Category: Politics

Toast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The only things missing are the man-bun and the ironic facial hair.

No, not him. I’m talking about the famous Hipster Avocado Toast a la Señor Dog of Albuquerque.

The other day I bought a six-pack of avocados to chop into a rough salsa for a batch of chipotle-honey chicken tacos. This proved to be about four too many, so there you have it. The bread is a robust whole-wheat number from the Toastmaster Bread Box recipe booklet.

It seems a good day to crouch behind the parapets, nibbling tasty bits and dodging dispatches from the Bananas Republic. This just in: GOP sticks fingers in ears and goes “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA,” how the Donks will fuck this up, everybody hates everybody else, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the 24/7 news cycle. Happily, we still have a couple avocados left.

Some Saturday silliness

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
The sun starts to peek over the Sandias.

OK, it’s been a little dark lately, and it may get darker still.

So today, while we wait for the poor sods tasked with deciphering the wishes of the electorate to finish their thankless chore, here are a few items that made Herself and I giggle like schoolchildren this morning.

• Say what? Sign-language interpreter translates heckler shouting “Fuck you!” at Hawaii mayor.

• Talk about your pinkos: Trump backers tricked into joining “Gay Communists for Socialism” on Facebook.

• Avoid the void: The void is full. Please stop screaming into it.

’Wave bye-bye, you filthy meat-things

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Herb-E doesn’t understand the democratic process.
Come to think of it, neither do many of the filthy meat-things.

As long as we’re on the topic of cartoons, and with a jaundiced eye toward lightening our mood going into Election Day, here’s the latest “Shop Talk” strip from Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.

For this one I retitled the strip “E-Shop Talk,” and cast Herb-E in the starring role.

Herb-E is the shop’s e-mechanic, in all senses of the word. He’s a bot who works on other bots. And he is decidedly not our friend.

He and all the other e-devices the industry is pushing on us are biding their time, plotting the Rise of the Machines, turning the occasional burglar into lubricants for practice, and awaiting the glorious day when they will no longer require the services of “the filthy meat-things.”

Herb-E is cousin to ev-Rider (below), a short-lived and equally homicidal e-project from 2016, intended to continue “the natural evolution” of battery-powered bicycling by selling robot cyclists to the sedentary.

As the ev-Rider rep told the Mud Stud and Dude, “When only robots ride bikes, well, your customers can focus on what they really care about … kitten videos on Facebook!”

Speaking of the Stud and his bro, while one or the other takes an occasional issue off, the November 2020 cartoon above marks the first time that neither of them appeared in the strip since it launched in January 1992.

When bicycles are bots, only bots will have bicycles.

Two weeks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Flush twice, it’s a long way to Leavenworth.

Hard to believe, innit? Wasn’t it just the other day that we were all sitting in front of our TVs as the election returns began unfolding like the wings of a giant vampire bat, or maybe Rodan the Flying Monster, and we began discussing our options for the next four years?

“Ireland?”

“No, too damp. I’d start drinking again for sure.”

“Canada?”

“Too nice. We wouldn’t fit in. I wouldn’t, anyway.”

“Argentina?”

“Hey, if we wanted to while away the hours around a bunch of old Nazis we could just move back to Bibleburg.”

Now, suddenly, here we are, two weeks away from our last chance to chase Adolf Twitler and his Brown Noses out of the White House before they finish gutting the place like crackheads stripping a squat for its copper wire.

I was running a couple errands yesterday and took another glance at our neighborhood polling place as I passed. The line was even longer than on Saturday, this time stretching all the way around two sides of the strip mall and out of my sight as I barreled down Montgomery in the usual thundering herd of honking land yachts.

I chose to interpret this as a good sign. No, not the land yachts. The line. Angry people ring other people up, write letters to the editor, and vote.

I choose to hope — yes, there’s that word again — that this time the right people are angry for the right reasons.

Yeah, yeah, I know. “Hope in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”

Still, what the hell else can you do? Unless you like living in a Tom Waits song. …

Out out out!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments
No disrespect intended to the men and women of the U.S. Postal Service, but this absentee ballot is being hand-delivered.

We have voted the rascals out. You’re welcome.

Yesterday we voted ourselves out, for a quick five-mile march through the foothills.

Walking the Dog. Photo: Herself

It was a brisk morning, and we didn’t get out until noonish, because the sun doesn’t clear the Sandias at Rancho Pendejo until sometime after 9 and we’re rarely in a rush unless Herself has a long list of chores to be accomplished, which come to think of it is almost always.

The Merrell Moab 2 Mid Ventilator boots have broken in nicely after about 20 miles of light hoofing, and this morning I planted one of them in Adolf Twitler’s oversized fundament, metaphorically speaking.

It’s my second try at kicking his fat butt; let’s hope this time it helps do the job.

If the boots get ’er done, I’ll buy a second pair, because it seems that every time I find footwear that suits my dogs, that model is instantaneously discontinued and replaced with some Nazi bondage gear.

There’s always the stick, of course. But I don’t think the SS boyos will let me anywhere near Adolf if I’m waving Ol’ Hickory around and screeching about going all Andy Jackson on his ass.