That’s ‘Life’

Man, that hourlong retraction from “This American Life” was a tough listen. I didn’t catch it all, but what I heard basically constituted every journalist’s nightmare: “You have fucked up, and been caught at it, and in failing to catch you ourselves we have fucked up. And now we are going to discuss our fraternal fucking up at length, in public.”

Anyone who has ever worked for “the media” has fucked up. It goes with the territory. You crank out a pile of word count, audio or video for the 24/7 news cycle it is not a question of if you will fuck up, but when, and how big. And it sure doesn’t help when one of your contributors decides to salt his or her work with a few fictions.

I no longer consider myself a journalist. I’ve rassled with school boards, cops and managing editors—the last of these is the worst—but back in the Eighties I abandoned the manly arts and took up sportswriting with a focus on cycling. And now I spend my workdays debating the voices in my head.

These days I call myself a rumormonger, because I mong rumors, whenever I’m not just flat making shit up. This is much easier than doing real journalism, or even pretending to.

And no one is outraged or even surprised when I say that Rick Santorum is an expert on pornography because he is a dildo, or Mitt Romney is the sort of robot that Microsoft would build, or that Apple makes its iPads out of Chinese babies.

• Late update: The New York Times’ David Carr addresses the issue at length, with more wit and fewer fucks.

Escape from San Diego

Beers to you.

Thanks to everyone who high-fived this old dog after he hit the VeloDoor a-runnin’.

Mostly a scribe doesn’t hear from the readership unless he’s managed to piss them off somehow. This will certainly come as a surprise to longtime readers, but despite my gentle demeanor I myself have received the odd bit of criticism for an occasional lighthearted, vicious attack on All We Hold Dear. So to read all these cheerful comments on my New Year’s Day post really made my day. Kicked 2012 off on a high note.

Today I had planned to celebrate my deeper embrace of underemployment with a long ride, but quickly got tangled up in e-mails, phone calls and social media. So instead Herself and I went for a short run in a nearby park.

It was the kind of January day the Greater Bibleburg Chamber of Commerce wishes it could bottle and sell at single-malt prices — beautiful blue skies, temps in the 40s and nearly windless — and we discussed strategies for moving forward as we … well, moved forward. Very, very slowly. Ask anyone who’s seen me run. So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the Old Guy Who Gets Fat In Winter is still very much alive, as is the Mud Stud, who hangs around Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. And if you prefer bicycle travel to industry news, I crank out the occasional piece for Adventure Cyclist magazine, too. Thanks to Marc Sani and Mike Deme for keeping kibble in the dish.

But for pure filth — rock-bottom, unadorned snark — this is the place to be.

So thanks again for getting the gags, and I toast each and every one of you. May the road rise up to meet you in a fashion that does not require cosmetic facial surgery.

The times, they are a-changin’

You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone. …

I started the New Year off with a bang, resigning my temporary commission as a junior officer aboard the sinking ship VeloNews.com.

It may sound impulsive, but it was a decision long in the making. I had been with VeloNews (now Velo) for nearly 23 years, since March of 1989, and had been a contributor to VeloNews.com for some nine years, eventually rising to the lofty post of online editor at large. As the MarketSpeak® has it, I felt some “ownership” of the “brand” and wasn’t eager to simply walk away as some equally frustrated friends and colleagues had done, among them former editor in chief Ben Delaney and former web editor Steve Frothingham.

Your Humble Narrator back in the mid-1990s, working a road race for VeloNews.

But VeloNews.com has been rudderless since Steve moved back to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, and though I agreed to fill in as web editor five days a week until a replacement unit was located, acquired and installed, I was a having an unusually difficult time getting management at Competitor Group Inc. in San Diego to commit to a basic two-days-a-week contract for Your Humble Narrator as 2012 approached.

Contractual squabbles were nothing new. Rassling management over contracts became an annual Feat of Strength after CGI acquired Inside Communications Inc. back in 2008, and excising toxic bits from their reams of legalese was like unbuilding Frankenstein’s monster.

