Month: November 2020

From one pilot to another

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Harold Joseph O’Grady, from the 1941 edition of the Seminole yearbook.

Behold The Colonel, before he was a colonel, or even a pilot.

Harold Joseph O’Grady of Foley, Florida, was a freshman at the University of Florida in 1941. By February of ’42, he was a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps, having enlisted at MacDill Field “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law.”

He stayed on a little longer than that. The old man retired as a full bird in 1972, when I was a freshman at Adams State College in Alamosa, getting grades that were even worse than his had been. And mind you, I was taking stoner classes, not elementary physics, organic chemistry, and motorized artillery.

I didn’t last long in college, either, but not because I was going to war to save the world from fascism. I was going to be a push-broom pilot, saving banks from stanks.

Oh, well. As Will Rogers observed, “We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”

Hey, he can’t DO THAT … can he?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Between now and whenever — or if — some less unhinged person takes charge of the Oval Office, we’ll take note of an occasional viewing-with-alarm story to be lumped into the category, “Hey, he can’t DO THAT … can he?”

Our inaugural entry raises the question of whether Adolf Twitler’s tiny little asshole of a mouth might excrete some of the nation’s deepest, darkest secrets once its operator has been forcibly returned to private life.

“All presidents exit the office with valuable national secrets in their heads, including the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, intelligence-gathering capabilities — including assets deep inside foreign governments — and the development of new and advanced weapon systems,” writes Shane Harris of The Washington Post.

“Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the ‘deep state’ conspiracy that he believes tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection.”

The good news, according to the article, is that (a) he hasn’t been paying attention during briefings, and (2) the Espionage Act might close his barn door … if only after all Four Horses of the Apocalypse have already galloped through it.

So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Poachers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Continuing with our food theme, we consider the tale of three hungry fellas who got busted for boiling a pair of chickens in one of the geothermal features at Yellowstone National Park.

What, there wasn’t a Chik-fil-A in that neck of the peckerwoods? The National Park Service must be too busy kowtowing to the e-bike lobby to take care of important business. When Bubba has to boil his own birds at a campout, goddamnit all to hell anyway, the terrorists win.

Anyway, it proved a pricey meal. According to The Guardian, the three were banned from the park and received fines ranging from $540 to $1,250, plus probation.

And two did a short stretch in the stony lonesome, where the dining is anything but al fresco and the menu less inventive.

Toast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The only things missing are the man-bun and the ironic facial hair.

No, not him. I’m talking about the famous Hipster Avocado Toast a la Señor Dog of Albuquerque.

The other day I bought a six-pack of avocados to chop into a rough salsa for a batch of chipotle-honey chicken tacos. This proved to be about four too many, so there you have it. The bread is a robust whole-wheat number from the Toastmaster Bread Box recipe booklet.

It seems a good day to crouch behind the parapets, nibbling tasty bits and dodging dispatches from the Bananas Republic. This just in: GOP sticks fingers in ears and goes “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA,” how the Donks will fuck this up, everybody hates everybody else, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the 24/7 news cycle. Happily, we still have a couple avocados left.