Category: Dire portents

Cold blow and the rainy night

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

In comments Pat O’B reminds us that Sprinter, Wing, or Wang, whatever you call it, is not done with us quite yet.

The forecast for the Greater Duck! City Metropolitan Area calls for a rough aul’ day in the barrel, starting right about now and lasting until 2 a.m. tomorrow. From the National Weather Service:

Southwest winds 30 to 50 mph with gusts of 60 to 75 mph expected. … Damaging winds will blow down trees and power lines. Damage may occur to mobile homes, roofs, sheds, barns, outbuildings, and fences. Widespread power outages are expected.

Oof. Batten down the hatches, mateys.

We’re semiprepared for Apocalypse Junior.

The lanterns are charged, and the headlamps and flashlights all have fresh batteries, with a candle lantern in reserve.

Jugs of filtered water abound, and a few days of nonperishable edibles are close at hand, so we won’t have to eat the neighbors. Yet.

The ovens will be out of commission, but we have a gas cooktop, and a two-burner Coleman for backup.

Staying warm might be an issue — we have a Mr. Heater Portable Buddy and two fireplaces, but have never used either of them. We could end up warmer than we like (on fire) or colder (dead). Thus, the three-season sleeping bags in reserve.

We have battery banks for our iPhones, for all the good that will do us, because our cul-de-sac is a sinkhole that cellular signals float past unmolested unless the phones can mooch off the wifi.

Finally, my main MacBook Pro is plugged into an APC battery backup. This is likewise useless since without power the Innertubes will deflate, and trying to use the iPhone as a hotspot (see “cellular signals,” above) is the hee, and also the haw.

At least I can take copious notes on the End Times. I hope the alien archaeologists who stumble upon my chronicle are fluent in Snark.

• Musical note: The headline is taken from the Planxty tune of the same name. They know something about the shite weather in the auld sod, so they do.

Snow joke

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
I guess we can leave the skinny skis in the garage.

Well, it must be true, if both The New York Times and The Washington Post simultaneously catch up to the sad story about Rio Verde Foothills, where dreams go to die in the dust.

It’s an old story, with the new wrinkle being Scottsdale finally putting a cork in water sales to Rio Verde, saying it had to consider its own residents first and foremost. From the WaPo:

“The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.

The stories share a squeaky wheel — Cody Reim, who has a wife and four kids, works for the family’s sheet-metal business, and is looking at a water bill that could surpass the tab for his mortgage, when he’s not chatting up the national press. Again, from the WaPo:

“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.

“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”

I have sympathy for the Reim family. Like them, we chose to live in a sandbox — the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert — and our water gets humped uphill to El Rancho Pendejo via a series of pumping stations. If we paid what this liquid gold is actually worth, or had to fetch it here by bike or burro, you can bet your ass we’d use a lot less of it.

Either that or we’d move to where the water is. Yet here we are.

Deciding to build your base camp in the desert is magical thinking going toe to toe with mathematics. As John Fleck observes in his ongoing Dead Pool Diaries, decent runoff this year will not change the fact that Colorado River water is overallocated and always has been.

“It’s just arithmetic!” he says.

If God wanted us here, He would’ve stored more agua fria under the rocks and cacti. But clearly He wasn’t expecting quite so much company.

“Hey, you come to the desert to get wisdom, 40 days and nights, tops. And then you go back where you came from. You silly sods never went back.”

Erection Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“Bad morning, Mr. O’Grady. We trust your wait was unpleasant
and overlong. Sauron will see you now.”

Looks like Mordor out there, doesn’t it?

High cloudiness robbed us of our full moon/total lunar eclipse this morning, and the Repugs will take everything else this evening, if you hew to the conventional wisdom.

Kevin Drum, who is a reasonable fellow for a lefty blogger, argues from time to time that the United States is a center-right country and that Democrats “need to moderate if they want to win over centrist voters.”

