Category: Satire

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.”

Today in hisssssssstory

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
The devil you say. …

Today in history, from The Associated Press:

On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Also on this date: In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.

Sorry about that, Joan. In a righteous world you would have lived to a ripe old age and this other would have been a fatty chunk of long pig sputtering on the grill.

Gumsmoke

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
“Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Dog?”

What I need is a manifesto.

Everybody has one. How are The Authorities to understand why you act the fool if you don’t provide some sort of owner’s manual? A map detailing the weed-strangled, varmint-infested trails between your hairy ears?

Fun Fact: The word “manifesto” has its roots in Latin, deriving from the noun manus, which means “hand,” and festus, the scruffy character who in 1964 replaced Chester Goode as Marshal Matt Dillon’s deputy on the TV oater “Gunsmoke.”

Don’t let him bite you.

Thus “manifesto” means “Hand of Festus,” or, more accurately, “Fist of Festus,” something often found in some miscreant’s face.

As in season 12, episode 17 of “Gunsmoke,” titled “Mad Dog,” in which Festus believed he’d been bitten by a rabid mutt and was on the brink of a hideous death, which for some reason led him to beat the snot out of Goober from “The Andy Griffith Show,” who was on leave from Mayberry and moonlighting as a bad man.

So I’m thinking my manifesto should say something like “Don’t act like an evil Goober unless you’re after a puck in the gob,” which should suit the ever-shortening national attention span.

And maybe we should throw something in there about how you don’t want to get bit by no mad dogs neither. As Festus has taught us:

That hydrophobia, it’s a pretty sorry way to die, ain’t it, Doc? You know, a fellow gets shot, why, he’ll just fall flat on his face. Oh, he might kick a couple of times, that’s what makes the crowds turn out. But what I mean is he won’t go just snatching off his clothes and sashaying around trying to bite folks.

Of course, that advice may be coming a little late for a few of the strutting mutts who really need it. But don’t try to pin the rap on me, just because I suddenly have a manifesto. Their rabies ain’t my doing. I wouldn’t bite ’em with your teeth.

A drop taken

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The start of Tramway’s descent toward Interstate 25.

Never fear, I’m not back on the sauce. This drop taken was down to the bosque, for the first time this year.

It was a lovely day, if a bit windy — high of 80°, 65° when I started — and if I’d had my wits about me I could’ve finally ridden my age (in kilometers).

The Rio lacks a certain grandeur.

But I didn’t. After inspecting the state of the Rio Grande below the Gail Ryba bridge (still fluid, in a not-so-solid fashion), instead of pulling a U and heading home via the Paseo/North Diversion/Osuna-Bear Canyon trails, I noodled back to the ranch through Old Town to Odelia-Indian School and the Paseo de las Montañas/Tramway trails. Wound up 8 miles short of a birthday ride. In kilometers. Which is kind of like kissing your sister.

The Bosque Bandido never materialized, but I did notice a John Law parked on the gravel at trailside. We exchanged waves. Didn’t ask to see my papers or nothin’. Which was fortunate, because all I had on me was an elderly iPhone 13 mini, a water bottle, and a stick of Clif Blox. It would’ve been off to County Clare for Your Humble Narrator.

“Ireland? But your honor, my client’s bicycle doesn’t even have fenders!”

“Tough titty, counselor — he should’ve thought about that before his great-granddaddy came here to occupy a barstool that by rights belonged to a nat’chal-borned American. Next case!”

The good news is I missed whatever it was Melania thought she was up to behind the pestilential lectern, where nobody could see the rug burns on her elbows and knees, and that “Property of Satan’s Slaves’ tat’ on her ass.

Isn’t it about time we started relocating some of these Trumps to gilt-free cages in the swamps, deserts, and desert swamps of Wottalottaland, Lower Slobbovia, and Spaminacanistan? I mean, Christ, Boss Hogg is bombing anything he can’t steal, Melanoma’s doing this feeble impression of Richard Pryor’s “Now are you gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?” bit, and now Barron wants to start dealing speed in Florida?

Dude thinks he’s being cute by calling it “yerba mate,” which I think is Guarani for “murder tea.” Wait until he hears what the Cartel calls it. “Gringo failing to swim across the Gulf of America while wearing 300 pounds of chains, a jukebox, and a burlap sack,” is what.

See if you can get mommy and daddy to join you for that dip in the shark tank, kid. Your ould fellah could certainly use the exercise. Driving the golf cart and having people killed ain’t getting it done.

• Addendum: Artemis II made it home safely, and about 20 minutes after they were bobbing around in the Pacific off San Diego, boom! We got our first hummingbird of the new year at our feeders. Winning!

A king-size turd

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
O, for the days when kings didn’t have shit all over them.

What a perfect lead-in for next weekend’s No Kings rallies.

The Marquis of Mar-a-Lago is definitely not a king, by the standards of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Shit all over him. Plenty of it his own.

James Fallows has a few thoughts about how the Marquis chose to note the passing of former FBI director Robert Mueller, who died Friday at 81. Quoth His Excremency:

Good, I’m glad that he is dead.

Ouf! Dude sure knows how to set the tone, que no?

Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way, not least because I have a penchant for short and not-so-sweet obits myself, some of them with a callback to the old National Lampoon headline — “Franco Dies, Goes to Hell” — and I’m very much looking forward to writing his.

Fallows gives a shout-out to the upcoming No Kings rallies and suggests that we call/write the Orange House, plus our senators and representatives, to deliver “messages of outrage.” Great idea, and I’m all for it.

But that old Yippie-wannabe streak of mine, as always, yearns to take the response just a wee bit further. …

What about sending His Excremency a roll of industrial-grade toilet paper, the kind of 220-grit sandpaper you find in roadside rest areas, hot-sheet motels, and jails, with a note suggesting that he use it to wipe his all-too-public asshole, the one just below his nose?

Or perhaps a single long pubic hair taped to a postcard, with instructions to use it as dental floss after shitting through his face like this? Which he wouldn’t, of course. You know His Excremency never flosses; just tosses his dentures to a minion, who dunks them in the thundermug and then shoehorns them back in through that wrinkled, puckered orifice.

No, not that one. We’re talking the attic here, not the basement.

In the meantime, we can attend our local No Kings events and wait for that glorious, long-overdue day when we can all breathe a sigh of relief and say:

Good, I’m glad that he is dead.

Call me an optimist, but I like to think that this non-king will rest under a blanket of shit for eternity. His should be the only tombstone in the boneyard with a toilet-paper dispenser.