So I hit the grog shop this afternoon as part of a grocery run (yes, French rosé is a food group) and as I’m headed to the door with a double armful of Gallic brain eraser some other customer inquires thusly:

“O’Grady?”

Regrettably, I am unarmed, not even a Buck knife, and thus am disinclined to lay claim to that tarnished crown until I’ve gotten a good close look at the speaker and some idea of his intentions. Especially since both of my hands are full of wine for which I have already paid.

Turns out it’s Felix Magowan, who with John Wilcockson and David Walls constituted the original Trio that owned VeloNews when I started drawing cartoons for the magazine beginning with the March 10, 1989, edition. The Trio had declined to hire me as managing editor, which worked out well for both parties; I wouldn’t have lasted six months as ME but I’ve cashed 20 years’ worth of VeloNews checks as a cartoonist, reporter, editor and occasional columnist. Sometimes they even arrived more or less on time.

When Competitor Group Inc. of San Diego bought Inside Communications in March 2008, Felix stuck around as a consultant, a gig that recently came to an end. Like Walls and a whole mess of other folks over the years, he is now formerly of VeloNews. Indeed, of the original cast of characters listed in the masthead of that March 1989 edition, when VN was first setting up shop in Boulder, only Wilcockson, Lennard Zinn and I remain. A Limey, a conehead and a pain in the ass. Throw some tits and a car chase in there and we’re talking boffo box office, if only in summertime.

“You’re officially a member of the Old Fart League,” quipped senior online editor Charles Pelkey, who has logged fewer years but more hours and actually quit once for a few months. Happily, he got bored with the quiet life as editor of a quarterly alumni magazine and leaped right back into the frying pan of UCI regulations, doping inquiries, live updates from grand tours, classics and other monuments of the sport, and weekly bouts of explaining the inexplicable in his “The Explainer” column.

Here’s to our noble selves. There are damn’ few of us left.

Well, the Tour hasn’t even started yet and Lance Armstrong has already dropped someone — VeloNews.com’s Charles Pelkey, from his Twitter feed.

No stranger to social media, Pelkey used Facebook to announce having been 86’d from Armstrong’s exclusive private club, which at last count had just 1,249,162 members. Noting that he had been blocked from the feed “at the request of the user,” Pelkey added, “I wonder if Dan Schorr felt like this when he made Nixon’s enemies’ list.”

Shoot, ask him, Charles. He’s on Twitter, too — and the enemies list is one topic ol’ Dan is always delighted to discuss.

• Extra credit reading: Check out the Neiman Journalism Lab’s four-part series on the shifting world of sports journalism, wherein “the subjects of coverage are becoming the creators of coverage — and what implications those shifts have for the rest of the news business.”

The clock is counting down toward the start of that little three-week bike race we all know and love, and a reader asks what the workload is like for Your Humble Narrator come Tour de France time.

Put simply, it was Death back in the bad old days, when Charles Pelkey was the lone web guy and I was a two-day-a-week free-lancer who was shanghaied for the duration during the three grand tours. Charles is an early riser, so he’d be cranking out the live updates at an hour when sane journos were still abed. I’d log in around 7 a.m. and we’d tag-team the editing and posting of words and pictures from John Wilcockson, Graham Watson, Andrew Hood, Casey Gibson and whoever else was across the pond.

Charles would usually fade out early, so I — who spent all those enjoyable years at newspapers working the night shift — would stick it out past dark-thirty just in case the dope cops decided to set riders to jumping out of hotel windows. Then we’d do it all again the next day. Repeat until the Champs-Élysées.

The rules were simple: Post like an ADHD baboon flinging dung against a primate-house wall and find an hour to ride. I added a third: Drink French wine. Come July we’d go through Côtes du Rhône like an alcoholic Panzer division.

Last year, things changed. Steve Frothingham joined VeloNews.com as the full-time web boss-fella, and this year, with him and Charles both on salary (read: no overtime), I’m told I’ll probably only have to cover my usual two days a week, which suits me just fine. I unplugged the cable after the Floyd Landis debacle in 2006, and I am seriously uninterested in watching Versus bury its monocular face in Lance Armstrong’s lap again. Plus the workload these days means I can’t camp on the back deck with a laptop anymore — I need two large monitors, the souped-up G4 tower and the laptop just to take care of business in the modern age.

So I’ll follow this Tour when I’m paid to do so, with the exception of a few stages: Saturday’s opening time trial; Tuesday’s team time trial; the stage-18 ITT; and of course, stage 20 to Mont Ventoux. I like time trials, and you have to watch Ventoux.

In between business and pleasure, I’ll ride my own damn’ bike, see if I can sweat a few pounds off, which seems unlikely. I still like my wine, and I’ll have more time to cook.