I was not expecting to see 16° on the old weather widget when I stumbled into the kitchen this morning.
Six-fuggin’-teen? On April 5? Was Dante right? Hell is cold? Can we crank up the heat a smidgen, please, Beelzebub, you old devil? I know, I know, I’ve been bad, but shit, if I wanted to freeze my huevos off before coffee I’d still be doing my sinning in that hillside hacienda outside Weirdcliffe, where I had a stove, ax, and woodpile.
Still, could be worse. I spoke with Consigliere Pelkey yesterday and he said that I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne due to vile weather, th’owin’ a hitch inta his gitalong as regards a doctor’s appointment in the capital city.
My old Bicycle Retailer comrade Steve Frothingham checked in from the People’s Republic of Boul-Daire to report that it was “puking snow” in his neck of the Woke Woods.
We passed a few pleasant moments discussing jurisprudence and journalism in Manhattan and agreed that if a courtroom artist were required we wanted Ralph Steadman, since S. Clay Wilson is unavailable, being dead.
Today, meanwhile, rather than skulk around indoors and risk absorbing some news, I decided to motor around and about The Duck! City, scratch a few chores off the to-do list, wait for the desert to assert itself.
By midafternoon, the temperature finally inched into the low 40s, and I finally ventured out for a leisurely 5K on the trails, though asthma and allergies (juniper, poplar, elm, etc.) had me sounding like a secondhand accordion in the mitts of an unruly middle-schooler with a tin ear.
Tonight the wizards are calling for another hard freeze. I didn’t hear them calling yesterday, but I’ve heard them this time and unplugged the two hoses I use to water the trees.
“These temperatures are cold enough to kill most early season vegetation,” says the National Weather Service.
Good. Maybe they’ll croak the junipers, poplars, and elms. A man needs some breathing room.
Calm down, ye amadáin, I’ve not a drop taken: That’s a Guinness 0 so.
Birthdays. Some of us get overserved, others get 86’d with the cork barely out of the bottle.
Whoever’s in charge of this party seems a bit random. Can’t tell the top shelf from the well, the class from the dross. Proper ladies and gents given the shove while the most appalling tossers have the run o’ the place.
Take me, if you can bear to. Here I sit, roaring up on an age at which I had fully expected to have been stone dead for at least 39 years. Upended many an office pool I did.
“Who picked 69? 69? Well, doesn’t matter, because the bugger is still alive!”
Turn your radio on.
Meanwhile, there’s many an empty stool in this shabby shebeen. Where’d everybody go? They were all here just a minute ago. …
Herself is back east with family and friends to raise a belated parting glass to a lifelong friend carried off by COVID last fall.
I’m right here, having charge of the cat. But recently I spoke with one of my old pals, the former Live Update Guy Charles Pelkey, who has taken a few sucker punches since a cancer diagnosis a dozen years ago but is still on his feet in Laramie, all bouncers be damned.
It may be my birthday that’s on tap come Monday, but I’d buy Charles a round to celebrate his most recent lap around the sun, may it not be his last. Lucky for me and my 401(k) I don’t drink anymore; I don’t think he does, either. ’Tis unknown the amount of money our younger selves could piss away in a proper pub.
At the publisher’s expense, of course.
But that’s neither here nor there.
And anyway, it’s the thought that counts.
So belly up to the bar — unbeknownst to the landlord, who is manhandling another tray of industrial lager to the hoops-watching gobshites glued to the TV in the back of the pub, we’re uncorking an 18-year-old, double-cask, single-malt episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. And sláinte to yis.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: There was an inordinate amount of racket in and around El Rancho Pendejo this week, but after a series of false starts I was finally able to nail something down using my trusty Shure SM58 mic and the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Music and sound effects are courtesy of Zapsplat,Freesound, and Your Humble Narrator.
The GoFundMe that David Stanley set up to help our old pal Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey is ticking along nicely, which is more than I can say for the “classic” LUG video up above.
As of 2 p.m. Dog time the fund was at $24,410 — a tip jar that we never could’ve imagined when we were begging for nickels to run Live Update Guy. A thousand thank-yous to everyone who has contributed and/or spread the word about the fundraiser.
Now, give a listen to another old pal, Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Jenks, who interviewed David for the most recent episode of her long-running podcast.* You’ll get a better idea of how all this good fellowship came about.
If you haven’t joined the party, here’s a link to CP’s GoFundMe page.
* One minor correction: The cartoon of Charles that accompanies the GoFundMe news Diane and I spread around is not by Your Humble Narrator. It’s by David Brinton, a.k.a. Brintoni, who did such great work illustrating “At the Back” in VeloNews while I was up front pissing on people’s shoes.®
We got a drive-by from that cloud over by the Sandias.
