Bingo!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Learn Big Numbers as you Play.” Or not.

Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times cranks out another keeper about the unholy combination of church and casino that is the Il Douche re-election campaign.

This dude alone is worth the price of a subscription to Mother Times. He throws a wide loop and brings ’em back alive.

A Democratic tech strategist describes the campaign website as a casino, “purposefully built to keep gamblers inside and at the table … trapping people inside an ecosystem of dangerous misinformation, conspiracy theories, and grievance politics. And it’s doing so while making the experience as fun and exciting as possible.”

In the nation’s “political churches,” meanwhile, a survey of hymn-singing white Protestants finds “clergy speech is driving up the religious significance” of Il Douche. In short, a strong plurality of respondents believe this gibbering gobshite was anointed by the Lord to be our Leader.

While elite “right wing media are having a profound effect on public opinion, serving to insulate Trump supporters,” the authors write, the process is also “built and sustained from the bottom up. That is, political churches, among Republicans especially, reinforce the argumentation that is also coming from above.”

I consider this another solid argument for taxing churches. Uncle Sugar gets a cut of what I earn for preaching my gospel. You want to play too, padre? Ante up, sucker, the pot’s light again.

Welfare check

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Herself chats with her mom jailhouse style,
on the phone, through a pane of glass.

We swung by the Dark Tower yesterday, bearing gifts.

Herself the Elder had requested huevos rancheros for Mothers Day. So we ordered up the takeout from Weck’s and ran it on by.

“You’re spoiled!” exclaimed a staffer. Dern tootin’. As spoiled as one can be in an assisted-living facility under lockdown in plague time, anyway.

Ain’t nothin’ a couple sacks of mulch and a cat statue can’t fix.

Afterward we continued a ongoing backyard-cleanup project. I’m a lifelong asthmatic with a personal, portable plague of allergies, the most severe of which is to yardwork.

But the space was starting to look like a tumbledown Tinkertoy tower of rusty playground equipment, a bullet-riddled ’63 Rambler American on blocks, and a three-legged pit bull with bowel issues would actually constitute improvements.

So, yeah. Yardwork.

Up north, where the yards are 35 acres, my man Hal forwards a Colorado Public Broadcasting piece about how gig workers there — including him — are getting the runaround from the plague-jiggered unemployment system, such as it is.

“This is exactly what happened to me when I applied,” he said. “I apparently need to call there. But of course cannot get through.”

Well, you can always get through here, bub. What’s going on out there in Greater Dogpatch? Are you digging holes and filling them in again? Redistributing wealth? Fetching takeout to shut-ins? As the Year of the Plague drags on toward Memorial Day, we want to hear how our readers are getting by. Wag your tales in comments.

R.I.P., Little Richard

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

“A wop bop alu bop, a wop bam boom!”

Rolling Stone called it “what has to be considered the most inspired rock lyric ever recorded.” Some may disagree; it is a high bar to hop. But Little Richard was most definitely inspired, and one of a kind, a true trailblazer.

As Jim Dodge noted in “Not Fade Away”:

“Little Richard had returned to the Church, but because he was wearing lipstick and eye shadow the Church wasn’t sure what to do with him.”

Now he’s gone on ahead. That Big Band Beyond best have its game on. Wooooooo!

Bird feeders

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
The food chain in operation.

It seems our bird feeders are doing double duty. Not only do they feed seed to birds, they feed birds to birds.

This may be a peregrine falcon* camped out in a backyard pine, stripping the feathers and flesh from an unfortunate dove, no doubt a visitor to the feeders hanging from a maple tree by the picture window. Hal thinks so, anyway, and he’s more knowledgeable about these matters than I am.

“Whaddaya taking pictures for? You with the police?”

We’ve seen a Cooper’s hawk working the neighborhood, but this is our first glimpse of a peregrine on the job. I wanted to get closer for a better shot with the Sony RX100 III, but I didn’t want to interrupt his/her dinner. Maybe it’s time to get another DSLR, start putting this wobbly economy back on its uncertain feet.

Funny thing is, the neighbor kids had just been visiting (at a safe and sane socialist distance) and we were talking about the wildlife we’d seen recently, from bugs to bobcats to bullsnakes. We didn’t notice the feathers falling from the pine until mom had come to collect them for their own dinner.

* Or a sharp-shinned hawk. Or a Cooper’s hawk. Or a very small Hawkman looking for his own DC movie, which would puzzle me mightily, because DC movies mostly suck with malice aforethought, even more so than Marvel movies, which is a very high bar indeed where suckitude is concerned, and no self-respecting raptor would have anything to do with either of them.