A jihad against January and journalism

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

January should be struck from the calendar. What a waste of days. One day you’re singing the praises of global warming as you cycle along in summer kit, and the next you’re freezing your nutsack off and watching it “snow,” which in Colorado these days means greasing the streets just enough to keep the ERs and body shops busy.

I'm goin' down — down, down, down, down, down.
I'm goin' down — down, down, down, down, down.

If I had any brains and a little money to go along with them I’d be camping in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona. Alas, I am short on both. Herself’s Subaru just got about four years’ worth of service all at once, and paydays remain uncertain as publishers try to find a pulse somewhere on the bike business.

The new owners of VeloNews have a mania for contracts that delayed my check for services rendered during January as online editor at large of the VeloNews.com website, and now we must negotiate a deal for the remaining 11 months of 2009. I’ve gotten along just fine for the past 20 years without a written deal with VeloNews, and so has VeloNews, but as the song goes, the times they are a-changin’.

Now we must set down at length in black and white what both parties already know — that for chasing typos around Al Gore’s Intertubes I will get a monthly paycheck and nothing else, and can be cut loose at any time with neither severance nor notice. Feh. When has it ever been otherwise? Cycling journalism is not a union gig, last time I checked.

And anyway, I learned a long time ago that a union card isn’t exactly a crucifix when it comes to warding off corporate vampires. The Newspaper Guild provided about as much protection as a thousand-year-old rubber when I found myself at odds with the management of The Pueblo Chieftain back in 1985. I negotiated my own buyout and got the fuck out of Dodge before they could sack my dumb ass. Before long I found an even worse job, at the Sentinel Publishing Co. in Denver, which laid me off two years later. No golden parachute that time, just six months of unemployment insurance.

My man Hal Walter is staring down that long lightless tunnel now, trying to figure out what’s next. He has a wife, child, mortgage and truck payment, in a changing world that seems to no longer need newspapers, so he can’t do what I did in January 1988 — give up the apartment, throw the dog and some essentials in the truck, and go looking for another newspaper job.

Ho, ho, ho

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
After a week of consuming nothing but sauerkraut, bratwurst, baked beans and non-alcoholic beer, The Decider blows one last, vicious, nucular fart in the White House before scuttling back to Texas.
After a week of consuming nothing but sauerkraut, bratwurst, baked beans and non-alcoholic beer, The Decider blows one final defiant, nucular fart in the White House before scuttling back to Texas.

Feels kind of like Christmas Eve, doesn’t it? What’s that over there under the Tree of Liberty? Why, yes, Virginia (and the other 49 states, too) — it’s a brand-new White House, one without shit all over it! It’s the gift that keeps on giving, when it’s not overrun by rats, roaches and other vermin, and you can open it tomorrow.

You know it’s time for a change when even Oklahoma is fed up with an executive branch besmirched by the sort of vicious dolt it usually sends to Congress. Leonard Nelson, 63, a 23-year military veteran of both the Army and the Navy, voted for Barack Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain. “But I’ve come to think the better man won,” he told The New York Times. And indeed he did.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Obama can’t walk on water, nor turn water into wine. If you must have mythology, look to the tale of Sisyphus and hope, as did the outgoing president’s favorite read, Albert Camus, that he will be happy in his ceaseless toil. There are a lot of rocks to roll, and nothing but mountains for miles around.

Made in USA

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

One more quick note on newspapers, if only to annoy those of you who are weary of my fascination with the topic. In a time when shopping locally, eating locally and drinking locally is finally in vogue, albeit a bit late, the American newspaper is a product that not only is made in the USA — indeed, made right in your own hometown — but is reinvented, redesigned and reconstructed on a daily basis, as Hal Walter notes at Hardscrabble Times.

Greg, honey, is it supposed to be this soft?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Over at Political Animal Hilzoy delivers a farewell dope-slap to the “petulant lazy frat boy” who turned the Oval Office into Omega house — President George W. Marmalard. Examining his 2000 inaugural address, she notes:

He’s a small, small man, who ought to have spent his life in some honorary position without responsibilities at a firm run by one of his father’s friends. Instead, he ruined our country, and several others besides. He wasted eight years in which we could have been shoring up our economy, laying the groundwork for energy independence, making America a fairer and better country, and truly working to help people around the world become more free. Instead, he debased words that ought to mean something: words like honor, decency, freedom, and compassion.

To this day, I do not think he has the slightest conception of the meaning of the words he took in vain.

To repeat an old gag, he’s a man of few words — he only knows a few. Joe Galloway knows a few more, and he uncorks them with a vengeance here.

Meanwhile, it was another excellent day here in Bibleburg, and I enjoyed a third consecutive day on the cyclo-cross bike. This keeps up, it’ll be almost like training, only slower. And the unseasonable weather is supposed to hold, with temps in the 50s —and even the low 60s — forecast throughout the week.

Today’s ride with Dr. Schenkenstein went north into the Air Force Academy and back, and the contrast with Friday’s ride to Fountain was amazing. South of Woodmen the trail is drier than a popcorn fart. North of there it is a gooey, icy mess, with one particularly evil sheet of damp ice curb to curb on the concrete just before the trail turns to dirt.

On the way out, we both walked it. On the way back, I joked that if Dr. Schenkenstein got high enough on the concrete banking of the drainage channel, he could probably ride it. No sooner said than done. Up the wall he went, coming down just short of clearing the ice entirely, but keeping it up nonetheless. Think about going high on the velodrome, but with the high side to your left instead of your right. Pretty friggin’ impressive for a 50-something guy with a $10,000 deductible on his health-insurance policy.