Dry streets and wide loads

May 28, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

It finally stopped raining for a couple of days, and Tonatiuh the sun god has delivered us a long-overdue solar stimulus package. The cats couldn’t be happier — especially Turkish, a.k.a. Mighty Whitey the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Big Pussy, the Turkinator, Turkenstein, et al. Indoors is anathema to the big galoot, who on rainy days stalks from door to window to basement to office, making a doleful sound not unlike helium escaping from a leaky balloon.

Mia Sopaipilla is less demanding, but she’ll take the outdoors on a sunny day, if it’s offered. And so will I. I got out for a quick hour on the ‘cross bike, and wowsah, has the foliage ever exploded. All of a sudden there’s shade on the bike path — which is not always a good thing.

Once those spindly trailside trees fill in with greenery, every blind corner is one more crank on the handle of the old jackoff-in-the-box. A guy has no idea what’s gonna pop up. But whatever it is, it’s probably gonna be wearing an iPod.

I’ve thought about mounting a bullhorn on my handlebars, or maybe an air-raid siren, but my poor bike is already carrying more than enough weight. What a shame the iPod isn’t equipped to receive radio. Just think what fun you could have with a mic’ and short-range transmitter. “Hey, Wide Load, watch your six, incoming! Shift three feet to starboard. And put on a shirt, f’chrissakes. You look like a Wookiee with an eating disorder.”

Que triste es la vida

May 26, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Judas Priest. The furnace just clicked on. Forty-eight and raining outdoors, 67 and cranky indoors. Are we sure this is late May in Colorado? ‘Cause it looks more like February in Oregon to me.

Oh, well. So it goes. Baldilocks will have something else to complain about before the bears come home. Like your average House Republican, who could fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking his thumb, I am never satisfied. The glass is neither half empty nor half full, but rather a scattering of shards in a filthy gutter, just waiting for a bare foot.

Elsewhere, the prez has tapped Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter in the Supremes. She would be the Court’s second woman and its first Latina. The consensus among the parlor pinks I patronize — Kevin Drum, Steve Benen and others — seems to be that she will have little trouble winning confirmation.

Still, I have some small hope that the Repugs will insist on doing what they do best, which is acting swiftly on their worst impulses and in general behaving like spoiled children denied an undeserved treat. Hey, my pessimism knows some bounds.

Ooo, it’s all sticky!

May 23, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

April showers bring May flowers. May showers bring puddles.

That was Eddie Izzard talking about landing on the moon only to find it was covered in jam, but he could have been talking about Bibleburg. Except Bibleburg is more squishy than sticky, and if there were any jam lying about, the rain of the past few days would’ve washed it away, so no. Sticky? Not so much. Squishy, that’s the thing. There. Glad we’ve got that sorted out.

This would be fine weather if I were a duck, but since I’m more of a dick it’s not doing much for me. Or for the Turk’, either. I just heard a loud thunk from the living room and went in to see him affixed to the top half of the screen door, forepaws spread wide, like an inmate clutching the cell bars. “Hey, y’dirty screw, call m’lawyer! I’m innocent, I tell ya! Lemme outa here!” If the Turk’ had a spoon and opposable thumbs, he’d be digging a tunnel in a blind corner somewhere.

Speaking of prisons, The New York Times recently paid a call on Cañon City and Florence to sample public opinion about sprinkling Gitmo inmates around the various local graybar hotels. One dingbat who owns a coffee shop fears an influx of Muslims and terrorists that would drive down property values for “good Christian conservatives” like himself. Never mind that property values have already taken quite a beating from the good Christian conservatives running the country and its financial system for the past eight years.

No, by all means let’s reserve our correctional system for fine upstanding American nutbags, like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who enjoys three hots and a cot in the federal Supermax at Florence. At least they won’t hate our freedom, despite having none of their own.

The waste land

May 2, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Mia Sopaipilla auditions for the starring role in a feline take on the noir classic "The Meowtese Falcon."

T.S. Eliot was full of shit. “April is the cruellest month,” my large, pale Irish-American ass. So far, May in Bibleburg sucks like a New Orleans pumping station crosswired to a black hole.

It can’t even rain properly around here, f’chrissakes — just this mincing little dribble that reminds me of why I fled Oregon like a Norway rat rocketing out of a sewer pipe. Fog, gray skies, the temperatures barely above freezing, Mia toasting her bum on the DSL modem and Turkish begging to go out for reasons only known to himself. Maybe he’s sick of dried cat chow and dreams of catching a passing fish, if there are any with legs in these parts. Good luck — that species appears to be restricted to Darwin emblems affixed to Volvos.

Up in Crusty County, meanwhile, my man Hal Walter has taken on the swine whine with recommendations for reducing your vulnerability to marauding bugs. It boils down to reducing stress and eating properly, which is a lot cheaper than building a R. Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome with an airlock and enduring hourly rubdowns with Lysol.

And on the seventh day, he worked

April 26, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Chairman Meow's tomb is a colorful sight come springtime.

Chasing typos around the Intertubes instead of wheels along the trail. Feh. Sunday is no-fun day if you happen to be an editor for a cycling website, even a part-time one.

They’re racing everywhere this weekend, on roads and trails, from Belgium to California — Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Little 500, the Athens Twilight Criterium, the Historic Roswell Criterium, the Santa Ynez Valley Classic and the Dana Point Grand Prix.

Each writer presents a different editorial challenge (some understand deadlines and English, others not so much); each promoter supplies results in a different fashion (HTML, Excel, PDF or not at all); each photographer has his own little quirks (giant jpgs with incomprehensible filenames, teensy jpgs with no captions). I, of course, bring my own peculiar habits (surly bibulousness) to the project.

Back in the day, when I was still a newspaperman instead of whatever it is that I am now, all these disparate personalities congregated under one roof, where we could all shout at each other over not much and then go get convivially shitfaced once the presses started rumbling.

Now we’re in Spain, Belgium, Wyoming, Boulder, Georgia, California and Bibleburg, and shouting over IM or via e-mail just isn’t the same. Plus a guy in León can hardly buy a round for another guy in Bibleburg, and vice versa.

We had more hands back in the day, too. We’re always undermanned at VeloNews.com, but this weekend the herd is especially thin for a number of perfectly defensible reasons. So instead of doing a little leisurely swashbuckling through a couple of short stories, I found myself pretty much glued to the office chair from 6:30 a.m. to late afternoon, hacking at this and that, frantically twisting my Strunk & White Secret Decoder Ring and muttering dire imprecations that would land you a chat with Human Resources in one of today’s newsrooms. And it ain’t over yet. California and Georgia have yet to check in. And they wonder why I drink.

I did get out to snap a couple pix of Chairman Meow’s tomb, though. She has a colorful honor guard again this spring, and if it ever rains, they should get plenty of reinforcements.