But before there had always been a web editor or magazine editor standing between me and San Diego. We would exchange pleasantries (“Fuck no, I ain’t signing that. And where’s my check for January?” “Didn’t get paid again, eh? Why don’t you go on one of your pain-in-the-ass strikes?”) and eventually the exasperated intermediary and I would reach a deal that graciously permitted me another year’s earnings (unless CGI woke up cranky one day and decided to sack me), the retention of my copyrights and some limited freedom of speech.

This time around the website was on its own for budgetary purposes, the digital herd had been ruthlessly thinned and I stood alone against the Pirates of Mira Mesa. Repeated inquiries as to future employment were met with: “We’ll take it up with the new cap’n soon’s he’s piped aboard, matey. Now grab hold of an oar, the admiral wants to water ski.”

Well. Call me paranoid, but having seen the cutlasses come out for Charles Pelkey, John Wilcockson and other more senior members of the crew, I was starting to hear the sound of whetstones on steel in my sleep. So rather than wait to walk the plank, I used it as a diving board and went over the side.

The coward’s way out? Maybe. Truth is, I just didn’t feel like fighting tooth and nail for half a chance at the dubious privilege of repurposing magazine content, rewriting press releases and picking a new featured image in an old photo gallery to make it look fresh. I’m too old a salt for that. It’s cabin boy’s work.

I hate to leave the boyos in Boulder behind, facing heavy weather, but I won’t miss the buccaneers in San Diego. It’s a Bounty full of Blighs and not a Christian in the lot.

Freedumb isn’t free

It's ever so much cuter than an actual journalist. I mean, have you ever seen an actual journalist? Eeeyeew.

OK, I think I have Freedumb Communications’ little content-distribution problem solved. Let’s run this one up the strategically repositioned collaborative flagpole and see who facilitates a transformative salute in real time.

First you buy up a metric shit-ton of Berg’s Little Printers. You’re buying in bulk, so there should be a deep discount.

Next you pre-program the cute little dickenses to download updates from The Associated Press, Mayor Bach’s smoke-and-mirrors dispensary and the Colorado Springs Police Department blotter. And finally, if there’s anyone left in the art department after the last round of layoffs you get him to redo the face so it looks like Tim Tebow just before you have security escort the poor, no-longer-useful sonofabitch off the premises. Hell, the fucking thing already has orange feet — give it a blue body and you’re golden.

Then you sell ‘em to the readership — whoops, pardon me, the community — at a steep markup.

And hey presto! Content delivery without all the hassle, expense and human interaction required in content creation. You’re welcome.

Merry Christmas, you’re fired!

The Bibleburg Gazoo continues to bleed like a hemophiliac with Ebolla in a sandpaper suit.

Yesterday word came — not from the Gazoo, natch — that owner Freedumb Communications had sacrificed another dozen or so staffers to The Invisible Hand of the Free Market.

It wasn’t clear whether editor Jeff Thomas was among those fed to the Beast or resigned in protest.

Today, the G finally issued a statement — in MarketSpeak®. Any journalist who would write content-free spooge like the following should be slapped in the mouth with a copy of “The Elements of Style” (duct-taped to a baseball bat).

The goal is to reposition The Gazette’s content center strategically to create and facilitate community conversation around issues that are important to the region, and deliver relevant information that serves the needs of readers on any platform.

“We need to evolve to meet the changing needs of our audience,” (content director Carmen) Boles said. “We’re embarking on a transformation. We want to collaborate in real-time with the community in defining what is relevant.”

Talk about spinning a story about continuing layoffs at a struggling newspaper in hopes of showing vision rather than myopia. This would be good for an F-minus in any tank-town community-college journalism class. George Gladney would have stuffed copy like this up the author’s ass back in 1977.

I still know people at the G, folks who are doing good work under difficult circumstances. But there are some dreadful hacks on the payroll, too, as the above clip shows all too clearly. And frankly, any newspaper that gives Michelle Malkin a platform is going to have trouble “defining what is relevant.”

It can’t be long before Billy Dean Simpleton at Digital Fist-MerdeNews adds the poor old Gazoo to his odiferous collection of bumwads. There goes the neighborhood.

