If we really want to do something about broken-down, smoke-blowing shitheaps stinking up our nation, shouldn’t we encourage the steadily shrinking minority of sane Republicans to trade in their sputtering party for a brand-new, fully functional, loyal conservative opposition? An outfit that actually presents workable, sane alternatives to Democratic proposals rather than galloping around and squealing about Nazis, socialists, Jesus, lynchings, foreigners, guns and homos like a bunch of ADHD preschoolers on a Ritalin binge? Call it “Right for Wrong” or something? Just sayin’.
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.
Work, work, work
After a fun reunion with the Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux mob it was back in the barrel with a vengeance. Sundays get a little hectic when there’s only one of us working at VeloNews.com (everyone else pissed off to their country chateaus). We got a whole lot of nothing all day long, and in French, too. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to decipher a French story about a Basque bike race for an American audience. Happily, I ate a lot of acid as a young man and now I understand everything.
I had a Bicycle Retailer and Industry News deadline lurking in the background, too, but it’s tough enough to write comedy when things are funny, so I pushed that to the back burner. Ain’t nothin’ funny about trying to translate a language you haven’t spoken since you were 8.
Meanwhile, I see my man Bill Clinton is so desperate for poontang that he has to go all the way to North Korea for some takeout. What do you want to bet he makes ’em both wear blue dresses for the flight home? I got a choice between 12 years at hard labor and 12 hours in a pressurized aluminum tube with Bubba, I’m busting rocks and eating kimchi, know what I’m saying?
Blast from the (recent) past
The first Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer Party in many a moon erupted Saturday night in Gabacho Heights, Colorado, a sprawling Aryan Nations compound just south of Bored Housewives Buttes, under the dark, phallic shadow of Pool Boy Peak.
Held at the palatial manse of Larry and Sheryl Martinez (“Oye, pendejo, make sure you call us ‘the Martins’ while you’re here!” hissed Larry upon our fashionably late arrival), the 2009 MC-ERDWBSP (Geezer Edition) reunited several members of a filthy fraternity that predated National Lampoon’s “Animal House,” which, contrary to popular mythology, was not a comedy but a documentary.
In attendance were the Martins, retired El Rancho jefe Jethro, Mombo Hisself and his wife Kimmie-Boats, Mudbone, Sarah and Charley Ellisonwonderland and of course Your Humble Narrator and the lovely Herself. The part of Fast Eddie was played by a potted plant, but the much-anticipated Dance of the Potato Salad had to be canceled in the absence of Chris Intercoursey, who advised via e-mail that he would be with us in spirit, if not in spirits.
“Say hey to the gang for me,” wrote the alleged writer, who now has something nebulous to do with trains in a northern suburb of San Francisco (yeah, I know, it sounds dirty to me, too). “Tell them I’m here in my back yard, sleeping with the toaster, snoring and blowing chicken feathers out my mouth every time I exhale.”
I was pleased to note that despite the passage of time and kidney stones that I remain the cutest member of the band, a perky Paul backed by a mangy pack of Ringos. Still, Mudbone has a kind of George thing happening (pre-Maharishi) and Mombo evokes John (pre-Mark David Chapman). That would make Larry George Martin, as he arranged the music for the evening, a typical El Rancho party mix of Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Waits, Parliament-Funkadelic and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
But the annual MC-ERDWBSP was always as much about comedy as it was about music, promiscuity, firearms, substance abuse and encounters with law enforcement, and though we were long on Cheeches and short on Chongs we laughed long and loud, winking to one another as we fraudulently cast absent friends as the stars in the worst of our reminiscences in order to avoid death by spouse (although the tale of Fast Eddie and His Faithful Dog Blowjob the Wonder Pooch remains wholly unexpurgated and unprintable, even on this site).
I snapped a few pix of the gathering, thinking that with journalism circling the bowl I might make a buck or two with the local gendarmes. But the only contraband these elderly maricons were smoking turned out to be a pair of old El Vestido Azul cigars left over from the Clinton administration, and the cops said no sale.
As space is limited here, we’ll put the rest of the pix up on Herself’s Flickr account as soon as I’ve finished Photoshopping everyone’s clothes back on.
Alas, the Ellisonwonderlands are not pictured, as they arrived even later than we did, and Sarah was carrying a great big stick.
The corner of Deluge and Vine
No wonder we felt as though we were growing gills in July. According to the Bibleburg Gaslight, we got 5.39 inches of rain — 3.43 inches more than normal — and there’s more on the way, as August is normally the rainiest month of the year.
This weather is one of the reasons my ancestors fled the Emerald Isle, the others being the Catholic church, the Presbyterian church and of course, the English.
And it’s why I left Oregon for a job on the copy desk at The Pueblo Chieftain, which is a newspaper in the same sense than a Roadmaster is a bicycle.
Alas, I can’t flee Bibleburg for drier climes. I’m married now, and a property owner. Plus there are the cats to consider. Their shortest auto trip is my bus trip to Vegas.
Besides, we have this vine taking over the deck we can’t use because it’s generally about as welcoming as the boat dock outside the hotel in “Key Largo.” Someone has to stick around and keep an eye on it.
Dummy of the Day
When Herself worked in the private sector, she had to deal with loons, asshats, feebs, ninnies, ne’er-do-wells and vicious lying swine. Her post-work tales of woe became so common that I took to asking, “So, who was the Dummy of the Day?” There was always at least one, and sometimes more than one.
Now she works with smart people she likes, but I have decreed that the Dummy of the Day shall live on in the form of snark directed at the would-be King of Fucktardia who most amusingly opens his fat yap around a note-taking reporter on Friday.
For our inaugural edition we have a tie — Reps. Mike Rogers of Michigan and Phil Gingrey of Georgia, both Republicans from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been considering health-care legislation.
Under the public option, Rogers oinked: “You will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor.” Never mind that America’s seniors and soldiers — among them Rogers, a former Army officer — already enjoy public medical care that in my own personal experience beats the mortal shit out of that provided by the private sector.
Not to be outdone was Gingrey, a pro-life OB-GYN and Star Scout. In addressing a compromise that would not permit the use of public funds to pay for abortions, Gingrey bleated thusly: “We don’t compromise on the use of taxpayer funds for the destruction of human life.” Uh huh. How about all those post-birth abortions we funded in Iraq and Afghanistan, Doc? Whoops, almost forgot — as the late George Carlin once noted, dead brown folks don’t count.
