Category: Bad news

Dead air

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 52 Comments
KRCC is just one of the three public broadcasters we support.

CPR, we hardly knew ye.

The Right got another zopilote feather in its asshat with the news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will cease operations in 2026.

What’s the problem? Why, money, of course. There’s just not enough to go around! Writes The New York Times:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been in the cross hairs of Republicans for decades. Conservative policy advocates, legislators and presidents argued persistently that the public shouldn’t be responsible for financing media they perceived as having a liberal bias. But repeated attempts to defund public broadcasters failed, until this year.

Congress voted last month to claw back more than $500 million of the organization’s annual funding in a narrow vote that played out along party lines. That forced the corporation into a cash crunch.

Hey, $500 million here, $500 million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Money for stuff like — oh, I don’t know — say, a $30 million military parade to give Felonious Punk a chubby on his birthday. Or $1 billion to refurb’ a Qatari jet that he will take with him to his “library,” which will be a walk-in closet full of fuck books, golf scorecards (see the Fiction stacks), and classified documents (homeless dude thumbing through them whilst on the shitter).

And then there’s the tab for flying this fat cunt around the world to visit his golf courses, where the locals gather to jeer, snigger, and call him a fat cunt. We can call him a fat cunt right here at home for free. See? I just did it. Didn’t cost one of the pennies we won’t be making in 2026.

Maybe that’s why the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got it in the neck. No pennies for that crowd.

R.I.P., Tom Lehrer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“And this is what he said on / his way to Armageddon. …”

I have no idea where or when I made the acquaintance of Tom Lehrer, who has gone west on us at the ripe old age of 97.

But I was immediately enthralled. What a mind!

I couldn’t do math at gunpoint. What few resources I possessed were directed at trying (and often failing) to make people laugh.

But Tom Lehrer could do both, and seemingly with ease. Numbers and words alike danced to his merrily sardonic tunes.

In the end, he chose academia over comedy. I expect his GPA was a wee bit more impressive than mine. At the age of 18 he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard; at that age I was a freshman on drugs and academic probation at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo.

As Lehrer’s obit in The New York Times recounts:

His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

I never caught his mathematical act at those venues. But I saw him perform on TV a time or two, and heard him now and then on FM radio, both freeform and public. My faves were “Wernher von Braun,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “A Song for World War III,” which I suspect may have inspired Randy Newman’s “Political Science.”

And five years before he left us on Saturday, he remembered us in his will. Well, on his website, anyway, where he announced that:

[A]ll the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.

In other words, he relinquished the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of a few that used his words but someone else’s music.

The curtain may have rung down, but his satirical legacy survives. So long, Tom, you never dropped a bomb.

The Rio Ground

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
The Rio Grande, pictured July 11, two days before it was declared officially dry in The Duck! City.

Welp, piss on the dogs and call in the fire — the Rio Grande is now the Rio Ground.

John Fleck reports that the “official” call is that the Rio ran dry in the heart of Albuquerque last Sunday evening, for only the second time in the 21st century.

I was down by the river last Friday (not to shoot my baby; I was on a longer-than-usual bike ride) and took the above snap from the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge paralleling Interstate 40. A stone bummer it was and will be; the future does not look bright, but we’ll have to wear shades anyway. And possibly Assos stillsuits as well.

I wasn’t wearing my dancing shoes.

Happily, I took two tall iced water bottles on this 45-miler. And I had drained both of them before I saw something that made me smile, in Lynnewood Park just short of The Old Home Place.

The Paseo de las Montañas Trail runs right through the park, and on the concrete path someone had drawn a rough square with a message inside: “Dance Here.”

I would’ve, too. But I was hot, tired, and thirsty, and the soles of my ancient Sidis have been ground down to nubbins by the years and miles. Plus it would’ve felt a little like dancing on my own grave.

R.I.P., Samuel Abt

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
One of the many books Sam Abt wrote about his summer vacations.

The great Sam Abt is finally done following the Tour de France. He went west this week at age 91.

I never met Sam, much less worked with him. He was an editor at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, a real chain-smoking pro who worked on the Pentagon Papers and other top-shelf stories and covered the Tour de France — in his spare time — because he loved it. I was a editor at a series of lesser papers who read Sam at work (if the paper subscribed to the NYT wire service) and rode bicycles in my spare time because I loved it.

But my friends Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood knew and worked with Sam, as did James Startt, who has a fond remembrance of him over at Velo.

Writes James:

Simply put, his writing was exceptional. It was at once efficient, witty, insightful and at times downright transcendent. Oh, and his fans went well beyond the press room, as at least one head of state would call him during the Tour to get his take on the race.
All of this from a chain-smoking reporter who never really rode a bike. But he knew the sport like few others did.

Sam was covering Le Tour in those dark days when an American fan had to settle for a soupçon of “Wide World of Sports” coverage, a couple grafs from The Associated Press in your local paper’s sports section (if you were lucky), and Winning: Bicycle Racing Illustrated, which would hit your mailbox about three months after the race was done and dusted.

When VeloNews moved to Boulder in the late Eighties I latched onto the back of that breakaway and hung on for dear life, doing what I’d always done for newspapers — cartooning, writing and editing. I even helped cover a few Tours, from a distance, as an editor. The magazine offered to send me abroad a time or two, but I always declined, thinking I could get more done at home.

But that meant I never got to meet one of the titans of the Tour. Not a racer — I met more than a few of those folks — but Sam, who fed the monkey for all us bike-racing junkies.

As Hoody put it:

Abt was a mentor and inspiration for a generation of English-language journalists who later came to cover a once-exotic sport that’s since gone global.

Peace to Sam, his family and friends, and to his many, many devoted readers.

• Addendum: Here’s the NYT obit.

The Wrath of Con

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
“You did what?”

Is Khan Noonien Singh running Starfleet in this timeline?

No, he’d have been deported to the Klingon Empire by now. The braying asshole whose shysters just extorted $16 million from Paramount is merely a student of his methods:

“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.”

To boldly go … where? To the bank for a cashier’s check, it seems. Hold the phasers, drop the shields, piss on the dilithium crystals and call in the Tribbles.

Beam me up, Scotty — there’s no intelligent life down here.