Category: Politics

Political science fiction

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Mayor Tim Keller addresses the crowd at Sunday’s ward meeting.

It’s been a few days since we hosted the Donk ward meeting and El Rancho Pendejo remains in a state of disarray.

We had to shift the furniture around to accommodate the throng and speakers, and the plan was to put everything back in its proper place on Monday. Until Herself had to go in to the old job site to piss out a number of fires, that is. Ordinarily Monday is a work-from-home day with a little leeway built into the schedule.

So here it is Wednesday, and if I were the sort of geezer who wanders around the house at night, leaving his eyeglasses back on the nightstand while hunting the source of some strange noise and/or peeing on the floor instead of in the toilet, I’d be doctoring a number of lacerations, contusions, and abrasions from stumbling into this and that instead of entertaining you lot over the second cup of joe.

Meanwhile, I see our national house remains out of order as well. We are shocked — shocked! — to learn anew that barring some random act of god or man we’re looking at a Joe-NotJoe contest come the fall. This, after a thundering herd of 410,000 Republicans in two states has expressed its preference. That’s about 151,000 people less than live in The Duck! City, according to the latest U.S. Census estimate, from 2022.

Well, cultists gotta cult, y’know?

Nobody else in the cult was actually running against The Leader. They were pitching themselves as The New and Improved Him. And doing a piss-poor job of it too. It was like watching a bunch of home-schooled thumb-suckers auditioning to play the Joker with Joaquin Phoenix standing right there, smirking. “Aren’t they just darling?”

One by one they bend the knee, kiss the ring, and wander off to seek some other role better suited to their talents, or lack thereof. All the world’s a stage, y’know.

Friday the 13th

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Gym Jordan wants a turn at bat.

Is today the day we get Gym Jordan (R-Locker Rumba) as Squeaker of the House of Reprehensibles?

That would be bad luck indeed, on a par with naming Koba chairman of the Flying Monkey Caucus.

Of course, one wonders whether this conclave of lesser primates could agree to hand the gavel to anyone, even a troika comprising Taylor Swift, Jesus Christ and Zombie Ronald Reagan.

Still, dumber things have happened, or are being contemplated, and here are a few of them:

• Streets on the moon (The Guardian). Scientists have devised a method to transform that pesky moon dust into solid landing pads and roads. “You might think: ‘Streets on the moon, who needs that?’” said professor Jens Günster of the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing in Berlin and co-author of a report on the technique. Right you are, prof. How about repairing a few of the roads we have down here on Terra, where the people are? We can’t even reliably land and maintain a construction crew alongside Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque, much less at Faustini Rim A.

• Throw up, pay up (The Washington Post). Restaurants whose bottomless-mimosa brunches have encouraged bargain boozers to do what drunks do — hurl, blow chunks, call Ralph on the big white phone — are starting to charge for the privilege of engaging in the Technicolor Yawn on their premises. “Welcome to the Vomitorium (a small handling charge will be added to your check).” The Romans got here first, of course, but you know how empires are; always declining, and not just to learn from history, either.

• Go ruck yourself (The New York Times). I’m not quite certain how we transitioned from upchucking to rucking up, but here we are. Wipe your lips, buff the barf off your boots, and shoulder that pack, soldier!  It’s great fun! As long as no angry foreigners are shooting at you. If marching around and about with a heavy pack catches on, I wouldn’t expect a spike in enlistments, but we might see a few new magazines in the Inside Outside Sideways Down portfolio, like Rucking, Rucksacker, and Rucksack Retailer and Industry News. Hey, vulture capitalists gotta eat, and not just at bottomless-mimosa brunches, either.

The bright side

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

The Morning Star Grocery, our turnaround point.

“Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.”
— P.J. O’Rourke, “Parliament of Whores”

It’s true; the catastrophe remains. The bright side — yesterday, anyway — could be found along NM 337 south of Tijeras.

My fellow velo-geezers and I decided to skip our usual Wednesday spin through the Sandia Foothills in favor of an extended climb to the southeast, from the corner of Homeless and Hungry at the eastern edge of  The Duck! City to the Morning Star Grocery, just past the Carolino Canyon Open Space.

From El Rancho Pendejo we’re talking 42 miles round-trip with about 2,400 feet of vertical gain. I rode down to meet my compañeros at H&H, which Google Maps calls “Tramway and Central.” From there, it’s nothing but rolling hills, wide shoulders, and a single stoplight where Old Route 66 meets NM 337.

This is a two-bottle ride in cool weather, which it was; I started out wearing arm and knee warmers. In summer you can resupply as necessary at Los Vecinos Community Center or the Sandia District ranger station; toilets are available at both spots, too. For anyone feeling the urge at the turnaround there’s a porta-john outside the Morning Star.

The ascent from the stoplight to the grocery, nine miles or thereabouts, reminds me of the climb from Manitou Springs to Cascade, which the Mad Dogs did now and then in the Before-Time, when we still had the mighty legs of mastiffs instead of the quivering pins of Chihuahuas.

But while U.S. 24 has the shoulders of a young Calista Flockhart, NM 337’s shoulders are padded and smooth as a zoot suit, especially since both shoulders and highway recently got a fresh coat of asphalt. We got this intel preride from one of our number who reconned the route last Sunday, solo. Most manly.

One of these days I have to stop and snap some pix of this ride. But in a group I tend to get caught up in aimless chitchat interrupted by minor acts of aggression because hey, we may be old but we’re still cyclists. There will be attacks and counters.

Meanwhile, anyone out there feeling the ravages of time and contemplating an e-bike should know that our senior road warrior, who is 82, covered the whole route without electrical assistance and took his pulls in the paceline on the way back, too.

How’s that for a bright side, younguns?

R.I.P., Dianne Feinstein

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Photo Mariam Zuhaib | The Associated Press

Dianne Feinstein has finally left the Senate, and the hard way, too.

As the Los Angeles Times wrote:

Feinstein, 90, was a towering political figure for decades. She was the oldest member of the U.S. Senate when she died, and questions about her mental capacity shadowed her final years in office, blemishing her reputation and forcing her to repeatedly fend off calls to resign.

“I’d put my record up against anyone’s,” Feinstein said in a statement as she neared her 89th birthday in April 2022, after a series of news accounts that questioned her ability to do her job.

She ultimately bowed to age and political reality, announcing in February that she would not seek reelection in 2024 to a sixth full term. By then, the race to succeed her was already underway.

A fellow Californian, John Steinbeck, wrote in “Travels with Charley” about chatting up an itinerant thespian he met on the road who declined a refill of the author’s whiskey.

“No,” he said. “No more for me. I learned long ago that the most important and valuable of acting techniques is the exit.”

It’s a tough lesson to learn. Feinstein had her successes and her failures, but for now, at least, all people will remember is that in the end, she overstayed her welcome.