Some of you are seeing your comments on posts multiplying like parasites in a Taco Hell salad. I’m looking into it and will be tugging on the coat of some “Happiness Engineer” here directly.
I asked Herself to post a comment and she did so without issue, using an M1 Mac Mini rocking Big Sur (yeah, I know, OTBJ) and some equally aged edition of Safari. We didn’t get any duplicates, triplicates, or quadruplicates of the comment, nor was she presented with a “continue reading” button after posting, which Longtime Reader of the Blog Steve O’ suggests may be the trigger for comment duplication.
She was not posting as a subscriber to the blog, just using her email and a screenname.
That’s all the intel I have for the moment.
In the meantime, while we await Wisdom, maybe commenters should ignore any “continue reading” buttons after posting and hit their browser’s “back” button instead.
And please be patient while waiting for a comment to appear. I’ve noticed some sluggishness from WordPress lately and attributed it to our ridiculous Internet connection, for which we pay far too much in a town with a national lab, a university, and all manner of other outfits that require something with more git-up-and-go than dialup AOL.
Could be that all these bells and whistles WP has been adding lately has caused something to go awry.
• Addendum: Still waiting on MeatBased® support here. A.I. speculates that “theme-level behavior” may be our problem. This would not surprise me, as this is an old theme, to which I switched after the even older theme started showing some behaviors that would get it punched in some of the bars I used to frequent.
I may have to go to manual approval of comments for a while, so if anything you have to say seems to be a tad slow on the rebop, why, you can blame Your Humble Narrator.
“No, not the trans antifa, you fool! The irony-poisoned, terminally online, neonazi groyper types!”
Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.
I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.
For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:
“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”
Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.
“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”
Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?
No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.
I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.
The early bird can have the damn’ worm. Especially if it’s a brain worm.
Who needs a cranial parasite before coffee? Not me, Skeezix. What I need before coffee is sleep, and plenty of it.
And I really don’t need a brain worm at midnight, which is about when some noise of unknown origin finished the job of dragging me out of a sound sleep the other night.
Herself had just gotten up for a drink of water and tiptoed back to bed. After three decades of holy macaroni I barely notice this nightly ritual. I drift lazily up toward consciousness, wondering idly: Ghost cat? “Play Misty for Me?” Night fart powerful enough to levitate a sheet, blanket, and comforter? And on the other side of the bed, too. …
But it’s always Herself, having a wee or a drink or a wee and a drink. If it were a gust of the southern wind strong enough to unmake the bed I’d be sporting a fresh bruise or two somewhere.
This time, however, just as she settled back into the sack, came the Mystery Noise.
Ordinarily my practice is to ignore all things that go bump in the night, as hauntings, Clint Eastwood movies, and night farts often end badly. There will be some cleanup involved.
Alas, unable to forgo a bit of vengeance for three decades of midnight wees, I rolled over and asked, “You hear that?”
“Yep,” she replied, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes.
Well. Shit. Check and mate. Outsmarted yourself again, ould fella.
So up I got to prowl around the house in my skivvies looking for … well, your guess is as good as mine. Herself has added NextDoor to her list of online pasatiempos and recently showed me a wildlife-cam video of a mountain lion slinking up a nearby driveway with a raccoon in its jaws. For sure we have had bobcats, raccoons, foxes, skunks, hawks, coyotes, and deer in our yard.
But a peek through various windows and sliding glass doors revealed bupkis.
Maybe it was our in-house varmint, Miss Mia Sopaipilla? I checked her bedroom (a half-bath off the kitchen) but saw no evidence of midnight mischief. She was briefly delighted to have company, then outraged that breakfast was not forthcoming.
And I abandoned all hope of zeroing in on the mystery noise because the hills were alive with the sound of Mia.
Back to bed. Sleep, like wisdom, would not come. The imagination, no longer gainfully employed, was working overtime on threat analysis.
Water heater finally gasp its last? No rusty puddles by its door. Roof failure? Didn’t stumble into the package unit or any ductwork while wandering around below. Owl hit the pigeons nesting by the wisteria? No feathers. Bicycle thieves? Jesus, this isn’t some postwar Italian neorealist film — it’s your basic Yankee jump-scare, meat-in-the-seats, spill-your-popcorn slasher flick. Happily, the only Jason in the vicinity lives next door with his lovely wife, two saucy daughters and several bikes of his own.
