‘Yeah, but it’s a dry heat. …’

July 28, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

The Rio Gonzo, as seen last Friday by Your Humble Narrator.

What a difference a day makes. Or even a few short hours.

On Friday I rode down to the bosque because why the hell not? I was sick of all my usual foothills routes and wanted to log some respectable mileage for a change, so off I went.

The New Albion Privateer sails the Paseo del Bosque.

Also sick of its usual route was the Rio Grande, which has buggered off to parts unknown. You can tell because rivers don’t usually sport tire tracks, not even if Jeebus is driving.

I knew the Rio had run dry since I last saw it back in April. But it’s one thing to know and another to see.

Anyway. The dearth of river notwithstanding, it was a lovely day, if warmish — 81° when I got a regrettably late start, 10 degrees hotter when I finished — and then Thor woke from his nap, got his clouds in a row, and began swinging Mjölnir like he meant business. Hammer time!

Boom! Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch in less time than it takes to type “Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch.” The National Weather Service told the Urinal that 1.74 inches fell at Indian School and Moon in a half hour, with near-record winds that peaked at 78 mph.

Photo liberated from what remains of the National Weather Service.

I mean, that storm flat parked itself overhead and let go, like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

“Remind me to turn off the sprinkler system,” I said to Herself. And it stayed off. Y’can’t touch this.

• • •

Now, of course, Loki is back on the job. Regular heat advisories from 1 to 8 p.m., high 90s to low triple digits.

No records set, as far as I know, but 9 in the a.m. is starting to feel a little late for the twice-weekly Geezer Rides. A second bottle goes in the seat-tube cage. Attacks are few and far between.

And mowing the lawn post-ride, like I did yesterday? That’s just stupid.

Having a lawn in the desert is stupid in and of itself, but having one and mowing it noonish moves the bar up a few notches.

Still, there’s the lawn, growing, and it won’t mow itself. I’ve been watching. That shit does not happen.

Maybe what I need is a bicycle with rotary blades attached. A velo-mower. And an early start. I could create a whole new thang and a magazine to chronicle its adventurers.

Nah. That’s even dumber than having a lawn in the desert.

• • •

Speaking of greenery stuffed into the ground, it seems that we may finally be getting the fabled fiber optic here in the cul-de-sac.

The Company Formerly Known As CenturyLink, a.k.a. CenturyTel, Qwest, et al., now calling itself Lumen Technologies, has provided our internet service for ages, even before we moved here in 2014. But for some reason Duck! City DSL is twice the price for half the speed we enjoyed in Bibleburg.

Even there, the tales of comically inept customer service were endless. Once we had a modem croak on us and The Company agreed to send us a new one. In that they proved better than their word. They sent us five of them, one after another, like Red Chinese soldiers marching to B-burg from Beijing over the bodies of their comrades.

Miss Mia loved her some Qwest modems on a chilly day in Bibleburg.

I may still have one in an old-tech box around here somewhere. I’m fairly certain I brought one with us when we moved because, hey, you never know, amirite? Miss Mia Sopaipilla loved toasting her po-po on one of those Qwest-branded Motorola jobbers Back in the Day®.

But I digress. We were talking about getting some fiber in our digital diet.

The water-company boyos were out in the cul-de-sac yesterday afternoon, spraying their blue cryptograms and hieroglyphics ever’ whichaway, so I asked one what was up. Thus I learned that the diggers are coming to bring us The Future, which we had in the B-burg a dozen or so years ago before time-traveling back to the stone knives and copper wire of Albuquerque.

“Take photos of your property before they get started,” the water dude advised. And I followed his advice. At least three of the companies charged with bringing fiber optic to Duck!Burg have been slapped with temporary stop-work orders after reports that they made a shambles of various properties.

I won’t lie. It’ll be great to have a faster, cheaper on-ramp to the Infobahn. But be careful what you wish for. The news of the day — a river of sand in Duck!Burg, shit monsoons in DeeCee — is already bad enough at a piddling 13.5 Mbps.

And it comes in a whole lot faster if it’s breaking just beyond the office window, where some rando rocking a backhoe is uprooting your sewer line.

Slinging in the rain

July 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

New Mexico has the *best* clouds, swear to Dog.

Looks like I picked the right day to sleep in.

