Month: October 2010

Love train

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

You gotta feel for Jon Stewart, who has one of the toughest jobs in show business. He has to be informed, folksy, intelligent, self-deprecating, persistent, polite, informative without being pedantic and both witty and funny simultaneously, which is not easy.

And today, he had to be reasonable.

Oy. Reasonable. How’s a guy supposed to run a 150,000-person rally on the Washington Mall being reasonable?

Pretty well, actually. Considering the self-imposed handicap, Stewart and Stephen Colbert could’ve done worse with their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Some of the musical guests were predictable (John Legend, Sheryl Crow), others less so (the O’Jays and Ozzy Osbourne).

I could have done without a benediction from Don Novello’s Father Guido Sarducci, an act that should’ve gotten the hook about 20 years ago. I’d also have liked to have seen the Mythbusters orchestrate the crowd into a halftime-show marching-band arrangement that spelled “WTF?”, something a guy could see from the International Space Station, just in case the aliens are watching. But I’m funny that way. Maybe not.

Stewart was Stewart, albeit dialed down a couple of notches. But Colbert gets the Doggy for best gag. He “honored” the mainstream media (including The New York Times, CNN and NPR) with one of his Fear Medals for ordering their employees not to attend the rally, and then draped it around the neck of someone with more guts — a 7-year-old girl.

I would’ve liked more snark, but then I’m a bitter old left-wing partisan media hack. And even I, Captain Cynical, got a little lift from seeing all those folks in one place, having a more or less good time. No screamers, no book-burners; nobody with fake blood (or the real deal) on his or her hands, or being hanged in effigy. Just a bunch of folks who had come to the nation’s capital to be reasonable.

Let’s hope we send a few more of them there on Tuesday.

No frost on the punkin

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Lacking arboreal elegance in the backyard, I've installed a bit of performance art. It will perform as soon as I find some playing cards to clip to the spokes.
Lacking arboreal elegance in the backyard, I've installed a bit of performance art. It will perform as soon as I find some playing cards to clip to the spokes.

Ah, Colorado. Twenty degrees yesterday morning, 50 today. We’re looking at a high of 70-something, and good weather is in the forecast (mostly) for the next 10 days. Is it any wonder our rose bushes are seriously confused, budding out in October?

Normally we’ve had at least one round of moderately unpleasant weather by Halloween, but two rounds of slightly subfreezing temps hardly qualify.

This is good news for Democrats come Tuesday’s midterms, as conventional wisdom is that we’re all too fearful of inclement weather to venture outdoors on Election Day, preferring instead to huddle communally in our organic hemp houses, chuckling as NPR sacks its uppity conservatives, teaching our kids to be gay and e-mailing detailed aerial photos of nearby military installations to Al Jazeera.

It’s also good news for those of us who have backyards bereft of trees. A neighbor has a young maple she’d like to get rid of before it cracks her sidewalk, and since we seem to be enjoying fine weather for transplantation, we may adopt it. The yard looks naked without trees, as if somehow there is more of it to mow.

Footloose redux

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

People sometimes ask me, “Mr. Mad Dog, dude, sir, why on earth did you ever abandon the spectacular high-country beauty of Crusty County for the gritty unreality of the clusteropolis known as Bibleburg?”

The answer lies (or rather, jogs) here. A few more years on that wind-scoured rockpile outside Weirdcliffe and I’d have started running barefoot in the snow, too. What the fuck, it was only 10 miles to the liquor store, and most of it was on pavement.