Category: Good news

Charles in the morning

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Charles Pelkey circa 1987 at Wyoming Public Radio.

Our old pal Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey is switching gears again.

He’s worn a lot of hats in his time — newspaperman, press secretary, cycling journalist, lawyer, legislator — and now he’ll be wearing headphones as the local host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” at Wyoming Public Media.

It’s not his first radio rodeo, mind you — Charles had the cans on at Wyoming Public Radio in the mid-Eighties, long before joining VeloNews in 1994. He may not have used a trebuchet to launch a piano into low earth orbit — not yet, anyway — but like the “Northern Exposure” deejay Chris in the Morning he has done some time in Alaska.

These days Charles and his wife, Diana, live within walking distance from the NPR affiliate in Laramie, so he probably won’t have to break out the tattered LUG kit and rusty two-wheeler for his daily commute, which should begin in the next week or two. But anything is possible, as he’s shown us many, many times before.

When Herself and I got the word about the new gig we immediately signed on as sustaining members of Wyoming Public Radio, which just happens to be running its annual spring membership drive. They’ll be rocking “The Thistle & Shamrock” here in about 15 minutes, so why the hell not? That’s a two-fer you can two-step to.

If you want to join us, and WPM, tell ’em Charles Pelkey brung ya. And don’t touch that dial. …

Tick, tock

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Blanket pardon.

“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

—Taisen Deshimaru

When I awakened on the morning of my 70th birthday, March 27, 2024, my heart was still beating. Tick, tock; tick, tock. Fifty-two beats per minute, just like clockwork.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Hell. I don’t know if we take heartbeats with us to Hell, but if we do, I expect they’re slightly more elevated, what with the pitchforks and roasting and screaming and all.

Also, it was almost six o’clock, and it seemed I had been allowed to sleep in. I’m almost certain that’s not part of the drill in Hell. If there’s any extra sack time in Hell it’s probably spent in an actual sack, being dipped like a teabag into a giant iron mug of boiling shit that you have to drink instead of coffee in the mornings that look just like midnight, only more so, while a grinning D.I. who looks like a cross between R. Lee Ermey and Hellboy screams at you: “You gotta be shittin’ me, Joker! You think you’re Mickey Spillane? You think you’re some kind of a fuckin’ writer? Now get on your face and give me infinity!”

When I finally crawled out of the sack I was 99 percent convinced I was not in Hell.

For one thing, instead of Gunnery Sergeant Beelzebub demanding an eternity of pushups I found a sweet little kitty-cat purring happy birthday to me. Like Herself, who had slipped silently off to work, Miss Mia Sopaipilla had granted me a little extra catnap instead of yowling me up at stupid-thirty to fill her bowl and/or empty her litter box.

And for another, it was 29° outside, with a dusting of snow on the green grass.

Huh. Not Hell. Albuquerque. Some people think it’s Hell, but everyplace is Hell to someone. Especially in March.

So I enjoyed two cups of coffee instead of a bottomless mug of Lipton Shitfire Hellbroth, attended to Miss Mia, and got back to the bloggery. Tempus fugit. Tick, tock; tick, tock.

Thanks to one and all for the birthday wishes. And apologies to anyone who had 69 in the office pool. I had 30; imagine my surprise.

I have good news and bad news

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Guess which is which?

It’s a very Irish sort of day here in The Duck! City, gray and gloomy with a steady drizzle, just the ticket for observing the departure of Shane MacGowan.

’Tis a fine soft day so.

He was just 65. But as Jerry Jeff Walker is reputed to have said to an elder, “You’re older than I am, but I’ve been up more hours.” By that reckoning MacGowan may have rivaled Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-old Man.

I have the two classic Pogues albums, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” produced by Elvis Costello, and “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.”

Every Christmas Eve Herself and I dance in the living room to “Fairytale of New York.” I have never been moved to dance to one of Henry Kissinger’s bleak, self-aggrandizing dirges.

However, I’m happy to let the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain dance a whipsong on Kissinger’s grave. Here’s a passage from his 2001 book “A Cook’s Tour,” forwarded by Hal Walter:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

For more of that sort of eulogy, see the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. I’d give a pretty to see Zombie Hunter S. Thompson arise from the grave and pick up where Bourdain and LG&M leave off. You may recall HST’s Rolling Stone obit for Richard Nixon.

• Late update: Charles P. Pierce also has a few thoughts, as you might expect.

Trenchant commentary

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

A final trench coat.

If trial, conviction, and a long-overdue fatal stroke proceed apace we have a fine disposal site in the back yard for Cheeto Benito.

He would spend eternity in crucifixion pose, too, which should suit his persecution complex. Some might call it Death Yoga for Traitors.

I know, I know — it looks awfully narrow for his bulk. But it may actually be a size or three too large once Jack Smith is finished with him.

The biggest downside I can see, other than the strong likelihood that none of this will ever come to pass, is that all the poison he sucked through his pursed little piehole during a lifetime of culinary sins would probably kill all our new plants, shrubs, and trees.

Good reads

• Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. You have to love a guy who writes so clearly and forcefully, while throwing in a bonus reference to “The Verdict,” one of my favorite Paul Newman flicks.

• Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. Don’t mourn, party, sez he.

• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire. My man Chazbo, never at a loss for words, writes thusly:

In fact, it is in its precision where lies this indictment’s real power. In no place, does Smith get out over his skis. It is monumental as a historical document, but, as a legal document, it is carefully crafted, almost delicately etched. For example, there is no talk of citing the former president* for treason or for insurrection. Smith clearly has crafted an indictment precisely drawn to conform to the whopping silo of evidence he has compiled and nothing else. And it is precisely drawn to sit the former president* down under a swinging lightbulb in a dark interrogation room.

• Peter Baker at The New York Times. He’s covered five presidents, so you know he’d have some thoughts on this guy. Here’s one.

George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what “we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

Until Mr. Trump came along.

Up on the roof

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

On the roof, the only place I know,
where you just have to wish to make it so.

Every day you are above the sod is a good one.

I was a little further above the sod than is my custom this morning, filling up four 39-gallon Hefty bags with the pine needles carpeting the northernmost corner of our roof.

Ordinarily this would give me some worthy topic for complaint (“Flat roofs are stupid,” and so on). But we don’t live in Turkey, or Syria, so we still have our stupid flat roof intact above our heads instead of in pieces smack dab on top of them.

Plus, we had a roofer take a look-see up there the other day, and he said he thought we didn’t need a completely new roof, just a few precautionary touchups here and there. And maybe someone should rake up that shaggy carpet of pine needles on the north side, he mused.

This roofer worked for the company that installed our roof back in 2007, and shortly thereafter launched his own operation with a lot of the same people from the previous outfit, which is no longer with us (due to personal matters rather than personnel matters).

So we’re inclined toward optimism, which regular visitors know is not Your Humble Narrator’s natural state of being.

Below the roof, down there where the sod lies, a landscaper whose work we have admired has had a walkaround — like the roofer, The Big Boss Man of his outfit — and one of his people just popped by to take some measurements. So we’re expecting a design proposal and cost estimate directly.

Maybe, just maybe, since it seems we might not have to put a new bonnet on El Rancho Pendejo, we can afford to have its grass skirt hemmed. Use a little less of our imaginary Colorado River water. Encourage the lawn-gobbling deer to browse elsewhere, which would endear us to our gardening neighbors.

Flat roofs are stupid, though. Just sayin’.