‘Yeah, but it’s a dry heat. …’

July 28, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

The Rio Gonzo, as seen last Friday by Your Humble Narrator.

What a difference a day makes. Or even a few short hours.

On Friday I rode down to the bosque because why the hell not? I was sick of all my usual foothills routes and wanted to log some respectable mileage for a change, so off I went.

The New Albion Privateer sails the Paseo del Bosque.

Also sick of its usual route was the Rio Grande, which has buggered off to parts unknown. You can tell because rivers don’t usually sport tire tracks, not even if Jeebus is driving.

I knew the Rio had run dry since I last saw it back in April. But it’s one thing to know and another to see.

Anyway. The dearth of river notwithstanding, it was a lovely day, if warmish — 81° when I got a regrettably late start, 10 degrees hotter when I finished — and then Thor woke from his nap, got his clouds in a row, and began swinging Mjölnir like he meant business. Hammer time!

Boom! Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch in less time than it takes to type “Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch.” The National Weather Service told the Urinal that 1.74 inches fell at Indian School and Moon in a half hour, with near-record winds that peaked at 78 mph.

Photo liberated from what remains of the National Weather Service.

I mean, that storm flat parked itself overhead and let go, like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

“Remind me to turn off the sprinkler system,” I said to Herself. And it stayed off. Y’can’t touch this.

• • •

Now, of course, Loki is back on the job. Regular heat advisories from 1 to 8 p.m., high 90s to low triple digits.

No records set, as far as I know, but 9 in the a.m. is starting to feel a little late for the twice-weekly Geezer Rides. A second bottle goes in the seat-tube cage. Attacks are few and far between.

And mowing the lawn post-ride, like I did yesterday? That’s just stupid.

Having a lawn in the desert is stupid in and of itself, but having one and mowing it noonish moves the bar up a few notches.

Still, there’s the lawn, growing, and it won’t mow itself. I’ve been watching. That shit does not happen.

Maybe what I need is a bicycle with rotary blades attached. A velo-mower. And an early start. I could create a whole new thang and a magazine to chronicle its adventurers.

Nah. That’s even dumber than having a lawn in the desert.

• • •

Speaking of greenery stuffed into the ground, it seems that we may finally be getting the fabled fiber optic here in the cul-de-sac.

The Company Formerly Known As CenturyLink, a.k.a. CenturyTel, Qwest, et al., now calling itself Lumen Technologies, has provided our internet service for ages, even before we moved here in 2014. But for some reason Duck! City DSL is twice the price for half the speed we enjoyed in Bibleburg.

Even there, the tales of comically inept customer service were endless. Once we had a modem croak on us and The Company agreed to send us a new one. In that they proved better than their word. They sent us five of them, one after another, like Red Chinese soldiers marching to B-burg from Beijing over the bodies of their comrades.

Miss Mia loved her some Qwest modems on a chilly day in Bibleburg.

I may still have one in an old-tech box around here somewhere. I’m fairly certain I brought one with us when we moved because, hey, you never know, amirite? Miss Mia Sopaipilla loved toasting her po-po on one of those Qwest-branded Motorola jobbers Back in the Day®.

But I digress. We were talking about getting some fiber in our digital diet.

The water-company boyos were out in the cul-de-sac yesterday afternoon, spraying their blue cryptograms and hieroglyphics ever’ whichaway, so I asked one what was up. Thus I learned that the diggers are coming to bring us The Future, which we had in the B-burg a dozen or so years ago before time-traveling back to the stone knives and copper wire of Albuquerque.

“Take photos of your property before they get started,” the water dude advised. And I followed his advice. At least three of the companies charged with bringing fiber optic to Duck!Burg have been slapped with temporary stop-work orders after reports that they made a shambles of various properties.

I won’t lie. It’ll be great to have a faster, cheaper on-ramp to the Infobahn. But be careful what you wish for. The news of the day — a river of sand in Duck!Burg, shit monsoons in DeeCee — is already bad enough at a piddling 13.5 Mbps.

And it comes in a whole lot faster if it’s breaking just beyond the office window, where some rando rocking a backhoe is uprooting your sewer line.

Words without song*

June 9, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments

“I got nothin’ here,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

How many different ways are there to write, “This fuckin’ mook is 300 pounds of bellowing bullshit in a 10-pound Brioni bag?”

Beats me. I’ve read a ton of variations on that theme, even had a few goes at it myself, to no particular effect. Manhattan Fats and his Brooks Brothers bandidos just keep rolling merrily along, stealing everything that isn’t screwed to the floor, stenciling his name in gold Krylon on whatever’s left, and bombing the rubble just to watch it bounce.

It’s like watching a CBS remake of “The Maltese Falcon” in which Kaspar Gutman grabs the bird, the real one, and gets away scot free, while Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook announce their campaign for the White House, Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a talk show and a book deal, and Sam Spade goes to jail. And we’re just supposed to sit down and watch.

Did I mention it’s a series, not a movie? On every channel and streaming service 24/7? And not so much as a tiny box of stale popcorn with a watered-down soda for the rubes. No fertilizer, no corn. Thanks, Obama!

