Category: Bad news

Fetuses have Second Amendment rights too

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

Do you suppose a mass shooting of fetuses might move the Senate to action on gun control? Naw, they’d just vote to station armed guards in American wombs.

Herself and I sent the usual NastyGrams® to our senators, for all the good that does. Two more mutts yapping. You don’t even hear it after a while. I’ve lived next to runways and railroad tracks, crack houses and frat houses, and if I’ve learned one thing it’s that a fella can learn to sleep through any kind of godawful racket, even me screaming at you over the phone.

If the killing of 20 children in Newtown can’t motivate “our” elected representatives, I don’t know what can. Oh, yeah, right — money. How silly of me.

The National Rifle Association spent $500,000 on Wednesday alone, for advertising critical of “Obama’s gun ban.” Of course, this is above and beyond what they’ve already invested in the best Congress money can buy.

Smile, though your heart is aching

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 41 Comments

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. — William Hazlitt, English essayist, 1778-1830

I first stumbled across Hazlitt’s notion by way of Robert A. Heinlein, in “Stranger In a Strange Land,” which I was reading when I should have been reading English essayists. Valentine Michael Smith had asked Jubal Harshaw, “What is ‘Man?'”, and the answer took Jubal a little time to puzzle out.

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself. The very bedrock of humor was—

“Man is the animal who laughs,” Jubal answered.

There will be many ponderous pronouncements over the coming days. While we endure them, let’s all remember that Man is the animal who laughs.

One bomb deserves another

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments

The best advice I’ve seen so far about the bombings in Boston comes from Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

“If you live in Boston, stay home until things are better sorted out. If you live elsewhere, try to avoid jumping to any conclusions.”

Word. On a related note, I suppose it’s too soon to make a joke about how we’re all gonna have to take off our shoes before we’re allowed to run our next marathon.*

* As an ink-stained wretch of long standing I assume that this bit of black humor or some variation thereof hit the nation’s newsrooms before the smoke cleared.

Burning daylight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

Today started and ended well, lightly toasted slices of metaphorical bread comprising an actual shit sandwich.

On arising I recalled that we had a huge slab of meaty Ranch Foods Direct bacon in the fridge, so breakfast included coffee, eggs over easy, American fried potatoes, buttery English muffins and great thick rashers of pigmeat. Your basic heart-attack special, but I like it.

My plans for the workday hinged on breaking a piece of new technology to harness, but despite a hearty breakfast I couldn’t even get my rope on it, much less my brand.

Being something of a persistent cuss — you may call it “obsessive-compulsive,” I call it “persistent” — I kept working at it, trying first this and then that and finally the other, all the while taking copious notes on each fresh dysfunction with an eye toward eventually tattooing same on someone using an icepick and ball-peen hammer, with a sack of wormy dogshit for ink.

Thus the hours passed and the daylight faded, and the technology breezily countered my every move. By late afternoon, which saw the mailperson deliver an overdue check for services rendered that was redeemable for slightly less than half the expected quantity of Dead President Trading Cards, I was at a rolling boil, hissing like a teakettle full of vipers, blistering steam boiling out of both ears.

Herself and I had earlier scheduled a joint birthday dinner with friends, so I stuck my head in the freezer, counted to a thousand in Irish, and off we went to The Blue Star, where the four of us ate all manner of good things while discussing music, metaphysics and literature. Also, we solved every last one of the world’s problems save mine (you’re welcome).

Now I’m hardly pissed off at all. But tomorrow is another day.