Spring training

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
I haven’t ridden this one yet.

It was a good week on the bike.

Actually, make that “bikes.”

The red Steelman Eurocross, Jones, and Sam Hillborne all enjoyed some quality springtime during the week, and the New Albion Privateer got the nod on Sunday.

Nothing outlandish, mind you. I’m not training for anything; just trying to avoid collapsing into a smelly heap of bone splinters and bad ideas. We’re talking 90 minutes per outing, or thereabouts, with a thousand or so feet of vertical gain, and an average speed that wouldn’t impress anyone, especially me.

I’ve never been what you would call fast, but I’ve been faster.

“Listen up, you kids, don’t make me stop this tree and come back there.”

Still, who cares? The idea is to be above ground and moving around, amirite? You know what my dad was doing when he was my age? Nothing! Because he had been dead for seven years.

So when Herself and I rolled out for our Sunday ride we were focused not on heart rate, average speed, or mileage, but on how many Gambel’s quail we might see (that would be a half-dozen, plus a couple deer).

Back at the ranch we have hummingbirds re-enacting the Battle of Midway around our three feeders, finches of various types bellied up to two tubes of birdseed while the doves prowl the ground for dropped morsels, and a northern flicker feeding babies bunkered up in a dead limb on our backyard maple.

And our young Chinese pistache tree is coming along, too.

It’s starting to get warm, so I expect we’ll start seeing buzzworms soon. But it’s OK. Every garden has its snake. Just steer clear of the fruit stand.

¡Que viva Puebla!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
We’ve got visitors.

It’s Cinco de Mayo, which is not the Mexican Fourth of July, though Americans treat it as comparable, even adding it to their National What the Hell Let’s Drink & Drive Party Calendar.

The neighbors, the ones with the kids, have decided to throw a fiesta in the cul-de-sac this year, possibly because an uncle from Colorado was coming down to do the Turquoise Trail Burro Race at Cerrillos.

• Read “The Treasure of the Sierra Mojada,” in which I recount my own experience as a burro racer.

The uncle got here yesterday and his burros were quite the draw for our sleepy little ’hood.

My man Hal Walter will not be participating in tomorrow’s race at Cerrillos — he will drive pretty much anywhere at the drop of a sombrero, and will drop it himself if need be.

But he is busy retrieving his son Harrison from Colorado Mountain College this weekend; the kid just finished his first year of postsecondary education and will be spending the summer at the family’s Crusty County rancheroo.

This evening, Hal and Harrison will be motoring from Leadville back to Weirdcliffe, the uncle and the burros will return to the cul-de-sac, and we’ll have some quality neighbor time and medium-light refreshments to commemorate the ass-whuppin’ that General Ignacio Zaragoza and his troops laid on the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

One time, one night in America.

Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.

Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.

It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.

Screenwriters?

Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.

Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.

And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:

Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.

“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Off with his head!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“We are not amused.”

Her Royal Felinity, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, has retreated to the Winter Palace.

Forty-seven degrees is not what I would call cold, though it’s a few degrees cooler now than it was when she meowed me out of a sound sleep at 5:30 this morning.

Ordinarily it would be Herself who answers the call of duty at stupid-thirty, but she has gone a-questing to East Texas to join sisters Beth and Heather, other kinfolk, and friends in bidding adios to Herself the Elder, who is to be laid to rest tomorrow in the family plot.

Frankly, Miss Mia finds all this a feeble excuse for being short-staffed, nay, abandoned to the questionable care of a junior staffer who thinks that he belongs where she is now.

That’s treason, that is. Heads will roll, and they will not be cute gray furry ones with luxurious whiskers and fetching green eyes.

‘Bigger even than I had feared’*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Not enough moral fiber in the Fox News management diet.

“We’re gonna need a bigger plunger, hon.’ This one doesn’t want to go down and stay down.”

Two takes on Tucker Carlson’s fall from grace: Alex Shephard at The New Republic thinks it’s funny, and David A. Graham at The Atlantic thinks that whoever replaces him will be even worse.

Me, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. The only time I ever watched the bowtied little prick was when Jon Stewart punk’d him on “Crossfire.”

* The headline is a bit of bathroom humor from “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.