Category: Smashing the State

Paddywhacked

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
A wee drink for the ould sod.

’Tis a fine soft St. Patrick’s Day morning so.

After a 24-hour sandblasting — I’m talking wind in the 30-mph area with gusts approaching 50 — we finally got a drop of rain to refresh the greenery without the need to crank up our irrigation system, tapping the invisible water that’s always in such short supply around here.

Now it appears to be snowing. Yay, etc.

Not snowing snowing, mind you. Not like it has been in Colorado or California. Hijo, madre. This borders on too much of a good thing, unless you’re a skier, or a yeti. Or perhaps an overdeveloped and underwatered desert community downstream from ski country.

What we’d like is a nice blanket that soaks into the sod before the wind can blow it to Hell. Water wizard John Fleck calls this “sublimation,” which means “the loss of snow straight to atmospheric drying without [it] ever having a chance to melt and make it to the rivers.”

As we speak, right on cue, here comes the wind again, as reliable as bad news from the campaign trail. We’re all doomed, some say. Proper fucked.

Well, the world ends for someone every day, yeah? A whole bunch of someones, most days. I’m not sure it helps to dwell overlong on when your turn might be coming round. Better, maybe, to spend that time seeing to it that the other guy’s parade is the one that gets rained on.

Arise, ye pris’ners of … Hollywood?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

The New York Times is a little short on May Day news, surprise, surprise.

Other than one piece about the French, who remain pissed off about having their retirement-age goalposts shifted two years (To age 64! Zut alors!), I found exactly one labor story on the website.

It concerned the struggles of — wait for it! — screenwriters.

Screenwriters?

Now, I don’t mean to make light of screenwriters’ issues. They remind me very much of the issues Your Humble Narrator faced as a free-range rumormonger. So, up the rebels, etc.

Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to make today’s singing of “The Internationale” the version from the 1981 Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton vehicle “Reds,” which I have liberated in the name of the people from YouTube, which is owned by Google.

The writers credited for the flick are Beatty and Trevor Griffiths, according to IMDB, which is owned by Amazon.

And you’d better hope Apple TV flogged Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the writers room into cramming a shit-ton of “Ted Lasso” episodes into the can. According to Mother Times:

Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.

“Even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.” Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.