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.

No turkey, but a trot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Black Friday me arse. Here in the Duke City we’re expecting blue skies, a high near 70, and no bloody shopping.

Another Thanksgiving done and dusted. A thousand thank-yous to everyone who continues to pop round to the rumormongery, if only to see whether I’ve croaked and left them a slightly used bicycle or two or three.

Posole verde on the fire.

We kept it light this year. Neither family nor friends were in attendance (we phoned Herself the Elder, my sister, and our former Bibleburg tenant Judy) and thus the kitchen drudgery was nothing out of the ordinary.

I cooked a simple posole verde based on a recipe by Rodrigo Bueno, Herself whipped up a raspberry cobbler, and that was that. No leftover turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy and whatnot for snacking purposes, but the post-feast cleanup was greatly expedited.

Before sitting down to eat we went out for a short and leisurely run, neither of us having legged it around and about for a while. It was a gorgeous November day, with temps in the 60s and nothing but blue sky overhead.

Indeed, it was so pleasant we gave the cats a good airing, too, and they spent the rest of the day snoozing in their respective towers by a window.

Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), keeps an eye peeled for Rooski ratfuckers.

Ordinarily we watch “Home for the Holidays” on Thanksgiving, but this year we opted for a few episodes from season two of “Baskets,” a weird little series starring Zach Galifianakis. It’s not for everyone — especially now, since disgraced weirdo Louis C.K. is one of the co-creators and producers — but it’s definitely … different.

Elsewhere, there’s nothing different about the way special counsel Robert Mueller is pressing his inquiry into the Rooski ratfucking of the 2016 elections.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla favors a sunny spot underneath the yard art.

The Old Wise Heads speculate that Mike Flynn has rolled over and begun chirping canarylike arias, which is generally what happens when the laws have you by the short and curlies and wish to grab hold of someone a little higher up the criminal chain of command.

It’s probably a tad early to give thanks. But may we please have a few indictments neatly wrapped and under the tree by Christmas, Santa baby?

Wide Load Wednesday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Comedy is easy. Gravity is hard.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and come Black Friday you’re gonna need to go for a long, slow, fat-burning ride to recover from the turkey flu. Sweat a little gravy. Know what I’m talkin’ about?

But your kit won’t fit anymore for some strange reason.

What to do?

Good news, Tub-o. We can’t help you for this holiday, but if you act now, you can have your official Old Guys Who Get Fat In Winter kit ready to roll by Christmas.

Just click here to take advantage of our special holiday offer* and you, some anonymous porker who happens to be wearing your XXXXL underwear, or a gravity-challenged friend, co-worker or family member, can be trundling along in style like a Clydesdale hauling a beer wagon, just in time for the New Year.

We even have a long-sleeved model now, the better for mopping grease from your chins.

• The fine print: Some restrictions apply.** One jersey per customer.*** Offer void where prohibited by law.****

* Actually, it’s not that special.

** No, they don’t.

*** Bullshit. We’ll run your credit card until it smokes. Buy as many as you can afford, and in ascending sizes, because you’re only gonna get bigger, bubbeleh. Eat, eat; like a skeleton you look.

**** Law? What law? You see any law around here lately? If we had any laws in this country we’d have a jail on every streetcorner instead of a Starbucks, and there would still be a waiting list to get in.

Abyss in ya

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
The high point of today’s outing, just below the Sandia Tram.

“And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”

Screw the abyss, I said, and went for a ride. And what a fine idea it was, too.

It was sunny and warmish out there, away from the Mac, and grew more so. I’m still reviewing the Fuji Touring Disc for Adventure Cyclist, and thus it’s the go-to machine for any bike rides out of El Rancho Pendejo, unless I absolutely, positively must have some dirt time.

I can’t stay gone for long. The Boo has been showing signs of the Dogzheimer’s and frequently forgets the difference between indoors and outdoors, with deleterious consequences for the brick floors and carpets. I kennel him when I leave, but that’s no guarantee that I won’t come home to a mess. And confining him to quarters means he can march around in any messes that he makes. I should get him some little Wellingtons to wear in the slammer.

So, yeah. Short rides, two hours or less. But still, it beats watching everybody in America be revealed as a perv’, fascist, false prophet, lickspittle, tinpot dictator, coward, fool or some combination thereof.

You can’t spell ‘harass’ without ‘ass’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
The Mud Stud is not exactly the most enlightened of males. In fact, he’s a pretty dim bulb on most matters.

Some of the lads wandered a bit off topic in the previous post, toward the cascade of revelations about just how many of us appear to be dicks.

The sheer number of recent revelations feels overwhelming, until you consider how long women have been enduring a thumping of one kind or another.

In this country women didn’t get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 (it was Tennessee, presently home to Herself the Elder and Herself’s younger sister, that tipped the scale).

Inequities remained and continued, of course. Today, women still earn less than men. Forbes says the Fortune 500 has more women CEOs than ever before, but that’s not saying much (32). Women hold just 8 percent of the top corporate spots in the U.S., according to CNBC.

In government, we find all of 21 women in the Senate and 84 in the House.

And of course, if you’re talking about simple condescension, or a good old-fashioned beatdown, men have the edge there too.

Then there’s sexual harassment.

I’m willing to bet that we all know at least one person who’s been the unwilling target of unwanted attention. In my newspaper days I knew two people — one woman, one man — who were stalked by their supervisors. To management’s credit, both perpetrators were disciplined, one by a swift sacking.

These creeps were creating toxic environments for at least two employees and had to go. But newsrooms, like cop shops, are rough-and-rowdy places, with an us-against-them atmosphere, frequent booze-addled socializing outside the workplace, and a lot of raw language. Plenty of torrid romances bloomed — editors with reporters, reporters with photographers, and ad salespersons with their clients.

And of course the publisher was boinking all of us.

So where do we draw the lines between acceptable, frisky, risky and abusive behavior, especially at the workplace? What merits a “Oh, go fuck yourself, Ed, you’re drunk” and what mandates a pink slip?

I look at Al Franken and I see a comedian who made a stupid joke. I look at King Donald the Short-fingered and I see a self-confessed serial abuser. Plenty of built-in bias in that evaluation, to be sure, but there it is.

Am I wrong? If so, what’s right? I’m particularly interested in hearing from the women in the audience on this one, because I’ve never been sexually harassed, on the job or anywhere else.

Unless you count the time the giant African-American crossdresser in the red miniskirt hooted at me as I was cycling through Denver’s Cheesman Park back in the Eighties.

“Oh, honey, let me ride it, let me ride it!” s/he squealed. I don’t think s/he was talking about my bike.