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.

‘The awful waste and destruction of war’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“That’s All, Brother,” a restored C-47 that flew on D-Day. Read more about the project here.

In case the spectacle of a belligerent chickenshit with a three-word vocabulary representing the United States at the annual remembrance of the Normandy invasion just doesn’t do it for you, here are a few alternatives for your own personal observance of D-Day:

• The Poetry Foundation has compiled a selection of poems from and about World War II.

• HBO is airing “The Cold Blue,” a documentary about the men of the Eighth Air Force, featuring freshly restored footage by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and a score by Richard Thompson.

• The New York Times gives us a remembrance of Ernie Pyle, the correspondent who brought the war home, until it finally took him.

• The New Yorker reprints a three-part piece on Normandy by its own war scribe, A.J. Liebling.

• And finally, 1st Lt. Harold J. O’Grady‘s war was elsewhere, but you can read about the biscuit bombers of New Guinea in “Back Load,” a history of the 433rd Troop Carrier Group.

How many moments in a day?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The Soma Double Cross in light-shopper configuration.

It being World Bicycle Day, I thought I’d go for a run, then do some light resistance training.

I’m funny that way. Maybe not.

Still, days, weeks, months, and years don’t much interest me. I’m more about moments.

Anyway, the run was delightful. Lots of flowers around and about, on cacti and elsewhere. Headwind out, tailwind home. It was already 71 degrees by the time I started pounding ground at 8:30 in the a.m., so when I got home and started lifting I actually had to crack a window on the shady side of the house, let a little cool air into the “gym.”

I did get out on a bike, eventually. Herself was out of rosé, and since no less an authority than the United Nations has described the bicycle as “a simple, affordable, reliable, clean and environmentally fit sustainable means of transportation,” I decided to cycle up to the grocery to fetch some.

Rosé, not bicycles. Bicycles we got, and then some.

Didn’t see a single grizzly, but then I wasn’t on a mountain bike. Anyway, I was focused on the automobiles, which are a good deal more numerous than grizzlies and even deadlier.

Speaking of deadly, there was a time when Apple could’ve nailed me with a new Mac Pro. But this ain’t it. Doing my little bit of business with one of these bad boys would be like using Thor’s Mjölnir as a tack hammer.

Curb your enthusiasm

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
It was one of those days. First we saw the hare; then we saw the tortoise. They weren’t racing, though.

Herself noticed this armored gent during our ride through High Desert this morning, and I inquired whether he knew Mitch McConnell.

“That asshole,” he replied. “Fuck that guy. He’s a snake on his mother’s side, you know. Gives us all a bad name.”

e-DWI

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 38 Comments
The operator of this gas-powered scooter was appallingly sober.

In less than a week after rentable electric scooters hit the mean streets of Albuquerque, we’ve collected our first e-DWI. ¡Salud!

I suppose we could look on the bright side here. Had our early adopter not gotten popped for allegedly e-scooting under the influence — the cops say she got all beered up at Marble Brewery and had planned to hit at least one more grog shop downtown — she probably would’ve clambered into her land yacht and driven home to Belen, an hour or so to the south, depending on how many ditches and medians one inspects en route.

Or tried to, anyway. ¿Quien sabes? Having had some small experience in these matters I expect it’s a lot easier to hide one’s impairment from the John Laws behind the tinted windows of a four-wheeled Ford than on one of their two-wheeled throwaways.