Category: Casual snark

From soup to nuts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Our Chinese pistache is not quite in “Last Leaf” mode, but it’s getting there.

I fight off the snow
I fight off the hail
Nothing makes me go
I’m like some vestigial tail
I’ll be here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree
I’ll show up in a song

Not a lot of snow or hail to fight off in these parts lately.

Christmas brought a record high temperature — 65°, eclipsing the old mark set in 1955(!) — and it wasn’t even The Duck! City’s first record high this month.

Herself and I went out for a little pre-feast hike in the Sandia foothills with a couple hundred of our closest friends, their extended families, and their dogs. Only saw two cyclists in just under five miles, and their rigs didn’t look new to me, so, maybe not a festive holiday season for the local IBDs.

The good news is, we’re delivering the teachings of Jeebus to the Nigerians in the usual explosive fashion. So, at least the Military-Industrial Complex is ticking along nicely, if only in terms of supplying shiny objects to the news media, since it’s a little late to carpet-bomb the Epstein files.

The bad news is … well, not all that bad. I couldn’t locate any crosscut beef shanks for my beef vegetable soup, so I had to call an audible and run with another recipe that proved to be not quite as good as our favorite, which is from a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook with a 1981 copyright. After a week’s worth of chile-infused dishes I was striving for mild, and overachieved for a change.

However, Herself’s cornbread was superb, as was her salad, and thanks to exchanges with neighbors and colleagues we had an extensive menu of possibilities for dessert.

With the second season of “Fallout” finally available, we’d thought to revisit season one, since we’d forgotten what all the fuss was about. Alas, our Amazon Subprime Video membership is not ad-free, and the viewing experience was peppered at random with multiple sales pitches for depression meds, Range Rovers, and other shit that we don’t want, don’t need, and/or can’t afford, some of them running more than two minutes at a stretch.

Which was really a stretch. So this morning we decided to bring capitalism to its knees by signing up for the ad-free tier, then binge-watching both seasons before finally canceling the service entirely.

¡Venceremos! You’re welcome, comrades. Just crawl out through the fallout, baby.

More bucks, less bang

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The New York Times editorial board has some thoughts about the U.S. military and “the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones.”:

The late, great Jeff MacNelly had a few thoughts along those lines himself. This one is from his collection “Directions” … copyright 1984.

Winter shows its teeth

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Where my cross-country skis at?

The bad thing about snow is it keeps me indoors, where the news is.

The good thing about snow is it gives me something else to shovel.

We got a couple-three inches of the white stuff here yesterday, about double the official tally at the airport (which is stupid, because I don’t know anybody who lives at the airport).

It started falling overnight. This I know because the Cold Moon reflecting off the accumulation in the back yard blasted me out of a sound sleep around 2 a.m. I howled at it, briefly, then drifted back into a fitful drowse that ended at stupid-thirty, when I had to drag ass out of the sack and shovel the Driveway of Doom for Herself, who had an early appointment with the dentist and a 2WD Honda to get her there.

I got her half of the drive cleared without breaking a hip or throwing out my back, and she navigated the descent without incident, so, winning, etc. Then I went back indoors, microwaved my half-finished second cup of coffee, slammed it, and went back out to shovel my half, as I too had an appointment with the very same dentist, but at a reasonable hour.

Or what would’ve been a reasonable hour, had I not already burned some critical daylight freeing the driveway of Itztlacoliuhqui’s icy booger-snots. There was no time left for my traditional X-rays-and-cleaning breakfast of sardines in mustard sauce sprinkled with chopped anchovies, red onions, and feta, which keeps these visits short and to the point.

So instead, as the hygienist chiseled, scraped, sanded, power-washed, and polished, I was compelled to listen as she prattled on and on — backed by a soundtrack of treacly holiday ditties clearly penned by Satan Himself — about how lovely Herself is and how she was sure someone had made a mistake when listing her birthdate on the paperwork, with nary a word about the striking male beauty of Your Humble Narrator, his wrinkly old Irish-American apple cheeks aglow from an hour’s snow-shoveling in the frosty high-desert air.

Oh, well. At least it wasn’t news. Not to me, anyway.