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.

After the deluge

May 5, 2026May 5, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

You probably can’t see the scattering of raindrops on my sunglasses, proof that I chose wisely when I decided to go for a run at 7:30 this morning instead of waiting to see whether the skies cleared.

The forecasts from the National Weather Service and Weather Underground were for … well, frankly, they were for shit. No common ground. One declared that it was already raining (it was not) and might be doing so again later. The other? “A chance of showers, with thunderstorms also possible after noon.”

Well, there’s always a chance of something happening somewhere. It’s what makes life worth living. There’s a chance that Jeebus might come back, give Orange Julius Caesar a sandal right in the ballroom, and deliver a new gospel over his squealing carcass: “This is not what I had in mind at all, y’all.”

But I’m not betting the rancho on it.

I did catch a few sprinkles on my run, mostly on the return trip. But they added up to bupkis on the rain gauge.

So naturally I’m sitting here wondering whether I should’ve gone for a ride instead.

But, chance being the fickle bitch that she is, Jeebus is probably waiting out there to give me the other sandal in the chamois and proclaim, “Nope, not him either. Sheesh, you people and your false prophets. Do I have to hire a babysitter every time I step out for a couple thousand years?”

Pontificating from the rectumry

February 24, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Barking mad and talking out his arsehole as per usual.

His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered will be farting higher than his ass this evening during what the legacy media insists upon calling “the State of the Union address” but will almost certainly be more along the lines of the late George Carlin’s “Complaints and Grievances,” only not funny.

I will not be watching for mental-health reasons. Not his mental health; that leaky vessel has sailed, caught fire, exploded, and sunk. My mental health. What with the tariffs and inflation and whatnot, new TVs are way too pricey for me to be shooting ours in a fit of rage.

What say we all give it a miss this time around? If the senile old toad doesn’t stroke out tonight in what he promises will be a long airing of Crimes Against Him, he might just get ferried across the Styx tomorrow by the sort of ratings you might expect from a live goat fuck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Papal bull

December 3, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

If you live long enough, despite the flu’s best efforts, you’re bound to learn something.

For instance, in my ignorance, I always thought that the phrase “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” was of comparatively recent coinage. It sounds like something U.S. Col. John “Nits Make Lice” Chivington might have said at the Sand Creek Massacre. Or maybe Lt. Col. Allen “Islam is Not a Religion” West while torturing a captive in Iraq.

But according to Charles P. Pierce, who recently took note of a New Republic piece on a fondness among the right-wing intelligentsia for the good old days of medieval Catholicism and other European niceties — “Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in,” — writes Graham Gallagher — the phrase has its roots in the 13th-century papal crusade against the Cathars in southern France.

Here’s Charlie:

Back in those days, of course, Roman Catholicism had armies and its temporal power was unsurpassed. Theological disputes were conducted at the point of a sword. The crusade against the Cathars in the south of France killed more than a million people, many of whom died simply because of where they lived. It was this latter sanctified savagery that gave us the infamous battle plan explained by Arnaud Amalric, a Cistercian monk and the official ambassador from Rome to the armies arrayed against the Cathars. Before the crusaders massacred almost everyone in the town of Beziers, Amalric is reputed to have said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

And you thought it was an inconvenience when the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling, brandishing their Watchtowers. Just wait until a flying squad of these new warrior monks rings your bell. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the intellectual heirs of these ring-kissing brigands might not be fans of Tom Lehrer.

Bingo!

May 13, 2020 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

“Learn Big Numbers as you Play.” Or not.

Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times cranks out another keeper about the unholy combination of church and casino that is the Il Douche re-election campaign.

This dude alone is worth the price of a subscription to Mother Times. He throws a wide loop and brings ’em back alive.

A Democratic tech strategist describes the campaign website as a casino, “purposefully built to keep gamblers inside and at the table … trapping people inside an ecosystem of dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and grievance politics. And it’s doing so while making the experience as fun and exciting as possible.”

In the nation’s “political churches,” meanwhile, a survey of hymn-singing white Protestants finds “clergy speech is driving up the religious significance” of Il Douche. In short, a strong plurality of respondents believe this gibbering gobshite was anointed by the Lord to be our Leader.

While elite “right wing media are having a profound effect on public opinion, serving to insulate Trump supporters,” the authors write, the process is also “built and sustained from the bottom up. That is, political churches, among Republicans especially, reinforce the argumentation that is also coming from above.”

I consider this another solid argument for taxing churches. Uncle Sugar gets a cut of what I earn for preaching my gospel. You want to play too, padre? Ante up, sucker, the pot’s light again.