Category: Capitalist swine

Horseshit and gunfire

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Black and blue and yellow.

Black Friday? Not entirely. As long as you avert your eyes from the news, that is.

And from your email in-box, too. Jaysis H., etc. Everybody and his bookkeeper is trying to sell me something. Take a break, f’chrissakes. I’m still digesting last night’s feast.

Well … truth be told, as feasts go it was fairly light dining. Green chile stew, salad, freshly baked cornbread, and raspberry cobbler with whipped cream. Fake beer for me, real beer for Herself.

While feasting we watched a couple episodes of the old HBO series “Deadwood,” a tale of unfettered capitalism ascendant in which much of the dialogue sounds like Pestilence Piggy addressing the press.

In one episode a gambler and whoremonger growing fat on fear of and hatred for the government ordered the newspaper office ransacked, its machinery vandalized and shat upon.

So, yeah, ripped straight from today’s headlines. Art imitating life; horseshit and gunfire.

Before we sat down to eat I slipped out for a bracing 90 minutes on the Soma Double Cross, tooling around the Elena Gallegos Open Space and a few of its neighboring trails. Lots of folks out, hoofers and rollers, either working up an appetite for Thanksgiving dinner or sweating out the gravy. And no wonder, with temps in the low 50s, though there was still a bit of mud in the shady spots after last Thursday’s rain.

The DC is a good choice for EG: 42mm Soma Cazadero tires at 30/35 psi, a low end of 24x34T, and grippy IRD Cafam cantis for when shit gets real. Eight-speed bar-cons and XT/Ultegra derailleurs. The 54cm frame is small for me, but has a longish top tube, so I don’t look like a frog trying to hump a helmet when I’m in the saddle. The little sucker is really frisky in the swoopy, twisty bits.

I enjoyed myself so much that I went right back out and did it again today. One more thing to be thankful for. Like leftovers.

Today’s forecast: A hard rain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Oh, boy, it’s gonna be fun driving a high-profile vehicle on the I-5 in California today as the 155mm artillery rounds from Camp Pendleton sail overhead.

The good news is, it should be awful quiet at the National Nuclear Security Administration come Monday. Or so we may hope, anyway.

Some people voted for this shit. I sure hope they like the taste.

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Awaiting fulfillment

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“All right, group, it’s time to meditate on the Pure White Light of Stupidity.” — Firesign Theatre, “W.C. Fields Forever.”

The email read: ” Hi Patrick, the status of your order has changed to Awaiting fulfillment.“

Well. Join the club. Cult. Whatevs.

I wasn’t waiting for the electrician or someone like him. Just waiting on delivery of a product I’d ordered online because it was not to be found locally.

An earlier online transaction had gone walkabout, wandering from Abilene to Albuquerque only to pull a U and mosey right on back to Texas, where it reversed course yet again and returned to Albuquerque. Not to me, mind you. Just somewhere here in town. Me, I was passing the time watching bots, banks, and Budget rent-a-vans with Oklahoma plates perform “The Dance of Late-Stage Capitalism.”

In Chicago they have been awaiting a delivery of another sort altogether. National Guardspersons from Texas. “Be All That You Can Be,” the ads used to say. If this is all you can be, try harder. Fulfillment is elusive. I mean, I wanted to be a rich and famous political cartoonist and just look how that turned out.

Job fairs like a recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement extravaganza in Texas seem popular among a certain subset of job-seekers. More so than, oh, say, working in America’s agricultural industry, replacing the people the ICEholes are dragging off to Christ only knows where.

“I’m looking for a career, not a job,” says a 25-year-old would-be masked avenger from San Antone, a contract worker in the solar-energy industry, one cross around his neck and two more in his ears.

Ho ho. A “career” in the very government being stripped for salable parts like a stolen Honda Civic in a chop shop. A fine place to be awaiting fulfillment. And ICE couldn’t care less if you’re a former sergeant at arms for an outlaw motorcycle club, or just look like one. Say, are those Iron Crosses in your ears? And is that a “Blut und Boden” tat? You got a signing bonus coming, son!

You’re gonna need those fat stacks Big Gummint is promising you, Bubba. Have you checked the price of groceries lately with the workforce gone walkabout? If you were an humble farmworker, just trying to feed America’s families and your own, you might could swipe a peach now and then for yourself.

The turn of the screw

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“When I said ‘I’ll take it black,’ I didn’t mean this black. …”

Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?

Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.

Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.

Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.

“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”

Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.

“Assume the position!”

We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.

‘No more fun of any kind!’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Disney CEO Vernon “Dean” Wormer pulls the plug on Jimmy Kimmel.

The Dean came for Jimmy Kimmel’s “Animal House” yesterday.

Nobody should be surprised, especially Kimmel, who has been attending the Hollywood School of Hard Knocks for the better part of quite some time and been sacked and/or compelled to apologize more than once over a long and checkered career.

Kimmel got his start in radio while still in high school, but didn’t land on America’s TV screens until 1977, when he provided the comic relief on “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which aired on Comedy Central. “The Man Show” followed two years later.

And then in 2003 he got to hang out his own late-night shingle, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC.

Maybe he felt safe there. Comedy Central would fall under the pinstriped shadow of Paramount, which earlier this year punked CBS News and Stephen Colbert to get its merger with Skydance approved.

But this year, ABC — a lesser rub-and-tug parlor in the Disney chain of cut-rate whorehouses — found itself caught between two rocks and a very hard place.

Two big owners of TV stations — Nexstar and Sinclair, the first seeking FCC approval to buy a rival, the second a right-wing white-noise machine — said they would suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he addressed the killing of the recently canonized — or is that “cannonized?” — Charlie Kirk. Disney’s empty suits took notice and then gave same to Kimmel, reportedly as his audience was filing in for yesterday’s show.

If Kimmel didn’t see it coming, Calvin Coolidge certainly did. In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, the president said: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”

Some of them are, for sure. And you’re only funny until you get in their way.