Category: Ranting and raving

Fetuses have Second Amendment rights too

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

Do you suppose a mass shooting of fetuses might move the Senate to action on gun control? Naw, they’d just vote to station armed guards in American wombs.

Herself and I sent the usual NastyGrams® to our senators, for all the good that does. Two more mutts yapping. You don’t even hear it after a while. I’ve lived next to runways and railroad tracks, crack houses and frat houses, and if I’ve learned one thing it’s that a fella can learn to sleep through any kind of godawful racket, even me screaming at you over the phone.

If the killing of 20 children in Newtown can’t motivate “our” elected representatives, I don’t know what can. Oh, yeah, right — money. How silly of me.

The National Rifle Association spent $500,000 on Wednesday alone, for advertising critical of “Obama’s gun ban.” Of course, this is above and beyond what they’ve already invested in the best Congress money can buy.

From here to there and back again

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

Twelve hours after I left home and hearth, sallying forth in the service of bicycle journalism, I found myself back at the ranch, cracking the first of what would be more than one bottle of Odell’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale and speaking in a tone and volume that startled the dog, although the cats are used to it.

It’s all of 85 miles from here to Denver International Airport, a distance I once routinely covered via bicycle, and that’s as far as United Airlines got me today before I finally told them, “Piss on the fire and call in the dogs, I’ve had the course.” Not even bicycle racers can make this many excuses for failure. Call it the Tour of Concourse B.

Had I been flying Air Subaru I’d have made Flagstaff in about the same time as it took to fly from Bibleburg to Mile High and back again (total air time: 40 minutes tops). I could have enjoyed a Hopshot IPA at the Beaver Street Brewing Company, hit the sack, then arisen early and motored to Sacramento for a glass of Thunderhead IPA at Pyramid Breweries. But nooo. …

More tomorrow, once I calm down. We must think of the animals.

Hot times in the old town (for now)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Bibleburg popped a 4-year-old record today, hitting 78 degrees. And the springlike weather had all the eejits  out and about, believe you me.

First, I nearly got right-hooked by an inattentive motorist at a stoplight on the outbound leg of today’s ride; happily, being a lifelong paranoid, I saw her coming. On the homestretch I avoided T-boning a couple of dipshit mountain bikers on a fast descent through Palmer Park. They rolled casually from a parking lot into the road, right in front of me, screened by a phalanx of parked vehicles. Once again, I was lucky to have seen them long before they saw me. Disc brakes helped, too.

There is a particular class of narcissistic nitwit at large these days whose members believe that nothing they do can ever be wrong. It’s thinking on a par with Tricky Dicky’s “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Then again, calling it “thinking” is a bit extravagant. I saw the faces of both motorist and mountain bikers, and they resembled nothing so much as the vacuous mugs of feedlot cows, contentedly chewing their own cuds.

The temptation is to lock up the binders, gesticulate and in general make a spectacle of yourself, offering up loud, detailed and specific instruction delivered mostly in words containing only four letters.  But what kind of crazy bastard shouts at cattle on a beautiful spring day?

The danger of distracted pedestrians

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

First, they came for Muffy’s iPod, and I said nothing. …

Jesus H. Christ. Do our lawmakers have nothing more pressing to take up than the blistering stupidity of fleawits who fall into fountains or totter into traffic while entranced by their Personal Lobotomy Devices?

I fail to see the problem here. Stupidity should be painful, and if it is occasionally fatal, well, the gene pool appears badly in need of chlorination, does it not? Back to job creation, if you please. Hey, here’s a thought: Hire personal assistants for everyone to keep them from hurting themselves!

‘Look, they got jobs’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Who’s in the valley when the shit rolls downhill? Twenty-five thousand Coloradans. Another 21,000 folks in Kentucky. Some 454,000 Californians.

And that’s just the the tip of the turd-berg. All because the Republicans have no shame and the Democrats have no balls.

Where was all this hand-wringing over the deficit when the Elefinks were running two wars off the budget, flushing buckets of your grandbabies’ money down the loo of the Daffy-Fudd dream of global empire? That this murderous profligacy continues under a Donk administration is doubly abhorrent, but at least it’s in the budget where everyone can get a good, cold, hard look at the cost of being the world’s cop on the beat.

This is not about the deficit. It’s about power, and the little guy is on the short end of that very big stick.

Kentuckian Latoya Collins gets it exactly right. Waiting at the Jobs Center in Lexington, the 27-year-old — who hasn’t been without work since she was 15, until now — says maybe Congress doesn’t notice the working man.

“Look, they got jobs,” she told the Lexington Herald-Leader. More’s the pity. America is laying off all the wrong people.