Sometimes a hero is just a sandwich

July 26, 2024July 27, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

One of those weeks, I guess.

We watched Joe Biden’s presser and I felt as though I should weigh in, but Charlie Pierce beat me to it with his remembrance of how Laughin’ Joe knuckle-chuckled Lyin’ Paul Ryan right off the stage during their 2012 veep debate, in which “he effectively demolished Ryan as a political figure simply through good old Irish barroom bonhomie.”

Like Charlie, I always had a soft spot in my heart for José after he gave that empty suit the old one-two, the hee and the haw.

Next, my APC Back-UPS NS 1080 went loudly sideways, presenting various error messages overlaid by a soundtrack from the Nostromo on self-destruct in “Alien.” This caused me to spend the better part of quite some time online with tech support, trying to diagnose what I suspected — and the tech eventually confirmed — was a terminal case of old age, the unit being 7 years old, the short end of this battery backup’s lifespan.

Speaking of old age, in the course of unplugging and inplugging laptop, monitor, dock, speakers, backup drives, backup battery, and what have you during the diagnostic process I was reminded that the fans in my 2014 MacBook Pro 15-incher seemed to be running all the time, no matter how light the workload. Also, its trackpad was largely inoperable again.

The first time the trackpad issue cropped up, the cause was a swelling battery. I had Apple replace that and give the innards a wash and brushup. But this time I didn’t see any telltale bulge in the case, and some casual nosing around the Innertubes led to the usual potential suspects — old, dried-up thermal paste, other failing critical bits, filth and clutter, demonic possession, Cthulhu awakening, and why not just buy a nice new MacBook and shitcan that 10-year-old relic, you penny-pinching eejit, etc.

Well, we’re not quite there yet. I unplugged all my gear again, set the 15-incher aside, and swapped in its little brother, the 2014 13-incher, which has gone mostly unused since I sidelined my Radio Free Dogpatch podcast and seems as quiet as a mouse.

Naturally, there’s a downside to that maneuver. When I bought the 13-incher I went for 8GB of memory and the 128GB SSD for reasons that elude me now (possibly penury; more likely stupidity). And that drive is pretty close to full. Happily, I had a 480GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini external drive lying around doing not much, so, yay, problem solved. Or at least avoided. For now.

I know, I know. I should sack up, crack the Big Mac’s clamshell, get in there with my little toolkit and root around like I know what the hell I’m doing.

But I’m gonna take my cue from Joe here. Pass the torch to the Vice-MacBook Pro. It’s not so much the big fella’s age; it’s the hours it’s been on and running hot.

There may be a better candidate out there somewhere, but so what? I got shit to do, man.

Sallying Fourth

July 4, 2024July 4, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Five-thirty in the morning. Doors and windows open to a cooling breeze. Birds and crickets singing up the sun.

An old analog clock ticks off the seconds. The clock is the front wheel of a bicycle. I don’t think of this as time rolling away from me, because this tiny bicycle’s wheels do not move. But the hands of its clock do — tick, tock; tick, tock — so maybe I’m mistaken. I’m a scribbler, not a theoretical physicist.

As dawn unfolds the lawn looks good from my perch on the couch. After yesterday’s ride on an actual bicycle I watered, mowed, raked, and just sort of generally tidied up back there. This morning I’ve set aside my traditional practice of washing down the news of the day — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexican, et al. — with the first cup of coffee. I’ve had enough of their squawking for the moment — call it a declaration of independence — so this limited reconnaissance from the couch will have to serve as my newsgathering as the sun comes up on this Fourth of July.

My first post this morning, like the ticking bicycle clock, was analog. I stepped outside and stuck our two cheapo plastic flags into the dirt at either side of the front walkway. Right side up, too.

I was thinking of our old Bibleburg friend and neighbor, Marv Berkman, who when asked why a freethinking old saloon picker like himself would fly the Stars and Stripes every morning replied, “I don’t want those people to think they’re the only ones who can do it.”

Tick, tock

March 27, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“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.

Risk: The Red Sea Edition

January 13, 2024January 13, 2024 ~ 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

December 19, 2023December 19, 2023 ~ 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.