Happy birthday to Herself

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
Dig those crazy puffballs.

The gods served up a cotton-ball sky for Herself’s mumble-mumble-th birthday this morning.

I immediately felt a kinship with this piece because she’s still cute
and he looks like shit.

They won’t be there for long — the forecast calls for gusty winds out of the SSW as Thor breaks out the old hammer for a little light touch-up work on Colorado.

As The Bug® still holds sway over the land, and we have not yet had our shots, the birthday festivities will be muted, as they were last year.

Herself and a colleague did manage to enjoy a socially distant cocktail and appetizers on some uptown bistro’s patio yesterday afternoon while I stayed home and cooked dinner (turkey tacos and arroz verde).

The other day we went shopping for a birdbath to keep the juncos hydrated and stumbled across the Dia de los Muertos talavera pictured above, a bride and groom sitting on a bench looking slightly stupified, probably from strong drink and/or unbridled lust.

Vato’s got a ticket to ride. Orrrrale.

As we both have March birthdays, it was a no-brainer — boom, two birthdays, one present, no waiting.

The couple matches the cyclist we have by the front door, so, bonus. You may remember El Señor from our Interbike coverage in days gone by.

Meanwhile, the phone rings off the hook it no longer has with calls from well-wishers. Later we will nosh on some delicious snacks and watch something silly on TV.

Par-tee, baybee. Not even The Bug® can stop us.

The more things change. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 36 Comments
“No, I don’t want any Girl Scout cookies. I want to get the hell out of here.”

We popped round to the Dark Tower yesterday to visit Herself the Elder.

The weather being cooperative, we decided to make it our first bicycle drive-by of the new year.

The State had recently made some noise about changes to its protocol for visiting residents of long-term-care facilities, but for our purposes, that’s about all the announcement amounted to — noise.

After looking over the four-page document we decided that for everyone involved, the simplest, least bothersome way to enjoy a little face time (not FaceTime) with HtE remains peering through a closed window and speaking via phone.

Scratch race

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
“Where’s everybody going?”

Calendar, schmalendar: Herself got out yesterday for her first bike ride of 2021, so it must be spring.

It wasn’t definitively springlike here in the Duke City — but still, arm warmers and knickers beat long sleeves and tights for the first week of March.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla did not join us. She prefers her indoor exercise apparatus.

Going to town from the desert

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments

Triggered by a listener’s letter, Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio rang up Phoenix scribe Jason P. Woodbury, and the two of them demythologize desert life a bit by trading observations about a few Southwestern communities — among them the Duke City, home to Your Humble Narrator.

Layne says our town “has a reputation as sort of the ugly stepbrother of Santa Fe,” which he argues lends it a skosh more soul than its pricey neighbor to the north. A working-class, salt-of-the-earth vibe, don’t you know.

Albuquerque “is sort of famous for eight of nine cars around you in the process of falling apart all at the same stoplight,” he says.

The ninth, of course, is stolen.

Also up for review: Palm Springs (Woodbury likes hanging out at the Ace Hotel) and Sedona (Woodbury’s a fan; Layne, um, not so much).

“Sedona’s like a vortex of intelligence, you know? And it all disappears as soon as you get there,” he says.

R.I.P., Tony Hendra

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

“It is the job of a satirist to make people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.”

That was Tony Hendra, and he knew whereof he spoke. Hendra, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Thursday, helped make a lot of people very uncomfortable indeed with his work for National Lampoon and Spy magazine, among others.

Had it not been for the trailblazing Lampoon some of us would have laughed a great deal less over the past half century. The magazine had a nut-crushing stable of funnymen, among them Hendra himself. And its “Radio Dinner,” “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” and “Lemmings” led directly to “Saturday Night Live,” “Animal House,” “This Is Spinal Tap,” and the “Vacation” movie franchise.

Hendra’s “Magical Misery Tour” was a brutal takedown of John Lennon using Lennon’s own words from an interview in Rolling Stone. I bet John wasn’t laughing when he heard that one.

Hendra may not be as familiar to you as Chevy Chase, John Belushi, P.J. O’Rourke, or Christopher Guest. But he was right in there among them, one of the ha-ha mechanics throwing shit, just to see what might stick, and to what, or whom. Making people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.

One of his last smiles before the disease took those from him came when he learned the results of the last presidential election, said his wife, Carla.

“He was an immigrant who sailed from London into N.Y. Harbor on the SS United States after being given free passage in exchange for performing stand-up,” she told The New York Times. “What was to be a two-week visit became 57 years, because he believed in the promise of America.”