A bog less trotted

October 24, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Sunscreen would seem to be optional this morning.

We had a storm sweep through last night, bitch-slapping leaves off the backyard maple while spraying a half-inch of water around and about.

No complaints here. San Juan County took a beating, though. People stranded on rooftops were getting choppered to shelters and here I sit in my office, warm, dry and full of breakfast, thinking I should’ve ridden yesterday because today looks like more of a running opportunity.

With another round of thunderstorms, hail, and strong winds in the forecast, riders tackling the Day of the Tread‘s Bosque Boneshaker are liable to be shivering in their skeleton costumes and getting their plastic gravel gobblers all gooey.

Caution: Dog Crossing. Cyclocross in Fort Fun, sometime in the Nineties.

There was a time when I relished that sort of outing in October, driving hundreds of miles and paying dozens of dollars to get my muddy arse handed to me, tidying up afterward pumping quarters into a car wash.

But that was when I was a man, instead of whatever it is that I am now. If I get caught out in this sort of weather I will deal with it, but I’m less inclined to seek it out just ’cause.

Instead I may trot another class of bog altogether. The revelations about PHP, A.I. skulduggery, and what some coneheads are dubbing Black October have me thinking I should relocate my old blog’s archives from their bus-station locker in the Twilight Zone to WordPress, which is — or at least should be — better equipped than Your Humble Narrator to deal with the fallout.

We’re not talking the Book of Kells, the Magna Carta, or the Code of Hammurabi here. But some of this prehistoric blather still packs a few yuks, if only for me, and I’d hate to see it sucked through the Black Mirror into the Phantom Zone because I built it using stone knives and bear skins.

And if it all goes kablooey anyway, taking my digital dogma with it? Well, shit happens, as Hammurabi has taught us. There’s always Old Reliable, the 4×8-inch Ampad Reporter’s Notebook. Scribble a “post” in ballpoint, tear out the page, and staple it to a power pole somewhere in the ’hood.

Just call me the Analog Dog: “Our Motto: ’Zine, not Herd.”

The cool September morn

September 27, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Does a moral handicap count when it comes to reserved parking? Asking for a friend.

I had time to sneak in a quick ride around the Elena Gallegos Open Space on Friday before motoring off to the Sunport to collect Herself, who was inbound from Tennessee after spending a week helping her sisters give bro-in-law Bill “Wild Man” White a proper sendoff to The Source.

And now things are more or less back to what passes for normal in these parts, if you overlook the rain. “Normal” precip’ for September is 1:15 inch; we’ve already gotten 3.12 inches and the month ain’t even over yet.

Mind you, I’m not complaining; just observing.

Anyway, the deluge made a pedestrian of me for three days last week and two this week. I got carried away and put fenders on the Soma Double Cross, which was both unnecessary (I had three fendered bikes already) and unsmart (the short wheelbase means some serious and unwelcome toe-fender overlap).

So that poor decision will get reversed directly and the DC will once again sport some bare-ass 42mm Soma Cazadero knobbies, which are better suited to riding trails, especially now that they’ve been guttered all to shitaree.

There’s more time for this sort of aimless wankery in the mornings these days because the sun doesn’t show its face above the Sandias until around 8:30 and it won’t be much longer before I greet it wearing pants instead of shorts.

The sliding glass doors remain closed until sunrise because our friendly neighborhood bear is back. We finally caught him on our trail cam at 3:08 a.m. on the 22nd, dropping a deuce by the butterfly bush.

This may be retribution for my bringing the bird feeders in at night and storing garbage in the garage until pickup day. If we won’t be his restaurant we will be his restroom.

The skunk is likewise back, rooting around in the yard for tasty morsels. So is the Cooper’s hawk. As for the hummingbirds, they’ve never left. It still looks like the Battle of Britain out there every time we refresh their feeders.

Miss Mia finds The Pile purr-fection itself.

And Miss Mia Sopaipilla has found herself a new sweet spot for naptime — a scattering of fluffy bits and bedding that we’re calling The Pile. Just the place to sleep off a medium-heavy breakfast, treats, and thyroid medicine.

Sure beats watching His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered waddling along the red carpet alongside the Red Menace, who looked as thrilled to be there as an OYO Rooms C-suiter tallying pecker tracks on the hot sheets at a Motel 6 in Chlamydia, Nevada.

“No, I don’t care to see your ‘ballroom.’ I can smell them from here.”

Westwhirled

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Just ask the guys at the shop how that whole robotic-workforce thing is working out for them. *(BRAIN/2018)*

A couple weeks back, while trying to discover what exactly the fuck was up with the “Report” button that mysteriously appeared next to “Reply” in comments, I found myself wandering through the bleak, shabby A.I. wilderness, like Ted and the gang in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”

I still had a mouth, and I was screaming, albeit virtually. But at whom?

First at bat was a bot, because of course it was. They reign supreme in Lower Supportistan and Customerservicesylvania. This level is tasked with solving the easy problems, which mostly I am not. Ask any publisher.

With the bot dispatched, next up was a WordPress “Happiness Engineer.” Could’ve been from MeatWorld®, maybe ESL with an A.I. assist, but felt slightly off, like the HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, etc. Or maybe the reassuring, yet slightly menacing drone of The President from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.” Occasionally one longs for a Marvin the Paranoid Android from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Still, one never knows. Automattic (with its sidekicks WordPress, Akismet, Jetpack, et al.) has big feet, one in MeatWorld® and the other on the Infobahn. So I dialed back the attitude, got a side of actual help with the platitudes, fired off an email to Akismet support, and went about my business.

