Category: Podcasting

Midnight train to Gitmo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Cool Hand Luke goes off the rails.

You think we’re shipping the wrong people to Guantanamo?

I’m old enough to remember a time when, if some civilian loudmouth waltzed through your front door barking orders, you could kick him in the plums, give him the old heave and also the ho, and get back to whatever it was you were doing before all the bad noise started.

Yet somehow, in the Year of Our Lard 2025, we’ve allowed this porcelain pissant from South Africa to start rearranging the national furniture, to say nothing of the org chart, without so much as a “Just who the hell elected you to anything, anyway, Fisheyes?”

Raise a ruckus and you get frog-marched out the door, either to the breadline or maybe a gated beachfront community that doesn’t feature in Beelzebozo’s plans for the tourist trade. Meanwhile, our media watchdogs just keep licking their own nuts; chasing random brain farts down countless odiferous ratholes; and “fact-checking” the arsonists who are burning down the government faster and more thoroughly than the Brits did during the War of 1812.

But be of good cheer: There’s plenty of bark and bite to be had in the latest edition of Radio Free Dogpatch!

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The Captain from “Cool Hand Luke” and Yosemite “The Little Drummer Boy” Sam communicate to us from YouTube. The boot to the bollocks and subsequent heave-ho hail from Freesound. The French taunter you may recall from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Air travel to Gitmo, a newspaper’s printing press running, and soldiers on the march courtesy of Freesound. “Twisted Clowns” honk at us from Zapsplat. Charles P. Pierce does his barking from the Esquire Politics kennel. And last, but far from least, that’s Sam Cooke working the “Chain Gang.” All the other gang violence is the fault of Your Humble Narrator.

ICE, ICE, baby

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
He’s cold as ICE. Think someday he’ll pay the price?

The ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations.

Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. “Dr. Phil” even got in on the act in Chicago.

Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don’t take kindly to being shoved around.

Soon even the fanboys will find the price of admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus (“There’s One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside the bad guys, citizens decline to take their jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, food processing and service industries, and goods and services get more expensive and/or harder to find.

But never fear. We’ll be annexing Canada! And Greenland! And the Sudetenland (whoops, wrong fascists, never mind). The Circus will roll on a Road of Bones until the world is under One Big Red White and Blue Tent (handmade by skilled artisans in border internment camps)!

While you await your own personal invitation to assist the authorities with this project (and their inquiries) you might as well listen to the latest All-American Episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. Could be the last one. You never know who’s lending us an ear, or why.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The trailer theme from “Fort Apache” comes from YouTube, as do Rick’s conversations with Major Strasser and Sam in “Casablanca.” Bob and Doug McKenzie say “Good day” from SCTV’s YouTube page. The drum-heavy martial music (by Gregor Quendel) and “Out of Step” are both courtesy of Zapsplat. The Mescalero Apache tribe’s take on a member’s run-in with an ICE agent can be found here. The Guardian reports on a Navajo experience. Lawmakers from New Mexico and elsewhere view with alarm. The Associated Press covered immigration raids in Chicago. At The Atlantic Mark Leibovich had some fun visiting Greenland, soon to be our 52nd state. And at The New Republic Matt Ford shredded the pestilential ordure dropped on birthright citizenship. All the noisy, less-well-reasoned palaver comes from Your Humble Narrator.

Howling at an orange moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
And you thought the moon was made of green cheese. Sorry, losers and haters!

Blame the Wolf Moon. A vacationing wife. An acid flashback. Whatever.

But when I blinked myself awake in the dark on Tuesday morning I had no idea where I was.

If dementia runs in your family, as it does in mine, this can freak you right the hell out. But I found it oddly exhilarating.

“Where am I? Who knows? Who cares? This is great!”

And then I remembered.

“Aw, shit. Trumpsylvania.”

We’re just a few all-too-short days away from the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. “Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington” should’ve been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a franchise now. When the Joker started getting top billing we should’ve known what was coming. It’s just one evil clown after another.

