Category: Things that suck

Right in the eggs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Cool with a side of clouds.

Whew. Looks like I picked a good week to go on a news fast. These pendejos are pitching fastballs. At this pace there won’t be a wall without shit running down it before Valentine’s Day. A lot of it won’t stick, but it’s gonna pile up. The forecast calls for deep doo.

My news fast coincided with a cold snap that kept me off the bike. I don’t object to cycling in the 30s if the sun’s out, but when Tōnatiuh abdicates in favor of Ehecatl, it’s time to go for a run.

Thing is, I’m not a runner. Not really. A runner certainly wouldn’t call me one. Especially if s/he’d caught me at it.

I can pretend for 45 minutes but that’s about it. And that doesn’t burn a lot of daylight for a fella trying to avoid the doomscrolling.

Still, I managed. For about four days. Who can avert his or her eyes while passing a domestic disturbance in daylight or an unshaded window at night? This is like driving past a five-car crash without checking the gutters for rolling heads.

So I eased back in, slowly. A little Kevin Drum. Then a bit of Charlie Pierce. This is akin to reading the police report, if Joseph Wambaugh wrote it. The Atlantic, for a soupçon of button-down viewing with alarm.

Finally, I hit the hard stuff. The New York Times. Holy shit, etc.

I hope the rubes who elected this bozo are enjoying the shitshow. Looks like it’ll be a good long while before he gets those egg prices down.

Little pink houses

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
For you and me.

From Los Angeles, via The New York Times:

Some evacuees, like Lila King, have ended up staying in their vehicles.

Ms. King, 75, has been bouncing between motels and sleeping in her truck with her 40-year-old son since they were displaced by the Eaton fire.

Ms. King recently had surgery after she broke several ribs in a fall, and the nights sleeping in her truck have left her aching. She said she has been living off tacos from a nearby gas station, and wondering when, if ever, she will be able to return to her mobile home in Altadena, the unincorporated community at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains that was devastated by the Eaton Fire.

“We’re trying to get some help to get a place,” she said. “I’m worried.”

Ain’t that America?

King me, bitches

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
“Are we done? I have a 10 a.m. tee time.”

I don’t know about you folks, but every time a judge wanted to sentence me for something, I had to, like, be in court, an’ shit.

Tell me again about the whole “rule of law” thing. And then show me the tab for treating Nazi Jesus like he was some senile old fool who just “forgot” that he tried to walk out of the store with the whole country in his pocket.

Fuck me. Arlo Guthrie got tossed in the clink and fined $50 for illegally dumping garbage in Stockbridge, Mass. Nazi Jesus took a dump on the entire United States of America and he’ll be cheating on the front nine before noon Florida time.

And come Jan. 20, he’ll take his act on the road, to the White House.

Just another day at Alice’s Restaurant for this guy. He can get anything he wants. Excepting Alice.

CenturyStink

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
When a modem becomes a no-dem.

Our Innertubes punctured at 11 a.m. Friday, a flat that that didn’t get fixed until 8 p.m. So that was … fun.

Actually, it was hardly an annoyance at all, barring the dealing with CenturyLink “customer service,” a maze of domestic bots and overseas humans whose basic American is much better than my Hindi but still something of a guessing game, tech-support-wise.

Herself wrangled the bots with her iPhone while I dealt with the Subcontinent on mine, and as per usual she brought home the bacon. So I got to tell my guy, “James,” that yes, there was an outage in our area and it would not be resolved until 11 p.m. Ever the newsman, even in retirement. I should’ve sent him a bill.

Anyway, even when it works, we have shit Innertubes in our little corner of The Duck! City (“Gateway to Los Lunas”).

We pay top dollar for bottom-of-the-barrel DSL, same price as in Bibleburg for half the speed, and it inches ever higher from month to month because of course it does.

Our Actiontec C1000A modem-router dates to 2012, making it two years older than the MacBook Pro I’m using to write this. It is of course “retired” — the Actiontec, not my Mac — and I don’t see any point in replacing either device because El Rancho Pendejo apparently isn’t wired for the zoom-zoom all you fiber-optic types take for granted.

When the place was built in 1970 the telephone pedestal box was installed at the east end of the property, as far from the house itself as it is possible to get without actually being in the arroyo. The wiring to said box may have been upgraded over the past five decades; the wiring to the house has not.

Thus we limp along with download speeds ranging from 6 to 12 mbps, and uploads under 1 mbps.

So, when we lose our DSL, well — ain’t no thang. Because our iPhones — with maybe two bars from Verizon down here at the bottom of the cul-de-sac — turn into personal hotspots that work just as well as our DSL router-modem. When it works.

So, winning? I guess. In a losing sort of way.