When marketeers attack

April 2, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

In a continuation of its on-going strategy to become the global innovation leader in the bicycle-comedy market, Mad Dog Media (BIT: EM, E) today announced that its Biting the Hand That Feeds Us/Inside Jokes segment has launched a multi-faceted Worldwide Centers of Obfuscation program.

“Our vision is to create the most innovative and admired company in the bicycle-comedy marketplace, and to become a global leader, which is why the Mad Dog Media segment was established in the first place,” said Patrick O’Grady, Chief Cur and Head Hound of MDM’s Relentlessly Lampooning MarketSpeak® segment. “The strategy for transforming that vision into reality requires a unified, collaborative, and highly engaged workforce, relentlessly committed to innovation and supported by management in rapidly advancing the quality of the products and services we deliver.”

Toward that end, O’Grady said, he would be laying himself off effectively immediately and offshoring all cycling cartoons and commentary to a one-eyed goatherder with a closed head injury in Waxedstringandatincaninstan.

“I mean, hell, why not?” added O’Grady. “I’m too expensive. I need a whole bunch of shiny stuff and a roof to keep the rain off it, three hots and a cot, and top-shelf liquor. Plus I’ve spent the past three decades trying to learn how to write, but I just can’t make this sort of shit up — not sober, anyway. Maybe Abu bin Popeye can.”

Vidiocy

April 1, 2009November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

The news is too depressing to merit comment, so I shut down the MacBox briefly to install a new-used AGP video card to deliver the evil tidings faster, and on two monitors at once. I will never be smart.

Truth to tell, this is part of the reason I’m reluctant to pull the trigger on a new Mac — this old G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac is absurdly easy and cheap to expand. I scored it for the cost of shipping from the offices of Bicycle Retailer & Industry News in California some years back, and since have added a 1.1GHz processor upgrade, a DVD burner, an Airport wireless card, a second internal hard drive, a four-port USB 2.0 card, 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video card, which replaces an ATI Rage 128 Pro and thus brings my video capabilities up to, oh, 2002 or thereabouts.

The old beast even has a Zip drive, in case I need to tap some of my archived wisdom from the previous millennium, and a brand-new 250GB external HD for saving the latest and greatest brain droppings — including the entire boot volume, which gets copied over every week using SuperDuper!

Maybe tinkering with this dinosaur is my penance for being a complete retard in junior-high shop, where I couldn’t even forge a suitable cold chisel. Or for skipping auto shop in high school. Or for buying that 1978 Toyota Chinook pop-top camper, which had all the positive qualities of being trapped in an elevator with Glenn Beck.

The Turk' and I both got outside briefly today. Neither of us liked it.

Whatever. All I know is this hot-rodded Sawtooth from 1999 is still running on the original drive, unlike a certain newish MacBook I could mention. A guy could get a hernia fetching the 10-ton sonofabitch around from coffee shop to Internet café, but as Boris the Bullet Dodger once noted in the Guy Ritchie film “Snatch”: “Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn’t work you can always hit them with it.”

Late update: Good God, it’s snowing again. I am so moving to Arizona. Maybe I can get a gig chauffeuring Big Jonny from barstool to law school.

Unhappy motoring

March 30, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

The Aztec sun god Tonatiuh, a life-taker and heart-breaker.

More snow. Feh. The sun god Tonatiuh is angry. Let us feed him the hearts of American auto industry executives and beg his forgiveness in order that spring may return.

I’m not quite certain what to think about the feds getting all medieval on Detroit. I don’t have any sympathy for The Big 3’s management — my second and last American auto was a 1996 Ford F-150 that was possessed by evil spirits, and it’s been nothing but Subarus and Toyotas around here since — but you have to feel for the grunts who actually made things over the years instead of shuffling worthless pieces of paper around. As usual, the shit will roll downhill, and the working stiffs will be inhabiting a dank and smelly valley.

Over at The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris sees some useful lessons from previous federal interventions in the railroad industry, a tale told by Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation. Meanwhile, dday and Josh Marshall wonder why it’s all hugs and kisses for bank execs but cold shoulder for the auto bosses.

Myself, I’d like to know when the crucial cycling-humor industry will be getting its fingers off the keyboard and into Uncle Sam’s bottomless pockets. I need a new snow shovel, and I’ll be happy to surrender my private jet if that’s what it takes.

Late update: Also at Washington Monthly, Hilzoy opines on “cramdowns,” or allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce homeowners’ mortgage principle, noting that “it’s no good trying, for instance, to save GM if we don’t have customers who are able and willing to buy cars. As any number of commenters have said, we need to shore up the not just businesses’ balance sheets, but consumers’, since if they are not able and willing to spend, then even the best-run businesses will fail.” Well said.

Thanks for the memories (or not)

March 29, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Ever been to a Holiday Inn? Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! — Proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that cheap lager, nicotine and psychedelic drugs make you smart.

If you kept a journal or diary as a young person, do yourself a favor and feed it at once into the nearest shredder, wood stove or fireplace. Do not, under any circumstances, open it and begin reading. That way lies madness.

In 1974, when I was a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun, George Gladney — then a reporter, now a journalism prof at the University of Wyoming — urged me to begin keeping a journal, and I jotted down my “thoughts,” such as they were, into the mid-1980s. Today I have some 20-odd volumes of my musings, with the emphasis on “odd,” and I recently made the mistake of thumbing through a few to put myself back in the moment so I could write a blog post about a friend’s death.

Apparently the only reason I had any friends at all in college was that I never said aloud any of the stupid shit I wrote down. Or maybe I did and they just kept me around as some sort of science project. The University of Northern Colorado was primarily a teachers’ college, after all, and offered a degree in special ed.

Thank God there were no blogs, Twitter feeds or Facebook pages back then. If my parents or the State had had any idea of what was going on inside that hairy skull of mine, I would’ve spent the past 35 years weaving baskets or pressing license plates instead of annoying my betters in print and online. You think my little one-ring circus is appalling now, you should’ve seen it before I got all the animals mostly housebroken.

Donna Frances Shawcroft, R.I.P.

March 28, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

One of the downsides of growing older is that some of your friends don’t. Donna Frances Shawcroft died in her sleep a week ago today, and her friends and family are saying goodbye to her this morning in Grand Junction.

Donna and her husband, Doug, a.k.a. Mudbone, were part of the crowd I ran with in college, the venerable and infamous Mombo Club. They weren’t the first of us to get married — that dubious distinction went to Mombo himself, if memory serves — but if they weren’t first out of the gate, they certainly went the distance, nearly 30 years’ worth. Two kids, two grandkids.

The Mombo Club has since disbanded and dispersed, and it’s been years since I saw Doug and Donna. But I’m thinking of them now. Requiescat en pace, Donna.