OK, say ‘cheesy’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
A fuzzy Beaver Moon, which I suppose could be considered appropriate.

Betimes I wish I had an actual camera instead of an iPhone, especially when zooming in on something like the last full supermoon of the year.

But then I remember that I’m no great shakes as a shooter and the phone that I already own is exactly my speed. I’m not exactly Ansel Adams. More like Gomez Addams, or maybe Uncle Fester.

Hell, people who know what they’re doing shoot movies — actual films, not TikTok dances or cute-animal videos — using iPhones.

Not me, of course. Because (a) I don’t know what I’m doing, and (2) I don’t really want to learn.

When I was shooting bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist and teasers for Charles Pelkey’s Live Update Guy it was occasionally fun, kinda, sorta. But also complicated, because I was using a GoPro, or a more traditional camcorder — Sony VIXIA mini X or Panasonic HC-V770 — and there’s a whole lot of wobble when you’re recording video and audio in the wild, especially when the production crew is dumber than a bag of hammers and your leading man has a radio face.

Anyway, them newfangled consarned moving pictures do all the work for the audience. When you read or listen to a story, your imagination has to break a sweat. With video it just sorta slouches on the couch with one hand in the popcorn bowl and the other thumbing a phone, checking to see if there’s something better on.

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?

Infected, neglected and elected

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Looks all Dr. Hunter S. Thompsonesque, but this shit wouldn’t get a fly high.

I haven’t had a good hard sock in the snotlocker since the Before-Time, when I was shambling around half -drunk among the sneezers, wheezers and squeezers infesting the Interbike trade show in Sin City, chronicling the ups and downs of the bicycle biz for one magazine or another.

But I got one this fall, the sort that requires medical intervention, and just in time for the 2024 pestilential erection, too.

A daily fistful of antibiotics and steroids may cure what ails the sinuses but doesn’t do shit for the psyche as the electorate inexplicably sends the Clown Prince of Mar-a-Lago and his battalion of bozos back to the Oval Office to finish the job of putting the Republic up on blocks and stripping it for salable parts.

I can’t find a physician’s assistant who’ll write me a ’scrip for mescaline, psilocybin, or Old Reliable, the fabled L-S-Dizzy, not even at urgent care. And oy, is this ever a case for urgent care.

So I guess we’ll have to rely on talk therapy. Which means – yes, yes, yes —it’s time for another dose of Radio Free Dogpatch. Sorry; doctor’s orders. Look on the bright side — it’s not a suppository.

• Technical notes: Still rocking the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic massage. I lifted the opening and closing bits from The Firesign Theatre’s classic “How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All.” The clip from “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber,” with Steve Martin and Bill Murray, comes from” Saturday Night Live.” The background music, “Abandoned,” comes from Zapsplat. All the other bad noise is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Brown Dogging it

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Back in the saddle again.

“I hate to get hit myself as it digs a hole you don’t quite get out of for a couple of weeks.” — Brown Dog in “The Seven-Ounce Man,” by Jim Harrison

Brown Dog, a.k.a. B.D., didn’t burn a lot of daylight worrying about politics or getting his ass kicked.

He got drawn into both from time to time, as we all do. But they didn’t leave any lasting marks on him. Not for long, anyway.

Preparing to do battle with a couple of bruisers whose women he’d been romancing B.D. mused that “it wasn’t likely to be the end of the world, just a real expensive way to pay for getting laid a few times.”

All the world cares about, his grandfather once told him, is that you get to work on time.

Well. Shit. We got boned and beat up last Tuesday. I still feel as though I’m down in that hole, but I guess it’s time to get back to work.

A slice of watermelon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
In the pink.

Here’s a tasty bit of watermelon for all the veterans in the audience — sunrise over the Sandias — from your friendly neighborhood pinko.

Let’s also give a thought to all those who aren’t around to see it on Veterans Day 2024. Some of them might be a little upset with us for surrendering to the fascists they fought.