Author: Patrick O'Grady

After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

R.I.P., Jimmy Buffett

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
I think we’re all bohos on this bus.

“Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic,

But I had a good life all the way.” — Jimmy Buffett, “He Went to Paris”

Jimmy Buffett always seemed to be having more fun than the rest of us.

And not just because he got stupid rich — Forbes estimates his total net worth at a billion smackers, which ain’t sponge cake — off restaurants and real estate. No, sir.

Dude hung out with all the right (wrong) people. Jerry Jeff Walker. Steve Goodman. Jim Harrison. Thomas McGuane, who wrote the liner notes for “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” married Buffett’s sister, Laurie, and is the only survivor of this august cluster of poets, musicians, and miscreants.

Buffett died yesterday at 76, “surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs,” according to a statement on his website and social media. “He lived his life like a song till the very last breath and will be missed beyond measure by so many.”

My friend Hal Walter and I were fans, declaring occasional Parrot Shirt Days in his honor when we were on the copy desk at The Pueblo Chieftain back in the Eighties. Hal actually tried to get him to speak at commencement when he escaped journalism school at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I still love listening to “A White Sport Coat.” I have it on right now as I sip my morning coffee, and just played along (inexpertly) to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk?” That one is credited to “Marvin Gardens,” which was Buffett on maracas and beer cans.

The 1977 tune “Margaritaville” was his signature tune and biggest hit. But I always preferred “Death of an Unpopular Poet,” which Buffett clearly was not. I mean, he even had a species of Florida Keys cryptofauna named after him.

Many a margarita will be hoisted to mark his sailing away. Some for breakfast, I expect. Lots of vitamin C in those limes.

In a town this size

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Clouds grace the September skies.

Shortly after we settled here back in September 2014 a handyman told me that The Duck! City was a much smaller town than one might think on short acquaintance.

On the surface, it seems a lot like Bibleburg or Tucson: All three are sprawling, medium-sized Western cities dependent upon military installations, universities, and tourism, with transient, ever-changing populations.

But dig a little deeper and The Duck! City feels more like Pueblo, where some folks really put down roots.

I don’t know that I ever met a native Tucsonan, and born-and-bred Bibleburgers were likewise rare. But in Pueblo, and The Duck! City, it’s easy to meet people whose attachment to location runs generations deep.

Longevity breeds networking, and this can work for you or against you. I took the handyman to be hinting that outlandish douchebaggery gets broadcast faster than a triple murder on local TV.

More often it’s a case of meeting some rando in the course of doing a bit of business and finding out that he or she knows everyone you know, and probably a whole lot better, too.

This was the case with the landscaper we engaged to tackle our back yard. North Valley guy, of an age with meself, and in one of our first chats it turned out that he knew more than a few of the guys I used to race bikes with when we lived in Fanta Se back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Then last night we’re chatting about the final touches to the project and learned that his mom saw the same doctor as Herself the Elder, lived in the same assisted-living home (albeit a few years earlier), and passed on there, just like HtE.

He knew the owner of the place, and the staff, and also was familiar with the operator of HtE’s previous digs, noting with discretion that he decided against housing his mom there.

A small town indeed. In a town this size, there’s no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.

Smug shot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Asshole by Vonnegut
This is not Ginger Hitler’s mug shot. It is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole, from “Breakfast of Champions.”

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Ginger Hitler immediately set about monetizing his Fulton County mug shot, because, hey, lawyers don’t work for free, unless you stiff ’em, which he does, which is why he has to (a) keep hiring new ones and (2) find some way to monetize things the rest of us might prefer to forget, like mug shots.

But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part is, according to Intelligencer, that one of the underfed cells in his brain trust, Chris LaCivita, fired off an aggro and illiterate warning on social media to anyone else hoping to turn a buck off The Face That Launched a Thousand Shits without having received “prior permission,” to wit, the copious wetting of a voracious orange beak.

“If you are a campaign, PAC, scammer and you try raising money off the mugshot … WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU. …”

This is strictly the hee, and also the haw. As law prof Betsy Rosenblatt told Spectrum News Cleveland, it’s likely that the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department — not the famously litigious Moue That Roared — holds the copyright as the creator of the image.

Also, according to Reuters, the Fulton County court distributed the mug shot to media outlets, which are always — especially in these dark days — eager to accept a handout, even one as fugly as this.

Adds Intelligencer:

Team Trump loves threatening to sue people, but its follow-through rate is pretty low. Plus right now Trump has far bigger fish to fry than the person selling Trump-mug-shot toilet paper on Etsy.

Hey, you never know. So many lawyers, so little money. …

Ash, holes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
Fire on the mountain? Nope. Smoke from Canada.

The haze around here lately is courtesy of our neighbors to the north, who continue to be on fire.

Down south, Georgia finds itself contending with an unnatural disaster, as a conga line of douchebags waltzes in and out of the Fulton County sneezer after cutting bond-and-release deals of various weights.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla supervises the landscapers.

Here at El Rancho Pendejo we have our ongoing landscaping project, which involves neither conflagration nor sedition.

As it enters an extended ditch-digging/pipe-laying phase I thank the gods that I stumbled into journalism, much of which can be done sitting down, in the shade.

Still, I’d gladly stand for hours in the Georgia sun if I got to see the Tangerine Turd get printed and mugged, especially if he came off looking half as frazzled as Rudy the Mooch. Dude looks like a drunk goat trying to shit a rusty tomato can.

‘Trails are gonna wash out in this rain. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
This is not the work of Hurricane Hilary, which should carve a much wider swath through the high desert.

COVID finally came for Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio. But he did his usual Friday-night stint at the Z107.7 FM mic anyway, and you can catch the podcast of same at all the usual places.

“Some people say you should not do your radio show when you’re sick in the head. But I am not one of those people,” he explains.

Layne is waiting for Hurricane Hilary to visit the Mojave — it’s something new for a lot of the local desert rats, but as an old Nawlins hand he knows a little something about rigging for heavy weather.

This week’s episode is heavy on advice for riding out the storm. But he also recounts his bout with The Bug, a random prowler testing his door, and the apparent death and resurrection of a big ol’ spiny desert lizard who is a regular on his patio (but not the radio show).

“Be careful, friends,” Layne advises, adding, “And once you’re prepared, it’s time to hunker down. Enjoy the excitement — nobody ever says that on the weather report — but it’s exciting. It’s real life, it’s right here. No Netflix necessary.”

No excitement for us here in The Duck! City — Hilary will be giving us a miss — but we might catch a little wind burn from her passage. I guess it’s Netflix for us. How about you?