Category: Just mumbling along

No lie

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Just a touch of yellow in the ground cover and some red in the leaves. More to come. Next time I'll take a proper camera along.
Just a touch of yellow in the ground cover and some red in the leaves. More to come. Next time I'll take a proper camera along.

Busy, busy, busy. Having three stage races going on simultaneously blows the meat whistle. Not as much as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-Dipshit), but it’s right up there. No lie.

Happily, the Vuelta a España was on a rest day, so it was fairly light duty today, with only the Tour de l’Avenir and the Tour of Missouri to follow. I even got out for a nice hike and saw that we’re getting a little color in the foliage around here. Leaves in the gutters. Still warm enough for shorts and a wife-beater, but not for much longer.

I lived in Springfield briefly during the summer of ’72, but I had forgotten how hilly those Missouri roads can be. This may be because I spent more time walking or hitchhiking than cycling. Finally I hitchhiked right the hell out of there, taking the scenic route east to St. Louis, west to Kansas City and north to Iowa Falls, Iowa, before catching one last lift back to Colorado with a friend of a friend.

Tomorrow it’s back in the trenches with VeloNews.com for all three races.  Plus there’s a cartoon needs drawing for VeloNews (Dead Tree Edition). I’d hitchhike right the hell out of here and dodge the whole deal, but I had enough trouble getting rides when I was young and pretty, and I’m too old to be that broke.

Stop the presses

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Freedumb Communications, which owns the Bibleburg Gaslight, is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week, according to the Wall Street Journal. Freedumb’s flagship rag, the Orange County Cash Register, popped up a story yesterday saying that discussions with lenders about restructuring $770 million in debt are “ongoing.”

Some people must be pooping in their pantalones over there on Prospect Street. G staffers have already enjoyed five unpaid days off this year, and the Cash Register has laid some folks off. A quick check of JournalismJobs.com finds, um, not much in the way of gainful employment for rumormongers. So it goes.

I don’t like Freedumb’s editorial philosophy, which is somewhere to the right of the John Birch Society, and quit subscribing to the G years ago. But an ink-stained wretch has to feel for his colleagues when the deal goes down. The ones who don’t write the editorials, anyway.

Cat nap

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
No, he won't go down the drain. We've tried.
No, he won't go down the drain. We've tried.

Turkish is a creature of ritual. Every morning when I drag ass out of the sack he leaps from the couch and joins me in the bathroom, where he launches into a clockwise series of bows and stretches, getting back rubs twice a lap.

After a few go-rounds, he curls up in the sink or on the carpet; if he picks the latter, one is permitted to scratch his chin and belly without the need for disinfectants and stitches afterward.

After a few minutes of what for the Turk’ is fairly lovey-dovey behavior he suddenly remembers who he really is — Mighty Whitey, the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Turkenstein, The Turkinator, et al. — and he commences stalking about the house from door to door, demanding his freedom in a keening sound like helium leaking from a balloon, or maybe Glenn Beck with his teensy nuts in a vise.

Let him out and my schedule is in his large, massively clawed paws. The sonofabitch is harder to catch than bin Laden, and should I manage to lay hands on him, there will be blood. Not his. The good news is, once he’s fined me a pint or two, he has no objection to taking a bracing nap in a window, or perhaps our bed, under the ceiling fan.

Every now and then Turk’ wants the lap, generally while I’m working, and if I don’t give it up he sets about turning the office carpet into confetti. Once aboard, he becomes a critic — not of my writing, but of my typing, which interrupts his carnivorous dreams. He also enjoys supervising my situps from a perch atop my navel.

Come bedtime, Turk’ briefly becomes cuddly again, until Herself plucks him off the bed to take him downstairs for the night. A guy going to the gas chamber complains less, and he’s not gonna be coming back tomorrow.

Maybe that’s why he’s so cheery in the mornings. “Hey, cool, you didn’t take me to the pound again! Dude, scratch my belly!”

Screwed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

“We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK. It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

A newspaper publisher? Record exec? Movie mogul? Nope. That would be Bill Asher, co-chairman of porn giant Vivid Entertainment, who told The Los Angeles Times that his company’s revenue is down more than 20 percent this year as hard times lead to soft sales (har de har har).

For working stiffs like Savannah Stern, things are even worse. The 23-year-old once took in nearly $150,000 per year doing the ol’ mattress mambo, but is down to a third of that and thus will be giving up her Mercedes-Benz CLK 350 for a used Chevy Trailblazer given to her by her parents.

“I wish I would have never gotten into (porn),” says Stern. “When you get used to a certain lifestyle, it’s really hard to cut back and realize this may not be forever.” Poor baby.