From hairballs to purrs

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments

“We are adequately served. You may go now.”

O, Lord, sometimes a fella feels like he’s barefoot navigating a carpet spotted with hairballs in the dark.

Warner-Discovery bollixed its big switch from HBO Max to Max, forcing subscribers like Your Humble Narrator to dash hither and yon across the Internets, trying to figure out how we could enjoy “content” we were paying for but suddenly not receiving. Handy Household Hint to W-D execs: As error messages go, “Something went wrong” is just a wee bit vague.

E. Lawn Mulch stepped on his own dingus (yet again) with a rapid unscheduled disassembly of Ronald DeSadist’s pestilential campaign on Twatter Spaces. I expect various minions, varlets, and knaves (if any remain) were promptly laid off and escorted from the Twatter offices (for which rent is not being paid). Look for DeSadist to ban Twatter in Florida.

At Verizon, which is shedding customers, employees in “customer experience, loyalty, and technology positions” have been advised to prepare for “transition to the next stage of your career journey.” Your call is important to us. Or not.

Meanwhile, in the vast retail/services landscape, there is at least one happy customer. Miss Mia Sopaipilla got an A++ in her most recent visit to the vet and gives the chef’s kiss — muah! — to her bedcave.

Is there a Meow as well as a Yelp? I’m looking forward to a glowing review.

‘Bigger even than I had feared’*

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Not enough moral fiber in the Fox News management diet.

“We’re gonna need a bigger plunger, hon.’ This one doesn’t want to go down and stay down.”

Two takes on Tucker Carlson’s fall from grace: Alex Shephard at The New Republic thinks it’s funny, and David A. Graham at The Atlantic thinks that whoever replaces him will be even worse.

Me, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. The only time I ever watched the bowtied little prick was when Jon Stewart punk’d him on “Crossfire.”

* The headline is a bit of bathroom humor from “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

Having a blast, wish you weren’t here

April 21, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Sort of a mixed message, isn’t it?

Some of us contemplate replacing our gas appliances and infernal-combustion vehicles with electrical gizmos, whizbangs, and comosellamas in order to help stave off (or at least slow down) global environmental catastrophe.

Meanwhile, in one go, a single wealthy narcissist can spray Mother Earth with a money shot of 15 million pounds of liquid methane-oxygen propellant, a jillion bits of shrapnel from an exploding 120-foot-long dick-missile, and uncounted gigatons of Texas sand, soil, and Christ only knows what … and then call it a learning experience.

I know what I’ve learned. My little electric kettle ain’t gonna git the cattle to Abilene, is what.

Some rides are better than others

April 14, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

While a 21-year-old Air National Guard tech-support REMF was getting rousted in his skivvies on charges of playing Sun Tzu for an online audience of teeny-boppers, I was out riding the old bikey-bikey on a fairly glorious spring day.

If I have a choice, I’m always gonna go for the latter over the former. It’s hard to shift and brake with the bracelets on.

Thursday’s conditions were not quite as sunny as they were Wednesday, when the high was a blistering 81° (!).

But they had to be a whole lot better than the atmosphere in the SUV with the FBI as they ferried our man Airman First Class Jack Teixeira down to the federal jug and a date with Magistrate Judge David Hennessy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who ordered him jailed until a detention hearing next Wednesday, according to The Associated Press and The New York Times.

My conversations with judges have mostly been brief and costly — the dollar-to-word ratio is appalling — and I try to avoid them whenever possible.

So, yeah. The bike ride. The single-ring, seven-speed Voodoo Wazoo and I went for a leisurely spin around the Elena Gallegos Open Space, which is generally a low-traffic area on Thursdays, as was the case yesterday.

The water feature remains in operation, as you see. I hurdled it cyclocross style and went along my merry way. Here’s hoping that pleasant little rivulet helps dilute the shitshow downstream from Jemez Springs, where spring flooding has overwhelmed the sewage-treatment plant.

Ain’t much gonna dilute the shitshow over OG, The Great and Powerful, Duke of Discord. The Creature from the Sewage Lagoon, Margarine Trailer Greenhorn, has already expressed her “thoughts” on the issue (link not included), and the less said about that the better.

On the wings of a dove

April 8, 2023April 8, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

The Duck! City is something of an aviary all of a sudden.

I’ve heard a couple hummingbirds buzzing around (haven’t actually seen one yet). Quail I have seen, and heard. Finches are hitting our feeders like the working press swarming an open bar.

And we have the usual dove nesting beneath the overhang by the front door.

Speaking of our feathered friends, it seems E. Lawn Mulch must’ve gotten lonely in those Twitter offices he’s worked so diligently to empty. His latest attention-getting ploy is to do a flyby on newsletter platform Substack, which has announced plans to launch the latest Next Twitter Thingie, called Notes.

Captain Free Speech — who croaked his own newsletter platform — has apparently gone all Twitter Über Alles on Substack, forbidding embedded tweets in Substack posts, links in tweets to Substack articles, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

According to Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post:

On Thursday, Substack writers discovered that they were no longer able to embed tweets in their Substack posts. Writers who tried were met with the message, “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts.”

On Friday morning, Twitter began blocking users from retweeting, liking or engaging with posts that contained links to Substack articles. Users also could not pin posts containing links to Substack to the top of their profiles. On Friday evening, Twitter began marking links to Substack as “unsafe.”

Even Substack’s corporate Twitter account was restricted, with users reporting that they were unable to retweet or quote-tweet the handle’s posts.

A number of Substack writers are very much not amused, among them Matt Taibbi, who announced that “beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter. …”

Judd Legum, Matt Swider, and Laura Jedeed were likewise critical, with Jedeed telling The Verge that she sees subscription bumps “every time Musk does something stupid.”

“I think people realize Twitter is dying and they want to keep hearing from me after it falls apart,” she says. “He’s driving traffic my way by being stupid but, like everything he does, it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Hey, dude’s still laying eggs. The smelly brown ones. Anyone promoting an online presence anywhere other than Twitter should probably invest in umbrellas and air fresheners.