Just like cyclocross, only slower

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Big Red after we exited the Elena Gallegos trails.

Having grown weary of thumbing through heaps of dusty grimoires in my fruitless quest for the incantations through which I might impose my will upon the WordPress Block Editor (curse its name, yes), I stepped away from the Mac, climbed onto a bike, and pedaled out for an hour of rolling meditation with a heavy overlay of just not thinking about the fucking thing.

The bike was my red Steelman Eurocross, sporting a new seatpost; its predecessor, a RockShox suspension post, had begun showing its age, and for safety’s sake it’s worrying enough that the senile old fool in the saddle has been doing that for a few years now.

So I thought I’d get that minor gear change dialed in, and since the sun was out, I decided to take it off the pavement and onto the dirt at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the dreaded Brown Stripe followed me home.

Except the dirt was mostly mud, except for where it was snow or ice or all three at the same time. Oh, yeah, right — we got a half-inch of precip’ on Thursday. Duh, etc.

The mildly sketchy conditions reminded me of the Good Old Days™, when that bike, its mango-colored older brother and I motored around Colorado in search of 45 frosty, filthy minutes plus a lap.

Nobody else in Elena Gallegos was rocking drop bars and 35mm rubber today, and a couple spectators at my one-man not-so-hot lap pronounced themselves impressed, which says less about me and my mad skillz than about the visibility of actual cyclocross in The Duck! City.

In truth, I shouldn’t have been on those trails, as wet as they were, and once I saw how soft the surface was with no improvement in sight I headed for the nearest exit and thence for home.

At least I didn’t have to wash my bike and kit at the car wash as in Days of Yore©. No quarters in the saddlebag.

Up the chimney he rose

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Santos Claus ain’t comin’ to town no mo’. Not if the town is DeeCee, anyway.

The House lit him up and he’s nothing but a bad smell, with no salary, no pension, and 23 felony charges. Cast out, like a leper with herpes, running sores, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, into the cruel political wilderness.

In other words … he’ll probably be just fine. He’ll be hosting “Saturday Night Live.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. …

Recycling?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
The DBR Axis TT and I went for a spin in the Elena Gallegos Open Space on Tuesday as the temps inched back into the low 40s.

Naw. That ain’t trash, waiting to be packed out. It’s just old, like its operator.

So don’t pack us out, for pity’s sake. Ain’t neither of us ready for the scrap heap yet.

Speaking of old trash and scrap heaps, I finally heard from the WordPress people about the comments issue, which seemed to have resolved itself to some degree after my last complaint on Nov. 22. Quoth WP:

The comment reply box has changed to the new box that adds the options of styling or layout changes using blocks. It cannot be disabled, it is the new default.

Fear not, your visitors don’t have to use the blocks, they can simply click into the box, and start typing.

This is the new “Reply” box as I have been seeing it lately.

A limited inspection of the process indicates that leaving a comment is once again fairly straightforward:

1. Place your cursor (or, depending upon your mood at the moment, “curser”) in the “Leave a Reply” box and start typing.

2. You will then be presented with the option of logging in using a WordPress account, Facebutt, or email (the latter method wants your email addy and a name; providing a website is optional). Select a login method.

3. You also are prompted to have posts/comments emailed to you. The buttons are off by default. Make another selection.

4. Hit the “Reply” button at lower right.

I switched laptops and launched Chrome to try commenting using an old email address. But I was not logged into the Gmail account I wanted to use and got a prompt saying so (O, buggah, etc.).

Rather than dive down that rabbit hole (usernames, passwords, and shit, O my!) I switched to Firefox to post my comment and saw it had me already logged in using my WP info.

I don’t have a Facebutt account so I couldn’t evaluate that option.

Anyway, that seems to be where we are at the moment. We don’t have to face that quadruple-decker “Reply” box with all the arcane symbols belonging to WP’s Block Editor (curse its name, yes). Just start typing and let ’er buck, cowpersons.

Anyone still having issues? Leave a note in commaaaaaaaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

I have good news and bad news

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Guess which is which?

It’s a very Irish sort of day here in The Duck! City, gray and gloomy with a steady drizzle, just the ticket for observing the departure of Shane MacGowan.

’Tis a fine soft day so.

He was just 65. But as Jerry Jeff Walker is reputed to have said to an elder, “You’re older than I am, but I’ve been up more hours.” By that reckoning MacGowan may have rivaled Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-old Man.

I have the two classic Pogues albums, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” produced by Elvis Costello, and “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.”

Every Christmas Eve Herself and I dance in the living room to “Fairytale of New York.” I have never been moved to dance to one of Henry Kissinger’s bleak, self-aggrandizing dirges.

However, I’m happy to let the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain dance a whipsong on Kissinger’s grave. Here’s a passage from his 2001 book “A Cook’s Tour,” forwarded by Hal Walter:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

For more of that sort of eulogy, see the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. I’d give a pretty to see Zombie Hunter S. Thompson arise from the grave and pick up where Bourdain and LG&M leave off. You may recall HST’s Rolling Stone obit for Richard Nixon.

• Late update: Charles P. Pierce also has a few thoughts, as you might expect.

Hasta la vista, John Nichols

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
John Nichols goes west.

When I bought my first copy of “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols — I have bought several over the years, replacing copies rumpled, thumbed and dog-eared half to death — the clerk at the Alamosa bookstore confided, “You know, this is about us.”

I bet a lot of people thought that, from Saguache to Socorro. “This is about us.”

The New York Times was not impressed. Reviewer Frederick Busch, himself a writer of novels and short stories, observed: “Nichols’s attempt to make his love for an area and his social concern coincide with his often celebrated sense of humor is doomed by his own always visible hand.”

Well, I never read any of Fred’s work. But I read a shitload of John Nichols. And I always came back to “Milagro.”

It wasn’t a great novel. As an editor I wanted to run through it with a cleaver, dispatching various digressions, superfluous characters, and a general flowery wordiness that must have caused a thesaurus or three to burst into flames from overuse. And the movie was pretty awful.

But “Milagro” gave me my first hint that water was not just something that came out of a faucet whenever and wherever you wanted it. And I met some of its characters — Joe Mondragon, Horsethief Shorty, Amarante Cordova, Charley Bloom — in places like Alamosa, Greeley, Española, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque.

Most of all, I enjoyed their wandering, collective story, in which The Little Guys go toe to toe with The Man. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. ¡Vamanos! They won a battle, but the war continues.

Alas, John Nichols does not. He has gone west after a long illness, according to his family. He was 83.