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.

’13 means shit and bad luck.’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

I see the Donks running the House Judiciary Committee decided to postpone voting on sending two articles of impeachment to the full House until today … which would be Friday the 13th.

Shit. Good luck with that.

Charlie Pierce had his bad luck early. Dude got hit by a car, which explains why you haven’t been seeing him over at the shebeen. I’m a little irritated with management for not giving us the word. Not everyone spends their days glued to Twitter, y’know.

Shit. Good luck with that.

Speaking of being glued to things, I’ve gotten two of three modern MacBooks updated to High Sierra without incident. Still haven’t dealt with the main box or the iPhone, and given the circumstances I think I might wait until tomorrow. I don’t need any shit or bad luck.

Climb every mountain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Operations at El Rancho Pendejo are sketchy, as always.

It’s only Dec. 11, but it seems my work for 2019 is pretty much done.

I wrapped the “Quick Spin” video on the Cannondale Topstone 105 for Adventure Cyclist on Monday, and yesterday I actually got a jump on 2020, scribbling a “Shop Talk” cartoon for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.

Today I’m contemplating some overdue computer maintenance — backups, updates, the poking with sharp sticks of things better left unmolested.

It struck me the other day that I’m a few iterations of operating systems off the back. The MacBooks are all running Sierra, but the kool kidz have long since moved on to macOS Catalina. So I thought I’d tiptoe up to High Sierra, see what the weather’s like up there. After all, I have the installers on all three ’Books.

Ho, ho. Pull off those hiking boots, Sir Edmund. The installers are all damaged, which is to say their certificates are probably expired. ’Cause, like, y’know, dude, sir, everyone else has, like, moved on to Catalina, an’ shit.

So I’m downloading a fresh installer as we speak. Shouldn’t take more than a couple-three days at Duke City DSL speeds. Then if I feel like getting the “two” in the ol’ one-two I can think about setting up the “new” iPhone 5.

Super, heroes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Just one more thing. …”
Photo hijacked from the Internet. So impeach me already.

So this is impeachment.

With just two counts at the moment — basically, being a dick and punking Congress — it feels a lot like a cop catching one of the FBI’s Most Wanted driving a stolen Brinks truck full of automatic weapons, fentanyl, and dead teenagers, and then warning the guy about a busted taillight and waving him on before getting back to his donut.

I’m not sure this is gonna be must-see TV for a viewing audience grown fat on “Watchmen,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” It’s more like Mickey Mouse.

And anyway, seriously, fuck a bunch of Batman. I think a lot of us would settle for Columbo right about now.

Watch, man

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Funny, I always thought Dr. Manhattan was blue.

He must be loving this shit.

He’s a walking, talking cartoon character with incalculable power who lives for TV, and impeachment is unfolding like episodes in an HBO series. The orange Dr. Manhattan* won’t take the stage until the end is nigh.

What next? Don’t touch that dial! Stay tuned!

* In the original Watchmen comic, of course, Dr. Manhattan went to Vietnam … and won the war. He also ran around mostly butt-nekkid, but let’s not think about that with this version.

‘Something Went Wrong,’ Afghanistan Edition

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

It’s one thing to suspect it, and another thing to have it dumped in your lap by The Washington Post.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

Except ice cream cones taste good. This tastes like death.