Much noise, little signal

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
"Calling all cars; calling all cars; be on the lookout for a Manx sprinter, 5-foot-9, 150, a pair of guns concealed under the Lycra ... that is all."
"Calling all cars; calling all cars; be on the lookout for a Manx sprinter, 5-foot-9, 150, a pair of guns concealed under the Lycra ... that is all."

Arrgghh. Another one of those days at Le Tour. “As exciting as watching flies do the nasty,” as I tweeted between bouts of posting stories and photos at VeloNews.com. And I don’t know which of those things is dirtier — flies doing the nasty, tweeting or posting cycling journalism to the Ethernets.

The peloton had its collective chamois in a bunch over the decision to ban race radios on this stage and one other, stage 13, which may explain the general lack of action.

Yet who among us can blame them? The riders found themselves alone, cast adrift on a roiling sea of asphalt, with no resources other than teammates, feed zones, cell phones, team vehicles full of directors, spare parts and complete bicycles, Mavic neutral support, the race doctor, guys on motos bearing blackboards, maps of the day’s route and their own intimate knowledge of the strategy and tactics of the sport. Oh, the humanity.

Sure enough, the lack of moment-to-moment radio communication between the team cars and their riders proved so decisive that (gasp) Mark Cavendish won a bunch sprint on a mostly flat stage! Imagine that, if you dare. I tell you, it had me whimpering like a little child.

Meanwhile, in DeeCee, the extremely junior Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Aryan Nations) tried to bitch-slap Supremes hopeful Sonia Sotomayor during day two of her confirmation hearing today and found himself munching a fat mouthful of his own feeble knuckle sandwich.

Contrasting Sotomayor’s approach to jurisprudence with that of Reagan nominee Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, saying Cedarbaum “believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices,” Sessions got whacked upside his pointy head with a one-two tag-team tap from Sotomayor and Cedarbaum, who was present at the confirmation hearing. It’s a wonder that Kluxer hood of his stays so white, considering where he keeps his head.

Said Cedarbaum, so beloved of Sessions that he didn’t know she was in the room, “I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging.”

Quipped Ian Millhiser of the ThinkProgress Wonk Room in live-blogging day two of the Sotomayor hearing: “Note to Sessions: before you put words in a federal judge’s mouth, make sure that she isn’t in the hearing room to hear your false claim.”

I’ll bet the sonofabitch goes home, spills a generous dollop of Old Tennis Shoes on the carpet and blames it on the maid, then makes his wife fire her. This empty suit is a disgrace to rednecks ever’whur. Thanks and a tip of the Mad Dog gimme cap to Steve Benen of Political Animal.

Stranger in a strange land

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
The cartoon I drew to commemorate my 20th anniversary as VeloNews' editorial cartoonist.
The cartoon I drew to commemorate my 20th anniversary as VeloNews' editorial cartoonist.

So I hit the grog shop this afternoon as part of a grocery run (yes, French rosé is a food group) and as I’m headed to the door with a double armful of Gallic brain eraser some other customer inquires thusly:

“O’Grady?”

Regrettably, I am unarmed, not even a Buck knife, and thus am disinclined to lay claim to that tarnished crown until I’ve gotten a good close look at the speaker and some idea of his intentions. Especially since both of my hands are full of wine for which I have already paid.

Turns out it’s Felix Magowan, who with John Wilcockson and David Walls constituted the original Trio that owned VeloNews when I started drawing cartoons for the magazine beginning with the March 10, 1989, edition. The Trio had declined to hire me as managing editor, which worked out well for both parties; I wouldn’t have lasted six months as ME but I’ve cashed 20 years’ worth of VeloNews checks as a cartoonist, reporter, editor and occasional columnist. Sometimes they even arrived more or less on time.

When Competitor Group Inc. of San Diego bought Inside Communications in March 2008, Felix stuck around as a consultant, a gig that recently came to an end. Like Walls and a whole mess of other folks over the years, he is now formerly of VeloNews. Indeed, of the original cast of characters listed in the masthead of that March 1989 edition, when VN was first setting up shop in Boulder, only Wilcockson, Lennard Zinn and I remain. A Limey, a conehead and a pain in the ass. Throw some tits and a car chase in there and we’re talking boffo box office, if only in summertime.

