Month: January 2010

Hail, Gloptron!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
A constitutional convention goes awry in Gilbert Shelton\'s "Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November."
A constitutional convention goes awry in Gilbert Shelton's "Wonder Wart-Hog and the Nurds of November."

Over at AlterNet, Greg Palast writes: “In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as ‘natural persons,’ i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.”

This very scenario was envisioned decades ago by cartoonist Gilbert Shelton in his graphic novel “The Nurds of November,” in which the jobless deuce reporter Philbert Desanex — the mild-mannered alter ego of the Super Swine, Wonder Wart-Hog — runs for president against the corporation Gloptron.

Whether he was drawing Wonder Wart-Hog or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Shelton always seemed more politically intelligent than most of his contemporaries. In 1976, he teamed up with Ted Richards, Gary Hallgren and Willy Murphy to pen “Give Me Liberty! A Revised History of the American Revolution.” The “Nurds” book followed in 1980. It ends, as you might expect, badly, with a hungover constitutional convention establishing a fascist dictatorship led by a very much alive Adolf Hitler, who had his skull and teeth surgically removed to mislead his enemies.

Shortly thereafter Shelton left the Benighted States for France, taking his prescience with him. In 1995, he told The Idler: “The Christian fundamentalist right are … scary. I just didn’t want to be involved. The whole way that America wants stupid people in power, and the way they want to remove anyone with any ideas or any education, get rid of the bright people.”

When did the Irish learn how to ride upright?*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm old and brittle and inflexible. Shuddup.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm old and brittle and inflexible. Shuddup.

The people of Arizona clearly have sold their souls to the Devil and this is the upshot. Well, this and John McCain, who is full of more bad noise and wind than any tornado.

The weather is deteriorating here, too. I probably should’ve done a long ride yesterday, but instead I went to Old Town Bike Shop for a bike fit from Randin Isip, who’s been through the Serotta school. After dicking around with my position for too many years on too many different bikes I was convinced that I’d settled on a bad setup and wanted an expert’s opinion.

Turns out I was right. I’d done a little homework before going in and lowered my saddle height a couple centimeters, which also brought it forward a bit and felt like a slight improvement. But Randin took it a good deal further, adjusting my saddle height, angle and fore-aft position, tinkering with my cleats, and finally swapping my already-geezerish stem for one with even more rise. Sucker looks like the boner on a 14-year-old kid surfing Internet porn.

When the sun finally peeked out around noon I sucked it up and got out for a two-hour test ride, heading east and then north for some mild to moderate climbing. The new position felt just fine, especially when I hit the drops into an ass-kicking headwind out of the south that transformed me into the Titanium Tortoise. I felt like I was doing an extended trackstand.

And at times I was, mostly at stop lights that refused to recognize the fat bastard on the bicycle. Every time I had to roll over to punch the pedestrian-crossing button I pretended I was punching a traffic engineer.

* When the English invented the pedicab, of course.

R.I.P., health-care reform?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
Sen.-elect Scott Brown, R-Asshat.
Sen.-elect Scott Brown, R-Asshat.

Hm. We seem to have drifted into a parade of obits here. So let’s have another — this one, for health-care reform, which apparently croaked last night with the election of dingbat Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate.

Political Animal’s Steve Benen seems particularly sour this morning, noting that a Senate seat once held by John F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge and John Quincy Adams “is now filled by a dim-witted wingnut, and that’s a real shame — for Massachusetts, for the Senate, and for all of us.”

I can’t say I’m exactly jumping for joy, either. I’ve never been sold on the idea that this haphazardly stitched Frankenstein’s monster of a health-care bill is the final answer to a complex problem, but f’chrissakes something has to be done. Our premiums just shot up 34 percent, and I’ve spoken with others who report hikes of 40-plus percent. Anyone out there seeing their take-home pay increase by a similar or greater amount? Yeah, me neither. I recently had to make myself very unpopular with an editor just to get paid for work performed, so I’m not exactly counting on a fat raise anytime soon.

And I’m not expecting much out of the Senate, either. Not with Brown adding his wingtips to the Repuglican foot-dragging.

Ask not for whom the (Taco) Bell tolls

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Glen W. Bell Jr., founder of the Taco Bell chain, has gone to The Big Tortillera in the Sky. He was 86.

According to The New York Times, Bell opened his first Taco Bell in 1962, in Downey, California, and three years later sold his first franchise. In 1978, he sold his 868 Taco Bells to PepsiCo for $125 million in stock. Today, Yum! Brands is the boss, with more than 5,600 locations and 36.8 million customers per week, gobbling up 2 billion tacos and 1 billion burritos per annum. Yum! also owns Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, A&W and KFC, so if you get tired of eating fake Mexican food, you can have fake pizza, fake fish, fake burgers or fake chicken as an easy, greasy change of pace.

What with “the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs,” Donald E. Goerke, shoving off last week at age 83, one might wonder whether God has had enough of people turning His plants and animals into tasteless, chemically “enhanced,” heavily processed foodlike substances. Probably not. Yum! claims to be the world’s largest restaurant company, with more than 36,000 outlets in 110 countries and territories.

One thing is certain. Bell and Goerke sure as hell didn’t make it into their 80s eating the shit they sold to the rest of us.