Month: November 2022

Out out out!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
They said they wanted to get everyone outside. Turns out they just wanted them out of the building.

Well, Outside Etc. is at it again, driving an additional 12 percent of its staff into the vast publishing wilderness.

Newspapers and magazines made it possible for a wastrel like Your Humble Narrator to earn a meager living and even have a bit of fun while doing it. But at times it seemed that half the job was keeping one step in front of the headsman.

I got laid off once and frequently fled under my own steam upon hearing the thin keening of file upon blade. Oh, it’s not good here. How about over there? Or there? After a half century of this I managed to coast across the finish line more or less intact, albeit with two flats and a broken chain.

Lucky doesn’t even begin to describe it. I could’ve been broomed off the course and into the tumbril at any point, and plenty of spectators and competitors would have cheered as the ax finally fell.

It was and remains a rough old road. Betimes I miss it. But not often.

“Information wants to be free,” someone once said. Not someone who actually collects and distributes the information, of course. But plenty of their customers feel that way, even as they insist on being paid for their own labor.

I haven’t “joined” Outside Etc. for the same reason I don’t watch “sports” on the TV. I’d rather be doing something than reading about it, listening to it, or watching it.

Hell, I didn’t even want to work for Outside Etc. Not once I’d seen the contract. And they were proposing to pay me, not the other way around.

Maybe some things just don’t scale up well. I think I grasp the general concept — build a one-stop shop for all your sweaty fun — but it struck me as sort of a Spandex Ballet, some anonymous cable company with a thousand channels I didn’t want to watch.

It sucks to get the heave-ho. And I know a few of those heaved, and also ho’d. But some of them will stagger away from that crumbling tower of babble to build something a little homier, maybe more like the corner bike shop instead of the sporting-goods section in Sprawlmart. The rumblings are already out there, in forums, on Substack, even Twitter (though this last may be about like shouting “Fire!” in Hell).

Who knows? Without all those grandiose schemes weighing them down, Outside Etc.’s refugees might just find a living in it. And maybe a bit of fun, too.

Leaf me alone

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The autumn took the rest, but they won’t take me.

No, it’s not the last leaf on the tree. But it doesn’t have a lot of company.

A cold snap this week brought us a soupçon of snow and temps in the 20s, a superfluous reminder that mid-November is not always shorts weather, even in The Duck! City.

Speaking of truths that should be self-evident, The New York Times has a piece this morning explaining that calling elections rigged and their results fake probably isn’t the best way to drive your base to the polling place.

Casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections might be an effective tool for galvanizing true believers to participate in a primary — or, at its origins, to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn a losing result. But it can be a lousy strategy when it comes to the paramount mission of any political campaign: to get the most votes.

“If you tell people that voting is hard, or voter fraud is rampant, or elections are rigged, it doesn’t make people more likely to participate,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with election officials to bolster trust and efficiency in voting. “Why would you want to play a game you thought was rigged?”

Plenty of people already think that their vote carries no weight, makes no difference. Maybe they’re blue voters in a red state — hey, been there, done that — or vice versa.

But when you make voting more difficult than it needs to be, tell the electorate that their ballots might get shitcanned to Area 51 by the Illuminati, and just generally waffle-stomp your own dingus into a thin paste, well … this doesn’t exactly encourage folks to take a seat at the table and ante up.

And if you don’t play, you can’t win.

On a related note, turnout might trend upward if some parties fielded candidates long on defensible policy and work ethic rather than screeching psycho knucklefuckers, pistol-packing “Red Dawn” wanna-bes, and vengeful bored man-babies.

Some movies you only need to watch once. Sequel not required.

Food for thought

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
“Only a bonehead would try to predict what happens next. So, yeah — ‘Reply hazy, try again later.'”

“What do you think about the election?” the waitress asked.

“I’m glad it’s over,” I replied.

It’s not, of course. And it won’t be for a while yet, maybe not until just before the 188th Congress gets sworn in on Jan. 3, 2023.

When we finally get there, more than a few of the noobs — and plenty of the holdovers — will kick off the session by lying through their artificially brightened teefers as they take the oath of office.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

But before we cross that crumbling bridge over the Styx we have many a long, hard mile to walk, through a wall of sound that even Phil Spector would deem overwrought. Enduring the media’s dissection of the 2022 midterms will be like trudging through an animal shelter that takes in only werewolves, banshees, and howler monkeys, and whose keeper is La Llorona.

The National Kindergarten for the Criminally Insane may change hands after Jan. 3, but you probably won’t get bitten if you keep your hands away from the cage.

If the inmates do wind up in charge of the asylum, Sleepy Joe will get carpal tunnel from ripping their frantically scribbled Crayola fever dreams off the Capitol refrigerator. But he has a generous medical plan. And once he’s past the first few impeachments the rest of his shift shouldn’t be any worse than a casual lunch with Hannibal Lecter.

Speaking of lunch, the green chile chicken enchiladas at El Patio were delicious and the service cheery and superb, all as per usual. I paid my tab, left a preposterous tip, and took the scenic route home through the North Valley, with a brisk autumn wind robbing the trees of their gold.

Erection Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“Bad morning, Mr. O’Grady. We trust your wait was unpleasant
and overlong. Sauron will see you now.”

Looks like Mordor out there, doesn’t it?

High cloudiness robbed us of our full moon/total lunar eclipse this morning, and the Repugs will take everything else this evening, if you hew to the conventional wisdom.

Kevin Drum, who is a reasonable fellow for a lefty blogger, argues from time to time that the United States is a center-right country and that Democrats “need to moderate if they want to win over centrist voters.”

Maybe. But I think the Donks have been trying to be Repug Lite for a while now, to no particular purpose, and no matter how far they tiptoe to the right, they will always be at least one long goosestep behind.

“You got to put the kibble over where the slow dogs can get some,” as Roy Blount Jr. advised in “Why It Looks Like I Will Be the Next President of the United States, I Reckon.”

And the Donks do, bless their hearts. But it’s generally a sprinkle of some vegan non-GMO Oregon Tilth Certified Organic small-batch free-range hemp kibble, in a bespoke ceramic bowl, with 10 percent of the profits divided among Planned Parenthood, PETA, and the ACLU. And the marketing thereof — why this is a good thing and not just a stone saucer full of sawdust and spider webs — is polysyllabic and ponderous and even harder to swallow than the chow.

So the slow dogs bite the hand that feeds them, and then they scamper over to where the loud fella with the red tie is th’owin’ the raw meat on the ground.

Well sir, before long the slow dogs aren’t feeling so good and the national yard is a monument to canine intestinal distress and the loud fella with the red tie has wandered off somewhere to holler into a microphone about how everything’s gone to shit and the libs are to blame.

And so the libs trudge into the national yard with shovels and bags, clean up the mess and doctor the slow dogs while the loud fella with the red tie hollers at them through a bullhorn from the other side of the fence because that’s where the shit isn’t.

And before you can say “FREE DUMB!” the only thing any of the mutts can think about is how good that raw meat tasted.