Category: Deep political thought

Cats and flats

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets a bit of sack time.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla and I have been enjoying a respite from wall-to-wall politics, with the Donks seemingly in a joyful state of mind along the old campaign trail and the press, or what remains of it, finally noticing in the absence of Joe Biden that it’s the other candidate who is a psycho, serial fabulist, and senile old fool, with one foot in the grave and the other in the nuthouse.

The shit monsoon will resume eventually, of course, once the Cult remembers where it left its copy of the Necronomicon (Classic Comics edition, with a foreword by Lee Atwater):

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Jesus Hitler Mar-a-Lago wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

In the meantime, the cycling has been excellent, albeit a bit toasty with the occasional deluge and explosive decompression to keep us on our toes.

I had a back-tire blowout at speed yesterday — hit a scattering of roadside debris that was deeper and chunkier than it looked, with heavy traffic in the lane and thus no way to dodge it. In an instant I was riding the rim and thought I might take a tumble, but managed to wobble to a stop without bloodshed.

It has been a month of flats, on both Steelman Eurocrosses, the Nobilette, and finally the DBR Prevail TT. That last was the worst, because it rolls on 26mm rubber, which is as fat as the rear triangle can handle. Not much in the way of a rim to ride, is what. I’m lucky it wasn’t the front that went boom or I’d have done likewise immediately afterward.

Could be worse, though. A couple folks got swept down the arroyos during Friday’s flash flood, and one of them didn’t land on his feet.

And now, from our Good News Department: The Ethan Allen dealer at Montgomery and Tramway has been replaced by (wait for it …) a Goodwill store, right behind the Filiberto’s without a sign. Economic development, Duck! City style.

Weird, huh?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Happy warriors?

OK, remember July? Everybody who thought we’d be here in August, raise your hands.

Herself and I watched Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rally the troops in Philly last night. I can’t say either of them can sing the old chin music Obama-style, but at this point I’m desperate for a ticket that’s younger than me, reasonably healthy, and joyously pugnacious.

Frankly, it was comforting to see a spark of snarky life in the creaky old Donk-O-Tron 9000™. And given the political realities — anyone been paying attention to what’s happened to other party progressives lately, like Cory Bush and Jamaal Bowman? — ol’ Coach looks like a pretty savvy choice.

I’m not even remotely complacent — we have 90 days to go before shit gets real — but they seem to have backfooted the blowhards for the moment, saving their name-calling for the candidates.

Weird? Creepy? You bet your ass they are, that and more. Say it often enough and maybe the Donks can keep a grip on any wobbly centrists, poach a few independents, and maybe even persuade that mythical handful of Republicans who retain some vestigal sense of shame that these creepy weirdos are not their friends.

Mourning in America

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Blue skies, smiling at me. … Or maybe not.

“Joe, the Supremes just said you can stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and can’t nobody do a god-damned thing about it. What are we waiting for?”

“No, they said he could do that. We try that shit and unless you learned how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush at Harvard Law we’ll be getting hourly prostate exams in the Leavenworth shower room. Until we ‘hang ourselves’ in our cells.”

“OK, OK, so maybe that’s getting too far out over our skis, even for the Supremes. Maybe we just Gitmo his fat ass?”

“You keeping up with our W-L record in the courts? I’m not at all sure we could beat a speeding ticket if we were taking a stroked-out Pope to an ER in Boston.”

“I feel ya, Boss. What about a plane crash? He’s still using that old Boeing piece of shit, yeah? Those things go down more often than Lauren Boebert. Accidents happen, amirite?”

“Only works on Democrats and rock stars.”

“Deranged loner?”

“All registered Republicans. We checked in 2016, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right. OK, how’bout we get Stormy to sign a sworn affidavit saying he liked to make the ’shroom angry by licking Mickey D’s ketchup off a 10-year-old kid or boinking a golden retriever, has a library of videos that makes a Scranton fuck-book shop look like a Christian Science reading room. Send the FBI over to ‘check it out,’ they get into a ‘gunfight’ with his SS detail, he goes down in the crossfire. Shit, I bet at least half his SS detail wants to shoot him three times before breakfast.”

“Too many moving parts; too much wobble. But the dog thing. … How about this? We invite him over for lunch and I introduce him to my dog, Commander.”

“Jesus, Joe. We’re talking a dog bite here? Fuck that. Go big or go home.”

“Going home is starting to look awfully good. I could use a nap.”

That’s reaching

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
The backyard maple is slowly leafing out as it reaches for more sunshine.

Good gravy. You couldn’t find more gasbags in the news if it were Thanksgiving Day and the Macy’s parade were meandering through Manhattan. On fire.

You have Rep. Mikey Mouse (R-Dizzyland) calling himself “a wartime speaker.” This is true in the sense that he is at war with his own caucus.

Then there’s tough guy Tom Cotton, (R-Dunk-’n’-Flay), regaling us from the depths of his dead eyes about how they know how to treat peace-creeps and hippies in Arkansas, where he apparently rarely shows his … well, I suppose you’d call that a face, if only because it’s parked on the front of his head.

And of course there’s Will D. DeFendant smirking, snoozing, and sounding off through jury selection in his criminal trial.

Hizzoner was not amused.

“Your client was audible,” Judge Juan Merchan told the defendant’s shysters, mouthpieces, and ambulance chasers.

Boy, is that ever an understatement. An offense to the ears, eyes, and nose, if you believe what you smell on the Innertubes from noted yukmeisters Adam Kinzinger and Kathy Griffin.

Well, look on the bright side. The trial takes a day off tomorrow, and we’re not in the jury pool.

In the beginning was the Word

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
“See this word here? It’s not pronounced the way you might think. Cecil B. DeMille got it right in ‘The Ten Commandments.'”

When I awakened this morning not as a fleeting puff of radioactive gas but as Your Humble Narrator, I knew it was gonna be a good day.

Jesus H., etc. The Middle East has been figuring in my nightmares since, well, forever.

When I was a smaller, humbler narrator my parents taught me to read phonetically, aloud, using whatever printed material was handy. Stumbling through a report in Time magazine one day I encountered the incomprehensible “Egypt,” and after rolling it around in the gem polisher of my mind for a spell I decided it must be pronounced “Iggy-pit.”

My parents roared. I never heard the end of it. They told it to their pals over martinis. They told it to my pals, who had to endure it stone-cold sober and punished me for it afterward. They told it to my dates, who otherwise might have become actual girlfriends, which may help explain why it took so long for me to find someone to marry.

I’ve been deeply suspicious about home-schooling ever since. Later, I would come to question faith-based titles to real estate.