“You’re officially a member of the Old Fart League,” quipped senior online editor Charles Pelkey, who has logged fewer years but more hours and actually quit once for a few months. Happily, he got bored with the quiet life as editor of a quarterly alumni magazine and leaped right back into the frying pan of UCI regulations, doping inquiries, live updates from grand tours, classics and other monuments of the sport, and weekly bouts of explaining the inexplicable in his “The Explainer” column.

Here’s to our noble selves. There are damn’ few of us left.

Pyrénéezzzzzzzzzzz . . . .

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

What a travesty, turning the Col d’Aspin and the Col du Tourmalet into a couple of speed bumps en route to a two-up sprint that barely beat an 80-man dash to the line. Bor-ring. A la chingada con el Pyrénées, in this format, anyway. More Roberto Duran, less Gary Kasparov, please.

Meanwhile, Big Tex has transformed himself from The Great Stone Face to Chatty Cathy, briskly dispensing wisdom to fans and foes alike. Contador? Ambitious. Evans? Gutsy. Race radios? Stupid. The ’10 Tour? Maybe. We could change the name of the site to “VeloLance: The Journal of Competitive Lanceness” based on the volume of copy we got on him today, f’chrissakes.

I think I liked him better when he was stiff-arming the press. Sheeyit, a guy could get tired of Mozart if he heard too much of him.

No ride for Your Humble Narrator today. First it was too busy, then it was too hot, and finally it was too rainy. This is the weirdest Colorado summer I can recall, and I’ve seen plenty of ’em. We have three fans going on in the bedroom now, and I could still test a Cervélo P666 and a prototype asbestos Assos skinsuit in there. I want heat and humidity, I’ll move back to San Antone.

When pigs have wings

~ Patrick O'Grady

The swine flu comes to the Air Force Academy. Jeez, like it isn’t already tough enough to be a doolie at the Zoomie Zoo.

Downtown, it was a bear scaring the berries out of the civilians.

In Frogland, meanwhile, the Schleck brothers came out to play, briefly dragging most of the other contenders away from yellow jersey Rinaldo Nocentini on the Col d’Agnes. It seemed a pointless exercise at 8 a.m. Bibleburg time, the course being downhill all the way to the finish, but hey, what do I know? You can count my stage-racing wins on the toes of a peg leg.

Cool dinner, hot descent

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
This corn-tomato salsa is not only tasty, it's pretty.
This corn-tomato salsa is not only tasty, it's pretty.

Summertime always calls for some bitchin’ in the kitchen, ’cause this place with its six south-facing windows gets hot. Deciding what to prepare for dinner is something of a struggle — cranking up the oven for enchiladas, oven-fried chicken or baked salmon is only adding fuel to the fire. But being a man of some appetite (as in “great fat bastard”), I generally want something more than a simple salad.

Whenever I’m stumped I turn to Martha Rose Shulman’s “Recipes for Health” feature in The New York Times. She focuses on fairly simple, seasonal dishes — as she puts it, “food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat” — and when I checked in on her yesterday she had posted a recipe for soft tacos with chicken and tomato-corn salsa whose cooking demanded only a single saucepan for poaching the bird and a skillet for warming the tortillas. No sweat, to coin a phrase.

“These light, fresh tacos make a wonderful summer meal,” Shulman wrote, and she did not lie. Happily, we have enough leftovers for a repeat performance tonight.

Meanwhile, Le Tour hits its first real mountain today. Astana is running the bunch as if they had the yellow jersey, while the guy who actually does, Fabian Cancellara, double-flatted on a descent and had to chase back on at speeds approaching 60 mph. Dude went around the corners like he was on rails. I wasn’t scared at all, but somebody shit in my seat.

• Late update: Once again, Big Tex did not get the yellow jersey, and there is much chin music among my colleagues as to just how he feels about Alberto Contador hitting the afterburners on the final klicks of the climb to Arcalis. The two of them probably split a sixer of Shiner Bock in the Astana bus and cackled at the befuddled chamois-sniffers, professional and amateur alike.