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.

Screwed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

“We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK. It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

A newspaper publisher? Record exec? Movie mogul? Nope. That would be Bill Asher, co-chairman of porn giant Vivid Entertainment, who told The Los Angeles Times that his company’s revenue is down more than 20 percent this year as hard times lead to soft sales (har de har har).

For working stiffs like Savannah Stern, things are even worse. The 23-year-old once took in nearly $150,000 per year doing the ol’ mattress mambo, but is down to a third of that and thus will be giving up her Mercedes-Benz CLK 350 for a used Chevy Trailblazer given to her by her parents.

“I wish I would have never gotten into (porn),” says Stern. “When you get used to a certain lifestyle, it’s really hard to cut back and realize this may not be forever.” Poor baby.

Sick burn

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
You can't fix stupid. Lifted from Michael Albans of The Associated Press via The Missoulian.
You can't fix stupid, not even with socialized medicine. Lifted from Michael Albans of The Associated Press via The Missoulian.

Adolf Saddam Hussein Obama has a 1,200-word op-ed in The New York Times, and Steve Benen at Political Animal found a keeper in there: “No one in America should go broke because they get sick.”

Truer words, etc. And who among us are the most vulnerable? Just look at the pix of these tinfoil-beanie tea-baggers and tell me they won’t lose their single-wides, their rusty F-150s and their beloved three-legged hounds to bankruptcy without affordable health care. Obesity, illiteracy, ignorance and insanity are all treatable ailments, if not rejected for coverage as pre-existing conditions.

Congenital idiocy, alas, we shall have with us always. Until Adolf gets his death panels, of course. Then we can set about vigorously chlorinating the gene pool.

Running (ex-) Dogs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Big doin’s around Colorado yesterday. Former Mad Dog Cindy “Geek” O’Neill won her age group and took third among women in the Pikes Peak Ascent, a race she has won thrice. Her time: 2:51:50. Not bad for an old broad.

Another ex-Dog, Tungsten Alcazar, finished 175th in his age group in 5:09:40, which has to be a timing error unless a bear gnawed off one of his legs or he got stuck behind a really fat guy. Other friends plucked from a casual glance at the results include Nancy “The Hobbs” Hobbs, 32nd among women and fifth in her age group (3:29:03), and neighbor Ken Stauffer, 90th in his age group (4:22:36). Chapeau to all.

Oh, yeah, and some Texan claiming to be the Colorado state mountain bike champion won the Leadville 100, setting a record in the process. There goes the neighborhood.

Chile today, hot tamale

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
This oughta hold me for a couple weeks.
This oughta hold me for a couple weeks.

For a variety of perfectly defensible and irksome reasons I am not in Santa Fe collecting freshly roasted bushels of New Mexico’s finest green chile, soaking at Ten Thousand Waves, eating at La Choza, drinking at Second Street Brewery and dodging cacti on the Dale Ball trails.

That said, we are not entirely without the green goodness here at Chez Chien. I picked up one bushel of freshly roasted medium Hatch from a seasonal street vendor I’ve patronized for the past three years and another of Big Jim from Colorado’s Western Slope, courtesy of Spencer’s Lawn & Garden. Six bags — about 50 chiles — are in the ‘fridge for immediate use, and the rest, as you can see, are in the freezer.

The Hatch seems a bit mild, but the Big Jim packs something of a wallop. After peeling and nibbling on a pepper from each batch, I made a pot of green chile sauce using a 50-50 blend, poured it over a rack of buffalo chorizo enchiladas with a little extra-sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack, popped it in the oven for 20 minutes, dug in and presto! Head sweat. Good times.

Herself had to take an intermission between enchiladas, but at least her hair didn’t catch fire this time.

Two thumbs down

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

It will surprise no one familiar with the Bibleburg Military-Industrial Christo-Clusterplex that the El Pendejo County commissioners have voted to oppose Uncle Ben Schickelgruber’s End O’ Life™ Care, just, ’cause, like, y’know, ’cause he’s a tax-and-spend Islamic socialist and illegal alien who wants to kill your granny.

Health-care reform, bleats Commissioner Amy Lethen — who is proud of having helped elect the infamous beer-swilling DA, John Newsome — would place the good, God-fearing bidnessmen of El Pendejo County “under the thumb of the federal government.”

Jesus wept.

Pardon my French, but just how fucking stupid can you get? Bibleburg could care less about the federal thumb — it already has a liplock on Uncle Sammy’s floppy pink comm’niss hooters that a lamprey would envy. The place is home to Fort Carson, Peterson AFB, Schriever AFB, NORAD, the Cheyenne Mountain Air Station and the Air Force Academy — and leave us not forget the military retirees enjoying gummint pensions, VA medical care and the local PXes, BXes and commissaries.

Then we have the civilian retirees and low-income families on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Head Start, the National School Lunch Program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Bibleburg has never been a fat-paycheck kind of town — a working guy (or a gal) often needs a little sumpin’-sumpin’ from Uncle to make ends meet in the cold, dark shadow of Pikes Peak, a famous view that clips more than a buck or two off the prevailing hourly wage.

So who needs health-care reform? Are there no emergency rooms? No prisons? No workhouses?