Category: Assholes

A ‘new’ year

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The Sandias, pre-Snowpocalypse.

January’s getting all, well, January on us. New year, same old song.

It’s been chilly, but not so much so that a fella can’t ride his bike for 90 minutes with three or four layers of 30-year-old cycling kit, adding and removing same as conditions indicate while awaiting the fabled Snowpocalypse, which by noon Thursday was as you see.

The Sandias, post-Snowpocalypse.

Betimes we are reminded that rich people, politicians, and rich politicians can be insufferable, twisted, lying, featherbedding assholes. This is not an annual or even seasonal event.

Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, evildoers found a back door to our credit card while Herself was in an personal-electronics-free secure area and I was out on the bike, oblivious to my my own digital alerts as I removed and added layers of this and that while rolling around to no particular purpose beyond taking pix of the Sandias.

So, once I had been made aware of the breach in our fiscal defenses, I had to race home, doublecheck my receipts, mumble several filthy words, block the attempted piracy and croak that card over the phone, go get two new cards from a local branch, and then go back to get two even newer ones because the Top Secret Your Eyes Only Three-Digit Security Code was buggered on the first batch.

Now I get to work my way down the long list of bills set to autopay in order that we do not suddenly find ourselves freezing to death in the dark with no Innertubes and The Blog up on blocks.

It should go without saying that today was the day I had to drop Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster at Reincarnation for its semiannual pulse check. I did not ride a bike home from the shop and will not be riding one back there to pick up the wee beastie.

Thirty-three, feels like 25°? No thank you, please. I’ve seen the way Burqueños drive under warm and sunny skies. There aren’t enough layers in my winter drawer and none of them are Kevlar.

Happy solstice

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Solstice, from the Latin solstitium, which means, “Aw, shit, here we go again. …”

The Duck! City is foggier than the deets about Rudy the Mook’s bank balance this morning.

Alas for The Mook, a judge has ordered that a hard cold light be directed upon his finances in order that at least two of the people he’s run his Scotch-addled yap at may be compensated for the damages they have endured. Like, immediately, as in now.

The judge may have to send over a team of marshals to beat it out of him, like loan sharks collecting from a deadbeat horse player. Sell the footage to ESPN and the ladies might yet get a little sumpin’-sumpin’ off the top. Beats spending the next few months digging holes in his yard looking for moldy shoeboxes stuffed with fat stax wrapped in plastic.

Winter isn’t just coming, y’know. It’s here.

Squeakers gonna squeak

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

“Cheese it,” as the Kool Kidz don’t say anymore.

Look, there goes former Squeaker of the House Charlie McCarthy, over the side, just like former Squeaker Pro Tem Patrick McBowtie before him.

What good news for the critical rubber-chicken sector of the nation’s economy. These hirelings spend years helping our corporate “citizens” turn the government into a $2 whorehouse, then travel the country proclaiming themselves* to be shocked — shocked! — that the government is a whorehouse.

And a cut-rate one, too. For them and their deep-pockets pals, of course. Not for you.

* A small fee applies, of course.

Up the chimney he rose

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Santos Claus ain’t comin’ to town no mo’. Not if the town is DeeCee, anyway.

The House lit him up and he’s nothing but a bad smell, with no salary, no pension, and 23 felony charges. Cast out, like a leper with herpes, running sores, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, into the cruel political wilderness.

In other words … he’ll probably be just fine. He’ll be hosting “Saturday Night Live.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. …

I have good news and bad news

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Guess which is which?

It’s a very Irish sort of day here in The Duck! City, gray and gloomy with a steady drizzle, just the ticket for observing the departure of Shane MacGowan.

’Tis a fine soft day so.

He was just 65. But as Jerry Jeff Walker is reputed to have said to an elder, “You’re older than I am, but I’ve been up more hours.” By that reckoning MacGowan may have rivaled Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-old Man.

I have the two classic Pogues albums, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” produced by Elvis Costello, and “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.”

Every Christmas Eve Herself and I dance in the living room to “Fairytale of New York.” I have never been moved to dance to one of Henry Kissinger’s bleak, self-aggrandizing dirges.

However, I’m happy to let the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain dance a whipsong on Kissinger’s grave. Here’s a passage from his 2001 book “A Cook’s Tour,” forwarded by Hal Walter:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

For more of that sort of eulogy, see the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. I’d give a pretty to see Zombie Hunter S. Thompson arise from the grave and pick up where Bourdain and LG&M leave off. You may recall HST’s Rolling Stone obit for Richard Nixon.

• Late update: Charles P. Pierce also has a few thoughts, as you might expect.