Month: November 2024

Black (and Blue) Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Interdimensional gateway to a timeline where Beelzebozo lost the election? Naw, just our solstice tree reflected in a painting.

Turkey Day is done and dusted, and Black Friday is upon us like Nosferatu with the munchies.

We harmed no turkeys. But three chickens are missing thighs and I don’t think prosthetics or wheelchairs will help them cross the road anytime soon.

I cooked Melissa Clark’s sheet-pan chicken with sweet taters and bell peppers, plus a side of Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash with edamame. Herself kicked in a delicious raspberry cobbler for dessert.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla got a yummy StinkCube® with her kibble. When I make tuna salad for sandwiches I squeeze the water from the tuna and we thin it with drinking water before freezing it in ice-cube trays to give Her Majesty a couple weeks’ worth of tasty treats.

I should’ve taken some pix, but after a four-mile trail run and all that cookery we just sat down and chowed down. The grub was gone before I even considered preserving the moment in pixels. If I remember I’ll take some snaps when we wipe out the leftovers this evening.

Herself texted with her sisters, I did likewise with my bros (not blood kin, the chosen variety), and we rang up my sis and her husband to exchange holiday greetings and gnaw our livers over the Pestilence-Erect. Good times, etc.

Today I hope to buy a big bag of nuttin’. Either that or I may hit Page 1 Books for some fresh brain food because I find myself rereading old books again.

There’s nothing wrong with revisiting “Nobody’s Fool” by Richard Russo or “Essays of E.B. White.” But there are roads out there not yet taken.

Closed on Thanksgiving

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

There’s a chain across this dump and a sign that says “Closed on Thanksgiving.”

The tears in your eyes notwithstanding, you’re gonna have to find another place to put the garbage.

Hope you have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Keep an eye out for Officer Obie. You know what to tell the shrink.

Bigger even than I had feared

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Some turds just won’t go down and stay down.

The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.

There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”

Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. Sly and The Family Stone come to you from their YouTube channel. From Freesound we get a dog whining, a power failure, an Internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. Judge Dredd issues his opinions via YouTube. All the other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Shits happen

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
“Tell Bezos to add Mickey D’s kiosks to these crunchy-granola stores of his.”

Jaysis, the Foods Hole was nuts this morning.

I couldn’t tell whether the ravening hordes were preparing to:

(a) Mark the final Thanksgiving before fascism;

(b) Celebrate the impending arrival of fascism, or;

(c) Stock up on four years’ worth of grub that has gotten at least a casual look-see from Big Gummint before all the food inspectors get laid off/processed into Soylent Green@ brand “liverwurst.”

CenturyStink

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
When a modem becomes a no-dem.

Our Innertubes punctured at 11 a.m. Friday, a flat that that didn’t get fixed until 8 p.m. So that was … fun.

Actually, it was hardly an annoyance at all, barring the dealing with CenturyLink “customer service,” a maze of domestic bots and overseas humans whose basic American is much better than my Hindi but still something of a guessing game, tech-support-wise.

Herself wrangled the bots with her iPhone while I dealt with the Subcontinent on mine, and as per usual she brought home the bacon. So I got to tell my guy, “James,” that yes, there was an outage in our area and it would not be resolved until 11 p.m. Ever the newsman, even in retirement. I should’ve sent him a bill.

Anyway, even when it works, we have shit Innertubes in our little corner of The Duck! City (“Gateway to Los Lunas”).

We pay top dollar for bottom-of-the-barrel DSL, same price as in Bibleburg for half the speed, and it inches ever higher from month to month because of course it does.

Our Actiontec C1000A modem-router dates to 2012, making it two years older than the MacBook Pro I’m using to write this. It is of course “retired” — the Actiontec, not my Mac — and I don’t see any point in replacing either device because El Rancho Pendejo apparently isn’t wired for the zoom-zoom all you fiber-optic types take for granted.

When the place was built in 1970 the telephone pedestal box was installed at the east end of the property, as far from the house itself as it is possible to get without actually being in the arroyo. The wiring to said box may have been upgraded over the past five decades; the wiring to the house has not.

Thus we limp along with download speeds ranging from 6 to 12 mbps, and uploads under 1 mbps.

So, when we lose our DSL, well — ain’t no thang. Because our iPhones — with maybe two bars from Verizon down here at the bottom of the cul-de-sac — turn into personal hotspots that work just as well as our DSL router-modem. When it works.

So, winning? I guess. In a losing sort of way.