Category: Ranting and raving

Words without song*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments
“I got nothin’ here,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

How many different ways are there to write, “This fuckin’ mook is 300 pounds of bellowing bullshit in a 10-pound Brioni bag?”

Beats me. I’ve read a ton of variations on that theme, even had a few goes at it myself, to no particular effect. Manhattan Fats and his Brooks Brothers bandidos just keep rolling merrily along, stealing everything that isn’t screwed to the floor, stenciling his name in gold Krylon on whatever’s left, and bombing the rubble just to watch it bounce.

It’s like watching a CBS remake of “The Maltese Falcon” in which Kaspar Gutman grabs the bird, the real one, and gets away scot free, while Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook announce their campaign for the White House, Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a talk show and a book deal, and Sam Spade goes to jail. And we’re just supposed to sit down and watch.

Did I mention it’s a series, not a movie? On every channel and streaming service 24/7? And not so much as a tiny box of stale popcorn with a watered-down soda for the rubes. No fertilizer, no corn. Thanks, Obama!

Subscribe! Follow! Like! Share! CGI junk food in an A.I.-slop sauce. Eighty-six the side of fries. No fertilizer, no spuds. Thanks, Sleepy Joe!

It’s starting to feel like even the bots have run out of scrapes for this tepid potboiler. Take “It Can’t Happen Here,” “Idiocracy,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “It,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Lost,” the final installment in “The Godfather” trilogy, and the entire Marvel Universe catalog (except for maybe “Iron Man,” which was really pretty cool), throw it all in a big-ass blender, purée the shit out of it until all the ingredients are completely unrecognizable, and serve with a side of Motel 6 toilet paper.

Are we all just hanging on in hopes the final season will include a riff on the “Godfather III” scene in which the Devil — like the rest of us, mumbling, “Awright, OK, enough awready” — finally cuts Michael Corleone’s strings, leaving him to topple out of his chair like the dirty old man Tyrone F. Horneigh falling off a park bench in “Laugh-In?”

Well … maybe that’s just me. And in any event, we should all remember that the rest of the mob did not perish alongside Michael.

*Apologies to Felix Mendelssohn and his “Songs Without Words.”

Buckle up!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Road hard.

The Memorial Day Shopping Fiesta and Family Barbecue Getaway (Nothing to See Here, Move Along, Move Along) kicks off today with the murders most foul of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” and CBS News Radio, along with any remaining illusions that Americans live in a functioning democracy.

There is no truth to the rumor that the new national anthem for our next 250 years — or perhaps 250 days? Hours? — will be the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” reimagined by Black Sabbath. Or so we may hope, anyway.

One thing is certain: That cheery little ditty, along with an unauthorized Kid Rock cover of the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” will be in heavy rotation down in the Adolf & Eva Memorial Ballroom & Führerbunker. The lyric “Some rich men came and raped the land / nobody caught ’em” will be a huge laugh line for everyone save the slaves serving up the Big Macs and Diet Cokes.

Meanwhile, some good news: M-Day weekend gas prices are at a four-year high! But that won’t keep 39 million of us from cranking up the Family Yacht and burning a few tanks’ worth to spend time eating bad food poorly prepared and swilling tins of thin industrial lager with people we really don’t like all that much.

The Soma Double Cross takes five in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Last I looked go-juice was between $4.50 and $5 here in The Duck! City, which didn’t make AAA’s list of the top-10 Memorial Day getaways (the podium: Orlando, FL, Seattle, WA, and New York).

No worries here, bruh. I got my holiday shopping done early yesterday, before the ravening hordes could descend upon the grocery and strip the shelves bare like a cloud of fat betatted locusts. And today I ain’t driving nowhere, nohow, though I do expect to get out on a bike at some point. Yesterday was stellar in the Elena Gallegos Open Space; I saw only a few other trail users as I rumbled along on the old Soma Double Cross, and most seemed to be enjoying the wide-open space as much as I was.

Meanwhile, Republicans will be traveling home after shitting the bed in Congress. Here’s hoping their constituents have a few words with them about the horrible smell.

Oh, I ‘reported’ this, a’ight

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Report” your mama. …

A tip of the Mad Dog fedora — the one with the “Press” card in the hatband — to Pat O’B for noticing that, unbeknownst to Your Humble Narrator, WordPress had surreptiously installed a “Report” button next to the “Reply” button in comments.

I’d been having all manner of hassles accessing the goddamn blog this morning, and I suspect that this shameless little attempt at speech-policing may have been the culprit. When the dust finally settled I slapped up the “Don’t touch that dial!” post as a heads-up, Pat commented on same, and hey presto! We were off to the First Amendment races.

First at bat: A.I. When I asked it, “What is this ‘Report’ button that has suddenly become an option in comments on my posts?” WP’s robot buddy told me:

The Report button in comments is a WordPress.com feature that allows readers to flag comments they find inappropriate, spammy, or abusive — it helps with community moderation. It’s shown to logged-in WordPress.com users viewing your posts, and reported comments get reviewed. You can manage your comments at Comments. Want to know more about your comment settings?

Uh, no. Fetch me one of your disgusting Meat-Things® at whom I may shout, and with all possible haste. Be advised that I have my “comment settings” at “phasers on full.”

A Happiness Engineer appeared after a short wait and spake thusly:

We would like to let you know that the report button under comments is a standard feature that now comes with Comment forms, this is so that all of our users can report any content they may find harmful or inappropriate. This doesn’t mean a comment will be deleted for being reported; it will only be flagged and go through our review process.

