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.

Hasta la vista, John Nichols

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
John Nichols goes west.

When I bought my first copy of “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols — I have bought several over the years, replacing copies rumpled, thumbed and dog-eared half to death — the clerk at the Alamosa bookstore confided, “You know, this is about us.”

I bet a lot of people thought that, from Saguache to Socorro. “This is about us.”

The New York Times was not impressed. Reviewer Frederick Busch, himself a writer of novels and short stories, observed: “Nichols’s attempt to make his love for an area and his social concern coincide with his often celebrated sense of humor is doomed by his own always visible hand.”

Well, I never read any of Fred’s work. But I read a shitload of John Nichols. And I always came back to “Milagro.”

It wasn’t a great novel. As an editor I wanted to run through it with a cleaver, dispatching various digressions, superfluous characters, and a general flowery wordiness that must have caused a thesaurus or three to burst into flames from overuse. And the movie was pretty awful.

But “Milagro” gave me my first hint that water was not just something that came out of a faucet whenever and wherever you wanted it. And I met some of its characters — Joe Mondragon, Horsethief Shorty, Amarante Cordova, Charley Bloom — in places like Alamosa, Greeley, Española, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque.

Most of all, I enjoyed their wandering, collective story, in which The Little Guys go toe to toe with The Man. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. ¡Vamanos! They won a battle, but the war continues.

Alas, John Nichols does not. He has gone west after a long illness, according to his family. He was 83.

Nothing to fear but fear itself

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments
Beauty, eh? Take off, you hoser.

The reports of a squadron of heavily armed Bentley Flying Spur medium-heavy bombers targeting the United States from a top-secret Canadian base seem to have been slightly exaggerated, if by “slightly exaggerated” we mean “fabricated out of whole cloth.”

“This confirms our worst fear: the explosion at Rainbow Bridge was a terrorist attack.” — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Insult My Wife, Please)

“Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.” — Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Finance, Insurance & Banking)

“So it begins. We need to lock down the borders immediately. Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” — Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Ashkenazi Catholicism)

Yes, a 2022 Bentley Flying Spur exploded at the Rainbow Bridge connecting the United States and Canada. Yes, two people died. And yes, many more people freaked the fuck out, thanks in large measure to (wait for it) the 101st Half Cocked Rapid Response Team at Faux News (h/t Charles P. Pierce at Esquire).

And then, the other combat boot dropped:

“But the FBI and other assisting agencies concluded within hours that the explosion was not a terrorist act and rather a terrible accident – possibly caused by a medical incident or a vehicle malfunction,” reported The Buffalo News, adding, “In 2021, the Australian government issued a limited recall of Bentleys over problems with the accelerator getting stuck.”

A medical incident. The accelerator getting stuck. The case handed over to local police as a traffic investigation.

Well. That’s entirely different, as Emily Litella might say.

The Cape Comanche launchpad.

Down here in our little corner of The Duck! City we have some small experience with airborne motor vehicles.

At least thrice in nine years some leadfooted yahoo who failed to grasp the concept that all roads eventually must end has rocketed up Comanche and through the stop sign at Camino de la Sierra only to find the pavement replaced with what appears to be, and in fact is, a short dirt ramp that launches them and their cobbled-together street-racing shitbox through a wire fence and into the cacti-and-rock-studded base of the Sandia Mountains after a brief flight of, oh, I don’t know, three to six feet.

The Wright Brothers did better than that in 1903, and they were just a couple of bike jockeys who took the scenic route to what their descendants would call “hucking,” “getting big air,” or “shredding the gnar.”

So we have never considered going to DEFCON 3 over it. Of course, none of our local test pilots has ever been incinerated. That we know of, anyway. Also, our little wire fence isn’t at an international border, and we don’t dream of it becoming a Wall.

Blank Friday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Chicken cacciatore with succotash.

Another Thanksgiving feast has come and gone (though leftovers aplenty remain) and here it is Blank Friday already and I haven’t snapped up a single solitary bargain, not one.

Herself had requested Emeril Lagasse’s chicken cacciatore for dinner, and I decided to add the traditional accompaniment, Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash.

Butter cookies.

Somewhere along The Path for reasons unknown we got detoured into butter-cookie construction, and as a consequence I was a wee bit tardy getting started on my own preparations, which are extensive.

These dishes are not complex — the succotash needs just four minutes in the wok — but they involve more than a few ingredients, among them Emeril’s Essence, a spice mix with eight components.

The cacciatore itself has 20 more. The succotash? Eleven. Many cups and bowls for the mise en place, many, many of them.