I woke up way too early — 3 a.m. — then rolled over and went back to sleep until 6. Miss Mia was not amused, and said so, loudly, otherwise I might still be asleep even now.

Except Herself would’ve thundered in eventually to kick me up the hole, because she is a working woman and has a full day ahead involving the making of money, the care and feeding of the 401(k), retention of health insurance, and like that there. Some slacker is in charge of breakfast, which clearly was not making itself.

So up, up, I got, and set about my morning chores, which do not dollar up on the hoof nearly as nicely.

As I was emptying the litter box, making coffee, toasting bread, cooking oatmeal, brewing tea, medicating Miss Mia, and so on, I was thinking in terms of where to ride today. Forecast was for a slight chance of rain after noon, so I was considering a medium-long outing to the Morning Star Grocery and back. Haven’t been out there all year.

And then it started raining.

Well. Shit. Lucky me. If I hadn’t slept in, I’d have been out in that rain, dodging swings of Thor’s hammer instead of kicks from Herself’s tiny sandals.

• • •

Speaking of hard rains a-fallin’, I don’t expect there’s much that could go wrong — cough, cough, “Armageddon,” cough, cough — with helping Saudi Arabia plunge its bloody paws into Pandora’s nuclear box.

Writes Charles P. Pierce:

To the outside observer, there’s no reason to trust either end of this deal. The American side is being run by grifters and incompetents. The Saudi side is being run by people who have settled accounts with bone saws and beheadings and who also are sharper about money than the Americans ever will be. The idea that the current Saudi regime will be able to resist the temptations of enriching uranium without using it to build weapons feels laughable. I wouldn’t trust any government on earth that far, let alone an authoritarian theocracy with murder in its heart.

Alas, Babylon, etc. The Gospel according to Frederic Brown would seem germane here, if young Harry Graham were the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and not a bit slow. I take little solace from any headline that includes the null phrase, “Trump says. …”

The green, gobblin’

June 19, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

“Fuck … out of gas, and I don’t even have any quarters for the car wash.”

Best jokes so far about Art O’DeDeal pissing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool:

“It looks like they’re brewing Yodas in there.” — David Roth, Defector

“Some poor unsuspecting person is going to trip and fall into that stuff and become a @Marvel supervillain.” — a commenter unearthed by Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place.

Actually, it’s too late for that: Marvel Comics already has the Green Goblin, one of Spider-Man’s earliest adversaries. Dude experimented on himself with an unstable chemical and developed an alternate, evil personality that became the president of the United States — twice.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it would explain a lot.

Flag on the play

May 23, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Lady Liberty? Naw, just another headless dummy.

Anybody else feel as though they should tuck Old Glory away and fly the Jolly Roger this Memorial Day weekend?

Whenever our fellow Americans get their bib-’alls in a bunch and saddle us with some featherbedding fascist who’s only passing through to rob the savings and loan, poke anything with a pulse, and then burn the whole town down to its foundations, why, I think about how refreshing it would be to rock the hammer and sickle, skull and crossbones, or an upside-down stars and stripes on national holidays.

Someone up the road a ways is doing the latter, perhaps in response to a neighbor who did likewise during the previous administration. A quiet little tit for tat. Haven’t heard any raised voices or gunfire yet, anyway.

I don’t know who I’d be trying to impress with any kind of alternative flag display, though. El Rancho Pendejo sits at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and is seen mostly by the people who live here, the mailman, various tradespersons, and the drivers of a steady stream of delivery vans, though that torrent has become more of a trickle as the economy struggles with a distinct kink in its hose.

It all seems mostly performative, anyway. Like the mouth-breathers flying Trump flags from porch and pickup. Lets you know whom to visit at 2 in the morning come The Revolution, to be sure. But they’re starting to look like an endangered species in any event. Fingers crossed.

Back when we were new to the Greater Patty Jewett Yacht & Gun Club Neighborhood in Bibleburg, our next-door neighbor Marv, a veteran, explained that he flew the flag to make sure that “those guys” (his words) didn’t think they were the only ones entitled to do so.

Maybe that’s the example to follow. Memorial Day isn’t about “those guys.” If it were, we’d all be flying pirate flags for sure.

Buckle up!

May 22, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

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.