I threw a flag on that play:

I review comments. Not you. Me. It’s my blog. I can’t begin to tell you how angry this makes me.

I was a professional journalist for 45 years. I began blogging on WordPress ages ago. Everyone who visits my site sees a disclaimer about what to expect. Anyone who acts out gets warned, then blocked.

If WordPress is going to start deciding what is “harmful or inappropriate” on my blog, the blog I pay WP for, based on some undefined “review process,” I will look into taking my tiny little bit of business elsewhere.

The Happiness Engineer divined that my little choo-choo was headed off the rails and ran up the track a ways, waving a red lantern.

When s/he/they jumped back aboard, the story was as follows:

The Report button is part of a recent update to the Akismet spam-protection settings on your site. It’s not a change to how your blog is moderated and no one at WordPress will review or override your moderation decisions. If a comment gets reported through that button, it’s simply flagged to Akismet’s spam system; it doesn’t get removed or hidden from your site.

Uh huh. I’ve edited a story or two in my time, but I usually aimed for clarification, not simply topping it off with, “Just kidding!”

Long story short: If you have a WordPress blog, and this “Report” button appears in your comments, you can remove it in your Dashboard by going to Jetpack > Akismet Anti-Spam and unchecking “Allow visitors to report spam or inappropriate comments.” This bullshit is apparently enabled by default, and fuck you very much, meep meep meep.

I thanked the Happiness Engineer for helping me deny a hall pass to rat finks, stool pigeons and informers, and then added:

Adding this “feature” without a bit of warning is insane. Please feel free to tell Management that.

Come to think of it, if you have an email address for anyone in Management to whom I could express my extreme discontent, that would be helpful. We’re a tiny little group of overeducated First Amendment types, and more than a few of us have WP blogs. We’d like to kick this matter up your food chain if you have someone handy for me to yell at.

The HE promised to “share this internally,” added that my volcanic feedback “shows how this can look very different from what was intended,” and gave me an email address which may or may not be useful: support@akismet.com.

I wonder what Akismet’s robot thinks about this? Probably too busy trolling the Meat-Things’® cloud storage for actionable intelligence. If any.

Piece in our time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Ve vant only piece … a piece of Venezuela, a piece of Greenland. …”

Maybe I should count my blessings.

Herself has a good job, plus a small pension from PERA set to start in a couple months. I have my Social Security. We have health insurance. The house and cars are paid for, we live frugally, and our financial adviser says we’re in fine shape.

But I just can’t stop thinking about Nazis.

Goddamnit, I fucking hate fucking Nazis. Especially the homegrown variety. We should be making them jump off bridges. And not into Venezuela or Greenland, either.

Michael O’Hanlon recently wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs that noted, accurately, and with the usual disclaimers, that when it comes to national security policy the current federal management really isn’t that much different from a number of its predecessors.

Ohhhh-kay. Thanks for the history lesson, Mickey. What say we try learning from our mistakes? Remembering the past to avoid being condemned to repeat it? The name George Santayana ring any bells in your cerebral carillon?

It’d be comical if it weren’t so serious. Which of the various Marvel timelines are we experiencing now, in which an unelected strutting fuck-bubble like Obergruppenführer Stephen Miller is running the country, giving Kent State scholarships to educate anyone who won’t do as they’re told, while his alleged supervisor whiles away the hours nailing Hobby Lobby kitsch to the White House walls, cheating at golf, and watching on TV as “Happy Hour” Hegseth punishes another two-bit dictator for stealing the boss’s dance moves?

If they were mine, I’d leave them out on the street with a handlettered sign reading, “Free.” Or maybe just park them in the shitter at Mar-a-Lago next to all those classified documents that should’ve served as his ticket to Leavenworth until Thanos snapped his fingers. Or was it Eileen Cannon? Whatever.

“Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys here?” asks Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in an interview with Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.

Not according to the gin pig at the top of the DoD org chart, who’d like to hang Kelly’s pelt on his office wall, no doubt in part because (a) Kegsbreath would like to see what a pair of actual testicles looks like, and (2) Kelly is making presidential noises just in case we ever have another one of those elections.

But first we have to make damn sure we have some midterms, this year. Take the House and the Senate; impeach, convict, and remove Comandante Piggy — take a seat and another fistful of Bayer’s finest, Porky, watch those cankles swell like poisoned puppies in the summer sun— and then, in 2028, reclaim the White House.

And none of this “let’s not look back” bullshit. Not this time. What’s the phrase? Oh, yeah: Never again.

Call me selfish, but I wanna get back to scribbling my little tee-hees, and I find this relentless “America über alles!” screeching a huge distraction.

Yo, Nazis. Here are your MAGA hats, there’s your bridge, what’s your hurry?

O, brother. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Some old traditions are worth revisiting.

I’ll spare you my “hot take” on the latest capitulation by the Democrats, noting only that if we were ever to get serious about governance in this Republic, we could revive the domestic splintery rail, tar, and feather industries in a fortnight. Maybe less.

Jesus H. Christ on a flatcar. I believe these eejits could fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking their thumbs. Bringing a knife to a gunfight would be a remarkable escalation for this lot. A one-armed monkey could carve a better party out of a banana, using a single strand of al dente pasta.

Fuck these people. I’m going back to the commies. At least they go down swinging.

Meanwhile, to any who remain with the Jackasses: Primary ’em all, let God sort ’em out.