The New Abnormal

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Some folks think they’re getting the business.

The American attention span, ordinarily measured in nanoseconds, is fraying around its all-too-short edges as the walls start closing in on the homebound.

Relief payments have gone walkabout. The SBA ran out of money to loan. And almost no unemployment aid has made it to the self-employed.

Is patience a luxury we can’t afford, or a necessity we can’t live without?

For some folks, it’s just one more thing that they’ve run out of, like beer, beans, and buttwipe. But Your Humble Narrator still has a personal stash, and if you can bear about six more minutes of social distancing, he’ll let you have a little taste.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s another socially distant episode of Radio Free Dogpatch!

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic and Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. The trail-walking portion was recorded on a Tascam DR-10L. Editing was as usual, using GarageBand on a 2014 MacBook Pro. The background music is “Easy Day” by Kevin MacLeod, taken from the YouTube audio library, as was the angry crowd. The squeaky bike is from jamesrodavidson at Freesound.org. The yappi corgis are likewise from the YouTube. The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote are, of course, from the glory days of animation at Warner Bros. And the centurion calls us weird from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

Eight weeks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
No brace. No boot. Just a shoe, a sock, and me.

TGIF .. WTGAB!

That’s short for “Thank God it’s Friday … without that goddamn ankle brace!”

Eight weeks to the day after I broke my right ankle running the Foothills Trails, I was noodling along under sunny skies on a bicycle, in cycling shoes, on clipless pedals, with said ankle blessedly free of all wraps, braces, boots, and other encumbrances.

On Wednesday I went for a 2.4-mile walk without the brace, but that was an accident. I just forgot to put the damn’ thing on and didn’t notice I wasn’t wearing it until about 20 minutes into the outing.

“Oh, well,” I sez to myself I sez. “A man must carry on.”

See? It is possible to forget, just like Doctor Mike says.

 

 

The Charlie Fox Show

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
“Plan? Plan? What plan? Oh, that plan. Lemme keep looking, I’m sure it’s up here somewhere.”

Hm, lessee here:

• “Glitches prevent $1,200 stimulus checks from reaching millions.” (WaPo).

• “Small businesses in despair as fund for government aid runs out.” (NYT)

• “Trump’s ‘Open our country council’ runs into its own opening problems.” (NYT)

• “Clusterfuck: a complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation : a muddled mess.” (Merriam-Webster)

All the hits, all the time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
There are scribblers like Your Humble Narrator.
And then there is Bill Watterson.

“The Ginger Hitler Radio Hour.” Boy, that would’ve blown “This American Life” right off the airwaves, amirite? IHateMedia would syndicate that shit worldwide before you could say “Chinese virus.”

You’d never find ’phones for a head that swollen, though. The mic’ would need a pop filter and a set of windshield wipers. And none of the callers would be able to get a word in edgewise.

’Faced

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
I have a nose for this sort of thing, it appears.

The body may be confined, yet the mind wanders, as it will.

And a few minutes ago it wandered past a pile of old cycling caps and went, “Hmmmm. …”

Yes, that is a 100 percent cotton Schwinn cycling cap buttressed by a Princeton Tec headlamp strap.

I may not be the first to think of this, but surely I won’t be the last.