Category: TV

Alien nation

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
A Wall won’t stop him. Her. It. They. Whatevs.

Ordinarily I’d be mildly excited about “Alien: Earth,” Noah “Fargo” Hawley’s take on Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial horror franchise come home to roost.

But don’t we have enough real monsters down here already?

A handful of corporations battling over the remains of a dying planet? Check. Gazillionaire techlords acting on their every whim without let or hindrance? Roger that. The nice robot is your friend? Oh, hell, yeah.

Same goes for “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s vision of the spooky daughter from “The Addams Family.” Steve Buscemi joins the cast this season as an educator with a whole Edgar Allen Poe thing going on. And while I love me some Tim Burton, Steve Buscemi, E.A. Poe and Charles Addams, not necessarily in that order, well … see paragraph no. 2 above.

Our real-life spooks are hellbent on robbing me of my sweet girlish laughter, is what. The sonsabitches will do that to us, if we let them. I’ve had to add some old Dan O’Neill comics to my bathroom library to remind me ’twas ever thus.

Dan O’Neill in the dock, unrepentant.

Corporate swine, gazillionaire techlords, and the politicians who serve them deserve all the mockery we can muster and then some. Just ask O’Neill, who went to war with Walt Disney Productions Back in the Day®. Disney proved a remarkably humorless and implacable foe, for an outfit that made bank on the antics of a cartoon rodent and his pals, but O’Neill kept on slugging, a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.

He lost, of course. But it wasn’t a knockout; the judges had to turn themselves inside out to declare Disney the champeen. And even in victory the Mouse was left coughing up a couple mil’ in legal-fee corpuscles.

Forty-five years later, thanks to the Innertubes, parody, satire — and yes, outright mockery — can spread a whole lot further and faster than a handful of underground comic books, if we’re not all too busy clutching our pearls on our fainting couches. Follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and “South Park.” Hit ’em where it hurts with the ol’ one-two — the hee and the haw.

I don’t think Dan will be sprawled on his couch watching “Alien: Earth,” if only because it’s streaming on FX/Hulu, which is owned by — wait for it — Disney.

Between you and me, I hope O’Neill and the other surviving Air Pirates are busy working up a fresh parody of our modern monsters. Are you ready for Mickey Xenomorph? Game over, man … game over!

Dead air

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 52 Comments
KRCC is just one of the three public broadcasters we support.

CPR, we hardly knew ye.

The Right got another zopilote feather in its asshat with the news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will cease operations in 2026.

What’s the problem? Why, money, of course. There’s just not enough to go around! Writes The New York Times:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been in the cross hairs of Republicans for decades. Conservative policy advocates, legislators and presidents argued persistently that the public shouldn’t be responsible for financing media they perceived as having a liberal bias. But repeated attempts to defund public broadcasters failed, until this year.

Congress voted last month to claw back more than $500 million of the organization’s annual funding in a narrow vote that played out along party lines. That forced the corporation into a cash crunch.

Hey, $500 million here, $500 million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Money for stuff like — oh, I don’t know — say, a $30 million military parade to give Felonious Punk a chubby on his birthday. Or $1 billion to refurb’ a Qatari jet that he will take with him to his “library,” which will be a walk-in closet full of fuck books, golf scorecards (see the Fiction stacks), and classified documents (homeless dude thumbing through them whilst on the shitter).

And then there’s the tab for flying this fat cunt around the world to visit his golf courses, where the locals gather to jeer, snigger, and call him a fat cunt. We can call him a fat cunt right here at home for free. See? I just did it. Didn’t cost one of the pennies we won’t be making in 2026.

Maybe that’s why the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got it in the neck. No pennies for that crowd.

The Wrath of Con

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
“You did what?”

Is Khan Noonien Singh running Starfleet in this timeline?

No, he’d have been deported to the Klingon Empire by now. The braying asshole whose shysters just extorted $16 million from Paramount is merely a student of his methods:

“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.”

To boldly go … where? To the bank for a cashier’s check, it seems. Hold the phasers, drop the shields, piss on the dilithium crystals and call in the Tribbles.

Beam me up, Scotty — there’s no intelligent life down here.

Summer simmer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Scattered sprinkles, widespread haze, sunny and hot, sez the forecast for the first day of summer.

It was already 75° when we got up at 5:30 to greet the first day of summer. Helluva note when you open the doors and windows to let the cool morning air stream in and the air conditioning clicks on.

The wind was likewise in business, too, so Herself and I decided to go for a short trail run instead of a ride. We’d spent a couple hours yesterday cycling through the foothills and saw all the quail, from solos to pairs to coveys with adults herding thumb-sized offspring.

Today was my first run in a couple weeks so I wasn’t exactly crushing it. Still, it felt good to be lumbering along without all that specialized kit and machinery. Just shorts, shirt, and shoes. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall down.

CenturyLink fell down yesterday. Or Lumen did. AT&T? Whatever the hell that outfit is calling itself these days. You should’ve heard what we and the rest of its customers nationwide were calling it yesterday when it went tits up for the better part of quite some time and even the minimalist corporate website vanished like civil rights in an ICE storm.

We’ve been trained by bitter experience not to bother fencing with CenturyLumen’s chatbots and “live agents.” Instead we used our Verizon iPhones as hotspots and never missed a beat, even streaming a couple episodes from season three of “The Bear” as preparation for season four, which kicks off June 25.

Speaking of cussing, anybody who thinks I swear overmuch in the kitchen should check out “The Bear.” That crowd makes me sound like Nate Bargatze doing crowd work at a Southern Baptist picnic, even when I accidentally oversalt the arugula pesto, like I did last night.

It wasn’t quite like eating seaweed straight from the ocean, but it wasn’t exactly Michelin-star-level dining either, chef.

Aqua fina

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Not a lot … but we’ll take it.

I just searched my 2025 training log for “rain” and came up empty. Just like our rain gauge.

Until this morning.

As we began puttering around the Compound, getting our Sunday started, Herself said she thought she heard sprinkles tippy-tapping the skylights. But I said naw, warn’t nothin’ in the forecast.

But suddenly there it was, on the walkway. Not much, but it’s all good, amirite?

As news goes it certainly beats a hummer I saw in The New York Times this morning about some bloated sack of shit whose claim to fame — beyond boinking Madge Toilet Grout, that is — was asking President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine why he wasn’t wearing a suit to his ambush by — pardon, “meeting with” — that other, better-known, bloated sack of shit, who also gets too much press.

I got asked a similar question once, by a supervisor, during a performance review. It was majorly annoying, as I had been busting my hump for that two-bit cage-liner, which couldn’t keep its city and copy desks staffed, and they should’ve been delighted that I showed up for work at all, much less wearing a button-down shirt and tie.

Shit, they were lucky I didn’t show up butt-nekkid, knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk. But I was, after all, a professional. I was always fully clothed.

I fled that rag as soon as I could find another job. Any old asshole can wear a tie, and plenty of them do. Especially on TV.