Thanks to everyone who has dropped a dime in Charles Pelkey’s GoFundMe tip jar.
As of 8:30 a.m. Dog time the fund was approaching $18,000, which as organizer David Stanley notes represents “a phenomenal level of love, affection, and admiration” for our old Live Update Guy pal.
I’ve added a widget to the sidebar for anyone who missed the memo. And it was delightful to see so many former VeloNews types in the list of donors.
Meanwhile, here in The Duck! City this morning we got a wet little kiss on the cheek from the gods; just enough rain to rinse some dust off the cacti. Thank you, sir or madam, may I have another?
I expect Herself and her pal Leslie are glad they canceled their trip to Southern California, where the rain is washing away the dust, the cacti, the hillsides the cacti are rooted to, and damn nearly everything else. Especially since the FAA developed a hitch in its gitalong, an IT failure of some sort that buggered about 4,600 flights.
That’s a surfin’ safari you can keep, is what. Nobody likes this drought, but who wants to hang ten on their front door while rocketing down a diversion channel to the Rio Grande?
Editor’s note: While we’re waiting to hear from the man himself, I’ve unearthed a couple moldy oldies — a short video I did for Live Update Guy, and a piece I wrote about Charles “The Big LUG” Pelkey back in 2017, when I still had a column at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. Meanwhile, you can offload your spare change into Mr. P’s Tip Jar at GoFundMe.
• • •
“He shook his head, and as he shook his head, I heard someone ask him, ‘Please, Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles … dance.”—Jerry Jeff Walker, “Mr. Bojangles”
By Patrick O’Grady
This July marked the first time in years that I haven’t been required to follow the Tour de France.
So I didn’t. And it was swell.
Well, mostly.
I’ve spent nearly three decades paddling my little canoe along the bright yellow revenue stream of the Tour without ever having to visit its source in France, which I hear is quite a drive from Albuquerque, even in a Subaru.
The Tour got me into bicycle racing in the Eighties, and bicycle racing got me out of the newspaper business in the Nineties, before The Suits declared open season on copy editors.
Fight or flight? Flight, I thought as I hit the door running, and when does the beverage cart come around? Make mine a double. Anybody who thinks a pan-flat, 200km sprinters’ stage in the Tour is dull never edited a school-board story at 10:30 p.m., when sensible people are already half in the bag.
But even the Tour loses its kick after a while. And so, after Charles Pelkey and I agreed to leave his Live Update Guy project parked for 2017, I celebrated by stuffing part of a bike and all of my left hand into a trailside cholla.
Funny money. Of all the things I’ve done for money, Live Update Guy scores way up there on the fun meter.
This odd little enterprise came about in “Let’s put on a show!” fashion, a la Busby Berkeley’s “Babes in Arms.” Or maybe Monty Python’s “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” would be closer to the mark.
Charles had been handling live updates and other chores for a Boulder-based cycling enterprise until he got a pink slip and a black diagnosis more or less simultaneously in 2011, two days after the Tour wrapped.
The one-two punch of unemployment and breast cancer couldn’t keep him down, though. He put his University of Wyoming law degree to work full time, eventually becoming a co-founder of the Laramie firm Neubauer, Pelkey and Goldfinger, LLP.
But Charles still enjoyed following pro cycling, and while undergoing chemotherapy he hung out another shingle, LiveUpdateGuy.com, and called the 2011 Vuelta a España—supported not by advertising, or vulture capitalists, but by his readership.
Like Mr. Bojangles, Charles was dancing for tips.
Hey-o! I joined the show in 2012, but Charles was the star, and rightly so.
For starters, he had actually been to all three grand tours, performing feats of journalism. In this new role, he arose at stupid-thirty for the start of nearly every stage of nearly every GT, and generally carried on till the bitter end, then popped back in later to add results for the data-obsessed.
I generally clocked in late to make fart noises, get things wrong, and make people crazy. In other words, same as I do here.
This has its limits, as you know. If Charles had lawyering to do and left the keys to the joint with me, eyeballs and donations dropped off accordingly. Nobody turned on the “The Tonight Show” to watch Ed McMahon. They wanted Johnny.
Spare change? We said LUG operated on the NPR model—light on commercials, heavy on beggary—but it was more like busking next to an upturned hat on a downtown sidewalk.
When the act was good, we got paid. Not so good, not so paid. It was an astoundingly libertarian business model for two old commies, though there was a Marxist overlay; we didn’t bounce anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
We got a big assist from the audience, which included an actual monsignor at the actual Vatican who proved a prodigious daily essayist; a generous East Coast equestrian with a crush on Peter Sagan; and a poet laureate who affected the guise of a herring-mad penguin.
