Month: April 2017

Boom-boom, sailor?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Mr. Ivanka of Hollywood models the latest beachwear during a visit to Iraq.

Darth Cheeto donned his big black helmet yesterday and — after advising any Rooskies in the vicinity to take it on the Jesse Owens — ordered a barrage of ship-launched cruise missiles against a Syrian airfield, in retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack said to have killed 80 civilians.

Foreign Policy magazine and more than a few politicians of all stripes have questioned the thinking behind and legality of the strike. Congress, naturally, is sprawled on the couch, watching cable news and gobbling popcorn, happy to have someone else in control of the remote while occasionally shouting, “This show sucks!”

These things are always “targeted” strikes “in the vital national interest” and not at all acts of war, of course. And it goes without saying that they have nothing to do with bolstering anyone’s sagging poll numbers, or drawing the One Big Eye away from legislative failures, broken promises and tensions within the Praetorian Guard. Nor could there have been any messaging in the timing of the attack (while hosting President Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago).

I guess this is why Mr. Ivanka of Hollywood was modeling that stylish Kevlar-blazer combo in Iraq yesterday. The Chinese apparently have yet to supply the matching handbag, but you can’t have everything, y’know. War is heck.

R.I.P., Steve Tilford

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

It seems that Steve Tilford has followed Mike Deme’s wheel to the Beyond.

Few details yet, but it appears that he and a friend were in a horrific pileup involving a van and two semis west of Grand Junction.

Steve and I weren’t close, but we used to bump into each other now and again at various races, and he was always approachable, friendly and generous with his time.

And he wrote unsparingly of his sport, bicycle racing, on the blog. If you cut a corner, Tilly was gonna call you on it.

This is shaping up to be an exceptionally bad year. My condolences to his friends, fans and family.

Snow and IceBook

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
We have a fine crop of tulips this spring.

“It’s totally snowing,” said Herself at dark-thirty as she was leaving for work.

“No sir,” said I.

As usual, she was right.

It wasn’t much in the way of a storm. Just a piddling little wind-driven dusting. Happily, it didn’t nuke the tulips, which have been popping up with more enthusiasm than the daffodils, which had a very short and sparse run indeed.

Forty-four steps later. …

It being slightly sucky outdoors, I decided to take care of a bit of business indoors, where it was warm.

Herself’s old iPad 2 had been awaiting recycling, along with my old 800 MHz G3 iBook. The iPad had already been wiped and reset, but the iBook had not; alas, when I tried to wipe it via Target Disk Mode the sonofabitch croaked on me. And after only 14 years, too. They sure don’t make ’em the way they used to.

So I had to take it apart to get to the hard drive — don’t want the terrorists to lay hands on all my classified data from 2003 — and lemme tell you, I am mighty glad I didn’t have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Pulling the HDD required 44 steps and like Tim “Men Are Pigs” Allen I just knew I’d be left with a real small bag of important-looking shit left over.

 

No foolin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The wisteria is going wild out front.

We don’t do April Fool’s Day around El Rancho Pendejo, reasoning that it’s a sort of amateur hour, on a par with New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Election Day for the serious drinker.

Plus, I mean, like, damn. Reality is a tough act to follow lately. At any given minute you can point to eleventy-seven things on the Innertubes that seem outrageously improbable and yet are demonstrably true, or demonstrably false and improbably outrageous. Like just about everything else, the high art of bullshittery has been swamped by low-quality mass production.

Meanwhile, it’s 40-something and raining sideways in Duke City, so Herself has passed the morning paying her respects to various elders — phone calls with her dad’s second wife and our tenant in Bibleburg, FaceTime with her mom — and just now she hung up to scamper off to yoga, which can be done indoors.

Cycling indoors is more of a stretch — for me, anyway — and so I may go for a short run.

I’m also contemplating a sweeping purge of the family electronics. We have far too much of that crap around here, thanks to someone’s penchant for collecting Apple products, and it’s long past time some of them went away.

I mean, who needs an 800 MHz G3 iBook from 2002, or a 1.5 GHz G4 PowerBook from ’05? A scroll-wheel iPod from the same year? A 2011 iPad 2 that peaked with iOS9? They still work and all, unlike democracy, but they’re about as cutting-edge as a soup spoon.

The elderly iPod came in handy when I still rode the trainer, but see paragraph four. Come to think about it, there’s that stationary trainer cluttering up my meditation room-slash-podcasting studio. And those furshlugginer heart-rate monitors! Everything must go, going out of business going out of business. …