Sunrise surprise.
Finally I drifted off to a restless sleep … and then, bam, Herself arose again, this time to go to work and get a start on earning the preposterous amount of money required to remedy whatever hideous tragedy had befallen us during the night. Early birds. Worms. It felt as though they were locked in mortal combat between my ears.
I padded into the kitchen to make coffee, briefly contemplated going back to bed instead, and then glanced out the window.
Wow. Now that’s worth getting up for. It’s almost better than coffee.
Oh, yeah. And the noise? Turns out it was the uppermost cardboard box on a tall stack of same toppling onto an exercise ball that then bounded about in Herself’s home-office-slash-eBay warehouse.
Guess I broke out the ladder and clambered onto the roof for no particular purpose. I will never be smart. Or well-rested.
Ho hum. I see some deep-pockets blowhard strolled in and out of court again yesterday, without consequences, as per usual. Not even a mug shot.
Shit, I’ve done more time than this blabbering plastic sack of fast-food farts, a serial liar who cheats at golf and would sell his idiot children to the Saudis, if he could find one dumb and mean enough to buy them for sex toys and/or dog food.
And I didn’t have to lip off to the cops, DAs, or judges to get jugged, either.
No, that would’ve been one of my bros, the dude who told the graying Colfax beat cop with the rookie partner: “You can’t arrest us for walking out of a bar with a beer.”
Ho, ho. Wrong again.
This regrettable incident took place in the Glory Days, when my friends and I were basically ambulatory recruiting posters for the War On Drugs. We’d have let the feds put our faces on a “Know Your Enemy” flyer if they paid us in cocaine and Stoli.
None of us was wealthy. We had no well-connected allies. We had dedicated ourselves to scaling new heights of impairment and then tumbling down the other side into a crusty rental house that used to be part of a Glendale nursery. For plants. Not children.
And thus we learned how to talk to cops. Be polite. Rely upon the short, simple words you can still pronounce without drooling. Don’t let the nice flatfoot see the devils raging behind your blood-red eyeballs.
And never, under any circumstances, tell a cop, “You can’t arrest us for [insert your offense here].”
My friend forgot this cardinal rule — only for a moment — but that’s all it takes. Loose lips sink ships, especially when the crew is hammered. And so we all got a fun ride in the drunk wagon and a night to remember in the Denver calaboose, where we met some fascinating people.
One was a duster (crazed on PCP), and he was quickly awarded the entire drunk tank for his earsplitting arguments with people or Things who were not there. We more numerous but much less scary drunks got packed into two-man cells so we could enjoy the floor show from a safe distance.
Another was a glum-looking permed and pastel-leisure-suited gent who had gotten popped for soliciting a hooker who turned out to be a vice cop. He could see his apartment from our cell, but not his wife inside it. He was not looking forward to seeing her in his new digs.
We got sprung in the morning without charges. Go and sin no more, you silly little shits, they told us. But goddamn it, we did our time.
If only we’d been riot-inciting former presidents of the United States whose Florida resort’s crappers were overflowing with national secrets instead of addled stoners getting sideways with a Colfax cop.
We’d have been back in the Satire Lounge before closing time.
Though there apparently were more cops than Black Bandanas, New Mexico Highly Irregulars, or failed city council candidates at Monday’s Shootout at the Oñate Corral, nobody — the APD, the district attorney, or the state police — seem to have a choke hold on just who did what to whom and why, and what should happen to him. Them. Whatevs. Instead of occupying the moral high ground, they squabble over territory.
Fuck me running. No wonder everyone in this town is packing. Some days it just doesn’t matter if everybody at the dance is a cop except for you and the dude who shoots you. It’s the wild wild West out there.
As Thomas McGuane wrote in “Panama”:
Something about our republic makes us go armed. I myself am happier having a piece wthin reach, knowing if some goblin jumps into the path, it’s away with him. Here in Key West, we take our guns to parties.
Mad Blog Media 