Category: Audio

Howling at an orange moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
And you thought the moon was made of green cheese. Sorry, losers and haters!

Blame the Wolf Moon. A vacationing wife. An acid flashback. Whatever.

But when I blinked myself awake in the dark on Tuesday morning I had no idea where I was.

If dementia runs in your family, as it does in mine, this can freak you right the hell out. But I found it oddly exhilarating.

“Where am I? Who knows? Who cares? This is great!”

And then I remembered.

“Aw, shit. Trumpsylvania.”

We’re just a few all-too-short days away from the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. “Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington” should’ve been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a franchise now. When the Joker started getting top billing we should’ve known what was coming. It’s just one evil clown after another.

But hey: It’s an excuse for another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, in which I make it all about me. I tell ya, it’s evil clowns all the way down.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The wolf howls from Freesound, as do the sad trombones and the vinyl scratching. “Morning Mood” is from “Peer Gynt” by Edvard Grieg. Arthur, King of the Britons, and an anarcho-syndicalist peasant come from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail.” You’ll catch a snippet of the “Grapes of Wrath” theme in there (almost went with “Death Valley Days.”). The ass-kissing is by Your Humble Narrator. The sound effect, not the actual, y’know, like, obesiance. And the classic “There Stands the Glass” is courtesy of Ted Hawkins via YouTube. As usual, all the other raving can be pinned on the landlord of this dump.

Highway 666 Revisited

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
We seem to be missing a 6 here. Nevertheless, get your kicks, etc.

Another Jan. 6 has come and gone.

This time we managed to skip the armed-insurrection part of the program, so yay for us. Turns out that when they win, The System works.

Who knew?

Watching Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the 2024 election results this week sent me careening down Memory Lane, revisiting a night in the sneezer in 1977, a Louis C.K. dramedy from 2016, and the last three pestilential erections.

Somehow the Joker, Billy Joe Shaver, The Cars, Dana Carvey, Willie Nelson, and Bill Clinton snuck in there too.

Once you have a cast of characters like that assembled, for good or ill, you just know it’s time for — yes, yes, yes — the first episode of Radio Free Dogpatch in The Year of Our Lard 2025, Dog help us all.

Additional music not included, but which should replace “Hail to the Chief” for at least the next four years, is “Catch Us If You Can” by the Dave Clark Five.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. Performing for us this week are Danny O’Keefe, AC/DC, The Cars, and Billy Joe Shaver, all from YouTube. The 2016 dramedy “Horace and Pete” remains available on Louis C.K.’s website. Audio of the 2024 election-results certification courtesy C-SPAN. Dana Carvey as Ross Perot on “SNL” was lifted from YouTube. Bill Clinton comes (har de har har) from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The Walk of Shame is from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The headline is a riff on Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” not incidentally in honor of RFD’s 61st episode. Finally, ask not for whom the clown horn honks; it honks for thee (from Freesound). All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Doing it old school, or ‘Yeah! Science (fiction)!’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
A script from the Before-Time, possibly written by Dr. Eleven. Or that “Mad Blog” fella.

I always liked science fiction. Science, not so much.

Science always seemed rigid and impersonal. But science fiction, or speculative fiction, if you prefer — especially of the apocalyptic variety — spoke to the gloomy bog-trotter in my DNA.

So I studied the fiction instead of the science, with predictable results. When it came time for me to go to college, there was only one in the state that would accept me with my miserable GPA. However, the institution excused me from freshman comp because I was a fool for words, as long as there were no equations to solve.

SF seems best to me when the future isn’t pretty, but people manage to muddle through somehow. “A Clockwork Orange.” “Alas, Babylon.” Or “Station Eleven.”

We watched the “Station Eleven” TV series on Max, recently watched it again, and afterward I finally got around to reading the book, which as usual is considerably different. Author Emily St. John Mandel was gracious about the changes, though, saying she thought the series “deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways.”

I doubt that I’m adding any significant depth with this latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, but the notions contained therein have been taking up space in my head for a while now and the Voices would like them to leave. They’re your problem now.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. NASA noises, starship flyby, countryside ambience and appreciative audience come from Zapsplat. “Wernher von Braun” is the work of the inimitable Tom Lehrer. The Celtic tune is from Freesound. And the outro clip is from The Firesign Theatre’s “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus,” which remains all too relevant. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Thanks to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke for “2001,” Gene Roddenberry for “Star Trek,” Emily St. John Mandel for “Station Eleven,” Pat Frank for “Alas, Babylon,” Stephen King for “The Stand,” and The Firesign Theatre for … well, for everything.

The Nanofesto: writing a wrong

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Do the write thing.

When the John Laws collared their suspect in the CEO assassination he was said to have had in his possession a ghost gun, some fake I.D., and a 262-word “manifesto.”

A 262-word manifesto?

By the ghosts of Marx and Engels! That’s what I call phoning it in.

Except our man didn’t use a phone to compose it. Or a laptop. It was handwritten. Whether on papyrus, stone tablets, or a shithouse wall was not made clear.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that 262 words do not a manifesto make. And let me tell you why.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s time for another political-science fiction episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.

• Technical notes: RFD is loving the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. “The Internationale (Traditional)” and “The Internationale (Death Metal Edition)” both come from YouTube. The typewriter comes from Freesound. The police siren, screeching tires, ballpoint scribbling, and game-show buzzer all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

The winter of our dissed content

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Extry, extry, read all about it … or not.

At The Atlantic, Noah “Fargo” Hawley advises us that too many reporters are writing fiction.

In a fund-raising email from Mother Jones, David Corn warns us (with one hand casually searching our wallet pockets and purses) that the legacy media’s value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect’s latest play are a form of “sanewashing.’

And at Radio Free Dogpatch, well — our little purse pooch of a podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. Why not squeak in a little squirt of our own?

So lend an ear to the latest, massively hydrated edition of Radio Free Dogpatch, even though it may be, as The Bard had Richard declaim:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before [its] time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. …

Shit, now that I think of it, the title may be the best part of the whole damn thing. …

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. The music, “Black Fedora” and “On the Job,” and the people networking and chanting all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.