My Christmas caroling tends to wander far afield from the norm. This one does have a little drummer boy in it, though.
Pah-rum-pah-pum-pum, bitches. Give us some money.
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.
12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 6
From the June 2019 issue of BRAIN.
Training has gotten a lot of attention in the bike biz lately, with the rise of the Professional Bicycle Mechanics Association and the increasing complexity of the two-wheeler.
The Mud Stud knows that you can fix anything with the right-size hammer, from a creaky bottom bracket to a loose headset. The occasional irksome customer likewise can be corrected with a snappy tap on the Campy cap.
But even an old hand like him needs the occasional refresher, and if the shop is paying the tab, so much the better.
Ride ’em, snowboy
Happy happy joy joy, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
Here’s a-hopin’ all you little buckaroos got what y’wanted insteada what y’deserved. We should all be so lucky.
The Mad Dog in Winter
We may not have ourselves a white Christmas, but it certainly won’t be one suitable for test-riding that shiny new bike I’m not gonna be getting from Sandia Claus.
A chilly rain started falling at midafternoon on Tuesday, shortly after Your Humble Narrator got a short trail run under his tights. All in all, it feels like a marvelous evening for tamales smothered in green chile with a side of Mexican rice.
And for dessert? How about a heaping helping of deep-dish thought about who’s gonna be making it rain around here next year, when a certain somebody taps into that there Socialist Insecurity instead of working for a living?
“Working for a living.” Ho, ho. As if delivering the old hee, and also the haw, requires a strong back and a hand truck.
But deliver we do. Yes, yes, yes, it’s another thrilling episode of Radio Free Dogpatch! We’ve taken a dump right on your porch, and just in time for Christmas, too. Remember, lift with your legs, not your back.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with an Rode PodMic and a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. I edited the audio using Apple’s GarageBand on the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. The background music is “On the Job,” from Zapsplat.com. Freesound.org contributed the typewriter (theshaggyfreak); ticking clock (straget); wind (eliasheuninck); footfalls in snow (duck37fm); traffic (edo333); and the elevator going down (LG). Eddard Stark comes to you from the late King Joffrey Baratheon’s gruesome collection of Halloween ornaments. And Darth O’Grady comes to you from the Death Star trash can via Sony ICD-UX533 recorder.
12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 5
From the May 2019 issue of BRAIN.
If this one feels a bit like the last one, well, I was trying to match the ’toon with its issue’s theme, which happened to be (wait for it) e-bikes.
Plenty of people who should know better (some adventurous cyclists among them) think $1,500 is a lot to pay for a bike you don’t have to plug into a wall socket at night. And I’ve talked to more than one velo-curious person who thinks a third of that sounds about right.
So I was speculating how that sort of customer might react upon learning the price of a decent e-bike from the corner IBD.
And you know me — ever-ready with a cheap gag (rimshot).
Mad Blog Media 