“Say, does anyone else hear gunfire and sirens?”
If this shit had gone down 24 hours earlier Miss Mia Sopapilla and I would’ve been right in the thick of it.
Miss Mia had an appointment with the veterinarian, and the only thing between her clinic and this firefight is a Valvoline Instant Oil Change shop.
I imagine it’s slightly anaerobic to low-crawl through a fusillade with a cat carrier in one hand and a mask on your mug and only a few barrels of flammable liquids for cover.
Especially if someone has pooped in your pantalones. A fresh set of drawers is not the sort of instant change Valvoline provides.
Meanwhile, a word to the wise: Shooting the John Laws is exceptionally stupid, even for Duke City pistoleros. It only makes them mad. Plus it scares the cats.
Here’s hoping the injured officers recover quickly. I’m very much not looking forward to reading about what swell fellas their assailants were and how their grammies just can’t understand what got into them.
Tags: firefight, Miss Mia Sopaipilla
Mad Blog Media 
August 19, 2021 at 4:01 pm |
Jesus, its been a slow day in the Secret Factory so I saw that report come over the Innertubes. I hope that one officer is OK. It sounds like he got shot pretty bad.
I too am waiting to hear about the judicial revolving door club, to which I would assume these latest bums belong.
Sometimes one’s stars are in the right place. We tried to buy a place which is just a few blocks from Zuni down right near the War zone. It is at Southern Ave SE and Monroe. Seemed like a nice little place but then once while headed back home to Bombtowne I slowed down and waived some guy across Zuni in front of my car and almost had an incident. Then found out about Zuni. Then read about two shootings on Kathyrn SE. Ok, enough.
Fortunately, someone else showed up with a suitcase of cash while we were frigging around with a loan. Lucky us.
Glad your appointment wasn’t today, O’G. I worry about you and Herself down there. Albuquerque is becoming the kind of place where having that old Mini-30 might have been handy.
August 19, 2021 at 4:17 pm |
I’m back. Seems two days of ignorance was all I could stand. Kid got shot at a middle school a few days before in your town. Obviously the citizens of Duke City more guns.
August 19, 2021 at 4:18 pm |
Need, dammit, need more guns.
August 19, 2021 at 4:29 pm |
Yeah, that was a cheery story. Here’s the followup. I remember the story about daddy-o shooting another parent after a fists-and-sticks fight in the student-pickup lane; he sounds like a model citizen, for sure.
I suppose the lesson here is that if you step out to throw hands, be prepared to catch lead.
August 19, 2021 at 4:31 pm |
Yes indeed, Dad was a piece of work. And given that nothing happened to him, its not hard to figure out why the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree.
August 19, 2021 at 4:35 pm |
And daddy-o apparently agreed to make drug buys for the narcs to beat a meth rap. Or so says the Journal. I’m surprised he’s still walking the earth.
August 19, 2021 at 7:35 pm |
Holy shit! Talk about toxic masculinity. I know I’m just naive midwestern boy from the burbs, but for crybees sake that stuff is fuckin bananas.
August 19, 2021 at 7:48 pm |
It boggles the mind, no? We didn’t have a single solitary gun in the house when I was growing up. I couldn’t even have a BB gun.
If I had wanted to shoot some kid at age 13 I’d have had to use a rubber band between thumb and forefinger and load it with a folded chewing-gum wrapper. Maybe a paper clip if he was a real big kid.
August 19, 2021 at 8:17 pm |
Times and people have changed. When I was in middle school, if we threw hands, it stopped with hands. That was deadly enough. Not from each other, but from our sheep farming, Curly Culp size, assistant principal, Mr.George McCormick.
I got into it with a friend of mine in seventh grade in one of those stupid fights that grows out of nowhere and shoulda stayed there. Drew broke my nose and I knocked one of his teeth out. Then Mr. McCormick gave us The Treatment. The Treatment involved being alternately pinned up against the Asst. Principal’s office wall with our feet about a foot off the ground and then dropped and picked up again. None of us ever pulled any shit again. I think that is what is missing today. Deterrence.
Although guns were as common as cows in Alden, NY (and numerous in my home since once we moved out to the country, my stepdad got avidly into hunting and shooting), with us middle schoolers the most deadly weapon was a cafeteria straw cut to about three inches (so it could be concealed in a closed hand) and the mushy paper the straws were wrapped in formed into a small ball with saliva. I don’t know how many spitball wars we had but they were always spitballs, not lead balls.
