Just farting around

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The Big Fella must be letting Baby Jeebus fingerpaint again.

One thing about cycling in the desert — it’s tough to reacclimate to the chilly weather that even residents of the fabulous Duke City must endure from time to time.

Checking the training log yesterday I noticed that I’d been on foot a lot lately, either hiking or jogging (yes, I’ve started that back up again, in an extremely cautious, limited, and sissified fashion).

I seem to have a lot of bikes around here for some reason, so I thought I’d grab one and go for a spin as a change of pace. But what to wear?

All my kit is about a thousand years old, but at least there’s plenty of it, so sorting through the pile burns a bit of daylight, if there is any.

Old favorites included a long-sleeved Descente jersey that dates to the Nineties, some lightweight Pearl Izumi tights that are nearly as old, and a pair of threadbare Smartwool socks. Items from this millennium included bib shorts and a short-sleeved jersey, both from Voler; long-fingered Pearl Izumi gloves; a Sugoi tuque; and my Shimano SHXM700-S G Gore-Tex clodhoppers.

It was an imperfect ensemble, as per usual. In addition to looking as though I had just rolled out of a time machine I was underdressed for downhills and overdressed for climbs.

Still, it beat the mortal nuts out of hanging around the office awaiting dispatches like the one Herself just delivered, about how the White House staff has taken to burning incense in quantity to mask the nostril-searing stench of Il Douche’s fast-food-and-fear farts.

The Reich stuff

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
“We’ll be right back after this message from Trump 2024.”

In our second installment of “Hey, He Can’t Do That, Can He?” we have Ed Kilgore making a case for … maybe. Not without help, anyway.

Writing for New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Kilgore concedes that “nobody knows for sure” how long Adolf Twitler will keep contesting the 2020 election results.

But Kilgore breaks down the process by which this GOP-enabled defiance may devolve “from sour grapes to dangerous delusion.”

The good news, writes Kilgore, is that “the odds of Trump being able to pursue a 2020 election challenge into 2021, with his party at the federal and state levels unanimously behind him, are very limited.”

“There’s almost certainly not enough evidence of electoral irregularities to overturn Biden’s victories within individual states, and not enough raw political and judicial power for Republicans to defy federal and state laws and pull off an electoral coup early next year,” he adds.

Plus, if Il Douche wants to have another grab at the brass swastika in 2024, as has been widely discussed, well … how can we miss him if he won’t go away?

Kilgore concludes: “In other words, he can’t play Napoleon returning from Elba in triumph until he accepts his prior exile. The real deadline for Trump’s surrender to reality is the moment leaders of his party throw up their hands and cry: Enough!”

“Ich bin ein Loser!” Achtung, baby.

From one pilot to another

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Harold Joseph O’Grady, from the 1941 edition of the Seminole yearbook.

Behold The Colonel, before he was a colonel, or even a pilot.

Harold Joseph O’Grady of Foley, Florida, was a freshman at the University of Florida in 1941. By February of ’42, he was a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps, having enlisted at MacDill Field “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law.”

He stayed on a little longer than that. The old man retired as a full bird in 1972, when I was a freshman at Adams State College in Alamosa, getting grades that were even worse than his had been. And mind you, I was taking stoner classes, not elementary physics, organic chemistry, and motorized artillery.

I didn’t last long in college, either, but not because I was going to war to save the world from fascism. I was going to be a push-broom pilot, saving banks from stanks.

Oh, well. As Will Rogers observed, “We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”

Hey, he can’t DO THAT … can he?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Between now and whenever — or if — some less unhinged person takes charge of the Oval Office, we’ll take note of an occasional viewing-with-alarm story to be lumped into the category, “Hey, he can’t DO THAT … can he?”

Our inaugural entry raises the question of whether Adolf Twitler’s tiny little asshole of a mouth might excrete some of the nation’s deepest, darkest secrets once its operator has been forcibly returned to private life.

“All presidents exit the office with valuable national secrets in their heads, including the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, intelligence-gathering capabilities — including assets deep inside foreign governments — and the development of new and advanced weapon systems,” writes Shane Harris of The Washington Post.

“Not only does Trump have a history of disclosures, he checks the boxes of a classic counterintelligence risk: He is deeply in debt and angry at the U.S. government, particularly what he describes as the ‘deep state’ conspiracy that he believes tried to stop him from winning the White House in 2016 and what he falsely claims is an illegal effort to rob him of reelection.”

The good news, according to the article, is that (a) he hasn’t been paying attention during briefings, and (2) the Espionage Act might close his barn door … if only after all Four Horses of the Apocalypse have already galloped through it.

So we got that going for us, which is nice.

Poachers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Continuing with our food theme, we consider the tale of three hungry fellas who got busted for boiling a pair of chickens in one of the geothermal features at Yellowstone National Park.

What, there wasn’t a Chik-fil-A in that neck of the peckerwoods? The National Park Service must be too busy kowtowing to the e-bike lobby to take care of important business. When Bubba has to boil his own birds at a campout, goddamnit all to hell anyway, the terrorists win.

Anyway, it proved a pricey meal. According to The Guardian, the three were banned from the park and received fines ranging from $540 to $1,250, plus probation.

And two did a short stretch in the stony lonesome, where the dining is anything but al fresco and the menu less inventive.