Category: Just Fucking Shoot Me

Go run. Or not.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Run? On a day like this? I think not.

The weather was supposed to be taking a turn for the worse after a short stretch of sunny skies, and so I had planned to go for a short trail run this first day of February.

Instead, the sun leapt out from behind the clouds, the temp shot upward into the mid-50’s, and I called an audible: “Ride today, run tomorrow.”

I’ve had the old Steelman Eurocross out twice this week, and it was leaning against the Subaru just waiting to have another go, so I grabbed it and did a quick 90 minutes on the foothills trails, which have finally firmed up a bit since last week’s rain and snow.

It was just the ticket, especially since I was feeling unkindly toward running after reading about the Outside Hyperactive Currency Furnace’s latest scheme — to transform the ridiculously simple act of putting one foot in front of another into a mighty revenue stream through the miracle of MarketSpeak®.

Running is one of the most basic acts imaginable, and humans have been doing it since we first came down from the trees, which is starting to seem like a really bad idea. As soon as we hit the deck we were running toward things we wanted to kill, eat, and/or fuck, and away from things that wanted to do likewise to us.

Like I said, basic.

No longer. According to a press release whose author(s) should have “The Elements of Style” tattooed on their foreheads with a jackhammer, we runners have been blessed with a new “Running Media Platform” intended to meet us on our running journey and elevate, empower, build community, and disrupt through a one-stop shop of iconic brands delivering gender-equitable and inclusive best-in-class, world-class content.

Or something very much like that. I don’t know for sure. I blacked out somewhere in the middle of it and when I came to I was butt-ass nekkid with blue paint on my face and a big knife in one hand, shrieking and dancing around a fire built of old running shoes.

I showed the press release to my buddy Hal Walter, who has been running for something like 45 years, everything from 5Ks to marathons to the World Championship Pack-Burro Race in Fairplay — he guesses maybe some 65,000 miles all told — and he was immediately unimpressed.

“Jesus,” he said. “Go run for fuck’s sake.”

No comment (yes, again)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

This way to the Egress?

We seem to have been detoured off the Infobahn and onto yet another long and winding washboard gravel road to Hell as regards what should be the simple process of posting a comment on the DogS(h)ite.

I first noticed the latest WordPress “enhancement” the other day while trying to comment on the Better Burque blog. Being logged into WP, I assumed — wrongly, as it turned out — that I could write my comment and post it under my nom de blog.

But when I wrote my little piece, then clicked the “Reply” button, nothing happened. Or so it seemed. There was no visual cue that the button had been clicked. My comment just sat there, like a fresh turd on a flat rock.

So I clicked the “Reply” button again and immediately got a popup that said something like, “Oops! Looks like you’ve already said that!”

And so I had. The comment had been posted, but not as me — as Anonymous, who seems to be everywhere these days, and mostly up to no good, too.

Anyway, I forgot all about it because I comment on the DogS(h)ite from the Comments tab in WP and never actually see the preposterous clusterfuckery that appears at the bottom of each post, the way you Little People do.

Nevertheless, there it squats, like a poison toad, a probe from the WP Block Editor that has infiltrated my Classic Editor environment, bent on mischief.

Now, I just viewed the blog using my backup MacBook and a different browser (Chrome) that was not logged into WordPress. So I got the full nickel tour of Whatthefuckopolis.

And what an ugly neighborhood it is, too. Frank Lloyd Wrong on the brown acid designing the Hotel California for a Wes Anderson movie.

It seems navigable, but I didn’t go through the entire process of logging in with an email address or my Google, Apple, or WP deets because I don’t want to get caught in some digital Doom Loop that drops me onto the Event Horizon just before everything goes sideways in orbit around Neptune.

I will ping the Happiness Engineers about it. There must be a way to return to the simpler days of commenting, before some engineer decided to go all carbon-fiber, hydraulic-disc and electronic-shifting on us.

Stocks and bombs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

More bucks for your bang.

You know, without having to be told, that conversations like these take place.

Nevertheless, reading the actual words is something of a stunner.

Q.: “Hamas has created additional demand, we have this $106 billion request from the president. Can you give us some general color in terms of areas where you think you could see incremental acceleration in demand?”

A.: “I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”

— from a General Dynamics third-quarter-earnings call on Oct. 25.

“Lord Death is a real big eater,” as Jim Harrison once wrote. And His shit is pure gold.

Delta Farce

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

“If you’re traveling this summer, you better hope that you don’t need help from an airline.” — Mac Schwerin, “Somehow, Airline Customer Service Is Getting Even Worse,” in The Atlantic.

And yet people wonder why I refuse to fly the unfriendly skies.

Last evening Herself and I — from the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and The Duck! City, respectively — were watching her scheduled departure time shift from 6:35 p.m. Minneapolis time to 8:13, then 10 … and finally right off the clock entirely. Mickey’s big hand gave us the finger. Canceled. Sorry ’bout that.

According to FlightAware, the Delta aircraft headed her way from Maine was delayed more than four hours before finally taking off just before 6 p.m. Duck! City time — whether it had been in Maine all that time is anybody’s guess, as is where it was actually headed once it left the Pine Tree State — and for a while there it was looking like she still had a chance of getting home by stupid-thirty Tuesday morning.

But nix. No wheels up for you, toots. Go stand in line with the other poor saps to learn nothing useful from a Delta agent. Word on the concourse was that all Delta flights for Tuesday were already full up, and there might not be a seat available until Thursday. Yikes, etc.

So I book her a room at the nearby Hilton Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport … after which she decides to rent a seat on a Southwest flight to The Duck! City via Phoenix leaving at 5:35 a.m.

This means being at the Minneapolis airport by 3:35 a.m. for check-in, so there’s no point in cabbing it to the Hilton for a $200 wash and brush-up and then heading right back to the airport for another beating.

So I go to cancel that room … only Hilton won’t let me do it online for some mysterious reason known only to the servo-bots running the Hilton website. So I have to call and speak to an actual human being. How 20th century of them.

Happily, the obsolete meat-things prove friendly, efficient and helpful — tip of the Mad Dog Rivendell cap to Alicia working the front desk in Minneapolis — and the room is canceled without penalty, leaving Herself at liberty to wander aimlessly through the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport dragging Old Pinkie, her battle-scarred, doughty rolling suitcase, which Delta did not send to Tierra del Fuego, Ukraine, or the Event Horizon in orbit around Neptune.

Now, some might say that looking to Southwest for salvation is like hailing a passing shark to take you from the Titanic to that iceberg over there. And I am one of them.

But at least those pirates finally got her and Old Pinkie off the deck and into the air. If only to Sky Harbor. Happily, they have Hiltons in Phoenix too.

• Editor’s note: Yes, I read about the weather nightmares, traffic-control problems, and the overheating cable at Ronnie Raygun Intergalactic Airport. Thousands of flights delayed or canceled. And like Mac Schwerin I appreciate the complexities of arranging air travel. (“Delta flies something like the population of Sacramento every day, on average.”) But still, you’d think Someone in Authority might empower the boots on the ground at the Delta counter to grab a hot mic and shout, “You’re all fucked!” rather than making their customers queue up to get the same message one at a time.

Papal bull

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

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

Knights in white satin.

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.