Maybe. But I think the Donks have been trying to be Repug Lite for a while now, to no particular purpose, and no matter how far they tiptoe to the right, they will always be at least one long goosestep behind.

“You got to put the kibble over where the slow dogs can get some,” as Roy Blount Jr. advised in “Why It Looks Like I Will Be the Next President of the United States, I Reckon.”

And the Donks do, bless their hearts. But it’s generally a sprinkle of some vegan non-GMO Oregon Tilth Certified Organic small-batch free-range hemp kibble, in a bespoke ceramic bowl, with 10 percent of the profits divided among Planned Parenthood, PETA, and the ACLU. And the marketing thereof — why this is a good thing and not just a stone saucer full of sawdust and spider webs — is polysyllabic and ponderous and even harder to swallow than the chow.

So the slow dogs bite the hand that feeds them, and then they scamper over to where the loud fella with the red tie is th’owin’ the raw meat on the ground.

Well sir, before long the slow dogs aren’t feeling so good and the national yard is a monument to canine intestinal distress and the loud fella with the red tie has wandered off somewhere to holler into a microphone about how everything’s gone to shit and the libs are to blame.

And so the libs trudge into the national yard with shovels and bags, clean up the mess and doctor the slow dogs while the loud fella with the red tie hollers at them through a bullhorn from the other side of the fence because that’s where the shit isn’t.

And before you can say “FREE DUMB!” the only thing any of the mutts can think about is how good that raw meat tasted.

Here comes the night

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Trumpkin.

When did The New York Times add a Dire Portents section?

This morning, Mother Times hit me with this:

“During the early hours on Tuesday, darkness will slip across the face of the moon before it turns a deep blood red. No, it isn’t an Election Day omen — it’s one of the most eye-catching sights in the night sky.”

Not an omen. Ho ho ho, etc. As if. Fake news!

Then why was the moon a decadent orange during the early hours of this morning as it slipped behind a neighbor’s house?

And why were there Trumpkins scattered along my hiking route this afternoon? I saw at least three, among them the one leering at you from the top of this post.

And finally, why is KUNM bitch-slapping me with “Here Comes the Night?” right this minute? And not the good one, by Them, but some two-bit tosser’s take on the 1964 classic (featuring Van Morrison).

“Well, here it comes … here comes the night.”

So soon? I’m not ready for the night. What else you got, Ma?

“How to Follow the News Without Spiraling into Despair?”

How quintessentially capitalistic of you, Ma. Sell me the disease with one hand and the treatment with the other. A mindfulness methadone clinic for the hopeless news addict. This morning’s shaman is this afternoon’s snake-oil salesman.

Here comes the night? Got a news flash for ya, Ma. It’s already here.

Let’s go get stoned

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
I don’t remember Jesus mentioning all the lovely lawns he saw
during his sojourn in the desert, where the Devil does his gardening.

John Fleck tells us that the Rio is not so Grande these days in The Duck! City.

In point of actual fact, it is dry. As in no longer flowing. Just enough mud for a smallish election; p’raps a school-board contest.

Notes John in a subsequent post:

Between the levees, the river in 2022 has begun drying in the Albuquerque reach for the first time in four decades, as we grind through the summer of our third consecutive terrible spring runoff. By one measure I’ve been using, this is the worst three-year stretch here since the drought of the 1950s.*

*When Your Humble Narrator was hatched.—Editor

Now, some of that green in our lawn pictured above is courtesy of the 2022 monsoons, which are supposed to resume this week. But a lot of it came spritz-spritz-spritzing out of our sprinkler system earlier in the year, when the sun was doing its Death Star thing on our back yard.

I guess even a dumb dog can see a Milk-Bone by daylight. Because Herself and I have agreed it was long past time we engaged a landscaper, and today she picked up the phone.

We’re gonna rock out, is what. If we absolutely have to have grass we can get it from the cannabis shops like everybody else.