But hey: It’s an excuse for another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, in which I make it all about me. I tell ya, it’s evil clowns all the way down.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The wolf howls from Freesound, as do the sad trombones and the vinyl scratching. “Morning Mood” is from “Peer Gynt” by Edvard Grieg. Arthur, King of the Britons, and an anarcho-syndicalist peasant come from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail.” You’ll catch a snippet of the “Grapes of Wrath” theme in there (almost went with “Death Valley Days.”). The ass-kissing is by Your Humble Narrator. The sound effect, not the actual, y’know, like, obesiance. And the classic “There Stands the Glass” is courtesy of Ted Hawkins via YouTube. As usual, all the other raving can be pinned on the landlord of this dump.

A shadow of my former self

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The shadow knows.

Glancing back through my training log it strikes me that I have spent November and December intercoursing the penguin, as we used to quip at Live Update Guy.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In the Before-Time, when I was still racing cyclocross, September through December felt like one big pile of miles, perhaps because it was.

In my Golden Years, the glide from summer through autumn into winter seems better suited to a gradual change of pace. Trail runs, hikes, short rides; that sort of thing. Shake the old brain-box like a dice cup, see what comes rattling out, seven, 11, or snake-eyes.

This year the numbers told me I was getting slightly carried away for a geezer who wasn’t training for anything other than staying on the sunny side of the sod. I was grinding out weeks of 100, 120, even 150 miles. Which can be fun. But it burns an awful lot of daylight for a cat wrangler-slash-cook-slash-blogger who Frankensteined his dead podcast back to life around Halloween for no discernible reason. And come November I was starting to feel rode hard and put away wet.

So I backed off. A lot. Maybe too much. Running three or four days a week, doing a leisurely hour here and there on the bike, mostly on trails. At first it was nice to ease off the accelerator, but after a while this old endorphin junkie was jonesin’ for his fix.

This past week I did three short trail runs — but I also managed four rides, including a pair of back-to-back two-hour outings on my Soma Saga touring bikes, which had been dangling dolefully on their hooks for far too long. They’re stout and sturdy, with fenders and rear racks, and I’m not inclined to do anything wild with ’em; just turn the pedals over until I get tired of it.

A ride of two hours or better not only refills the endorphin tank — it puts the Voices in my head to sleep for a spell, same as a car ride does a crying infant. It’s another welcome change of pace to have only the one murmuring to itself in there as the year winds down.

What solstice is this?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
This year’s solstice seems to lack a certain wintry flavor.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Chri … no, no, it’s not, actually.

It’s 49° right now with a high of 58° anticipated, and we are remarkably light on snowmen in these parts.

Meet the new Mac.

The dearth of seasonal weather notwithstanding, I finally got around to unwrapping and wrestling with the solstice gift I bought for myself (with Management’s approval, of course). And this is the first blog post from my brand-new MacBook Pro, with the M4 Pro chip, 24GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

It’s hard to describe such a wonder as a midrange Mac, but that’s what it is. Anybody who’s priced the property in Cupertino lately knows how many Dead President Trading Cards you can flush down the loo if you’ve a mind to, and a life partner who’s willing to stand by and watch you do it. I tried to find the Middle Way between making do and delusions of grandeur.

And I think I succeeded.

With my old 15-inch Intel MBP sidelined by botched MacSurgery at the Apple Store, and the 13-incher hobbled by penury (8GB memory, 128GB storage), I needed something with more power, more memory, more storage, and plenty of ports for external drives, the LG display, a mic, SD cards, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Plus I wanted something I could snatch up and run with when the jackboots hit the front door come Jan. 21.

So, here we are.

I’ve got all the data transferred, connected everything I need to do my little bit of business to see that it all works, and downloaded fresh copies of a few third-party apps I use. Then I kicked the tires, lit the fires, and took her for a spin around the digital block.

I haven’t assembled a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast with the beast yet, and might not even publish an episode this next week. You may think of that as my solstice present to you.