Month: October 2021

Dune buggy

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Your Humble Narrator cultivates desert power.

I’m not casting a very long shadow around here lately.

Frankly, there’s not been much to report. That little tease La Niña is in town again and I’ve been chasing her around on the ol’ bikey bikes.

While all you Left Coast/PNW types deploy your parasols and Gore-Tex your loins against the Million-Pound Aquahammer, we here in the desert Southwest are enjoying a balmy period which makes us forget that before long we will be drinking our own sweat and tears, like Paul Atreides and his mom in “Dune.”

Yep, we watched Part I on HBO Max, and it was a’ight, pretty damn fine actually, not bad atall atall. Made the 1984 David Lynch flick look even worse than it actually was, which was pretty fucking bad.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on the Frank Herbert novel might’ve worked better as an HBO series; then he could’ve used a scalpel instead of a cleaver to move things along over the course of a season or two. But only a geek like myself, a science-fiction dweeb who’s read the book 1,207,275 times, is liable to grouse about the subtleties steamrollered to make the narrative march.

Too, if a series proved successful, there would be the temptation to milk the rest of the “Dune” tales. (We may have to deal with this in any case.) Me, I lost interest after trudging through “Dune Messiah” and “Children of Dune,” which is a very short trek indeed through the vast Duniverse.

Anyway, Rebecca Ferguson is the best of the bunch as Lady Jessica, and Timothée Chalamet is a whole lot better than I expected as Paul. He brings a whiff of Nic Cage and maybe a soupçon of Christian Bale to the role. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem as Stilgar is definitely channeling Anthony Quinn’s Auda abu Tayi from “Lawrence of Arabia.”

And the Hans Zimmer score is a character all its own, though digging it through our obsolete surround-sound system was like listening to the London Philharmonic performing Metallica over a walkie-talkie.

Still, it beat squeezing into the old stillsuit, flagging down a passing sandworm, and crossing the Duke City desert to the Harkonnen IMAX. We got beverages around here ain’t even been drunk once yet.

Roast, beast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments
The uniform of the day will include pants.

Nice to see devolution picking up the pace.

As literature loses ground to memes and emoji we’re inching back into nomadic life, killing each other with knives and bows.

Well done indeed. Can’t be much longer before we’re all living in caves, pulling the rope ladder up come evening and dropping rocks on the neighbors’ heads if they pop round to borrow a cup of fire.

Speaking of fire, our journey to the Dark Side is complete. Both furnaces snapped on this morning. Happily, I’d already plugged the sprinkler system into the wall to keep it from exploding like a baked potato in a microwave or we might have a skating pond in the back yard.

Our ovens are baked.

The joys of home ownership. Lately they include the decline and fall of our wall-mounted Whirlpool ovens, which date to 1990, if I read the serial-number code correctly.

The top unit has a bum element and runs 50° below proper temperature, while the bottom can be as much as 20° off the mark. The thermostat may have gone to its reward, too. And of course parts are hard to come by for ovens with this much white hair in their ears.

I suppose we could always roast a haunch of whatever in the fireplace. But in the meantime we’re going to roll the dice, replace the element, see if that’s all it takes to get off the bench and back in the game.

If not, well, then we’ll start shopping, see what the 21st century has to help a fella melt the cheese on his enchiladas. But a quick peek at the Lowe’s and Best Buy websites made my wallet pocket slam shut faster than a banker’s door on a homeless dude hunting a loan for the used van of his dreams and a river to park it by.

A cave and a rope ladder might be cheaper.

Piss on the dogs and call in the fire

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Space: the final frontier. (Some restrictions apply.)

What’s that ominous rumble? O buggah — it’s the Trane XR80 roaring to hideous life astride the cooling carcass of summer.

Mid-October is a wee bit early for this sort of thing. But these are strange times, and getting stranger by the minute.

Captain Kirk rode one of Jeffy Bozos’ dick-missiles to the edge of space yesterday and returned to tell us all how glorious it is to be a wealthy white man with friends in high places. A first-class ticket for Aer Dingus is just one more thing you can’t afford, suckers. Now get back to work.

“Live long and prosper,” murmur the Vulcans. But they’re being ironic, as usual.

Either that or they’re talking to the Vogons, whose Constructor Fleet should be popping round to start work on that hyperspatial express route any day now.

Resistance is useless!

R.I.P., Paddy Moloney

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Paddy Moloney, frontman and piper for the Chieftains, has gone west. He was 83.

Reports Mother Times, quoting Himself in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing. We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage. We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”

I’m grieved to learn that Paddy has left the party to which he brought so much feeling. In his honor let us banish misfortune.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
A big ol’ storm gives us a love-tap en route to punching someone else out.

O, ’tis of a class of a wind out there this morning would peel the decals off your down tube.

Yesterday was the first truly chilly ride of this fall. With our weather widget spitting out a wealth of contradictory data I dithered for a while — “What will the style-conscious velo-fellow be wearing this season?” — before finally settling on tuque, short-sleeve jersey over long-sleeve jersey (augmented by arm warmers), long-fingered gloves, bib shorts, some lightweight tights, and wool socks.

Naturally, I was overdressed.

Bell lap.

The arm warmers came off first, followed by the tuque. Knee warmers would have been just the thing — tights were overkill — but the wool socks were spot on.

Still, fashion failures aside, the thing is to get out the fuggin’ door, amirite? Don’t just sit there at the desk, letting the stink-tide of the Innertubes wash over you like a sewer backup, glancing out the window now and again to see if summer plans an encore. Get out there and take your beating.

That being said, I am not a fan of cycling in the wind. I’ve been blown off highway shoulders and rock gardens, spun around like a weathervane while running a cyclocross course, and shot-peened smoother than a baby’s butt while grinding squint-eyed into various gales.

But as you know, I will never be smart, so I went right back out in it again today. Kerchief, long-sleeve jersey over sleeveless undershirt, long-fingered gloves, knickers, and cotton socks.

Naturally, I was underdressed.

The wind gave me a welcome assist on the climbs, but when the rain auditioned for a part in my little passion play I said to hell with it and turned around. All the world’s a stage, but we needn’t be overly dramatic.