Food for thought

Whose peppers? OUR peppers!

There may be an upside to working five days a week, in addition to the obvious (a heftier paycheck): I spend more time reading cycling news and less time reading real news.

That’s got to be good for the blood pressure.

For example, today I got up at 7, grabbed a cup of Joe, assumed the position before the iMac and began the process of rerouting the contents of my in-box toward the sprawling server farm in Spaminacanistan that hosts the VeloNews.com website. This took the better part of quite some time but upon reflection seems very little like working for a living when compared to covering the interminable GOP “debates.”

The day’s chores included rewriting a press release; editing, augmenting and posting a few Agence France Presse wire-service stories; uploading a couple tech pieces; editing and posting a half-dozen bits from staffers and contributors; finding art to illustrate all of this; changing the marquee pic; and putting the finishing touches on a weekly e-mail newsletter The Company sends out.

I also managed to communicate electronically with distant colleagues in San Diego, Boulder, Laguna Hills, Brussels and Leon, Spain, without once using the word “fuck,” which may be a first.

So I didn’t get around to noticing that our friends at Fox News had decreed pepper spray to be “a food product, essentially,” until pretty late in the day, as I was self-administering a mild sedative that the French supply in liquid form without a prescription.

Pepper spray. A “food product.”

Well, shit. Don’t tell her momma, but it appears that I stealth-sprayed Herself last night. Slipped four dried red New Mexican chile pods into the posole I whipped up for dinner.

She never knew what hit her, the little commie.

Forward, into the past

It’s been 20 years since I had the traditional five-day, 40-hours-per-week job, and as those of you still manacled to same at wrists and ankles might expect I don’t miss it.

I quit for a reason. More than one, actually. Walking out of The New Mexican for the final time felt like taking one of those endless beer leaks after a long ride in an old truck on a bumpy road. Total relief.

I don't recall which job I held at The New Mexican when this mugshot was taken — I went from copy editor to assistant sports editor to assistant feature editor to feature editor in less time than it takes to say, "Why the hell am I still working here?"

To be sure, there are (or were) perks — health insurance, 401(k), two days a week off, sick leave, paid vacation and The Company buys your gear and puts a roof over your workaday head. But otherwise it pretty much sucks. I know, because during most of my 15 years as a newspaperman I was keeping a journal — you know, sort of an analog blog that nobody else gets to read.

So, having hard evidence that doing journalism eight hours a day, five days a week is like volunteering to get a daily pepper-spraying from Lt. John Pike, why in hell would I agree to go back to it? Especially considering that this time around, I don’t even get the perks because I’m an independent contractor and hellbent on remaining one?

Larry’s wife knows the answer. As for me, I’ll just note that when VeloNews.com lost both senior editor Charles Pelkey (involuntary retirement) and web editor Steve Frothingham (fled like a rat out of an aqueduct back to a former employer, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News), there was nobody left to ladle sludge out of the old VeloBarrel and onto the readers’ titanium-and-carbon-fiber plates save Your Humble Narrator (and Lennard Zinn’s daughter Emily, who recently clambered aboard as a part-timer).

So when The Company came a-callin’, I picked up the phone, even though we have Caller ID.

Call it equal parts stupidity (“Well, shit, someone has to do it,” a knee-jerk reaction common to journalists) and avidity (“There’s a pink slip out there somewhere with my name on it and I’d better start stockpiling fiat currency if only to save money on toilet paper.”)

All this is the long way around to telling you that if you see anything outrageously defective on VeloNews.com from Saturday morning to Wednesday afternoon during the next month or so, while The Company shops for iEditor 4.0, you’ll know whom to blame.

And if the bloggery gets a little thin around here, well — you’ll know whom to blame for that, too.

Charles Pelkey has some ‘splainin’ to do

"There are many exit visas sold in this café. ...

My friend and colleague Charles Pelkey has a couple reasons to celebrate today.

First, he’s over the hump as far as his chemotherapy treatments go — just nine rounds left.

