Tour time (well, almost)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
My Tour de France office circa 2005 ... today, I need the G4 tower, two large flat-panel monitors and the laptop to do business.
My Tour de France office circa 2005 ... today, I need the G4 tower, two large flat-panel monitors and the laptop to do business.

The clock is counting down toward the start of that little three-week bike race we all know and love, and a reader asks what the workload is like for Your Humble Narrator come Tour de France time.

Put simply, it was Death back in the bad old days, when Charles Pelkey was the lone web guy and I was a two-day-a-week free-lancer who was shanghaied for the duration during the three grand tours. Charles is an early riser, so he’d be cranking out the live updates at an hour when sane journos were still abed. I’d log in around 7 a.m. and we’d tag-team the editing and posting of words and pictures from John Wilcockson, Graham Watson, Andrew Hood, Casey Gibson and whoever else was across the pond.

Charles would usually fade out early, so I — who spent all those enjoyable years at newspapers working the night shift — would stick it out past dark-thirty just in case the dope cops decided to set riders to jumping out of hotel windows. Then we’d do it all again the next day. Repeat until the Champs-Élysées.

The rules were simple: Post like an ADHD baboon flinging dung against a primate-house wall and find an hour to ride. I added a third: Drink French wine. Come July we’d go through Côtes du Rhône like an alcoholic Panzer division.

Last year, things changed. Steve Frothingham joined VeloNews.com as the full-time web boss-fella, and this year, with him and Charles both on salary (read: no overtime), I’m told I’ll probably only have to cover my usual two days a week, which suits me just fine. I unplugged the cable after the Floyd Landis debacle in 2006, and I am seriously uninterested in watching Versus bury its monocular face in Lance Armstrong’s lap again. Plus the workload these days means I can’t camp on the back deck with a laptop anymore — I need two large monitors, the souped-up G4 tower and the laptop just to take care of business in the modern age.

So I’ll follow this Tour when I’m paid to do so, with the exception of a few stages: Saturday’s opening time trial; Tuesday’s team time trial; the stage-18 ITT; and of course, stage 20 to Mont Ventoux. I like time trials, and you have to watch Ventoux.

In between business and pleasure, I’ll ride my own damn’ bike, see if I can sweat a few pounds off, which seems unlikely. I still like my wine, and I’ll have more time to cook.

Your call is important to us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

A reader advises (thanks, Libby) that comments have suddenly been closed on posts and that nobody can read ’em or make one. I wondered why it got so quiet out there all of a sudden.  I have no idea what the problem is — comments show as enabled in settings, and I even tried overriding in a couple individual posts, but so far no joy. I’ve opened a support ticket at Hostcentric, which is akin to sacrificing a black goat to the Interweb gods, but what the hell? It’s either that or start banging on things with a big fuckin’ hammer.

Happy trails

~ Patrick O'Grady
This rose wasn't on the Kinnikinnick, but was in our back yard. The insanely wet June weather turned the joint into a tropical paradise.
This rose wasn't on the Kinnikinnick, but was in our back yard. The insanely wet June weather turned the joint into a tropical paradise.

Today not being a workday, I got out for a pleasant ride at a reasonable hour — my old Four Parks ride, which takes in Monument Valley, Goose Gossage, Pulpit Rock and Palmer Park. I wasn’t in any hurry to get home and spent a fair amount of time dicking around on the singletrack in Palmer Park, in the process discovering a trail that seemed entirely unfamiliar — the Kinnikinnick, just past the Council Grounds area.

I was on a ‘cross bike, my backup Steelman Eurocross, which was something like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There were some rocky bits I thought looked like the express lane to the ER, and June’s incessant rains had carved nasty V-shaped wheel-grabbers along a few loose descents. Everything was lined with flower-tipped cacti. Party time.

“Where the hell does this thing go?” I kept muttering to myself as I got on and off the bike.

And then I finally hit a junction I remembered. Hah. Comes the dawn. I’d ridden the Kinnikinnick before, but only on a mountain bike, and from the opposite direction. Duh. I will never be smart. I celebrated my sudden enlightenment by tearing off a quick piece of a trail I know backward and forward, the Grandview, and was rewarded with my favorite say-what stare from a couple of mountain bikers — “Is that dude on a road bike?”

Wheels up

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Our largish flower child is far from peaceful, and I have the scars to prove it.
Our largish flower child is far from peaceful, and I have the scars to prove it.

Michael Jackson seems to keep on being busily and profitably dead without my help, so I went back to work for VeloNews.com and did a few chores around the rancho between bouts of translating poorly from a French wire service while all our English-speakers fucked off somewhere, girding their loins for the Tour.

The garage now looks more like a bike shop than a toxic waste dump. I can walk from front to rear and back without barking a shin on something, and all the two-wheelers are hanging neatly from hooks, barring the Vespa, which has a prime spot on the deck, right next to the lawn mower.

Herself, meanwhile, got all medieval on the backyard greenery after a short bike ride. The June rains have turned the place into something out of “Platoon,” and it was getting tough to walk from the back door to the alley trash can without some vegetable grabbing you by the ankles and whispering, “Me love you long time, GI.”

The Turk, as usual, did fuck-all. Friggin’ hippie. Nobody ever told him that the revolution is over, and we lost.

Invincible?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

I suppose I should lay down some snark about Michael Jackson, who like many an entertainer before him danced down that yellow-brick road only to discover that the Emerald City was an MGM sound stage in Culver City, California, a far cry indeed from the Merry Old Land of Oz.

Unlike the rest of the universe, I never cared for Jackson’s music, unless a stripper was dancing to it. If I remember correctly, which is unlikely given the circumstances, when the fabled El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer Party in Denver one year relied heavily upon “Thriller” to undermine the morals of the women in attendance, I was appalled; I either ate a bunch of acid and retired to the top of a tractor-trailer parked nearby to meditate on the pure white light of stupidity, or went to sleep under my truck. Those parties tend to blur together in what remains of my mind.

To me, Motown meant Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and the Pips. Michael Jackson and his doppelgänger Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, defined talent squandered in the pursuit of celebrity.

A casual glance around the Internet indicates that the seriously disturbed artist who segued raggedly from King of Pop to Wacko Jacko donated heavily to various charities when he wasn’t throwing away millions on silly-ass bullshit, feeding an endlessly rotating nest of traveling vampires who are much more deserving of our scorn than was the young black man turned old white woman. But who among us has the wherewithal to tell a clanging cash register to shut the fuck up, even when it rings off key?

And anyway, what the hell? The millions were Jackson’s to piss away in any direction he cared to aim, and that some of his income went to worthy causes instead of his own private Disneyland, facial reconstruction and lawyers is to be honored and remembered.

Jackson famously outbid all comers to land the rights to a ton of Beatles songs, but he apparently failed to learn anything from one of the simplest of them — “Money Can’t Buy Me Love.” He died more than $400 million in debt, according to the Los Angeles Times. Isn’t it a pity?

• Late update: Herself asked if I’d mentioned the passing of Farrah Fawcett in this diatribe. I have now.