Cool cats

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Mister Jones and me, stumbling through the barrio.

Oof. The allergies are fierce. I slept OK last night, thanks to a hit of Benadryl, but the previous night I woke up at midnight with my nose running like a Democrat after the White House.

Snorting and snuffling like a hog hunting truffles, I had to relocate to the spare bedroom so that Herself could bag the Z’s she needs to help Darth Goodhair run the Energy Department.

And I felt like hammered shit most of yesterday, so none of the ol’ bikey ridey for Your Humble Narrator. In fact, I suspect that a two-hour trail ride through the junipers may have triggered the late-night snotlocker meltdown.

But we were talking about cool cats, and so here’s the tale of a Scottish cycle tourist who made a new friend on his two-wheeled trip around the world.

I suggested a global bicycle tour to Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) and his adjutant, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, and they told me I could fuck right off with that shit and bring them something to delicious to eat at once, if not sooner.

Also, here’s Marc Maron’s interview with T Bone Burnett, a very cool cat indeed who’s taking a hiatus from production to release his first album in 11 years, “The Invisible Light.”

Burnett’s chat with Maron covers a lot of waterfront, from the Beat Generation to Jackson Pollock, Jimmie Rodgers to “True Detective.” Did you know that Robert Johnson’s real name was Dusty Spencer? Or that the blues came from Texas? That mariachi music comes from the French?

Me neither. Maybe it’s the Benadryl talking. Just what I need, another voice in my head.

Words to live by

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“New Associated Press guidelines on suspensive hyphenation, you say?
That certainly whets the appetite.”

Neither I nor Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) was invited to the 2019 American Copy Editors Society conference this past weekend in Providence, R.I.

Of course, I only edit myself these days. And having spent a dozen or so years hanging out with copy editors for a paycheck, I don’t regret missing a chance to hang out with them on my own dime.

But the Turk found the slight particularly galling, since like any good deskman he lives for The Craft, even taking his meals in the office, from a bowl that sits atop tattered copies of Webster’s New World College Dictionary and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

April drool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
Yesterday’s air-quality report from the City of Albuquerque.

I lay low for April Fool’s Day. It’s gotten to be kind of like the St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve of comedy — not for serious funnymen. Funnypersons? Persons of funny?

My favorite April Fool’s gag may be the time the Gazette caught the Greeley Tribune napping. It was in the late Seventies, and some wisenheimers on staff faked up a photo of an El Paso County pickle farmer inspecting a bumper crop (reporter Don Branning in a planter’s hat, examining a plump dill tied to a tree across the street from the newspaper).

We ran it on the Metro front, then put it on The Associated Press wire just for giggles. To our astonishment, the Tribune picked it up and ran the shot on its Farm page despite the photo credit, which read something like, “GT photo by Aprylle Foole.”

The desk jockey who made that call clearly was not a local boy with shitcaked bootheels. The Tribune is in Weld County, one of the richest agricultural counties east of the Rockies, the state’s top producer of grain, sugar beets and cattle.

Not pickles, though. El Paso County had all the pickle farms in Colorado.

Here in New Mexico the ash and juniper are providing all the comedy, if your idea of a good laugh involves watching some poor sod’s nose run like an irrigation ditch with a busted headgate.

I pretended to be a runner yesterday afternoon and came home with an enraged snotlocker, a condition that persists this morning. Snot funny, man.

And on the seventh day. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
This invisible fella is off for a quick spin. But not me.

March is going out like … like it really, really, really wants out.

The wind is rattling our cage here in the Duke City, and our various mobiles, chimes and ornaments are taking a good shellacking.

I had enough of that bullshit yesterday, flogging the Voodoo Wazoo and its low end of 37.7 gear inches around the southern trail network for an hour. The wind out of the southeast was lionesque, and my legs were lamblike, so today, like the Lord, I shall rest and contemplate my handiwork. Legwork. Whatevs.

And it was good. A 131-mile week ain’t bad for a geezer.

 

Going, going. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Unzip over to Voler to join the team! Use the Secret Code (OLDGUYS15) to get 15% off your purchase. And no, goddamnit, for the last time, it does not come with fries!

Just two days remain in the great Old Guys Who Get Fat in Winter Spring Jersey Sale over at Voler. Use the Secret Code — OLDGUYS15 — and you can get 15 percent off your purchase (but not your carcass).

Once April Fool’s Day stumbles around, wearing its badly made clown suit and ragged rubber nose, you’ll have to pay top dollar like the little people.

O, the horror! The two words no self-respecting bicycle-industry type can bear to hear — “full retail.”

Actually, I have been known to pay the f-r-word from time to time, because I like having bike shops around in case I need something, like products, services or some poor sod who’ll pretend that I’m a witty fellow, if only for as long as it takes to run the credit card.

I don’t want to have to drive to Bend, Oregon, to visit the last bike shop, the way some folks do the last Blockbuster.