Category: Just mumbling along

Risk: The Red Sea Edition

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Whew. No Rat Patrol stuff going on at the Michial Emery Trailhead. …

Man, I wish I could think of something witty, insightful or even simply funny to say about this little game of Red Sea Risk we’re playing all of a sudden.

I managed to squeeze out the nom de guerre “Houthi and the Blowemupfish,” but my head hurt afterward and I couldn’t think of anything to do with it.

Yemen, or what remains of it, was not on the map when I was into the Parker Brothers board game Risk. Lots of places weren’t.

And I don’t recall any asymmetrical warfare in the game, either. Or in real life, come to think of it.

We’d seen “The Rat Patrol” on ABC, of course, but thought that was just “Combat!” in the desert with G.I.’s in Jeeps getting big air off dunes. We had no idea that the concept was lifted, lock, stock, and smoking barrel, from British Lt. Col. David Stirling’s real-life Special Air Service hit-and-run commandos. The last surviving member of the original group, the hotshot navigator Mike Sadler, recently died at the ripe old age of 103.

Now it seems the bad guys are the ones doing all the run-and-gun. The Somalis were the O.G’s with their “technicals” (Toyota trucks tricked out with machine guns and other delights), and now the Houthis are in the game with whatever they’re driving. Not Volvos or Teslas, I assume; the Houthis’ insistence on trying to steal or sink anything that floats in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden has disrupted those two companies’ production/shipping schedules.

A decade of dodging bombs from a Saudi-led, U.S. supported coalition has taught the Houthis to launch and leave before things get noisy on their end of the dispute. Thus we have the anonymously sourced admission from the Pentagon that despite all the boom-boom laid on them over the past few days, the Houthis retain something like 75 percent of their ability to shoot at any ducks in “their” pond. From the NYT:

But … U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.

“Put ’er in drive, Ahmed, Uncle Sammy will be wanting a word with us directly and we don’t want to be around to hear it.”

Walk it off

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

If you can’t ride or run, you can always walk.

It’s gonna be one of those holiday seasons.

The minor plague working its way through El Rancho Pendejo is taking its sweet time about the project. Herself seems past the worst of it — a lingering cough, but otherwise feels fine — while Your Humble Narrator remains in the early stages, making noises like a plumber’s helper working a clogged toilet.

As problems go, this is strictly First World, which ain’t bad for a couple of gabachos who live in the Third. We know people who have real diseases and realer troubles and somehow never go all Gloomy Gus on us.

“Gee whillikers, pal, you say you don’t feel perky enough for a little bikey ridey in the late fall sunshine?  Hard knocks for sure. Our puppy just died and the basement’s flooded and the kid just got filmed having gay sex in a congressional hearing room, so we had to quit our jobs, change all our phone numbers, and cancel the Internet. Plus we have Nazis marching around the neighborhood at all hours roaring “Blood and soil!” But I feel ya, bruh. ’Scuse me, back in a jiff, I gotta put out the cat. One of the Nazis set her on fire.”

So, yeah. Instead of being a whiny little gobshite all the time (instead of most of the time) I make my little tee-hees on the Innertubes, drink lots of hot beverages, and take short walks around the foothills trails, all the while hawking and snorting and spitting and in general trying to encourage the boogers to abandon this crumbling temple of the soul and jump on someone else, preferably a cat-torching Nazi.

It even helps, for a little while. Haven’t seen any sniffling Nazis out there yet, but I remain hopeful, if not optimistic.

Speaking of optimistic, the Colorado Supremes whack an underhanded insurrectionist with the fat end of the bat. The real Supremes bat next.

Trying to cough up some laughs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Tea time.

Whenever I skip the second cup of strong, black coffee for a tall, steaming mug of tea with honey, you may be certain that I am unwell.

Herself picked up a bug (not The Bug) about 10 days ago, one of those raspy coughers that keeps everyone in the house awake, and come Thursday I was quietly congratulating myself for having dodged it when I began to sense a disturbance in the Force during a short trail run.

By Friday it was me hacking away like a lunger with a three-pack-a-day habit, chain-smoking Luckies through the port in my windpipe. Kane didn’t make that much racket when the baby Alien did his “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” number at dinner on the Nostromo.