Kids these days are less mature, far better armed, and grow up in a gun culture where guns are for shooting each other rather than shooting empty cans, bottles, and the occasional rabbit. We are fucked.
August 20, 2021 at 8:24 am |
I don’t know about the less mature part. They have the same number of brain cells that we had, but we ask them to do too much with them. Remember the George Carlin bit about sitting in the woods and digging a hole with a stick for six hours? We don’t let kids do that anymore, and it is 1000% not their fault.
The United States Military Academy has been playing this game forever. Every time a bunch of graduates retire, they look back and say, “back in my day, when men were men and dinosaurs roamed The Plane …” there is this impression that the Academy has gotten softer and softer and softer over the years. But then when you do research, you find out that women at today’s service academies do more push-ups than the men did in the 60s. And you look at the calendars of the older generations, and they had all sorts of free time for sock hops and weekend camping trips and publishing a monthly poetry book and all sorts of weirdness that would just not fit into today’s schedule.
This isn’t an opinion, it is an observable and measurable fact, that we ask 21 year old brand new second lieutenants to do 1000 times more work then my generation did back in the 80s. And yet we walk around with this “kids today“ attitude.
It is no different in the civilian world. We have made life too complicated, we ask our kids to do too much, and we blame them for failing to navigate the world that we have created.
August 20, 2021 at 11:22 am
The USMA is a structured environment. I would guess that is a far cry from how this kid grew up with a douchebag dad in a violent city. As far as maturity and how we grew up vs. how they grew up, I think that is up in the air. Stuff like this suggests perhaps its complicated.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_teens_today_are_different_from_past_generations
Back to that story about my little dance with Drew. We had a new kid, Chris, in Alden, which was a rural, blue collar/farm/bedroom town east of Buffalo. Chris and family had just moved out from the inner city in Buffalo. Drew and Chris got into it for the usual stupid reasons and Drew, being a smaller kid like me, pulled a knife. Of course Chris, who grew up in the inner city where that meant war was about to stuff that knife up Drew’s ass so Drew went crying to the authorities.
I was a kid in the inner city of Buffalo before we moved out to the sticks. I was furious with Drew for being such an asshat as to pull a knife on a kid who had just moved from an area where people did get stabbed and then running to the principal’s skirts, which put Chris in pretty deep shit as Chris was not about to mention the blade so he just took his medicine. So Drew and I got into a fight over it.
I guess that is a long way of saying that our experiences matter. In those days in Alden, fights never progressed beyond fists. It would simply not have occurred to anyone to bring a gun to a fist fight. That is then and this is now, where you don’t bring a fist to a gunfight.
August 19, 2021 at 8:57 pm |
Jesus H. Christ.
https://www.abqjournal.com/2420801/major-police-presence-in-ne-albuquerque.html
August 19, 2021 at 9:14 pm |
I think Prine was right. I might need to duck out again.
August 20, 2021 at 6:56 am |
Albuquerque gun violence may be worse or better than other cities at this time. But, the whole country has this problem. DC, Chicago, and many other cities come to mind and are in the news. When human life is devalued, this shit happens. I tried to call lapierre about it, but he was shopping for new Western clothes in a boutique in Dallas. Tried the dumpster too, but he was getting a new weave.
August 20, 2021 at 7:22 am |
i’m impressed you got your cat in a cat carrier. if we tried that with our cats we would be stopping at the emergency room before going to the vet.
August 20, 2021 at 8:18 am |
Mia’s pretty easy to handle. She’ll happily slip her head through a harness to go outside on a leash, and though it takes two of us to get her in the carrier she’s not awfully combative there. Then she pitches a bitch all the way to the vet.
“Meow mrow wowr yowr rowr [repeat until arrival].”
The Turk was a whole other game. Big and strong and real uncooperative. Even the vets were askeered of him.
“No, I’m not gonna touch the sonofabitch. Just set him on the table there and I’ll examine him through these binoculars.”
August 20, 2021 at 12:47 pm |
The Turk sounds like Maile. All claws and teeth and a holy terror to put in the cat carrier.
August 20, 2021 at 8:07 am |
Every single time I see a bad kid, I see a worse parent and even worse teacher, pastor, or coach.
