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.

Kyle Kinane: Shocks & Struts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Since it’s looking like a very unfunny week in the news for the next few days, you might be sniffing around for a chuckle or two or three to take the edge off.

So here’s a dude that made us laugh out loud the other night: Kyle Kinane.

We’d seen him before, in a half-hour set in season two of the Netflix series “The Standups.” But I’d forgotten about him — we watch a lot of standup — until Jason Zinoman at The New York Times mentioned him in his regular roundup of who’s worth watching.

Kinane’s new standup can be seen on YouTube (see above), and once you pick yourself up off the floor you’re gonna want to go back to 2018 and catch his “Standups” set, and maybe listen to his 2009 interview with Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF” (Kinane comes in at about 13:30).

And if that’s not enough Kyle Kinane for you, you can pop round to his website for podcasts, videos, and more. More. More!

If that doesn’t wash all the ugly out of your week, nothing will.

April fuel

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Half of the ingredients for guacamole toast, plus the obligatory mug of joe.

We were down to one avocado and it didn’t look good.

I had just sliced it into halves when the dreaded brown spots made their presence known.

So I showed it to Herself, our resident avocado whisperer.

“Doesn’t look good,” I ventured. She agreed. What the hell, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is not into the morning guacamole anyway. She prefers a lick or two or three of a butter-smeared finger.

But when I went back to the kitchen with the dubious avocado I thought, “No, goddamnit, avocados cost, what, five bucks apiece? There’s gotta be enough edible flesh on this bad boy to spread on a couple pieces of toast.”

So I performed some reductive surgery on it, tossed the salvageable bits into a bowl with lime, salt, onion, and tomato, and hey presto! Guacamole for toast. No foolin’.

Let us spray

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
What a card.

However will The Mighty Mega NewsHose 9000® pass the time between now and Tuesday, when ’Is Lardship is to journey from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan to face some long-overdue music?

By jawing frantically with “people familiar with the matter who, like many in Trump’s orbit, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share details of private discussions,” as The Washington Post puts it in a piece about how various minions, knaves, and varlets got caught with their pantaloons around their cankles when the indictment was announced.

A shorter item in The New York Times credits “people familiar with his thinking,” which must be a horrific state of consciousness to inhabit, even for traitors, seditionists, and whores.

The anonymous source is the cost of doing business in this shabby neighborhood, where everyone with even a soupçon of inside info is on the lookout for the cops, stoolies, and other potholes on the road to Advancement.

Musn’t abandon this lame candidate for the glue factory in midstream, no sir. Not until a more viable hoss comes clip-clopping along. We see many horse’s asses but very few complete horses.

Meanwhile, the invaluable Charles P. Pierce reminds us that the real game may be afoot in Georgia, where the charges are liable to carry a tad more weight than an indictment alleging someone was cooking the books in New York.

Writes Brother Pierce:

And, even if the former president* were to win in New York, so what? [Fulton County DA Fani] Willis’ charges are far more serious than [Manhattan DA Alvin] Bragg’s are. In Atlanta, the former president* may be indicted for crimes against the republic, for offenses against the idea of popular democracy. That is also Jack Smith’s brief for the DOJ, an investigation that looms like a giant Dust Bowl cloud behind these state prosecutions. Time has come today, in the immortal words of the Chambers Brothers. There are things to … realize.

R.I.P., Keith Reid

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Keith Reid, the lyricist behind Procol Harum’s legendary “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has gone west. He was 76.

I would’ve written “has left the stage,” but Reid was apparently never on it. He was “a full-time non-performing member” of the band, according to The Guardian.

That doesn’t mean Reid wasn’t carrying his share of the load. He wrote almost all of Procol Harum’s lyrics throughout nine albums, from 1967 through ’77, and then a couple more albums’ worth for good measure in 1991 and 2003.

In an interview with Uncut magazine cited in American Songwriter, Reid addressed the song’s origin and meaning.

“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” he said. “It’s like a jigsaw where you’ve got one piece, then you make up all the others to fit in. I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”

In the 1991 film “The Commitments,” Jimmy Rabbitte derides Reid’s work on “Whiter Shade” as the “poxiest bleedin’ lyrics ever written.” But I notice he knew them so well he could correct Steven Clifford when the pianist misquotes the first line.

Me, I loved those lyrics, and the organ riffs nicked from Bach, too. So I tip me cap to Reid, who joins his old bandmate, lead singer Gary Brooker — who wrote the music for “Whiter Shade” — in that ever-growing jam band in the sky.

Extra credit listening

• “A Salty Dog.”

• “Conquistador.”