Category: Things that suck

e-DWI

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 38 Comments
The operator of this gas-powered scooter was appallingly sober.

In less than a week after rentable electric scooters hit the mean streets of Albuquerque, we’ve collected our first e-DWI. ¡Salud!

I suppose we could look on the bright side here. Had our early adopter not gotten popped for allegedly e-scooting under the influence — the cops say she got all beered up at Marble Brewery and had planned to hit at least one more grog shop downtown — she probably would’ve clambered into her land yacht and driven home to Belen, an hour or so to the south, depending on how many ditches and medians one inspects en route.

Or tried to, anyway. ¿Quien sabes? Having had some small experience in these matters I expect it’s a lot easier to hide one’s impairment from the John Laws behind the tinted windows of a four-wheeled Ford than on one of their two-wheeled throwaways.

It’ll all come out in the wash

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Well, I’d say that load is done.

The Wall Street Journal and Daring Fireball consider the clusterfuck that is the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Ho, ho, etc.

Samsung didn’t give a rat’s ass about their top-loading clothes washers exploding like land mines in laundry rooms. What makes anyone think they’ll lose sleep over $2,000 smartphones that snap like Olive Garden bread sticks when the rubes try to fold them?

We owned a Samsung top-loader once and it became the subject of a Radio Free Dogpatch episode. After dogpaddling across that customer-service vale of tears I wouldn’t buy a life jacket from the sonsabitches if I were standing on the stern of a sinking ship in the North Atlantic, surrounded by sharks wearing bibs with my mugshot on them.

But I’m sure somebody would. And so is Samsung.

• Editor’s note: Speaking of washers, Kevin Drum explains that tariffs caused Americans to spend 12 percent more on these devices than they might have had Beelzebozo kept his big bazoo out of things he doesn’t understand, which is mostly everything. MAGA, etc.

April drool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
Yesterday’s air-quality report from the City of Albuquerque.

I lay low for April Fool’s Day. It’s gotten to be kind of like the St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve of comedy — not for serious funnymen. Funnypersons? Persons of funny?

My favorite April Fool’s gag may be the time the Gazette caught the Greeley Tribune napping. It was in the late Seventies, and some wisenheimers on staff faked up a photo of an El Paso County pickle farmer inspecting a bumper crop (reporter Don Branning in a planter’s hat, examining a plump dill tied to a tree across the street from the newspaper).

We ran it on the Metro front, then put it on The Associated Press wire just for giggles. To our astonishment, the Tribune picked it up and ran the shot on its Farm page despite the photo credit, which read something like, “GT photo by Aprylle Foole.”

The desk jockey who made that call clearly was not a local boy with shitcaked bootheels. The Tribune is in Weld County, one of the richest agricultural counties east of the Rockies, the state’s top producer of grain, sugar beets and cattle.

Not pickles, though. El Paso County had all the pickle farms in Colorado.

Here in New Mexico the ash and juniper are providing all the comedy, if your idea of a good laugh involves watching some poor sod’s nose run like an irrigation ditch with a busted headgate.

I pretended to be a runner yesterday afternoon and came home with an enraged snotlocker, a condition that persists this morning. Snot funny, man.