Until I got a chipper reply from Akismet’s “Happy Bot” asking whether I was happy too. Ignoring that earned me a followup from — well, I have no idea what. Happy Bot ratted me out to someone, or something, which asked:

Since we haven’t heard back, we’re just checking in to see if the AI-generated response answered all your questions. Our goal is to ensure you get the help you need efficiently. If you require additional support from one of our experts, please reply to this email.

Well. Shit. Lead with your chin, why don’t you? So reply I did, recapitulating the original snark-laden complaint that led me down this digital rabbit hole.

And finally, I got an actual human response.

I think.

Which brings me to this piece in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He writes:

Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or use these tools, are living through a crisis of agency. The agita and paranoia, even the excitement—over AI’s encroachment on work, education, art, and culture—is the by-product of a cultural and technological moment in which humans are sliding into a more passive role in many activities. One way to look at the generative-AI boom is as a massive societal experiment foisted on us by Silicon Valley, the animating question of which is: What is a human for?

There’s much more to it, of course. And you should definitely read the Sam Kriss essay Warzel links to.

The Jetpack “Happiness Engineer” who was my last point of contact regarding this gripe professed humanity. My suspicions about the use of British spellings and semicolons were addressed (my correspondent mentioned having lived in the UK, writing detective novels on the side, and happily claimed semicolon usage as “proof of life”).

And my problem with the “Report” button? It too was addressed, and resolved:

Where things stand now: the developers who built this feature evaluated the results and determined it wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the concerns it raised, including exactly the kind of concerns you described. The Report button has been completely removed. It is no longer appearing on any site, including yours, regardless of your Akismet settings. You don’t need to do anything.

Y’hear that? I don’t need to do anything.

So … I’m happy? I guess. I think so. Yeah, sure, I’m happy.

But isn’t that exactly what they want? (Cue the spooky music. …)

Just wondering

February 23, 2026February 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

I’ve spent the past couple of days rassling various techno-gators in my undrained swamp of a media landscape and that gaudy championship belt remains elusive.

Most of the hitches in the gitalong of the latest Radio Free Dogpatch revival we have already examined, save one: The 2014 MacBook Pro I use as a podcast editor is not only long in the tooth, it’s short in the stomach, which is to say that its 121 GB SSD is about 3 GB short of full.

So over the weekend I sez to myself I sez, “Maybe it’s time I finally installed that 1 TB SSD that’s been gathering dust around here for the better part of quite some time.”

Well, sir, before a fella does that he wants to back that internal sumbitch up to an external drive. Which my backup software decided it didn’t wanna do, it being the Lord’s day and all.

So I emailed tech support, which was Johnny on the spot, especially considering that even the Deity takes Sundays off. And we got that issue resolved and the backup created after a couple of false starts and a promise to download the latest software update “for security reasons,” which “for not-in-the-mood reasons” I postponed until some later date.

Because by then it was time for a bike ride, and then a shower, and finally dinner with a bit of TV, which the day before required a bit of Kentucky windage because some streaming services are getting pissy about shared user accounts, the oinking capitalist swine.

And this morning I decided the MacBook Pro upgrade could wait a while because I wanted to address some other issues, this time with a email/website-hosting outfit (not WordPress) whose company has changed hands and/or names about eleventy-se’m times in the last year or so, and holy hell did that ever turn into an A.I./ESL/Subcontinental clusterfuck of epic proportions.

About which the less said, the better, because I don’t want to stroke out before His Excremency, who from the look of him lately might just oblige us tomorrow by exploding in a pinkish-gray, shrieking shit-mist of curdled Mickey D’s grease, aspartame, and prescription drugs during the State of the Union, one of the many things about which he knows exactly jack shit. I won’t be watching, of course, but someone’s bound to post the video online.

Anyway, when I’m struggling to get all my kazoos, whoopie cushions, and aaaooogah horns to play from the same sheet of music, I think of Beth in “Diner,” as Shrevie is berating her for failing to shelve his records properly.

“It’s too complicated, Shrevie. You see, every time I pull out a record, there’s this whole procedure I have to go through. I just want to hear the music, that’s all.”

For reals. Makes me long for the days of typewritten underground newspapers and CB radio.

Awaiting enlightenment

January 19, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Author George Saunders is much in the news of late, chatting up the press in preparation for going on tour to promote his latest book, “Virgil,” due out later this month.

Speaking with The Guardian, Saunders said he was still trying to decide how to speak about politics when he hits the road. Preaching to the converted feels “a little too good, like it’s too much sugar,” he said, adding that while his nature is to seek peace, “that’s dangerous right now because I don’t want to be a peacemaker for this regime.”

I’m not a celebrated author, prepping for a book tour, or a Tibetan Buddhist. I blog irregularly and without distinction, the only tours I take are by Subaru, and the only thing I’m promoting is my own mental health. My devotion to Zen is sporadic at best.

But I sure dig where Saunders is coming from when he says The Work is the thing.

The one thing I’m doubling down on is: just keep making fictive worlds. Improve the quality of your thought, improve the quality of your compassion, by that sacramental exercise, then whatever you have to do you’ll be better equipped.

It reminds me of the Zen proverb, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Also, and too, of the Epistle of James, which goes, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”

And I was pleasantly surprised to see Saunders prescribe a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down: “Also start weightlifting, build a machine-gun turret. …”

Sounds like the right sort of work for an old blogger short on faith as the reign of His Excremency Donald the Dozy barrels along unhindered. We’re running out of water to carry in the Southwest, and we don’t burn wood. But you never know when a buffed-up bod’ and a machine-gun turret are liable to come in handy.