Category: Viewing with alarm

Hey diddle diddle, there goes the middle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla contemplates a dreary future.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla contemplates a dreary future.

Some of those tasty middle-class gigs that went away during The Great Recession aren’t coming back, says Kevin G. Hall at McClatchy.

It’s not exactly news — the author of the report cited, MIT economist David Autor, says the trend has been under way for more than a decade. But it got worse during the latest installment of hard times, with zero job growth for professionals and an 8 percent decline in office and administrative employment.

But wait, there’s more! Writes Hall: “This loss of middle-skill jobs — what Autor calls polarization of the job market — intersects with another discouraging trend, the concentration of wealth at the highest rungs of the wealth ladder.”

Another study, this one from UC-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, suggests “that the top 1 percent of earners in the nation captured almost half of the growth in income over a period of stellar growth in the U.S. economy.”

“And this,” Hall writes, “came against the backdrop of disappearing good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, and what now appears to be an escalating departure of well-paying middle-skill jobs.”

Like I said, hardly news — the rich getting richer is right up there with “Dog Bites Man,” headline-wise. But still, is it any wonder that Miss Mia Sopaipilla is checking under the range for loose change? She has no idea where her next bowl of kitty chow is coming from.

Footloose redux

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

People sometimes ask me, “Mr. Mad Dog, dude, sir, why on earth did you ever abandon the spectacular high-country beauty of Crusty County for the gritty unreality of the clusteropolis known as Bibleburg?”

The answer lies (or rather, jogs) here. A few more years on that wind-scoured rockpile outside Weirdcliffe and I’d have started running barefoot in the snow, too. What the fuck, it was only 10 miles to the liquor store, and most of it was on pavement.

$45,000 bike (funeral not included)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Well, he went down down down
And the devil said where you been
He went down down down
He was screamin’ down around the bend
Down down down
This boy went solid down
He was always cheatin’ and he always told lies
He was always cheatin’ and he always told lies
Down down down
This boy went solid down
He went down — “Down, Down, Down,” Tom Waits

Every circus needs a sideshow, and every sideshow needs a freak.

Here’s Interbike’s.

Imagine riding that bad boy at speed along America’s crumbling infrastructure with nothing between you and Allah but a little Lycra. And then go clean yourself up and change your underwear.

Meanwhile, after a month of waiting, Ritchey finally sent me a new fork for the road bike. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this one appears to be defective too. I’m awaiting a final evaluation from the wizards at Old Town, who have logged more time wrenching on these things than I have riding them, but fearing the worst I rang up my old buddy Brent Steelman at Steelman Cycles, and he has graciously agreed to build me a steel road fork with his very own hands.

In the meantime, if you’re riding a Ritchey Comp road fork I’d advise that you have your local shop check the sucker for evil spirits before launching your next Il Falco attack on the local alpine descent. Consider the potential for lower rebirth. You could come back as an Irish-American rumormonger of the cycling persuasion.

The O’Grady Theory of Affordability

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Well, baby, what I couldn’t do
With plenty of money and you. — “With Plenty of Money and You,” Count Basie

There’s an old gag about the typical bicycle racer being the kind of guy whose car is worth less than the bike on its roof rack. But y’know, that ain’t all that high a bar to hop anymore.

Check out what one of my colleagues considers to be “performance bikes at prices for real people.” * A $3,000 frameset? A $7,000 ready-to-ride bike? If these are down-to-earth prices, I’m clearly living somewhere around the planet’s core, because the only way I could afford either of those items is if I did my shopping with the old S&W hand cannon instead of a Visa card.

You know what you can get for a hair over $3,000? A 2009 Honda Rebel. That’s right — a fucking motorcycle. Don’t gotta pedal it or nothin’.

Know what you can get for $7,000? A complete, ready-to-ride custom Steelman road bike with an Ultegra build kit — plus a spare frameset in case anything unpleasant happens to the first one.

And for $10,000? You can have my 2005 Subaru Forester. It’s got a Thule roof rack, too, so you can slap a couple $7,000 road bikes up there and fit the profile of the typical bike racer.

In the damp and steamy dreams of the cycling press, anyway.

* The headline has since been changed to something a little more sensible. So we’ve got that going for us.