He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.
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.
We got 0.28 inch of rain yesterday in about 28 seconds, so, ’ray for us.
The deluge will not resolve our water issues, though it ended the struggles of at least one poor soul whose last known address was a washout down near Edith and Roy.
We stayed indoors where it couldn’t get us. Well, mostly.
Herself took her chances with an early run. I held out hope for a bike ride, and if I’d moved fast I could’ve had one, too.
But fast is not my speed. So instead of risking a good soaking I dithered, waffled, and procrastinated, and then finally tottered out for a short run and never even got my shoes damp, though at one point I was jogging up a sandy arroyo that feeds into that long flume ride downtown.
Scanning The New York Times today I recalled the words of the late, great George Carlin of Manhattan: “Here’s another pack of jagoffs who ought to be strangled in front of their children.”
First up for a vigorous and final throttling: Whoever coined the abominable “polyworking,” which sounds vaguely sexy, like “polyamory,” but actually describes the need for more than one job to cover the payments on the used Ford Focus in which one sleeps between shifts in the barrel(s).
Erin Hatton, a sociology prof at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market, told the NYT that the practice can be “a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer.”
But Hatton conceded that not being identified “by one job, one employer,” is … not always optional.
“There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” she said.
Will this be on the final exam? Doesn’t matter, I’ll be working that day, and all of the others, too.
Next: Come on down, Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree!
Matt told the NYT — in a story about people who have to finance their groceries — ““If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you’re on a tight budget and you have several of these loans out at one time, it can be very easy to get over your skis here.”
“Over your skis?” You need a short-term loan to buy your Hot Pockets and you’re over the skis you don’t have? I mean, shit, dude, read the room. The room that looks a lot like a Ford Focus without a (duh) rooftop ski rack.
And as George reminds us: “Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.” It probably won’t help you understand the kids on TikTok, but at least you’ll be able to read your job(s) application(s) and the fine print on that buy-now-pay-later deal.
Thor is teasing us again, twirling his hammer like a drum major’s baton.
Will Mjölnir finally deliver the goods today? The Monday Geezer Ride is scheduled for 10:30, but I’d gladly trade 20 miles of asphalt for .20 inch of rain. What the hell, I got a nice 20-miler in yesterday on my No. 2 Steelman Eurocross, jumping from road to trail and back again as the spirit moved.
Gaming out a new bar setup.
If it does rain, it would be a perfect opportunity for me to revise that bike’s cockpit. I’ve never really liked the chunky aftermarket Flight Deck STI levers, and the old Deda bar has more drop and reach than I prefer in my Golden Years.
Happily, I have a new Soma Hwy One bar awaiting its callup and the original STI levers from my No. 1 Eurocross, long ago transformed to standard brake levers and indexed bar-end shifters.
I’d go to indexed bar-cons on No. 2, too, but I’m fresh out of the eight-speed versions — nine I got (from the now-dismantled Voodoo Nakisi), and seven (still on the Steelman time-trial bike,. But not eight.
While I’m at it maybe I could replace No. 2’s old Shimano 600 rear derailleur with a “new” 105 or a “slightly used” Ultegra? I even have a never-used Altus from Rivendell. Said to be Grant the P’s favorite rear d., it will accommodate a 34T (!) cog. That’d be a nice change from the 28T cog on there now. My No. 1 Eurocross uses a derailleur-tab extender and a 32T cog for the steep bits.
If I were smart I’d swipe the seven-speed bar-cons from the TT bike, put them and my last set of Shimano 600 brake levers on No. 2, and call it good.
Lots of schmutz in the air today. Our air purifier started sounding like a 747 trying (and failing) to take off from Newark, so I figured Elon was back to blowing up Starships in Texas between Special K binges and using his face as a catcher’s mitt for some pitcher’s high hard one.
But nope. Just windblown wildfire smoke and dust from Mexico, according to the local press. A health alert* has been issued. And warmish, too, so much so with the doors and windows closed that I finally caved and turned on the air conditioning. We must think of Miss Mia Sopaipilla, after all.
If you can’t change the channel, open a window, f’fucksake.
On this date last year, Beelzebozo became the first former president to be convicted of a felony — 34 felony counts, to be precise — stemming from a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush-money payments to a porn actor who said the two of them did The Nasty.
Less than six months later he won re-election to the presidency.
Some of the 77,302,580 Americans who voted for him probably thought they were pulling the lever for a Republican candidate. But what they actually pulled was his stubby little finger.
And on Jan. 20 of this year, the Great Rumbling began.
Small wonder the weather has been so unsettled.
When it comes to dealing with an asshole of this magnitude, there just ain’t enough air freshener in the world.
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