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.

¡Que viva Puebla!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
We’ve got visitors.

It’s Cinco de Mayo, which is not the Mexican Fourth of July, though Americans treat it as comparable, even adding it to their National What the Hell Let’s Drink & Drive Party Calendar.

The neighbors, the ones with the kids, have decided to throw a fiesta in the cul-de-sac this year, possibly because an uncle from Colorado was coming down to do the Turquoise Trail Burro Race at Cerrillos.

• Read “The Treasure of the Sierra Mojada,” in which I recount my own experience as a burro racer.

The uncle got here yesterday and his burros were quite the draw for our sleepy little ’hood.

My man Hal Walter will not be participating in tomorrow’s race at Cerrillos — he will drive pretty much anywhere at the drop of a sombrero, and will drop it himself if need be.

But he is busy retrieving his son Harrison from Colorado Mountain College this weekend; the kid just finished his first year of postsecondary education and will be spending the summer at the family’s Crusty County rancheroo.

This evening, Hal and Harrison will be motoring from Leadville back to Weirdcliffe, the uncle and the burros will return to the cul-de-sac, and we’ll have some quality neighbor time and medium-light refreshments to commemorate the ass-whuppin’ that General Ignacio Zaragoza and his troops laid on the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

One time, one night in America.

Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.

Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.

It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.

Screenwriters?

Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.

Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.

And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:

Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.

“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Off with his head!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
“We are not amused.”

Her Royal Felinity, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, has retreated to the Winter Palace.

Forty-seven degrees is not what I would call cold, though it’s a few degrees cooler now than it was when she meowed me out of a sound sleep at 5:30 this morning.

Ordinarily it would be Herself who answers the call of duty at stupid-thirty, but she has gone a-questing to East Texas to join sisters Beth and Heather, other kinfolk, and friends in bidding adios to Herself the Elder, who is to be laid to rest tomorrow in the family plot.

Frankly, Miss Mia finds all this a feeble excuse for being short-staffed, nay, abandoned to the questionable care of a junior staffer who thinks that he belongs where she is now.

That’s treason, that is. Heads will roll, and they will not be cute gray furry ones with luxurious whiskers and fetching green eyes.

‘Bigger even than I had feared’*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Not enough moral fiber in the Fox News management diet.

“We’re gonna need a bigger plunger, hon.’ This one doesn’t want to go down and stay down.”

Two takes on Tucker Carlson’s fall from grace: Alex Shephard at The New Republic thinks it’s funny, and David A. Graham at The Atlantic thinks that whoever replaces him will be even worse.

Me, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. The only time I ever watched the bowtied little prick was when Jon Stewart punk’d him on “Crossfire.”

* The headline is a bit of bathroom humor from “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

Humming along

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Little buggers are camera-shy.

Yesterday we finally saw the first hummingbirds of spring 2023.

We’d heard the little buzzbombs elsewhere in the ’hood — Zzzzz! Whizzzz! — but until yesterday none had appeared at our backyard feeders. We’d actually hung up the feeders once and then taken them down again due to a lack of customers.

I’ve been hearing and seeing quail for a couple weeks now but the hummers have proven elusive. And who can blame them? With weather advisories ping-ponging between fire alerts and freeze warnings this springtime has been screwier than GOP pestilential theater.