“I’d say that some of my favorite memories involve the family that we created out of that site,” said Charles. “They are a wonderful group of people. It’s been a privilege to get to know a lot of them.”
It’s … Monty Liggett. When action was slow on the road, LUG served up running gags (Monty Python and various Liggettisms were in heavy rotation).
So, too, were clubby and impenetrable acronyms like HWSNBN (“He Who Shall Not Be Named,” for a certain Texan), and NRRBBB (“Non-Race-Related Blah-Blah-Blah”), in which some critics argued we indulged too freely.
But when you have the effrontery to provide live commentary on a grand tour from start to finish, and from the wrong side of the pond, with few resources beyond unreliable video feeds and your equally dubious wits, it’s hard not to tumble into the ditch of digression now and then.
Some days trying to keep it between the ditches felt an awful lot like work. So, with Charles now a legislator as well as a lawyer—he won election to the state legislature in 2015—and me wanting to ride a bike in the early morning before the Duke City desert starts to smoke, it seemed wise to take a break this time around.
Maybe not, though. Because if we had been calling the Tour, safe in the ever-lovin’ arms of the LUG Nuts, I might not have stuck my hand into that damn’ cactus.
• Editor’s note v2.0: This column appeared in the Aug. 1, 2017, issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
Regulars here know the story. Charles fought breast cancer to a draw, then got back to living his life as a lawyer, legislator, and family man.
But he’s since had a few setbacks, the kind that dollar up on the hoof awful fast, and another friend has set up a GoFundMe site to help Chazbo stay one long step ahead of the bill collectors.
That’s right, folks — it’s Tip Jar time again! Doesn’t matter if it’s dimes or dollars, every little bit helps.
And if you can spread the word on your various social-media accounts, that would be swell, too. Thanks in advance.
Our segment kicks off about 33 minutes into the show. Steve Frothingham, editor in chief of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, gets things rolling with a discussion of the year just past in the bike biz and what we might expect in 2021.
Thanks to Diane for giving the Padre, Charles, and me a little corner of her chat room. You can give us a listen by clicking here.
Giclée prints are available in the lobby. Cash only. No checks.
Behold the latest in my celebrated “A Mad Dog in Winter” series. It may be my greatest Work. Either that or just an iPhone snap of the driveway.
Speaking of the Work, Charles Pelkey and I will be joining the fabled Diane Jenks this morning on “The Outspoken Cyclist” podcast. We’ll be talking about Live Update Guy in general and the late Msgr. Richard “Mons” Soseman in particular. Mons was a regular at LUG during his days at the Vatican, and this is just another way for us to tell the world how much we miss him.
Msgr. Richard Soseman, better known to the Live Update Guy crowd as “Mons,” has been taken from us by the pandemic. He was 57.
LUG’s Charles Pelkey gave me the word just now. The Catholic Posthas more.
A Mass at the tomb of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen on the 41st anniversary of his death on Dec. 9 also was a first opportunity for the Diocese of Peoria to mourn the death from COVID-19 two hours earlier of the vice postulator of the famed media pioneer and author’s cause for canonization.
“We gather with sad news for our diocese as Msgr. Richard Soseman has gone home to God this morning,” said Coadjutor Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria at the start of the 8:30 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria.
Msgr. Soseman, 57, had been the episcopal delegate assigned by Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, CSC, to assemble Archbishop Sheen’s sainthood cause and later became vice postulator. Acknowledging “our hearts are heavy” with the news of his death, Bishop Tylka said “in some ways it is providential and fitting that on the same day that Sheen went home to God, so does Msgr. Soseman.”
We knew Mons as a cycling fan, a witty, energetic correspondent, and a generous spirit who gave far more to our silly little sideshow than it deserved. Neither Charles nor I ever met the padre face to face, but we both miss him as though we had spent years in his presence. Which, in a small and remote way, we did, a blessing for which I am grateful.
The Catholic Post will publish a full obituary at some point. I expect Charles will have more to say as well. In the meantime, those of you on Facebook might visit the monsignor’s Facebook page.
Be well, take care, and give a thought to absent friends.
"Ever see a TV dinner just abandoned in the beer aisle?"
—— Kyle Kinane, “Whiskey Icarus”
Who’s this Mad Dog guy?
Patrick O'Grady has been making stuff up since, well, forever. He started doing it for money in high school and didn't quit until he retired in 2022. (To be honest, if you waved enough Dead President Trading Cards at him, he might do it for money again.) Until then, this blog is his pro-bonehead work. For more on Your Humble Narrator, click the comic.
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