Category: Things that suck

Be Worst

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Remember, kids, cutting and pasting other people’s work
is for bloggers only.

From Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog:

• Melania Trump’s “Be Best” blather was apparently another cut-and-paste job, liberating the content of a document released by the previous administration’s Federal Trade Commission in 2014. The writing, it is hard. I know, believe me, I know.

• While Ms. Trump was Being Best, her husband and his pals were being the other thing. Jeffy Bob Jimmie Joe Sessions plans to separate immigrant parents and children because, you know, “the best people,” etc., et al., and so on and so forth. The Big Orange Cheese, meanwhile, wants to slash more than $15 billion in previously approved spending, more than half of it to come from the Children’s Health Insurance Program, because children can’t vote, buy real estate, or suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

• And finally, according to The New Yorker, Eric T. Schneiderman has resigned as New York attorney general to spend more time with his family and work on a memoir entitled, “Shut the Fuck Up And Get Me Another Drink, You Whore (Before I Slap You Again).”

Losing Face(book)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

“No sir, I don’t like it.”

Mr. Horse was nobody’s fool. I bet he never signed up for a Facebook account. You may argue that this is because he’s a cartoon character, but then so is Il Douche, and he’s all over Twitter. There, I’ve run rings around you logically.

A status update from Mike Keefe at the Colorado Independent.

Over at Wired, Brian Barrett argues that Facebook “has been a poor steward of your data, asking more and more of you without giving you more in return — and often not even bothering to ask. It has repeatedly failed to keep up its side of the deal, and expressed precious little interest in making good.”

And at CNET, Sharon Profis goes a step further, recommending that users cash out of Mark Zuckerberg’s casino, and showing them how to do it.

I croaked my Facebook account some time back after not using it in a good long while, and I haven’t used Twitter since the new year began. Snapchat, Instagram and LinkedIn are likewise safely in the DogMobile’s rear-view mirror.

Some critics will sniff and observe that I’m simply antisocial, and what keen observers they are, too. But as Profis notes, there are plenty of other ways to stay in touch with friends (texting, email, chatting over a cup of coffee).

Why, you might even start a blog with all the free time you’ll suddenly be enjoying. Be sure to send us a link. No, not on Facebook.

• Late update: Want to erase yourself from the Internet? It ain’t easy, says Abby Ohlheiser.

• Even later update: At The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi recommends deleting Facebook at the very least. “The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica are an important wakeup call that we are all living with the sociopolitical consequences of surveillance capitalism. We are, I think, at a critical moment where the degree of corporate surveillance to which we are all subjected can either get much better, or much worse. So, I would urge you to extricate yourself from social media as much as you can.”

On my uppers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
Duke City as seen from the Sandia foothills.

I piddled away a bunch of daylight early yesterday doing bits of this and that, and come 10 a.m. I was in the mood for the great outdoors but not quite sure how to approach it.

Finally I loaded a Gregory day pack, pulled on my old Vasque Clarion boots and went for a short hike in the Sandia foothills. I have some marching to do next month, at Interbike, and it never hurts to refresh the old muscle memory, especially old muscles and old memory.

Shoes for industry.

Wise choice, as it turns out. On the way home my decrepit hiking boots performed what Herself, a former outdoor-equipment retailer, called “a de-lam’.” Both soles basically crumbled and peeled away at the heels.

“Sonofabitch,” I observed. “I’ve only had these boots since the elves made them for that down-on-his-luck cobbler, and what a steal they were, too. Or was it Elvis? Anyway, curses, etc.”

So home I flapped, like a nattily dressed hobo. And now I get to buy some new boots. I feel happier than Carrie Bradshaw with a Manolo Blahnik catalog.

Ice, ice, baby (redux)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments
Chillin’ back at the crib.

Ordinarily this space is reserved for displaying my irritation with the world at large. Today I highlight my own blithering idiocy.

I stuffed it into some trailside cholla on a loose, mildly technical singletrack descent yesterday, collecting a few jillion thorns in my left hand and spraining that wrist.

Naturally, I was riding a drop-bar bike on terrain better suited to flat bars and fat tires. I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway.

The bike is fine; thanks for asking. But that left glove is a total loss.