Category: Time travel

Fall back

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Whoops. …

Halloween 2025 is dead and buried, but the boogeymen remain very much among us.

And now it’s time — well, nearly so, anyway — to fall back.

This is fine, for as far as it goes, which is not very. It’s 8:45 a.m. as I write this, the temperature is a brisk 42°, and the sun has yet to pop round from behind the Sandias. So tomorrow, once Daylight Saving Time ends, it will be 7:45 a.m. and I’ll have an extra hour to dither over whether I’ll need arm and knee warmers for the day’s ride or can just let it all hang out.

Well, not all, as in everything. One must consider the neighbors. Also, the police.

In any event, getting back one measly hour isn’t going to cut it. Not this year. I want to go all the way back to Nov. 5, 2024, this time to see a different result in that year’s pestilential erection, with the Republican candidate headed for the Big House instead of the White House.

Perhaps the day of reckoning would only be postponed, not eliminated. So be it. All I know for sure is that this timeline ain’t working for me. And I’m not alone. Hell, I’ll bet a bicycle or two that a critical number of people who actually voted for this mess would like to have a do-over, and pronto.

Where’s H.G. Wells when we need him? Lost in the dim mists of Time, more’s the pity.

He I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

Mac Van Winkle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Even the tree seems to be reaching for something out of its grasp.

Anybody else having a hard time waking up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?

Maybe it’s a side effect from 10 days of snotlocker drugs. Could be the time change and tonight’s Beaver Moon. But my eyes didn’t open until after 6 a.m. this morning, which is a rarity in these, my Golden Years.

I know it’s not the avalanche of inanities we call the news, because I’ve been ignoring that shit. Oh, I’ll lift the lid for a peek now and then, but the smell is usually a dead giveaway. There’s something down there you don’t need to see.

Speaking of things best left unexamined, after the Great Power Failure I decided to rearrange the tech around here rather than buy a new Mac to replace the 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro that our local Apple Store “Genius Bar” demoted from a functional laptop into a half-assed desktop while replacing its battery.

So, now, the 15-inch MBP awaits teardown and recycling. The 13-inch 2014 MBP has replaced it in my office, hooked to a 24-inch LG external display and a couple external drives because it has next to no internal storage (I pinched pennies on memory and storage because it was my road-tripper in the Before-Time). And the 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air, which was for traveling seriously light, has replaced the 13-inch MBP on keyboards in the world-famous Infernal Hound Sound podcasting studio.

Both have been updated to the latest versions of macOS they can handle (Big Sur and Catalina, respectively). But man, I gotta admit, these Macs were price/performance compromises from the get-go. And in 2024, it kinda shows.

The MBP rocks a 2.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 chip, while the MBA runs a 2 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7. Both have just 8GB of memory, minimal on-board storage, and a shortage of ports. And they’ve been rudely awakened all these years later to find that things have … changed.

Hey, I can dig it. Shit looks a little different to me, too. And I can’t always keep up, either.

Y’think Apple will sell me a new Mac and a new me?

‘Story!’ cried the Editor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

My last piece for Adventure Cyclist.

It’s hard to retire when you don’t have a job.

It’s even harder when you have a couple-three-four of them.

Still, I keep trying to find that hole in the fence, because I am a persistent mutt.

I successfully “retired” from my last real job in 1991, when I bid adios to The New Mexican and took up the uncertain life of a freelance cycling scribe. I like to think I beat the rush to the door. The writing was already popping up on newspaper walls from coast to coast, and I wasn’t one of the lucky few who would be offered a buyout. Mine would be more like a “Get out!”

So, rather than wait for the shove, I jumped.

Other separations have followed in the 30 years since I hit that door running, or maybe cycling. Either the magazines have gone away or I have.

This month brings my departure from Adventure Cyclist. It was an amicable separation. Deputy editor Dan Meyer asked if I wanted to review a bike; I thought about it for a bit, then replied, “No, thanks.”

It may sound impulsive, but it really wasn’t. I have outlived Mike Deme, the editor who brought me aboard. His successor, Alex Strickland, has moved on to another job, as have colleagues John Schubert, Nick Legan, and others.

It’s been 10 years. The bike biz is moving in directions that mostly don’t interest me. I’m an old white guy who doesn’t need the work or the money and should really just get the hell out of the way.

Also, my last two pieces, about the New Albion Privateer and the march of technology, practically wrote themselves. This could not continue. Call it a premonition: By the pricking of my thumbs, something banjaxed this way comes.

So I jumped.

Mike and Adventure Cyclist came around at exactly the right time. I was in something of a rut, basically just going through the motions, and reviewing touring bikes forced me into new ways of thinking. Alex and Dan continued Mike’s generosity. I had big fun and made good money, and now it’s time someone else had a taste.

A thousand thank-yous to everyone who enjoyed my reviews. And if any of yis bought a bike on my say-so, may the road rise up to meet you. With the rubber side down, of course.

Getting clocked

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

The oven clock is missing a knob and any adjustments must therefore be made with pliers. Or, perchance, a hammer.

Fuck a bunch of Daylight Saving Time.

Take my column. Take the White House. Take my girlish laughter.

“Time is a social construct,” says the notoriously antisocial Turk.

But please, don’t take that hour of sleep from me on a brisk Sunday morning in March.

No, goddamnit, I mean it this time. I refuse to participate. I will be an hour late for everything until the nation (save for Hawaii and parts of Arizona) comes to its senses.

You don’t see the Turk getting up an hour early just because the tyrannical feddle gummint controls the nation’s time zones, do you?

You do not, and I have the photographic evidence to prove it.

• Extra Credit Tales of Daylight Saving Time in Crusty County and Elsewhere: And you think you had it rough, resetting your bedside alarm, oven clock and wristwatch. Harrison Walter has a whole room full of clocks that require his attention.