Second, the former VeloNewser — who got his cancer diagnosis and a pink slip on the same day — is taking his popular “Explainer” column to Red Kite Prayer, an online project by another friend and colleague, my dopplegänger Patrick Brady (you have no idea how many Patrick Bradys and O’Gradys there are in the journalism biz).

In welcoming Charles aboard, Patrick called his decision in part “a protest against MBAs who focus on the bottom line above all other considerations.” But he added: “The greater truth here is that I love his work and I believe by bringing him into our fold I increase the value of this blog to both you our readers and our advertisers.”

Truer words, etc. Where Charles goes, eyeballs will follow. Congrats to both Charles and Patrick. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Buh-bye, bunga bunga

A guy can't eat Mexican 24/7, f'chrissakes. One must think of the neighbors. Leave the gas attacks to the coppers at Occupy Denver.

In honor of Silvio Berlusconi’s departure and Larry T’s extended Giro d’Italia — and because we’ve had an overlong run of beans, green and red chile, and posole around the DogHaus lately — I whipped up a skillet of buffalo bolognese tonight and laid it out over spaghettini.

Herself assembled a green salad and tackled post-dinner KP, while as per usual the cats and dog contributed exactly jack shit to the common good. Why we let all these critters Occupy Caramillo Street free of charge remains a mystery. Oh, yeah, they’re cute. Mystery solved. You know my methods, Watson.

Bloggery was nonexistent this weekend thanks to an unusually large pile of VeloNews, which caused me to mumble many words of four letters and one syllable as I shoveled away.

I wrote five race reports thanks to the miracle of streaming video; fielded quotes, updates and wisdom from Brian Holcombe, our man on the ground at USGP Louisville; posted a mess of results and bits of this, that and the other from Euro’ scribe Andy Hood and other contributors — and yet, when I look at the homepage, somehow it doesn’t look like there was much going on. It just took a long time to get it up there.

Meanwhile, for some reason I’ve decided to resume “running,” if your idea of “running” involves five minutes of same sandwiched between two 10-minute segments of walking. My knees were bugging me earlier this year, so I 86ed the ground-pounding in hopes that a respite might spare me a trip to the doc. Bad news I can get right here in the office for pennies via the Innertubes.

But on Saturday I did the walk-run-walk thing, and I repeated it today — ramping the “running” segment up to seven and a half minutes — and while I can’t say that it feels as pleasant as getting a hot-oil rubdown from Elle MacPherson and Tyra Banks after a double Talisker, it’s not as painful as watching Rick Perry or Herman Cain demonstrate how woefully unqualified they are to hold any position loftier than that of Wal-Mart greeter in Undescended Testicle, North Dakota.

Slow news day

Turkish has almost come to terms with the New World Order, which requires him to wear a leash outdoors. Almost.

Seems like it’s either feast or famine in the ol’ VeloBarrel. Last week it was nothing but heartache; today, it’s been mostly nothing. I wrote up the men’s World Cup in Tabor (having overslept and missed the women’s race), posted some results and an Andrew Hood piece, and … well, that’s about it. Bor-ing.

There are things going on, of course. There are cyclo-crosses from coast to coast, the Pan American Games, the Japan Cycle Cup Road Race, but because we are short on staff, free-lancers and travel money my in-box remains appallingly free of dispatches from the front. Only Agence France Presse chimes in from time to time, and that lot mostly speaks Frog: Le Belge s’est imposé en solitaire lors de la seconde épreuve dimanche, à Tabor (République Tchèque). Parti très tôt, dès le quatrième tour, il a laissé derrière lui un groupe incapable de s’entendre pour refaire son retard.

C’mon — we saved you guys from the Nazis and you can’t give us a race report in U-nited States American? And who are you callin’ a retard? Merde. Where’s my big ol’ Google translation hammer?

Between bouts of doing not much Herself shaved my dome, Turkish got some quality time in the sun and I whipped up some tuna salad for lunch. And if my in-box doesn’t go ping! real soon I’m gonna grab a bike and enjoy what looks to be one of our last few really nice days before a winter storm blows in.