online store — apparently caused a minor stir among some folks in that niche. It was a calculated risk, since I’m writing a piece for Adventure Cyclist magazine about my tour of southern Arizona and really don’t need to piss off anyone holding a checkbook. Happily, editor Michael Deme was a good sport about it, having published his share of April Fool gags over the years.

I can’t remember how long VN’s been pulling these pranks. They date back to the newsprint edition of the magazine, and Charles Pelkey guesstimates the tradition to be 17 years old at least.

My favorite gag remains the time we “fired” me and posted the news online. I still can’t decide whose letters were funnier — the outraged readers who were canceling their subscriptions or the O’Grady-haters who were saying, “About damn’ time!”

On an unrelated note, I stumbled across a Rick Bayless recipe for tacos de papas con chorizo y salsa de aguacate last night and cooked the sumbitch right up. It was both easy and delicious, and that’s no joke.

Don’t touch that dial

March 30, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Click to enlarge — The future of video journalism, as captured by Casey B. Gibson during track worlds in Denmark. Photo © Casey B. Gibson | http://www.cbgphoto.com

Seems like the print media aren’t the only journos suffering in the Internet era. The Gaslight writes of how the local TV stations are hiring only people “capable of being able to do it all,” which is the kind of English one has come to expect from the video crowd.

Notes Paul Kavanaugh: “The local stations’ Pueblo bureaus, for example, used to be staffed by a reporter and a photographer. Now, they’re staffed by so-called ‘one-man bands’; one reporter writes, shoots, edits and broadcasts.”

Well, shucks. It makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure, as the late Hunter S. Thompson once said. The print people have been in that sinking ship for quite some time now, augmenting pad and pen with digital sound recorders, point-and-shoots and camcorders, and dashing out quick reports for dead-tree edition, website and blog.

And it only seems fair that TV should join newspapers in the Information Age tar pits, since the Internet is only finishing the job on the print media that TV started. Back in the day the local TV crowd piggy-backed on the daily newspaper, eschewing original reportage for the rip-and-read, whipping a slight rewrite on an ink-stained wretch’s story and shamelessly reading it before the camera. Occasionally we could recognize entire sentences lifted whole.

When the vidiots bothered to attend an event in corpus, the cameraman would often pan around over the audience. I had long hair and a beard then, and was something of a camera magnet, scribbling away on a note pad, and after seeing myself on TV a few times I took to scratching one cheek with an extended middle digit whenever the camera panned my way, bringing a quick end to my TV career.

My favorite moment remains an important school-board meeting disrupted by the video circus, which showed up late as always and bustled about, setting up tripods, lights and whatnot. The superintendent was well into his opening remarks, so naturally they asked that he start over from the beginning.

This was the last straw for my colleague from the smaller paper across town. She remarked, “Hey, assholes, the news doesn’t come packaged in tidy segments of 30 seconds apiece.”

It still doesn’t, of course, but that’s all you’re going to get in the era of the one-man band.

What is the sound of one fat lip flapping?

January 5, 2010November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Faux News dingbat Brit Hume has tromped in the Dharma with his big ol’ Bible-beatin’ feet, saying that the errant Tiger Woods should abandon Buddhism and come to Jesus, sparking fits of enraged zazen at sanghas worldwide.

Like Steve Benen at Political Animal, I couldn’t care less about Brit Hume, Tiger Woods, golf and industrial Christianity as promoted by a fake “news” network that is less interested in reality than is The Onion.

But I take a very un-Buddhist glee in watching loudmouthed nitwits step on their own dicks, as long as they aren’t me. But of course, they are.

Image lifted from CafePress.