Category: Casual snark

Smoke ’em if you got ’em

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
“Does that mean new pope or new SecDef?”

I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.

That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.

Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.

White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.

Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.

Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”

And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.

If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.

A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.

“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”

“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”

And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.

There’s a new tariff in town

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The “Rubáiyát of Owe-More Khayyám.”

Hoo-lawd. Anybody’s portfolio turn into a postcard yet?

In case you’ve missed Paul Krugman, he’s speculating over at Substack that Elon’s Hitler Youth may have cobbled together the tariff scheme using ChatGPT and/or other A.I. models.

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Good time to be heavily invested in the knee- and elbow-pad markets.

Haboob! Gesundheit!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
And here’s your podium in the 2025 Dust Bowl Derby: Paul Atreides, T.E. Lawrence, and Tom Joad.

The “good” news is, beginning July 1 cyclists in New Mexico can enjoy the infamous “Idaho Stop,” which means they can treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yields.

The bad news is, they may not be able to see oncoming motor vehicles through the dust storms.

Just another way to get “dusted” in The Duck! City.

Spring, Route 666

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Spring 2025, hold the shorts and sunscreen.

When I awakened my watch read 3:33.

“That’s a half-666,” I thought drowsily, trying to recall the details of a dream I’d been having. Something about needing to be somewhere, late as usual, and rooting through a duffel full of colorful short-sleeve shirts and shorts because of course I was butt-ass nekkid.

Then it came to me. Spring. First day of. I awarded myself a soupçon of spring break and dozed until 5.

When I dragged ass out of the sack to pull on some duds I was not looking for a flowered Paddygucci shirt and shorts, because spring in New Mexico debuted at 22°, which called for pants, long-sleeve shirt, and a light fleece vest.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla had already greeted the vernal equinox by blowing a hairball and carpet-bombing the litter box. Herself was clocked in at work, hoping to cash a few more checks before the X-Man decides Sandia National Labs doesn’t need any librarians to tell his DOGEbags where they might find the owner’s manuals for the Death Ray.

Just wing it, fellas. Hit that big red button on the grip and see what comes out the other end. Probably shouldn’t look down the barrel while you’re doing it. Move fast, break things, etc. Whoops, there goes Paris. Serves ’em right for wanting their statue back.

Yeah, Mr. Whitey! Yeah, science! Political science, anyway. Maybe political science fiction.

It’s (not) in the bag

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Don’t bring it home?

So, we’re not supposed to buy anything today?

That doesn’t sound like much of a rumble on the Richter scale of resistance to me. “Dang The Man?” Seriously?

A lot of us have already been sold a sizable bill of goods. And as we should’ve known, it’s not the initial cost, it’s the upkeep.

This “grass roots” call for an “economic blackout” feels like a reverse Dubya (“Don’t go shopping.”). It also reminds me of a line from Marc Maron’s 2020 Netflix special, “End Times Fun,” in which he neatly skewers us for smugly slipping our shopping fingers into the crumbling dike of environmental catastrophe:

“All of us in our hearts really know that we did everything we could. Think about it: We brought our own bags to the supermarket. Yeah, that’s about it.”

Elon Musk doesn’t care if you don’t buy a Tesla today. He’s too busy downsizing Social Security into a median and a cardboard placard on a rainy day.

And Jeff Bezos couldn’t give a shit if you skip your Friday visit to the Foods Hole. He’s launching his plastic fuck-puppet into orbit with a couple other “female celebrities.” It’s gonna be like “Sex in the City,” only in space, and with Mister Big down here on earth giving The Washington Post some pillow therapy in its bed at the nursing home.

“The Right Stuff” this isn’t. In fact, it sounds like something the Democratic National Committee would do, if it did anything, which mostly it doesn’t.

Anybody seen the DNC lately? Maybe they’re out shopping for a clue.