Fence ’em out, not in

April 19, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

All in all it’s just another tree and a wall.

Good fences make good neighbors, they say. (Hint: Fences work best if the neighbors keep their gates closed.)

Fences, walls, and gates seem to be keeping deer and Russians out of the yard. But how do we keep the Russians — along with Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, and the Kardashians, this last a species more invasive than deer, Russians, or kudzu — out of our heads?

A few of us were discussing this via email recently, and I chimed in thusly:

As a lifelong news junkie I hate to say it, but we should all try to pay a little less attention to what they call “news” these days.

Fully half of it is nonsense, and a quarter of it is something we can’t do anything about. The final 25 percent may have some bearing on you and yours, concerning something you can actually get a handle on. It will probably be local news. If you can find any.

What people like me used to call news 40 years ago was still pretty overwhelming on the supply side. We whittled it down and sold it in 24-hour doses, like allergy meds. It could boggle the mind at times, but most folks could take it, learn a little something, form a few defensible opinions.

Now anyone trying to keep up feels like a dog with his head out the window of a hopped-up Honda Civic doing 110 mph coming into the Big I at drunk-thirty on Friday. There’s just too much going on out there for one poor mutt to take in

Imagine my surprise when an industry bigwig agreed with me. Ken Doctor, a media analyst and consultant who is a longtime contributor to Nieman Lab, wrote that he too is trying to fence out the wider world with all its horrors while he focuses on nurturing a startup local news outfit in Santa Cruz, Calif.

I recently talked to an old friend about a project we were working on together. He could hardly engage, so troubled was he by the news from Ukraine. What’s going on in the broader world is bleak, more than enough to depress and deflate us. I’ve put all that in the back of my head because I have little time or room to address national or global issues on which I can have little impact. I’ve been working on Lookout now for more than three years, and it’s the hardest, most consuming thing I’ve done in a 47-year career. But as I, and my peers, focus fiercely on rebuilding our little parts of the planet, we focus on what we can change.

Well. Just goes to show you even a dumb dog can dig up a moldy Milk-Bone now and then, if he can just keep the deer and the Kardashians out of his yard.

The sneezin’ season

April 16, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

I’ve seen it twice now, at the NPR website and in the AARP Bulletin, so it must be true: Allergy season is getting worse.

(I’ve also seen it in our Kleenex consumption, if you’re looking for empirical evidence.)

The gist of it is that warmer temperatures mean your sneezing starts earlier in the spring and lasts longer come fall. And the hotter the climate, the bigger the pollen output.

“This is another unintended consequence of climate change that hasn’t been explored that much,” says Allison Steiner, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. “It has a big impact on human health.”

Warmer and drier also means more fires, and we have several going on at the moment, the worst of them down at Ruidoso. The McBride Fire has taken more than 200 homes and at least two lives, and thousands are under evacuation orders. There was zero containment as of last night.

“But it’s not even fire season yet!” you exclaim. You’re looking at last year’s calendar, Hoss.

Ruminating

April 14, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

“We’d like some port and cigars, if you don’t mind.”

We have visitors again. At least I don’t have to cook for this lot. Our back yard is their commissary. Also, their latrine.

They finally got on the neighbors’ last nerve the other day, waltzing in through an open gate and noshing on some choice bits of this and that, so we’re beefing up perimeter security here in the cul-de-sac.

This will require blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Also, probably, money. A mule deer can sail over an 8-foot barrier if there’s something to eat on the other side. We don’t have any 9-foot barriers handy, so in hopes of avoiding a pricey trip to Lowe’s we’re trying to dazzle ’em with bullshit. What the hell, it works on people.

Meanwhile, the deer had a high old time, strolling around the neighbors’ terraced gardens, leaping back and forth across our shared wall, and chasing each other around and about like very large hooved puppies. We should’ve shot some video — video cameras we got in spades — but we were having too much fun watching.

R.I.P., Gilbert Gottfried

April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Gilbert Gottfried, one of the least predictable comics ever, has left the stage. He was 67.