I hit the couch early on and stayed there, and when that proved exhausting I went to bed, around 7:30. And I stayed there until 7:30 this morning.

The fun part about having a bad cough is trying to find a position in which you can grab a bit of shuteye between eruptions. I usually sleep on my left side, but that was right out. So was the right side.

The only position that worked for me was flat on my back, just like Kane on the galley table.

The good news is, there was no blood on the sheets this morning and no midget Aliens chasing Miss Mia Sopaipilla around the house.

The bad news is I don’t feel up to throwing out a few half-baked zingers like “Rudy the Mook should be tossed in the sneezer until he can remember his bank balance,” or “The U.S. House of Reprehensibles resembles a legitimate legislative body in the same way that a tank-town dog pound resembles the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show,” or maybe “How is it that we still care more about Matthew Perry than anybody in Gaza?”

Denuded

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Leaf me alone.

Must be December.

God left Her leaf blower on high all day yesterday and the trees got stripped faster than an Escalade with Texas tags parked overnight at a Duck! City Motel 6. Now they look like backgrounds from “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which was just selected for the National Film Registry.

It’s beginning to look a lot like … Dec. 14.

Overnight the rain swept in, nearly a quarter inch of it, followed by the fabled “wintry mix” and then actual snow this very dark morning. Sort of a heavenly apology to the trees for pulling their bloomers down, I suppose.

In her office Herself is sipping some vile tea that recalls the scented-candle section at a Nordstrom, staffed by a retired exotic dancer who applies her eau de parfum using a power washer.

But she can drink whisky neat for breakfast if that blows her dress up, because she makes all the money around here. Herself, not the stripper. Though a stripper would too. Don’t ask how I know.

The private sector — Herself’s little corner of it, anyway — pays a damn sight better than anything I’ve got going on, especially if we’re talking about stripping. If we had to depend on the spare change Uncle Sammy drops in my tin cup or the singles drunk bachelorettes stuffed in my G-string we’d be fighting the cat for her kibble, and not just for fun, either.

Meanwhile, it’s 9:30 in the morning, but outside it looks like 9:30 at night, and if I had the sense God gave a stripper I’d start taking off clothes and … go back to bed.

Off the pot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Working the breadline.

Tuesday is a good day for chores.

It’s quiet around El Rancho Pendejo. Herself races off to the Lab at 5:30 in the a.m. and it’s just Your Humble Narrator and Miss Mia Sopaipilla manning the battlements. Cat’lments. Whatevs.

Sometimes I’m up before The Boss hits the door running, sometimes not. This morning I managed to see her off and then got down to brass tacks, as the kids don’t say anymore.

Miss Mia must be greeted, loved up on, given a second round of food and drink, and her litter box unburdened of its dark freight.

Then the Winter Palace is to be prepared for Her Majesty, after which I may offer myself a little sumpin’-sumpin’: coffee; toast with butter and jam; either oatmeal with dried fruit and nuts or yogurt with granola; an apple or mandarine; a scoop of crunchy almond butter; maybe a mug of tea.

The news is to be scanned but not dwelt upon lest it hamper the digestion.

OK, so I missed a few needles. I blame management.

This morning saw the last slice of bread slide down the rathole so a new loaf was in order, and I set that machinery in motion.

Next I congratulated myself for taking a moment yesterday to rake up the pine needles scattered across the lawn by last Thursday’s window-rattler, with the goal of restarting the irrigation system for a quick spritz this morning, when I noticed our bird feeders were getting low. So I filled those up. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

This short detour threw a slight hitch into my gitalong. The next items on the schedule were exercise and grocery shopping. If I hadn’t stopped to pat myself on the back I could’ve squeezed in a quick trail run before the sprinklers came on (I wanted to be around to make sure nothing had frozen up during our short cold snap).

Running afterward would put me at the grocery noonish, which is not optimal; the amateurs scuttle out of their holes and get in everyone’s way at noon and 5 p.m. I like to do my shopping between 9 and 10, or sometime after 1, when only pro hunter-gatherers are working the aisles and the registers don’t look like The Big I at rush hour.

Thing is, the meal I have planned for tonight is a slow-cooker deal that wants four hours in the pot.

So, yeah. Here I sit, muttering to myself (and to you) while I update my grocery list, avoid the news, and wait to see whether the irrigation system erupts like Vesuvius.