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.

Seeing red

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Turkey enchiladas in red chile after somebody’s been at ’em.

Even though we’ve mostly been steering clear of restaurants since March because, well, y’know, PLAGUE, an’ stuff, we eat quite a bit of Mexican food.

It’s not pro Mexican food, mind you. Category 3 at best. I missed my start time and will never catch the likes of Lucy Martinez, the enchilada-slinging mother of my old hermanos Larry and Jim.

Lucy could whip up a few platillos de comida mexicana in less time than it takes me to remember where I left my spatula. And while holding up her end of a rambling chat with a kitchen full of stuporous pendejos fresh from an long night of questionable behavior, too.

I may be slow, but I do get there, eventually. My green chile sauce is serviceable (as far as Irish green goes, anyway), but my red sauce is still hit and miss. The recipe I’ve been most successful with is this one, from the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

Last night I had a bunch of filling that didn’t get used in the previous evening’s turkey tacos, but I didn’t feel like a second round of tacos. So, boom, enchiladas it was.

I started with a 50-50 mix of Hatch chile powders (hot and mild), and recalling that I undersimmered my last batch of sauce, leaving it a little thin, I oversimmered it this time and had to add a little water to loosen it up a tad. Live and learn, they say. Riiiiiiight.

After the foil-covered Pyrex spent 20 minutes in the oven at 350° I topped the enchiladas with grated Kellygold Skellig, and gave ’em a few minutes under the broiler. Yum, yum, gimme some. Sides included potatoes roasted in red chile (another Santa Fe School of Cooking recipe) and a green salad.

The best part? Leftovers.

Bang-up job, New Mexico

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Sunrises and sunsets will be exempt from restrictions
during The Clampdown.

Welp, the gub’nah made it official on Friday the 13th: New Mexico is shit out of luck.

Starting Monday we’re back to where we were in April, more or less: non-essential businesses and nonprofits must cease “in-person activities;” essential businesses (including bicycle repair shops) may operate with restrictions and a reduced workforce; and all New Mexicans “are instructed to shelter in place” save for “the most essential trips for health, safety, and welfare.”

I’d like to give a shoutout to all the fuckwits who have been insisting on strutting around with their faces hanging out, throwing parties, hootenannies, and jamborees, and otherwise acting the fool.

A second shoutout goes to all the poor sods at USPS, UPS, and FedEx who are going to get hernias, sciatica, and flat feet delivering Internet purchases throughout the Land of Enchantment as local retailers suck the bleachy end of a wet mop for the next couple of weeks.

Finally, lo siento mucho to everyone who has to try to enforce this edict, badged or unbadged. I anticipate a few tense moments along the way and a fella can’t find ammo anywhere at any price.

Look for a strong uptick in the online sale of items that do not require a background check or waiting period, such as baseball bats, ax handles, and tire irons.

Just farting around

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The Big Fella must be letting Baby Jeebus fingerpaint again.

One thing about cycling in the desert — it’s tough to reacclimate to the chilly weather that even residents of the fabulous Duke City must endure from time to time.

Checking the training log yesterday I noticed that I’d been on foot a lot lately, either hiking or jogging (yes, I’ve started that back up again, in an extremely cautious, limited, and sissified fashion).

I seem to have a lot of bikes around here for some reason, so I thought I’d grab one and go for a spin as a change of pace. But what to wear?

All my kit is about a thousand years old, but at least there’s plenty of it, so sorting through the pile burns a bit of daylight, if there is any.

Old favorites included a long-sleeved Descente jersey that dates to the Nineties, some lightweight Pearl Izumi tights that are nearly as old, and a pair of threadbare Smartwool socks. Items from this millennium included bib shorts and a short-sleeved jersey, both from Voler; long-fingered Pearl Izumi gloves; a Sugoi tuque; and my Shimano SHXM700-S G Gore-Tex clodhoppers.

It was an imperfect ensemble, as per usual. In addition to looking as though I had just rolled out of a time machine I was underdressed for downhills and overdressed for climbs.

Still, it beat the mortal nuts out of hanging around the office awaiting dispatches like the one Herself just delivered, about how the White House staff has taken to burning incense in quantity to mask the nostril-searing stench of Il Douche’s fast-food-and-fear farts.

The Reich stuff

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
“We’ll be right back after this message from Trump 2024.”

In our second installment of “Hey, He Can’t Do That, Can He?” we have Ed Kilgore making a case for … maybe. Not without help, anyway.

Writing for New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Kilgore concedes that “nobody knows for sure” how long Adolf Twitler will keep contesting the 2020 election results.

But Kilgore breaks down the process by which this GOP-enabled defiance may devolve “from sour grapes to dangerous delusion.”

The good news, writes Kilgore, is that “the odds of Trump being able to pursue a 2020 election challenge into 2021, with his party at the federal and state levels unanimously behind him, are very limited.”

“There’s almost certainly not enough evidence of electoral irregularities to overturn Biden’s victories within individual states, and not enough raw political and judicial power for Republicans to defy federal and state laws and pull off an electoral coup early next year,” he adds.

Plus, if Il Douche wants to have another grab at the brass swastika in 2024, as has been widely discussed, well … how can we miss him if he won’t go away?

Kilgore concludes: “In other words, he can’t play Napoleon returning from Elba in triumph until he accepts his prior exile. The real deadline for Trump’s surrender to reality is the moment leaders of his party throw up their hands and cry: Enough!”

“Ich bin ein Loser!” Achtung, baby.

From one pilot to another

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Harold Joseph O’Grady, from the 1941 edition of the Seminole yearbook.

Behold The Colonel, before he was a colonel, or even a pilot.

Harold Joseph O’Grady of Foley, Florida, was a freshman at the University of Florida in 1941. By February of ’42, he was a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps, having enlisted at MacDill Field “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law.”

He stayed on a little longer than that. The old man retired as a full bird in 1972, when I was a freshman at Adams State College in Alamosa, getting grades that were even worse than his had been. And mind you, I was taking stoner classes, not elementary physics, organic chemistry, and motorized artillery.

I didn’t last long in college, either, but not because I was going to war to save the world from fascism. I was going to be a push-broom pilot, saving banks from stanks.

Oh, well. As Will Rogers observed, “We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”