What a boar

February 5, 2019 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

“Roll him back to makeup, fellas, someone screwed up the spray tan.”

Does anyone else find it suspicious that as we enter the Year of the Pig there will be some preposterous oinking from Capitol Hill?

Saaaaaaay: You don’t suppose he’s a Chinese stooge instead of a Russian stooge. …

Superb Owl Sunday

February 3, 2019February 3, 2019 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

The druid Malachy, played by Ciaron Davies, interacts with “Cracker,” a European eagle owl, as the re-enactment of Saint Patrick’s first landing in Ireland takes place at Inch Abbey on March 11, 2018, in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. Photo: Charles McQuillan | Getty Images)

For more Superb Owls, see The Atlantic.

No groundhogs here

February 2, 2019February 2, 2019 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

You’d think these dudes had engines, the way they stay aloft forever. But they’re just riding the thermals like big ol’ hawks.

Well, there was me. These daredevils may have been tooling around above the Sandias like Icarus and Daedalus, but yours truly kept his landing gear on the deck. I saw my shadow, too, and you know what that means. Bundle up.

But for today, temps hit the mid-50s, and basically anyone who wasn’t chained to a concrete bunk in the Graybar Hotel was out and about, doing something.

“I’m trying to get my bike legs on!” wailed one rider as I yielded a narrow section of trail.

“I feel your pain,” I replied. I’ve been running the trails, but riding the road; this was my first trail ride of 2019.

Ordinarily I shun the trails on sunny weekends, reasoning that I get to play pretty much whenever I please while the cube farmers have a limited window of opportunity. But it’s been a long week and I felt I needed a change of pace.

Speaking of which, there will be no Radio Free Dogpatch this week, for a number of perfectly defensible reasons. I had a notion, but it ran off with one of the voices in my head. I hope they didn’t get married. We don’t need any children from that quarter.