Yeah, I’m still on the right side of the lawn. But that doesn’t mean I’m not covered in deadlines, allergens and whatnot.
The few times I’ve surfaced for a peek at the news my outlook was not improved. It seems everyone’s nuts, armed and lawyering up.
Well, at least I don’t need any lawyers. Not right this moment, anyway.
Meanwhile, as a respite from the tyranny of evil men, have a listen to Hal Walter, who is trying really hard to be the shepherd.
We don’t do April Fool’s Day around El Rancho Pendejo, reasoning that it’s a sort of amateur hour, on a par with New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Election Day for the serious drinker.
Plus, I mean, like, damn. Reality is a tough act to follow lately. At any given minute you can point to eleventy-seven things on the Innertubes that seem outrageously improbable and yet are demonstrably true, or demonstrably false and improbably outrageous. Like just about everything else, the high art of bullshittery has been swamped by low-quality mass production.
Meanwhile, it’s 40-something and raining sideways in Duke City, so Herself has passed the morning paying her respects to various elders — phone calls with her dad’s second wife and our tenant in Bibleburg, FaceTime with her mom — and just now she hung up to scamper off to yoga, which can be done indoors.
Cycling indoors is more of a stretch — for me, anyway — and so I may go for a short run.
I’m also contemplating a sweeping purge of the family electronics. We have far too much of that crap around here, thanks to someone’s penchant for collecting Apple products, and it’s long past time some of them went away.
I mean, who needs an 800 MHz G3 iBook from 2002, or a 1.5 GHz G4 PowerBook from ’05? A scroll-wheel iPod from the same year? A 2011 iPad 2 that peaked with iOS9? They still work and all, unlike democracy, but they’re about as cutting-edge as a soup spoon.
The elderly iPod came in handy when I still rode the trainer, but see paragraph four. Come to think about it, there’s that stationary trainer cluttering up my meditation room-slash-podcasting studio. And those furshlugginer heart-rate monitors! Everything must go, going out of business going out of business. …
I’m still not very interested in what I have to say about anything, possibly because I just wrapped one deadline and am wrangling another.
Plus the weather has been, in a word, top notch (OK, so that’s two words, but you get the idea). So I’ve been spending a whole lot of my free time outdoors. Yesterday I ran in the morning and rode in the afternoon. Fat city, is what.
So while I slack, feel free to kick back and sing along with some of today’s greatest hits, unearthed between bouts of work and play.
• If You Don’t Have a Dime, Don’t Do the Crime: Deep-pockets offenders can buff the rough edges off their jailhouse stays in Southern California. Says a guy paying $100 a night for a 90-day stretch for driving while smacked (it was his third DUI): “I’m really happy I was able to come here. But you need the money to do it.” Everybody sing!
• Make America Gravel Again! The cash-strapped folks in Omaha City Hall have been “reclaiming” some crumbling roads — if your idea of reclamation involves helping them crumble all the way down to gravel to cut upkeep costs. Kids quit riding their bikes on one street after the asphalt was torn out, said one retiree living next to what is now a dirt road a block from a busy Starbucks. “During the summer, it’s just a dust bowl,” she said. Everybody sing!
• It’s Nobody’s Business But the Turks’. Seems Mike Flynn was working for two turkeys at once during last year’s pestilential election. Which one came first? Sounds like a turkey-and-egg tale, or maybe a porno. Everybody sing!
Consider this your shelter from the storm that is April Fool’s Day.
Here at Mad Dog Media we do the perpetual tee hee, 24/7 and 365. As George Carlin noted on “Carlin at Carnegie Hall”:
“I am a professional comedian. As opposed to the kind you see at work all day long.”
To be honest, it’s been something of a pro-am week here at Ye Olde Gagge Factorie. I had professional obligations to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, and despite being sidetracked by the death of one of my favorite authors I managed to, as we say out here in the West, “Git ‘er done.” It was not unlike shitting a full case of broken whiskey bottles.
During rest intervals I reacquainted myself with the ins and outs of podcasting. This was strictly amateur hour.
Longtime victims of the blog may recall that I’ve dabbled in audio a time or two, but it’s been a couple years since my last episode of Radio Free Dogpatch. I even pulled the link off the site. It felt like driving past the same shuttered storefront every day.
I started out recording with Felt Tip’s Sound Studio, an application I got for free, I think, maybe with a hardware purchase from Other World Computing. Then I tried Audacity, another gratis bit of software, and finally moved over to Apple’s GarageBand, which I considered the least user-friendly of the three. But it comes with every Mac, so there you have it. And there was a dedicated “Podcast” selection in the startup menu, plus you could pull jingles and other sound effects out of the library it shared with iMovie.
Well, that’s all history. If anything GarageBand is even less user- and podcast-friendly than it was before. And I’m a couple years dumberer. So, yeah, there was a little bit of the wailing, the gnashing of teeth and the rending of the garments as we became reacquainted. It was like running into the smartypants kid from high school, the one you hated, and finding out that he had landed a job providing a service you needed.
Once I got back up to speed with recording myself as a solo act, I studied up on adding additional voices (and no, not the ones in my head).
The fun part was learning how to record a Skype call and import the audio into GarageBand. Any old scribbler has spent a fair amount of time recording phone interviews, but a painstaking transcription traditionally followed and the quotes gleaned thereby were worked into what we used to call “a story,” or “copy,” as in, “O’Grady, where the fuck is my copy? News editor has a two-inch hole on D42 and the slot man is drunk again.” Journalism 101, right there in the tar pits, next to the brontosaurus.
Here at the FutureFair a modern Bozo (or Bozoette) wants to add the actual audio from that chat to a podcast. It’s a breeze, thanks to the brainiacs at Ecamm. Their Call Recorder records both sides of the Skype call directly to your Mac, and a widget lets you split the recording into individual tracks. Another widget converts those files into mp3 and you drag them sumbitches into GarageBand for editing. It’s easier than slipping a fabricated quote past a drunk slot man.
Anyway, my man Hal Walter and I did a short test drive yesterday. The wheels didn’t fall off, and nothing exploded, so our next attempt will be an actual podcast. No foolin’. Don’t touch that dial.
Between episodes of “Attack of the Booger Monster” it’s been National Fuckin’ Geographical lately around El Rancho Pendejo.
Yesterday afternoon I was slouched in the office, trying feebly to generate some paying copy with a skull full of Claritin-D 12 Hour, when I heard a bass thump! in the living room and assumed another dipshit dove had augured into the picture window by the cat tower.
Well, close. A falcon had chased a dove into the window and was sitting on the lawn, plucking the dumb sonofabitch like a harp, while the cats watched with professional curiosity. No photo of the raptor at work, alas; I went for a camera but he took off with his dinner before I could make a Kodak moment of it.
Then last evening I took a few snaps of the post-eclipse supermoon, having intercoursed the penguin the night before (check those ISO/f-stop settings, kids). We had a few shooting stars to keep Luna company when it was all red in the face, too. Quite the night.
Today I felt capable of a short bike ride for professional purposes — the reviews don’t slow down just ’cause I do — and afterward I treated myself to a second dose of green chile stew. I’m hoping it succeeds where the Irish penicillin failed. It’s a rare bug indeed that can withstand the one-two punch of chicken noodle soup and green chile stew.
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