But we always blame the kids. Like they picked their zip codes and school districts.
August 20, 2021 at 11:26 am |
I said that the other day to someone. No one is a born murderer. Its learned behavior, so who was the teacher?
August 20, 2021 at 8:51 am |
Maybe I should move to Hawaii?
August 20, 2021 at 11:24 am |
The article is paywalled for me.
August 20, 2021 at 11:25 am |
&%#* the Abq Journal article is paywalled.
August 20, 2021 at 12:12 pm |
Maybe O’G can save the article as a pdf and email it to you.
August 20, 2021 at 7:06 pm |
Done and done.
August 22, 2021 at 4:50 pm
Holee schitt! That was insane.
August 20, 2021 at 3:31 pm |
Paywall is not an end to news, but it is a long first step. I am not smart enough to figure out how all of the really good regional newspapers can survive.
Most of them have been purchased by Alden Global Capital. Doesn’t the name say it all. “Alden” maybe a family name, but I doubt it. ” Global” well there are the expectations. “Capital” need I explain?
A lot of good papers have been sucked into this black hole, and none of them shall reappear.
August 20, 2021 at 4:02 pm |
The Albuquerque Journal and Santa Fe New Mexican are both locally owned papers. Both of them sell hard copy and also charge a subscription for access to their electronic versions. I suspect if the e-paper was free, no one would take the actual fish wrapper.
August 20, 2021 at 7:21 pm |
Ownership by private equity, hedge fund, and other ass-bandits is the end of news. Alden Global Capital is one of the worst. Gannett, which GateHouse grabbed up a while back, is no prize, either. These zopilotes eat meat and shit bones. They go through a newsroom like Sherman marching to the sea.
Have a look at your choice of a dozen Gannett websites. Total cookie-cutter mind candy with sponsored content disguised as news.
Some of these buzzards are spitting out the small fry, though. It’s a combination of disinterest from the big boys and a thirst for local news in small communities, according to Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications.
Says Franklin:
As Khal notes, The New Mexican and Albuquerque Journal remain locally owned. If one were to fall, I’d expect the Journal to go first; they’re already having TNM print their paper, and the website is just wretched. I keep saying I owe it to journalism to subscribe to the print edition, if only to see whether it’s any better than the digital offering, but then I look at that website and all I want to do is hurt people.
August 21, 2021 at 9:25 pm |
The pop-ups and eye candy diversion clicks on the Journal website are enough to make one want to divert an asteroid onto their corporate offices. Still, at least its locally owned as is the New Mex. We write a check to both the Journal and the People’s Daily Revolutionary Report up in Fanta Se on general principles.
August 21, 2021 at 6:52 am |
Ah, welcome to the land of short attention spans, multi-tasking, and echo chambers. Don’t forget the platforms all us Mad Dog fans love, social media, the bullhorn for bullshit. “Still a man will hear what he wants to hear and disregard the rest.” Paul Simon
August 21, 2021 at 12:49 pm |
BTW P’OG Your old home state (Mesa County only) is in a bit of a kerfluffle about creating election fraud.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-lindell-tina-peters-colorado-q-b1906133.html
Will it ever stop?
August 22, 2021 at 7:30 am |
Well, we used to burn draft cards and bras. Why not burn some mypillows? You know, call the local news media, get a permit, and
Iight a few of ‘em in a burn barrel. That’ll be fun until the dumpster cultists start the shooting.
August 23, 2021 at 10:19 am |
Perhaps Mike’s hiding her away where nobody will find her. He does say he has this fantastic pillow fill material. I mean, what better way to hide the evidence.
But burning pillows only contributes to the CO2 in the air along with various carcinogens and dioxins. Whoops! I mean “what I believe” are probably carcinogens and dioxins.
Perhaps a better idea would be for a whole lot of us to purchase a new mypillow or two. We should use a buyer friendly payment method that supports buyer satisfaction purchases. We then use our new mypillows in ways appropriate for a night or two, verifying that they may, or may not not meet our satisfaction requirements. Then as needed, we pack them up with a mypillow pre-paid label and return them for a full refund. What? The mypillow company is being tight about pillow returns and not paying for the return shipping? Well, remember that we paid with that customer satisfaction friendly payment method? Yep. A payment dispute shall thus be filed because we are not satisfied and the pillows had a funny smell anyway.