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.

‘Something Went Wrong’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Uh, can you be more specific?

Indeed it did. And so it begins, the Decline and Fall of the iPhone 5.

The New York Times apparently has cooked up an app update that my device can’t digest — the iPhone 5 peaked at iOS version 10.3.4, while the NYT demands 11 or better — and now I can’t surf the shit monsoon from my 7-year-old phone. Woe, etc.

The iPhone SE, ready for its closeup.

Asked for comment, the NYT Customer Care Crew advises, “We are no longer supporting older versions of the NYT app,” adding that geezers in thrall to antiquated technology should “use the mobile browser to access all content on nytimes.com.”

So I sez back to ’em, I sez: “Thanks for the reply. I already figured that out. The iPhone 5 maxes out at iOS 10.3.4, so using v9.11 of your app is not an option. I’m disappointed to learn that the NYT has dropped support for older versions of the app. My iPhone is elderly, to be sure, but not yet senile. For instance, The Washington Post app continues to work just fine.”

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Sonny Jim. Then get off of my lawn.

It’s not this iPhone’s first step on the slippery techno-slope, of course. I’ve already had to replace the battery once, and the Phone app itself has developed the palsy, seizing up and even crashing from time to time.

I can fix that, as I always keep a large hammer within reach. But first, I should probably unbox the iPhone SE that’s been hanging around idle for the past few months. Naturally, it, too, is a discontinued model, slated for the boneyard — and rumor has it that the Wizards of Cupertino are working on a bigger-and-better model for release early in 2020.

But mine will run the latest and greatest version of iOS. For now, anyway.

Nolo cojones

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
What a blockhead.

Gosh. Il Douche won’t mount any sort of defense as the House Judiciary Committee contemplates articles of impeachment.

Imagine my surprise.

I don’t suppose it has anything to do with knowing that he’d come out looking like a purse dog that went three rounds with the Hound of the Baskervilles.

No, better he should stay all bunkered up, hiding behind various knaves, minions, and varlets, tweeting like a hyperactive budgie, and wait until The Turtle can run interference for him in the Senate, where he has the home-field advantage.

I’d like to have the lip-balm and breath-mint concessions at that ass-kissing contest. A couple days of the big money and I could retire, is what.

I don’t know much about ART, but. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
Once again, tragedy strikes Albuquerque.

Albuquerque Rapid Transit has been on the road less than a week, and already three of its 20 buses have been involved in collisions that left two of them knocked out of service and in need of repairs.

All three crashes occurred while motorists were attempting left turns. In two incidents the motorists apparently mistook the bus lane for a left-turn lane, because that’s what it would be pretty much anywhere other than ART’s nine-mile route down the center of Central Avenue.

That there was a giant garishly colored bus in the way did not deter the motorists from attempting to seize the lane. Burqueños, who get their driver’s licenses for free with their first six-pack of convenience-store lager, know that in the Duke City the first driver to acknowledge another vehicle’s presence surrenders the right of way. Plus, you take your eyes off your phone, you risk missing a text.

It’s not clear whether any of the drivers spilled their beers.