Category: Newspapers

‘Thank you for this new day. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Supervisor, the M-Dogg, and Your Humble Narrator gear up for a 63-mile ride from Santa Rosa to Hopland in August 2006.

Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.

“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”

And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.

The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.

Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.

Yow.

I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.

“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.

“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.

“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”

That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.

“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.

“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”

Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.

Horseshit and gunfire

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Black and blue and yellow.

Black Friday? Not entirely. As long as you avert your eyes from the news, that is.

And from your email in-box, too. Jaysis H., etc. Everybody and his bookkeeper is trying to sell me something. Take a break, f’chrissakes. I’m still digesting last night’s feast.

Well … truth be told, as feasts go it was fairly light dining. Green chile stew, salad, freshly baked cornbread, and raspberry cobbler with whipped cream. Fake beer for me, real beer for Herself.

While feasting we watched a couple episodes of the old HBO series “Deadwood,” a tale of unfettered capitalism ascendant in which much of the dialogue sounds like Pestilence Piggy addressing the press.

In one episode a gambler and whoremonger growing fat on fear of and hatred for the government ordered the newspaper office ransacked, its machinery vandalized and shat upon.

So, yeah, ripped straight from today’s headlines. Art imitating life; horseshit and gunfire.

Before we sat down to eat I slipped out for a bracing 90 minutes on the Soma Double Cross, tooling around the Elena Gallegos Open Space and a few of its neighboring trails. Lots of folks out, hoofers and rollers, either working up an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner or sweating out the gravy. And no wonder, with temps in the low 50s, though there was still a bit of mud in the shady spots after last Thursday’s rain.

The DC is a good choice for EG: 42mm Soma Cazadero tires at 30/35 psi, a low end of 24x34T, and grippy IRD Cafam cantis for when shit gets real. Eight-speed bar-cons and XT/Ultegra derailleurs. The 54cm frame is small for me, but has a longish top tube, so I don’t look like a frog trying to hump a helmet when I’m in the saddle. The little sucker is really frisky in the swoopy, twisty bits.

I enjoyed myself so much that I went right back out and did it again today. One more thing to be thankful for. Like leftovers.

Chew on this

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
“December? I don’t think so. Piss off.”

December is National Fruitcake Month, which should surprise exactly no one paying attention to the shenanigans in the nation’s capital.

But let’s not go there, hey? Whaddaya say? Tom Nichols at The Atlantic has posited that our latest Long National Nightmare will not be at an end for the better part of quite some time. It is a marathon, not a sprint, says Tom.

So let’s just jog gently along for a bit, as though we were trying to sweat out the whiskey from a long night of debauchery and hoping to forget (or perhaps remember) all the stupid shit we did while in our cups.

December always feels like an ending to me. Or perhaps the beginning of the end. Rarely am I in a celebratory state of mind.

For instance, this December I will enjoy not one, but two visits to the dentist. The first, yesterday, was for a routine cleaning; the other will be for replacement of a couple fillings that date back to my tenure as a union copy editor at The Pueblo Chieftain, 40 years ago.

“I don’t have the truck I was driving then, so I guess it’s time to get rid of these old fillings,” I quipped as the dentist Indiana Jones’d his way around the archaeology of my piehole.

“Mmm hmm,” he replied, no doubt thinking of his RV payment. “Keep up that home care.”

I was already the Mad Dog in 1984, but it would be seven years, a couple extended stretches of unemployment, and two more newspapers before I finally hopped the rickety fence of unsteady employment and went kyoodling after the bicycles, full speed ahead, damn the health insurance, sick leave, and dentistry.

Fortunate I am to have escaped the dental fate that befell Shane MacGowan. ’Tis a wonder that I have teefers to fill at all so.

Rocking out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments

Having taken note of of the pummeling endured by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for showing all the backbone of two clawless fiddler crabs when it came time to take a stand in the 2024 pestilential erection, Mother Times struggles up out of her rocker on the Saturday before Election Day, squeaks out a fart, and plops back down.

“That’ll show ’em,” she mutters before falling back into a fitful snooze.

Democracy dies, yadda yadda yadda

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Slogans, like talk, are cheap.

Ho, ho. I beat the rush to the exit after The Washington Post‘s management stepped on its editorial dick by declining to endorse a candidate in the pestilential erection. I had already canceled my account based on the plummeting value of their homepage, not the cowardice of the ownership.

Not long ago the WaPo was beating The New York Times like a dusty rug when it came to good, old-fashioned, nut-cutting hard news. Now they pretty much both stink, but at least Mother Times offers some good recipes to take the vile smell out of your nostrils. Plus she still employs a friend of mine.

So I’ll try to forget that the topside of today’s homepage is spattered with shit like “25 Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump,” “What’s It Like to Tail the Vice President?,” and “Nobody Told Me This Would Happen to My Body in My 40s.”

I’d serve up a critique of the content, if I had clicked on any of it. Alas, I moved on with great haste.

At least the NYT doesn’t start bullshitting you right up there in the flag, like the WaPo. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” me bollocks. What management does in the darkness you can see in the balcony at any adult theater. Tidy up afterward and check the phone to see if anyone Bezos has business with has invited you to a cocktail party. No? Might as well go lay off a few columnists, if they haven’t all quit already. Only one opinion counts at the newspaper in the nation’s capital, even if it’s mostly being expressed from mansions in Miami, SoCal, or low earth orbit.

Of course, if Jesus Hitler prevails on Nov. 5, it won’t mean much to the WaPo’s owner. Bezos is a podium billionaire, runner-up on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And when JH (No. 432) croaks any and all contracts with Blue Origin because Elon (No. 1) was the last guy in the Oval Office to kiss his ass when the deal went down, well … maybe the internment camps can double as Amazon fulfillment centers.

Hey, a dollar isn’t red or blue. It’s green, baby.