It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s aliiiiive!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
SuperTurk melts the snow with his X-ray vision.
SuperTurk melts the snow with his X-ray vision.

Once again Zombie Mad Dog Media (Hosted WordPress Edition) walks the earth in search of fresh brains.

The shamans of Waxedstringandacanistan resurrected the evil dead sometime on Thanksgiving Day, while Herself and I were in Fort Collins eating a defunct bird and related items with my sister, her husband and his brother. I should probably sacrifice a laptop to the XHTML gods to show my gratitude.

The drive home was the real party, as the first actual wintry weather we’ve seen so far swept in and glazed Interstate 25 like a cop’s doughnut. We were in second gear for most of the way from Larkspur to Bibleburg, but oddly enough saw only one leadfoot knucklehead backasswards in the ditch, at the south entrance to the Air Force Academy. Last year, in dry conditions, we saw a half-dozen or so.

The local nitwits are making up for lost time today, though, bashing into one another with a will as they race from mall to mall hunting Black Friday bargains. And in New York, one poor bastard, a Wal-Mart temp, got stomped to death by an unruly mob of cheapskates who broke down the doors and piled into the store, devil take the hindmost. Reports The New York Times:

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

Now that’s what I call a “door-buster.” The coppers should confiscate every single one of these yahoos’ credit cards, take the maximum cash advance from each, and hand the whole pile over to this poor sod’s survivors. I wouldn’t walk into a big-box store today if they were giving away eternal life with the Victoria’s Secret angels in a giant snow globe full of cocaine.

More holiday-shopping news:

Late update: OK, I confess, I surrendered to the siren song of consumerism, went out and bought … $125 worth of various groceries that over the next week will be magically transformed into chicken stew Provençal, chicken quesadillas, breaded pork chops with brown rice and braised kale, spaghetti alla puttanesca with Brussels sprouts, and black bean vegetable soup, along with various salads, breakfasts and lunches, the latter to be composed mostly of leftover dinners. Also a couple moderately priced bottles of Frog tonsil polish. And I didn’t have to trample anyone to get ’em, either.

Mmm, stimulus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

OK, who feels economically stimulated? Raise your hands, please. Eeeyeww, put ’em back in your laps, you filthy bastards, they’re all sticky.

The notion of going further into debt — credit cards, auto loans, what have you — leaves me feeling fiscally flaccid, frankly. I just don’t think I can get it up for buying a bunch of crap, no matter how shiny it is, if it means that in six months when VeloNews gets sold to Condé Nasty and Bicycle Retailer becomes a quarterly online newsletter some repo’ man name of Guido is gonna kick in the door of my refrigerator box down by Fountain Creek and take it all back.

Maybe I can get a job running off thousand-dollar bills at the Denver Mint. That seems to be where all the action is these days:

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

Oh, goody. Make that a bicycle box down by Shook’s Run.

Meanwhile, my buddy Matt reminds me that the bailout so far amounts to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, according to Bloomberg. That’s enough money to pay off half the mortgages in the country, conduct nine times the warfare we’ve already laid on Iraq and Afghanistan, and build a gold-plated escalator to the International Space Station.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it sounds about as sensible as propping up an elite class of paper-hangers so they can hose us all over again once we dummy up and resume buying shit on credit.

But enough about our crumbling economy. We’ve got a real crisis right here — cops rousting body Nazis from Santa Monica’s medians. Oh, the humanity.

A loss of focus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
"Without my super high-powered glasses I'm helpless!"

I’ve finally managed to lose my damn’ reading glasses after thousands of unsuccessful attempts, just in time for tomorrow’s shift in the virtual barrel at VeloNews.com. Expect typos in abundance.

I do have a set of bifocal “computer glasses” that I rarely use for actual computer work — they seem better suited to drawing cartoons — so, unlike Fearless Fly, who only had the one set, I am not entirely powerless. But these double-jointed sonsabitches give me a headache.

Come to think of it, so does editing. O, Lord, I will be gobbling the Advil like popcorn tomorrow.

Are you ready for some football?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Trying to add to my limited stores of cultural literacy, I switched the idiot-box controller from “video” to “TV,” manipulated the rabbit ears and plunked down in the rocker for a Sunday afternoon’s worth of Entertainment, American Style — the NFL on CBS, starring the Denver Broncos vs. the Oakland Raiders.

That lasted, oh, about 10 minutes.

Judas Priest, how can people watch this crap? Every other play was punctuated by three or four minutes of ads for wee-wee drugs, fast cars, watery beer, bad TV, worse movies and pricey electronic gizmos (including the new BlackBerry Storm, a Verizon-only iPhone rival).

And you know it’s only gonna get worse from Black Friday onward as panicked retailers start discounting this, that and the other in hopes of getting us to retrieve the Visa cards from cold storage, march down to the mall and do what Americans do best — buy a whole shitload of stuff they don’t need and can’t afford.

I’m no different. I like toys. Ask Herself, she’s keeping a list, and that sucker is longer than the original manuscript for Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” There’s another guy who had trouble controlling his appetites.

But I’m trying really hard to be sensible these days.

“Hi, I’m Patrick, and I’m a shopaholic.”

“Hi, Patrick!”

I have not rushed out and bought an iPod Touch, or an iPhone, even though I know Steve Jobs may have to start wearing mock black turtlenecks if I continue to refuse the Kool-Aid. A Honda Element does not, as yet, darken my doorway. I haven’t even augmented the Mad Dog arsenal, though the local militia seems convinced that Obama is coming for our guns and it’s time to buy buy buy before the blue helmets leap out of the black helicopters onto our brownish lawns.

Your call is important to us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Herself and I have been trying to learn something any 10-year-old knows — how to send multimedia messages from our AT&T cellphones.

Mia Sopiapilla atop the fridge, wondering why I'm pointing a cellphone at her.
Mia Sopaipilla atop the fridge, wondering why I'm pointing a cellphone at her.

I’ve been wanting to take pix on rides, but didn’t want to lug a camera along. Even my little Canon PowerShot SD600 fills up a jersey pocket, once in its carrying case, and there’s always the chance of yard-saling and destroying the shooter. Then I remembered I always pack a cellphone, and that cellphone has (wait for it) a camera, built right in. Duh.

But how to get the pix out of the phone? My old Samsung SGH-c417 doesn’t have a USB port, so the only exit is via e-mail, and I couldn’t find the door. This meant I faced a call to the dread tech support, probably a Hindu robot linked to a Chinese satellite phone in Spaminacanistan.

Imagine my surprise when I got a series of pleasant, helpful English speakers who walked me through the laborious process of reconfiguring various factory settings, changing the IP address and finally resetting the phone. It took about 45 minutes, but that was partly because it was a lengthy procedure and partly because I only use this phone as a phone. I don’t download tunes, text my peeps or IM; I ring ’em up. Hell, I didn’t even know how to toggle the keypad from numbers to letters and back again.

The procedure is not error-free; sending this pic of Mia atop the refrigerator took three tries and two reboots of the phone. And the pictures suck, frankly. Still, I suppose it’s better than packing a real camera and taking the chance of waking up trailside in a pile of prickly pear with the damn’ thing embedded in one lacerated kidney, busily snapping pix of your ruptured spleen.