I don’t care what you’ve read, what you’ve heard, or what you’ve seen.
It’s not me.
“What ’ave you been up to, my lad?” asks my supervisor, code-named “M.”
For starters, nobody in their right mind would give the likes of me access to a “secure” area. I do my little bit of business in an extremely insecure area at the corner of Social Security and 401(k).
I don’t take pictures of classified documents. I take pictures of sunrises and mountains and cute lil’ kitty-cats.
And while I may occasionally cause discord, I don’t use Discord.
Now, who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?
Oh, before I forget: Please burn your computer, laptop, tablet, or phone after reading.
The Duck! City is something of an aviary all of a sudden.
I’ve heard a couple hummingbirds buzzing around (haven’t actually seen one yet). Quail I have seen, and heard. Finches are hitting our feeders like the working press swarming an open bar.
And we have the usual dove nesting beneath the overhang by the front door.
Speaking of our feathered friends, it seems E. Lawn Mulch must’ve gotten lonely in those Twitter offices he’s worked so diligently to empty. His latest attention-getting ploy is to do a flyby on newsletter platform Substack, which has announced plans to launch the latest Next Twitter Thingie, called Notes.
Captain Free Speech — who croaked his own newsletter platform — has apparently gone all Twitter Über Alles on Substack, forbidding embedded tweets in Substack posts, links in tweets to Substack articles, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
According to Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post:
On Thursday, Substack writers discovered that they were no longer able to embed tweets in their Substack posts. Writers who tried were met with the message, “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts.”
On Friday morning, Twitter began blocking users from retweeting, liking or engaging with posts that contained links to Substack articles. Users also could not pin posts containing links to Substack to the top of their profiles. On Friday evening, Twitter began marking links to Substack as “unsafe.”
Even Substack’s corporate Twitter account was restricted, with users reporting that they were unable to retweet or quote-tweet the handle’s posts.
A number of Substack writers are very much not amused, among them Matt Taibbi, who announced that “beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter. …”
Judd Legum, Matt Swider, and Laura Jedeed were likewise critical, with Jedeed telling The Verge that she sees subscription bumps “every time Musk does something stupid.”
“I think people realize Twitter is dying and they want to keep hearing from me after it falls apart,” she says. “He’s driving traffic my way by being stupid but, like everything he does, it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Hey, dude’s still laying eggs. The smelly brown ones. Anyone promoting an online presence anywhere other than Twitter should probably invest in umbrellas and air fresheners.
Mostly winter, with a hint of spring at lower right.
The weather is a tad confused. Is it spring? Winter?
Maybe we should call this between-times season “Sprinter.” I’ve been seeing a lot of its four-wheeled namesakes lately.
And while ordinarily this would lead me to reflect that this violates O’Grady’s First Law of Economics — “Anybody who makes more money than me makes too fucking much!” — I don’t really care.
I don’t have lust in my heart for a Sprinter. Even if I did, I have no place to park one. Anyway, I live in New Mexico, where nobody knows how to drive but plenty of people know how to steal.
Maybe once a Sprinter collects a few whiskey dents, parking-lot sidewipes, and improvised cardboard windows it becomes a less attractive target? Who knows?
A sampling of the APD’s Twatter feed.
Not me, Skeeter. My RV is a scratched-and-scraped 18-year-old ’Roo with a tent, sleeping bag, and two-burner Coleman in the back. Also, and too, AWD for when the weather finally makes up its mind and decides it’s winter again.
Which it was, on Wednesday and Thursday. And I only went outdoors to broom snow and buy soup fixin’s. No cycling, not even running.
But on Friday Herself and I managed a couple miles of jogging along the foothills trails — not too cold, but squishy underfoot — and yesterday I sacked up, dragged out a bike with fat tires and fenders, and went for a 90-minute spin.
I’m always amused to see The Duck! City’s response to a few inches of snow. God love ’em, the road crews spread more sand on one day than Bibleburg has used since my family moved there in 1967.
And of course it all winds up on the shoulder, in the bike lane. Hence the fat tires and fenders.
It must be frustrating, trying to save Burqueños from themselves. The road crews know these people can’t drive a straight line on dry roads at high noon on a sunny day. Building speed humps and roundabouts, installing traffic cameras and radar trailers, spreading sand over ice and snow … this is like trying to teach a bullfrog to sing “Ave Maria.”
Burqueños have better things to do. And they will do them while they are driving.
Some leadfoot passed me at warp factor five or so on Juan Tabo the other day. In the right lane. The right turn lane, to be precise.
I saw him coming up fast in the passenger-side mirror and thought, “OK, here we go. …” And sure enough, my man rocketed straight through the intersection at Montgomery and just kept on keepin’ on. I kept the mirror on, but only just.
No idea what the rush was. The liquor stores weren’t about to close, and nobody was chasing him that I could see. No sirens, no gunfire. Maybe he’d just stolen the SUV from the Lowe’s parking lot and wanted to see what it could do.
One hopes he got a chance to test-drive the air bags and found them inadequate. And by “one,” I mean “me.”
So, yeah. No Sprinter for Your Humble Narrator. I know in my heart of hearts that as I was driving the shiny beast off the lot with the dealer plates still on I would hear a thunderous bang at the rear, pull over and stop to see what the actual fuck, and find a stolen Honda Civic parked on my sofa bed, leaking oil all over the Pendleton White Sands quilt.
The driver would be polishing off a tallboy and a text while his lady friend had a wee in the toilet-shower combo. Tugging a Sig Sauer from his waistband, he would mumble, “Shit, out of beer. Take us to the liquor store. There’s something wrong with this car.”
The final entry in The Duck! City trilogy that began with “Breaking Bad” and continued with “Better Call Saul” stars “This Fool” co-star Frankie Quiñones as Solomon Peña, a failed GOP candidate accused of ordering — and participating in — drive-bys on Democratic officials’ houses and offices.
“Gimme a minute, that Squeaker’s gavel has to be up here somewhere.”
The House of Reprehensibles is fixin’ to gavel itself on the noggin again starting at noon Swamp time, and you’ll want to have the popcorn and soda within easy reach.
From the sound of things Charlie McCarthy is prepared to give away everything that makes the Squeaker’s gig even halfway meaningful in order to get his pampered paws on the gavel.
Then the Freedumb Fighters will grab said gavel and run away, giggling. “Psych! Now we want a blood oath to the Constitution, mandatory open carry in the House Chamber, and the Squeaker has to do a daily dance on TikTok. In his tighty-whities.”
This is why it’s a bad idea to negotiate with terrorists. Their planning stops at the hostage-taking stage. From that point on it gets Western real quick, all horseshit and gunfire.
Mad Blog Media 