Subscribe! Follow! Like! Share! CGI junk food in an A.I.-slop sauce. Eighty-six the side of fries. No fertilizer, no spuds. Thanks, Sleepy Joe!

It’s starting to feel like even the bots have run out of scrapes for this tepid potboiler. Take “It Can’t Happen Here,” “Idiocracy,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “It,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Lost,” the final installment in “The Godfather” trilogy, and the entire Marvel Universe catalog (except for maybe “Iron Man,” which was really pretty cool), throw it all in a big-ass blender, purée the shit out of it until all the ingredients are completely unrecognizable, and serve with a side of Motel 6 toilet paper.

Are we all just hanging on in hopes the final season will include a riff on the “Godfather III” scene in which the Devil — like the rest of us, mumbling, “Awright, OK, enough awready” — finally cuts Michael Corleone’s strings, leaving him to topple out of his chair like the dirty old man Tyrone F. Horneigh falling off a park bench in “Laugh-In?”

Well … maybe that’s just me. And in any event, we should all remember that the rest of the mob did not perish alongside Michael.

*Apologies to Felix Mendelssohn and his “Songs Without Words.”

Today in hisssssssstory

May 30, 2026May 30, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Today in history, from The Associated Press:

On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Also on this date: In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.

Sorry about that, Joan. In a righteous world you would have lived to a ripe old age and this other would have been a fatty chunk of long pig sputtering on the grill.

Buckle up!

May 22, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

The Memorial Day Shopping Fiesta and Family Barbecue Getaway (Nothing to See Here, Move Along, Move Along) kicks off today with the murders most foul of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” and CBS News Radio, along with any remaining illusions that Americans live in a functioning democracy.

There is no truth to the rumor that the new national anthem for our next 250 years — or perhaps 250 days? Hours? — will be the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” reimagined by Black Sabbath. Or so we may hope, anyway.

One thing is certain: That cheery little ditty, along with an unauthorized Kid Rock cover of the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” will be in heavy rotation down in the Adolf & Eva Memorial Ballroom & Führerbunker. The lyric “Some rich men came and raped the land / nobody caught ’em” will be a huge laugh line for everyone save the slaves serving up the Big Macs and Diet Cokes.

Meanwhile, some good news: M-Day weekend gas prices are at a four-year high! But that won’t keep 39 million of us from cranking up the Family Yacht and burning a few tanks’ worth to spend time eating bad food poorly prepared and swilling tins of thin industrial lager with people we really don’t like all that much.

The Soma Double Cross takes five in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Last I looked go-juice was between $4.50 and $5 here in The Duck! City, which didn’t make AAA’s list of the top-10 Memorial Day getaways (the podium: Orlando, FL, Seattle, WA, and New York).

No worries here, bruh. I got my holiday shopping done early yesterday, before the ravening hordes could descend upon the grocery and strip the shelves bare like a cloud of fat betatted locusts. And today I ain’t driving nowhere, nohow, though I do expect to get out on a bike at some point. Yesterday was stellar in the Elena Gallegos Open Space; I saw only a few other trail users as I rumbled along on the old Soma Double Cross, and most seemed to be enjoying the wide-open space as much as I was.

Meanwhile, Republicans will be traveling home after shitting the bed in Congress. Here’s hoping their constituents have a few words with them about the horrible smell.

Tonight, on The Trump Channel!

April 7, 2026April 7, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

A hard-and-fast rule around Ye Olde Dogge Haus is, “Disregard anything that follows the phrase ‘Trump says. …”

But rules are made to be broken. And while I had been planning a grocery trip, now I wonder whether digging a bunker in the back yard might be a better use of my time.

This fuckin’ guy. A mouth like a yawning hippo and the brains of a flea on the hippo’s arse.

And nary a zookeeper in sight.

A friend and I were chatting this morning and he wondered why we hadn’t been hearing anything lately about the whole “running out of ammo” thing that the press had been pushing not long ago, as the U.S. military pitched top-shelf armaments at bargain-basement threats.

So … what exactly will John Whine be packing for the showdown in this Western he’s produced, directed, and stars in?

A few of the lefty bloggers I read are thinking the Fat Man wants to go all — well, Fat Man, the bigger-and-better 2026 edition — on Iran. And here I sit reminiscing about the Good Old Days, taking cover under my desk at Randolph AFB Elementary.

That was one of those solid Air Force issue deals, not this cheapo Office Depot number I’ve been working at for the past couple decades. I’m not sure it’s up to the task of sparing Your Humble Narrator that difficult job interview down below, at The Lake O’ Fire Apocalypse-Intelligencer.

Notice how His Excremency pitches the “death of a civilization” as though it were just another shitty episode of reality TV: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” But first, this message from Mar-a-Lago-Mars!

What I’d like to find out — and what the legacy media is not telling me — is what the other nuclear powers think about this slobbering shit-gibbon swinging his ’shroom around like a Central Avenue tranq addict oscillating between peeing and jacking off.

We know where Congress stands: watching from a safe distance and doing fuck-all, as per usual. Waiting for the midterms, I expect.

Aren’t we all? ’Scuse me, got a hole to dig. …