He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.
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.
“No, I don’t want any Girl Scout cookies. I want to get the hell out of here.”
We popped round to the Dark Tower yesterday to visit Herself the Elder.
The weather being cooperative, we decided to make it our first bicycle drive-by of the new year.
The State had recently made some noise about changes to its protocol for visiting residents of long-term-care facilities, but for our purposes, that’s about all the announcement amounted to — noise.
After looking over the four-page document we decided that for everyone involved, the simplest, least bothersome way to enjoy a little face time (not FaceTime) with HtE remains peering through a closed window and speaking via phone.
Calendar, schmalendar: Herself got out yesterday for her first bike ride of 2021, so it must be spring.
It wasn’t definitively springlike here in the Duke City — but still, arm warmers and knickers beat long sleeves and tights for the first week of March.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla did not join us. She prefers her indoor exercise apparatus.
Triggered by a listener’s letter, Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio rang up Phoenix scribe Jason P. Woodbury, and the two of them demythologize desert life a bit by trading observations about a few Southwestern communities — among them the Duke City, home to Your Humble Narrator.
Layne says our town “has a reputation as sort of the ugly stepbrother of Santa Fe,” which he argues lends it a skosh more soul than its pricey neighbor to the north. A working-class, salt-of-the-earth vibe, don’t you know.
Albuquerque “is sort of famous for eight of nine cars around you in the process of falling apart all at the same stoplight,” he says.
The ninth, of course, is stolen.
Also up for review: Palm Springs (Woodbury likes hanging out at the Ace Hotel) and Sedona (Woodbury’s a fan; Layne, um, not so much).
“Sedona’s like a vortex of intelligence, you know? And it all disappears as soon as you get there,” he says.
“It is the job of a satirist to make people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.”
That was Tony Hendra, and he knew whereof he spoke. Hendra, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Thursday, helped make a lot of people very uncomfortable indeed with his work for National Lampoon and Spy magazine, among others.
Had it not been for the trailblazing Lampoon some of us would have laughed a great deal less over the past half century. The magazine had a nut-crushing stable of funnymen, among them Hendra himself. And its “Radio Dinner,” “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” and “Lemmings” led directly to “Saturday Night Live,” “Animal House,” “This Is Spinal Tap,” and the “Vacation” movie franchise.
Hendra’s “Magical Misery Tour” was a brutal takedown of John Lennon using Lennon’s own words from an interview in Rolling Stone. I bet John wasn’t laughing when he heard that one.
Hendra may not be as familiar to you as Chevy Chase, John Belushi, P.J. O’Rourke, or Christopher Guest. But he was right in there among them, one of the ha-ha mechanics throwing shit, just to see what might stick, and to what, or whom. Making people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.
One of his last smiles before the disease took those from him came when he learned the results of the last presidential election, said his wife, Carla.
“He was an immigrant who sailed from London into N.Y. Harbor on the SS United States after being given free passage in exchange for performing stand-up,” she told The New York Times. “What was to be a two-week visit became 57 years, because he believed in the promise of America.”
Well. I see the U.S. House has adjourned to Captain Horatio Huffenpuff’s Hiding Box because some Q pootbutt sent them a mash note.
Apparently the Pancake House Patriots could only afford one night at the Motel 6 in Dumfries, Va. Either that or their ace sapper really has to drop a deuce after two months in a broom closet washing down expired MREs with his own pee and waiting on the “go” code.
Meanwhile, the rest of yis are commanded to show up for duty as per usual. That is all. Dis-miss.
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