The family says only that he died “after a long illness,” though his publicist told The Washington Post that the cause was complications of muscular dystrophy. I thought he seemed unwell (or at least ill at ease) in Neil Berkeley’s “Gilbert,” a look at the comic’s other life as a family man circa 2017.

The dude never saw a line he wouldn’t cross, and it cost him occasionally. But he kept crossing them, and at the 2001 Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner, when boos and cries of “Too soon!” spurred Gottfried to pivot from a 9/11 bit to a particularly vile take on the inside joke captured in “The Aristocrats” documentary, it reminded everyone who was in charge here — the little fella with the big voice.

“OK. A talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. …”

“It was arguably the dirtiest roast the Friars had ever done,” said roastmaster Jeff Ross, who knows from filth, believe you me.

But Gottfried’s bit was more than just a dirty joke — OK, so, more like a filthy, grotesque, eye-popping juggernaut of preposterous vulgarity — it was a joyous, raucous reminder that some scumbag may be able to take your life, but only you can let one take your laughter.

I still can’t watch that bit without heehawing like a donkey. What a gift Gilbert Gottfried gave us.

Be here when?

April 10, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

On Saturday I was making breakfast and mulling over Ken Layne’s latest Desert Oracle podcast when I smelled something burning.

The Wirecutter boyos say you can’t buy a proper toaster anymore, whether you spend a lot or a little, and I believe them. If I don’t keep an eye on and make adjustments to this cheapo Cuisinart what I wind up with is either lightly dried bread or a blackened slab that looks like a smoking shake shingle from a lightning-fried cabin.

A little thing, to be sure. Hardly the foundation for a thumbsucker The New Yorker might buy. And never mind writing about it — simply thinking about it may be a red flag, or so posits the Desert Oracle:

If you don’t have any sense of mission or destiny, or religious faith, or really any sort of sustainable lifetime philosophy, then the small stuff is all you can think about. Because no matter where you are in life, at one time or another you are going to have all the usual problems: health, money, sorrow, disgust, anger, gum disease, athlete’s foot, too much house or none at all. Your dog either up and died or it’s neurotic and full of hate and will outlive you by decades. Everybody’s out to get you or nobody pays any attention at all. The entirety of modern technological society has brushed away and marginalized the personal practice of philosophy. So we lose the plot while we’re in it. It’s like one of those Disney “Star Wars” movies.

I’ve had all of these problems, except being outlived by dogs. And that rough beast is bound to come slouching around one of these days, because Herself wants one, even more than she wants properly toasted bread in the mornings, slathered with Irish butter and French spread.

Maybe I should relocate to one of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville-branded “active-living communities,” a paradise for Parrotheads, which is a philosophy of sorts, maybe even a religion.

I had a brief Buffett period, and still enjoy his early works, like “He Went to Paris,” “Cuban Crime of Passion,” and “Death of an Unpopular Poet.” He may have foreshadowed his future as a geezer miner with the lyrics to “I Have Found Me a Home”:

And I have found me a home

Yes, I have found me a home

And you can have the rest of everything I own

’Cause I have found me a home.

That song and the rest of my best-of-Buffett list are from his 1973 breakout album, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” which features, among others, Steve Goodman on acoustic lead guitar, Vassar Clements on fiddle, and Thomas McGuane on liner notes (“We are beset by the quack minstrels of a non-existent America, bayed at by the children of retired orthodontists about ‘hard times’ and just generally depleted by all the clown biographies and ersatz subject matter of the drugs-and-country insurgence that is replacing an earlier song mafia,” and if that isn’t vintage Captain Berserko I’m a Daytona Beach Realtor.).

The folks who live in Buffett’s beach-bum burgs out there in Disney country certainly seem to have a philosophy that works for them. In his New Yorker piece Nick Paumgarten quotes Stuart Schultz, Latitude Margaritaville’s head of residential community relations (and a former summer-camp director), as saying that living in a Margaritaville property is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study. You have a great dorm room, you never have to go to class, and there’s always a party.”

Hm. I dunno. An earlier version of me never went to class but took in many a party, so I feel like I’ve done my time in that dorm room. And like the toast from my Cuisinart I have the scorch marks to show for it.

It’d probably be smarter to stay put. Get a philosophy. And maybe a dog.