A cartoon by Paul Conrad, then of The Los Angeles Times, circa 1982, when I was the editorial cartoonist (and a number of other things as well) at the Corvallis Gazette-Times.
Editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad died today at age 86.
He was one of the greats, deflating blowhards with a stroke of his razor-sharp pen, and won three Pulitzers for his mastery of the art. His first came at The Denver Post, where if memory serves he was succeeded by the even more acerbic Pat Oliphant. Conrad also won himself a spot on Nixon’s famous enemies list.
I met Oliphant once, at the Fine Arts Center here in Bibleburg, back when I was working for the Gazette. But I never met Conrad. However, I do have a signed print of one of his cartoons, a nice rap in the tusks for the Elefinks from when he worked for The Los Angeles Times.
OK, time for another cooking show here on the Dog Channel. Remember the NPR kung pao chicken recipe I linked to a while back? Well, I’ve reprised it a few times since, ramping up the chile content each time and changing the protein from chicken to beef to pork.
Today Herself and I are both suffering from various ailments — allergies, injuries, you name it — and so I went for the healing pork and 14 chiles plus an overflowing teaspoon of Sichuan peppercorns. Hijo, madre, puto, cabron … my head is still sweating. And I think I just grew a third testicle. It was that powerful.
But there’s not a picture, because we were both so beat down and hungry that we just dove right in, and I ate all the leftovers for seconds. Sorry ’bout that. Stir fry up a batch yourself and you’ll forgive me for my piggishness.
GOP voters decided in the primary that they’d prefer a feeb to a thief, but the party apparatchiks were appalled at their choice of the dingbat Maes — a mental midget, serial liar and astoundingly inept “businessman” who equates bicycles with blue-helmeted, black-helicoptered One World Gummint — over Scott McLobbyist, who had been the anointed front-runner until he got caught with someone else’s words under his byline and tried to brazen it out, like a shoplifter snagged with a hot Blu-Ray player stuffed up under his shirt. “Who me?” Yeah, you, pal. Out y’go.
So now they’re trying to get Maes to bail from the gubernatorial race before today’s 5 p.m. deadline for ballot certification so they can appoint a candidate with more computing power than a 1982 Osborne Executive.
Never happen, says state Sen. Dave Scheisskopf (R-The Crazy).
“You won’t see Dan backing down, I know that,” Scheisskopf told our local cage-liner. Let’s hope not. Watching John Hickenlooper kick the mortal shit out of this clown is liable to be the highlight of my fall election season.
Damn, this has been a fun week. First I make drunkard tartare out of my right leg in a trail tumble, and now I’ve managed to throw my back out again.
Hitting the deck on Tuesday started the ball rolling. Favoring the bum leg gave it a nudge. And the kicker was probably spending too much time crouched over the cutting board, assembling last night’s New Mexican feast, chicken quesadillas and calabacitas.
These are easy dishes, to be sure — the quesadillas are merely poached and shredded chicken, seeded and sliced jalapeños and grated Monterey jack layered between two flour tortillas and baked for 12 minutes at 350 — but some assembly is required.
Long story short, this morning I bend down to see if Turkish is lurking under Herself’s car and pop! Out goes the back, which I first injured in college while delivering heavy appliances for beer money. Every couple of years it likes to slash the tires on my chariot and hiss, “Thou art mortal!”
It's not music that soothes the savage breast, it's pasta and vino.
Maybe it wasn’t such a horrible speech after all. I was cranky (having just shredded my right leg in a boneheaded trail mishap) and hungry (Herself was working late so I didn’t have dinner on the table pre-speech). After getting a meal and a few drams of Spanish vino into my system, I felt more kindly toward the prez and his little chitty-chat with the nation.
The recipe, pasta with salsa crudo and green beans, is from Martha Rose Shulman. Run it past the cranky-pants in your family and see if it doesn’t work wonders. I made mine with homegrown Portuguese beans and tomatoes from the gardens of two generous friends.
This is not to say, mind you, that I comprehend Obama’s fetish of continually extending olive branches to the Repugs only to watch them snatch them from his hand, toss them to the floor and piss on them.
Nor am I satisfied by his fondness for glittering generalities (“Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be traveling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the predawn darkness, better days lie ahead.”).
And while I’m delighted to hear he wants to at least cut back on croaking our fellow Americans abroad and get cranking on the domestic economy instead, I’m still waiting to hear any details of how he proposes “to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity.” How many of us wonder whether the next paycheck we get will be the last? Just ’cause you’re paranoid, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
And then there are the midterms. The more I watch the Obama “machine” in operation, the more I’m convinced these guys think they can take a page from the Repug playbook and blow off a sizable chunk of their supporters without consequences at the ballot box. The Repugs punk the Bible-thumpers every election year, and the Donks think they can do likewise to the lefty-loonies.
It’s a dangerous game. Sure, moving center-right to woo the independents and the handful of Repugs who aren’t yet completely unhinged may pick up a couple of loose votes. And it’s true that like the Bible-thumpers, lefty-loonies are not likely to hold their noses and switch their allegiance to the other side.
But a bunch of us, disillusioned once again, might just stay home on Election Day. And that’s really bad news, because the GOP’s whackjob base always turns out with a will, like a bunch of frat boys gleefully piling out of a van to beat up a longhair, nigra or queer.
Shit, now I’m cranky again, and I don’t feel like cooking. Happily, I still have some wine.
• Literary addendum: I almost forgot — one of the reasons I started writing this post was a recollection of Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here.” Red Sinclair certainly thought it could, and anyone who read the book will recognize many of its characters hamming it up on today’s stage.
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