For the cookery I needed a large Dutch oven, a pasta pot, and a wok. Knives, spatulas, spoons, graters, cutting boards, colander, oven mitts, rubber gloves, yadda yadda yadda. Clean as you go, etc. Stand back, gimme room, and so on.

A memory with fewer holes in it would have been nice, too. For some reason I had it in my head that the simmering phase of the cacciatore would last only 20 minutes, which was 40 minutes short of actuality. This put a slight hitch in my culinary gitalong and thus we were late sitting down to the actual eating, which annoyed Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who is a stickler for schedules (her own).

Didn’t matter. We’d lunched on eggs over medium and pan-fried potatoes, so we weren’t drooling and ravenous. We didn’t have two-legged guests waiting, growing surly with drink, reawakened memories of past slights, and plans for vengeance. And we didn’t have to drive home afterward.

During the final cleanup, which was extensive, we sang along with Arlo, singing loud to end war and stuff. We hope yous all did likewise. There’s a lot of it about.

We’re just waiting for it to come around. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Shut up, kid.
Shut up, kid.

It ain’t a dump, and it ain’t closed on Thanksgiving, and you can’t get anything you want.

Still, it’d be a friendly gesture if you took all the garbage down to the city dump, starting with that big orange sack of shit that keeps stinking up the church, downstairs where the pews used to be in.

And remember, if you want to end war and stuff, you got to sing loud.

Might not hurt to recite the Haudenosaunee address of gratitude, either. Props to Charles P. Pierce for showing us the way. For more on the Six Nations, a.k.a. Iroquois Confederacy, click here.

In which various turkeys come home to roost

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
No, I haven’t started cooking yet. But this is what it should look like.

Must be Thanksgiving or something.

Many a comrade has been checking in with Your Humble Narrator. There’s Charles Pelkey, who is now (a) a retired shyster and (2) with wife Diana, an empty nester; their kids, Philip and Annika, have fled Wyoming for the libtard swamps of Oregon. And Matt Wiebe, the renowned former tech editor, university-professor emeritus, and boat-breaking salmon fisherman, whose offspring are scattered far and wide; at least two of them, Willie and Esti, will be spending the holiday in Fanta Se with their ould fella and mom Lori.

Also billing in were Chris Coursey and Merrill Oliver, two of my oldest bros (oy, are they ever old). Especially Chris, a.k.a. The Supervisor, who yesterday in the Sonoma Whine Country marked the latest in a long string of birthdays. I expect he gummed down a little strawberry Jell-O with some chocolate frosting on top, wet himself, and fell asleep in the puddle as Merrill took a few snaps for posterity and/or The New York Times (“Notorious Santa Rosa Supervisor Drunk On Job (Again)”).

Actually, Chris, Merrill, and a few thousand of their closest friends plan a “birthday units” ride on Friday. Could be miles, could be millimeters. More as I hear it.

Bike-industry refugee Tim Campen chimed in from South Carolina with a few piquant observations about the good times in Gaza. He and wife Jill recently welcomed their Blue Zoomie son Ellis home after a tour in Saudi Arabia, and they must be relieved to have him back in the Land of The Big BX.

And Hal Walter filed a dispatch from Weirdcliffe, where some psycho was exercising his Second Amendment and Castle Doctrine rights just a few miles as the crow flies from our old hillside fortress off Brush Hollow Road.

Hal was trying to track developments as he, Mary, and Harrison prepared for their traditional Thanksgiving trip to Taos, where other people will do the cooking and washing up for a small (well, maybe not so small) consideration.

Alas, while there is said to be a “newspaper war” raging in Weirdcliffe, neither “newspaper” was engaging with the story, and Hal and his neighbors were getting most of their “information” from Facebutt.

We spent a little time nosing around on the Innertubes, and learned that shortly after being spotted in Salida the suspect was found to be hightailing it through — wait for it — New Mexico.

With three in the bag and one in the hospital I can only assume our man felt he was ready to step up from the farm club to The Show, where middle-schoolers routinely cap their classmates over a bit of the old side-eye.

But our Juan Laws said nope, thanks all the same, we got all the local talent we can handle. And they took him into custody just outside The Duck! City. So near, and yet, so far. Will he have to pay $50 and pick up the garbage? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the gendarmes have not popped round to invite me to assist them with their inquiries. I met a few psychos during our stint in Weirdcliffe but this dude wasn’t one of them. In my day property disputes were generally restricted to questions like: “Shit, was this your beer? Sorry, thought it was mine. Get another’n from the cooler. Whaddaya mean we’re out?”