Fuelishness 2: $3.89 for all my friends!

March 14, 2026March 14, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Everyone’s on the same page along Tramway Boulevard.

Way back in the Glory Days of Monday — remember that fabulous Monday? — a happy Duck! City motorist could gas up for $3.39 or $3.59 per gallon, depending on his/her choice of station.

On Saturday … not so much.

The going rate for a gallon of go-juice on Tramway today is $3.89, from Lomas to San Bernardino. Affordability is on the march, and soon the American public will be legging it around and about, too.

Just wait until Addled Hitler sinks Kharg Island, a small coral island off Iran’s coast that according to The Associated Press is “the primary terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass.” The Guardian has a nifty explainer, too.

Petras Katinas, an energy researcher at the Royal United Services Institute who calls Kharg “the main node” of the Iranian economy, said that if Iran were to lose control of the island, it would be difficult for the country to function, even though the island isn’t a military or nuclear target.

“It doesn’t matter which regime is in power — new or old,” Katinas said.

Oh, good. This is like blowing up a 7-Eleven and replacing it with a Circle K, only the Circle K has empty shelves, fuel pumps that don’t work, no employees, and an angry mob forming in the cratered parking lot with weapons in various calibers and configurations, craving a word with management.

Send Whiskey Pete Kegsbreath out to restore order. He can show them his tats. They can show him their rat-a-tat-tats.

Snow job

March 6, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

The lone GS-1 running the National Weather Service must’ve lost her Magic 8-Ball and is reduced to winging it, calling for “a slight chance of snow showers” here before 8 a.m.

As that hour has come and gone, we will not be breaking out the cross-country skis anytime soon.

Still, the weather is finally more or less seasonal for a change, so I can probably leave the lawn mower in the garage for a while, too.

In other news: 92,000 jobs swirled down the Gilded Shitter in February; the unemployment rate is up to 4.4 percent; retail sales fell in January; stocks drop amid “uncertain outlook”; gas prices jump again to their highest level in a year and a half; and a senator who can’t do his job helps the coppers do theirs.

So. Much. Winning.

Who can we bomb now? Are we bombing everyone yet? There must be somebody left unbombed. If we have any bombs left. …

Forrrrr’d, March!

March 1, 2026March 1, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

“Just another day on the set, people. Lights, camera, action!”

From The New York Times (gift article):

From the moment he announced an extensive military attack against Iran by posting an edited social media video at 2:30 a.m. Saturday, President Trump made clear that he would be taking a different tone and approach than his wartime predecessors.

Mr. Trump did not scramble back to the White House from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, to oversee the U.S. and Israeli strikes. He did not deliver a televised address informing the public of the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was the nation’s supreme leader for nearly four decades.

Instead, the president capped an extraordinary day of U.S. aggression abroad by attending a glitzy fund-raising dinner at his club.

With this REMF at the top of the org’ chart the old joke applies more than ever: What’s the difference between the U.S. armed forces and Scouting America? The Scouts have adult leadership.

Maybe the headline should be “Forrrrrrr’d, Mar … a-Lago!”

Re: Nobel Peace Prize

February 28, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Gen. Carl’s Jr. von Clownswitz: “War is neither a scientific game nor an international sport; it is an act of violence, characterized by destruction. Now where’s my cheeseburger?”

Should’ve given the feckin’ eejit his prize.

That lightweight bitch-slap to his tiny puckered hole of a mouth, coupled with The Supremes 86ing (well, 6-3ing) his insane tariffs scheme, and finally the shit ratings for his impromptu “Dope-rah” skit — a.k.a. the State of the Union — pretty much guaranteed he was going to pull the trigger on another half-baked, open-ended Charlie Fox in Iran so he can feel better about his poorly hung, pants-shitting, Adderall-addled, senile old self.

“Operation Fucking Shit Up: This Time We Mean It!” will annihilate Iran’s nuclear program, which was annihilated in the last go-round, except, oops, not. Bonus: It makes Congress look even more like Blanche DuBois and has every journo in the world working on a weekend.

Some people voted for this shit. Not me.

If I were running Cuba I might think about applying to become our 51st state — well, 52nd, behind Venezuela. Maybe 53rd if Mexico’s as quick on the draw as they were with “El Mencho.”

But that’s no guarantee of safety. Hair Füror has already shown he’s OK with invading U.S. territory and killing U.S. citizens if no one else is handy.

Incoming, baby. Duck and cover.

‘Our long national nightmare. …’

January 6, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

… is not over.

It wasn’t over on Aug. 9, 1974, when Gerald R. Ford trotted out that boogeyman-be-gone bullshit upon assuming the presidency vacated by Richard M. Nixon, a rat fleeing the ship of state he did his best to sink.

And Ford went on to be even more stunningly full of shit when he added:

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.

A month later, Ford finally achieved escape-velocity, bullshit-wise, when he granted “a full, free and absolute pardon” to his predecessor, a man whom Hunter S. Thompson called “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

Some of us thought that was as bad as it was ever going to get.

Ho, ho, as the Good Doktor would say. We were wrong.

We have elevated some remarkably stupid, ineffectual, and/or venal hombres to the presidency since then. Not Ford, though. Nobody voted him into the gig, but he certainly got voted out in ’76 when the nation decided, well, fuck it, they’d rather have a Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office than the knucklehead who waved Tricky Dicky off to San Clemency with nothing but his pension and related benefits to keep him warm in retirement.

And even now, when we appear to have reached our political nadir, the creaky national machinery in the tiny palsied handsies of a senile, shambling, burger-gobbling narcoleptic, a convicted felon with a mean streak a mile wide and an unquenchable thirst for wealth, power, and vengeance, who apparently has a joy buzzer installed in his diapers so an aide can shock him awake, however briefly, to unleash a torrent of non sequiturs to be dutifully chronicled, analyzed, and excreted by the press corpse, well … I’m not about to tell you that this is as bad as it’s ever going to get.

Pogo — himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952 and ’56 — hit the nail on the head back in 1971, when Tricky Dicky was still kneewalking drunk around the White House, arguing with the paintings and looking for an exit that didn’t involve a perp walk in cuffs. Had we insisted upon it, we might have been spared some of what was to come.

But we didn’t. And so it goes.

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Truer words, etc.