Category: Journalism

Wake me when it’s over

~ Patrick O'Grady
Miss Mia Sopaipilla employs a comforter against the cold.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla employs a comforter against the cold.

We’ve barely dipped a toe into winter and already I’m sniveling about the cold. It’s gonna be a long January for you people if this keeps up.

We have one semi-pleasant day coming up tomorrow, according to the fine folks at NOAA, and then boom! Back in the deep freeze. Meanwhile, McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills should be looking at temps in the mid-60s for the next few days. I am not there for some reason. I will never be smart.

I should’ve ridden today, but I couldn’t face another day of fenders and neoprene so early in the new year, so I went for a run in Palmer Park instead. Tights, two long-sleeved shirts, tuque, gloves and a sharp eye peeled for icy bits, of which there were many. Tire tracks, too, some imprinted deeply in the damp clay. Bad mountain bikers. Bad, bad, bad.

The rest of my day was devoted to keeping an eye on the VeloNews.com beta site, which remains very much a work in progress. Without warning, the old site vanished overnight like the proverbial Cheshire cat, taking the readers’ forums along with it and leaving no grins behind.

Meanwhile, as the mag’ staff cranks on the March edition, our lone wire service, Agence France Presse, sent us fuck-all between 10:16 a.m. local time on New Year’s Day and 7:46 a.m. this morning, when we got two stories, both on the same topic — the Team Sky launch in London — one in French and the other in English. No pictures. Zut alors.

Happily, our Euro’ whiz Andrew Hood was on the job, providing wisdom in U-nited States American, and ace shooter Casey B. Gibson came through with some pics courtesy of a colleague who was at the Sky shindig while the Frogs were busy letting the saucers stack up at some café or surrendering to someone. Welcome to the New Wheeled Ordure, January Edition.

No wonder Miss Mia Sopaipilla feels like staying in bed all day. Sometimes I do, too.

New year, same old dog

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Today I managed a third consecutive day of outdoor cycling and field-tested my ability to fix a flat with a damaged digit. All is well. I froze my nuts off, true, but that’s nobody’s fault but my own for underestimating how much heat a fat bastard can generate riding a flat-bar cyclo-cross bike in subfreezing temperatures with a brisk north wind.

A windproof jacket would’ve been smart. Ditto full booties instead of toe covers. Hell, how ’bout staying indoors and drinking whisky out of the bottle? How many 55-year-old fat bastards do you know who are layering on the Lycra for a 90-minute ’cross-bike ride on a football Sunday when they could be in some warm pub drinking Clydesdale piss and sneaking peeks down the waitress’s blouse?

Yeah, I know. Plenty. And I was one of them. Because I am a dog with a mission — get fit enough to do the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Arizona Road Adventure in mid-March without embarrassing and/or killing myself.

Then I will write about it for Adventure Cyclist magazine, cash the check, and use the proceeds to buy warm clothing. Or whisky. Or both.

Hoppin’ John, cornbread and cycling

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Hoppin' John and cornbread, mmm, mmm, good.
Hoppin' John and cornbread, mmm, mmm, good.

The holiday season is finally behind us, and soon we will be enduring fewer idiotic stories like this and more like this.

I can see why nobody wanted the byline on the first — any “what’s ahead in 2010” story that mentions Jimmy Dobson and the Broncos is not something a scribe at a bankrupt newspaper chain hopes will draw the eye of potential employers in a dodgy job market.

As to the second, it’s beyond laughable that Janet Napolitano’s gaffe about the Underpants Bomber (“The system worked”) is on a par with Shrub praising the insanely inept Michael Brown for botching the federal response to Hurricane Katrina (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”). But I blame the web editor who posted the piece for penning that fatuous nonsense, not NYT op-ed editor Tobin Harshaw.

And now for the real news: I and my dislocated finger got out for an hour on the mountain bike yesterday. It was my second outdoor ride since taking that digger six weeks ago, and boy, was I ever gun-shy. There’s still plenty of old ice and snow on the deck, just like there was when I laid it down, and I tiptoed around it like a Kurd in a minefield. Still, it’s amazing how much easier it is to do an hour outside than inside, even if it involves wearing neoprene. I liked it so much I may do it again today.

Back at the ranch, in honor of our shared Southern heritage, I whipped up that pot of Hoppin’ John and Herself made a cast-iron skillet full of cornbread. Wine was served and an episode of “Dexter” watched on our new-used Blu-ray player. I’d call that a fair start to the New Year.

• Late Update: I did do it again — this time on the Voodoo of Doom, the very machine that laid me low back in November. The Voodoo sports full-coverage fenders, and since things were getting a little slushy with temps in the mid-40s I took it out for a short spin out east to see if the evil sonofabitch would bite me again. Nope. Worst that happened was that the temps took a dramatic turn for the worse on the ride home and I was a tad underdressed. Oh, well, shivering burns fat, too.

Flying fish gets wings clipped

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

When people learn that I detest flying, they generally ask, “Why?” Here’s part of the answer.

I mean, shit, c’mon. Osama bin Laden probably saw this directive before Flying With Fish did. It’s like having the FBI kick down your door for for ripping off a Matt Groening cartoon (see previous post).

And what could the bloggers do but bend over and take it? If the TSA tried this sort of stunt with The New York Times it would be wearing a thick coat of lawyers the way a dead hog wears flies. A free-lance travel writer with a kid in his arms is going to be a good deal less aggro’ than a hungover editor with three bitchy ex-wives, ’roids and a bleak professional future without some best-selling book to pitch to Random House — say, about how he stood tall while having his nuts squeezed by some brownshirts from the Department of Open Your Duffel, Take Off Your Shoes and Shut the Fuck Up.

Jesus. This is why I drive everywhere. I don’t have to get to the Subaru two hours before departure, I can carry on everything from bikes to guns to jumbo bottles of booze, and nobody is ever setting his boxers ablaze in the seat next to me.

Fox in the video henhouse

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Abbey Normal Road, from Matt Groening.
Abbey Normal Road, from Matt Groening.

Bwah ha ha ha ha, as those crazy kids say today. In an Associated Press article noting that revenue from commercials is falling short of keeping TV moguls in private jets, Botoxed girlfriends and Tuscan villas, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch warns that the viewing audience should expect to pay more for satellite and cable service.

“Good programming is expensive,” bleats Murdoch.

How the hell would he know? Looking for “good programming” on TV in general, and Fox in particular, is like looking for virgins in a Nevada brothel. One may turn up now and then, but she won’t last long.

And yes, “The Simpsons” is the exception that proves the rule.

Murdoch and his News Corporation are frantically hunting new revenue streams, dreaming of the day when Fox News, the Times of London and The New York Post can join The Wall Street Journal in walling off all or part of their content, reserving it for paying customers only.

Yeah, good luck with that. While people may be willing to pony up for entertainment, news is another breed of dog altogether. Notes Alan B. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger, in a New York Times story: “One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs. They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”