Grocery run

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Top of the morning to ye. …

Yesterday the Geezers made their annual run to the Morning Star Grocery, a 42-mile round trip from El Rancho Pendejo that chalks up about 2,400 feet of vertical gain.

Medals and promotions all around!

Ordinarily we do this ride in the fall, when Tonatiuh steps away from the stove to burn one, to wit, something other than us.

Not so this year. Someone (not Your Humble Narrator) thought it would be a swell idea to make the trip when the forecast was basically “hotter than the hubs of Hell.”

Nevertheless, we persisted. And one of us more than the others.

Yesterday I chose the New Albion Privateer for the Assault on Morning Star Grocery. But for today’s recovery ride in the Elena Gallegos Open Space I chose the gentler gearing of the Soma Double Cross.

Our peloton included three octogenarians and a couple gents sporting aftermarket parts installed after unscheduled getoffs. One of the 80-somethings may have been jealous of the cyborgs and hunting a retrofit of his own, because he crashed coming into Tijeras; alas, not hard enough to require the full Steve Austin makeover.

Bloodied but unbowed, our man soldiered on and made it to the grocery without further incident, accompanied by our senior officer, an 84-year-old motorhead who immediately began grilling a stranger about the technical specs of his BMW motorcycle.

I made it into the lead group, but was not first to the grocery. We were a trio, ticking along nicely at 155 beats per minute, and I knew that I’d have to find another 10 bpm somewhere starting about six miles out to win the roses. This I felt was a dog that would not hunt.

When the terrain shifted from straight climb to rollers one of the cyborgs got the jump on me and that was that. I found another 14 bpm, briefly, but not in time to close the gap. No bouquet, no podium girl, no anthem.

Well, it wasn’t my first rodeo. Sometimes you’re the cowboy, other times you’re the clown. Good times either way.

Like Bilbo Baggins I made it there and back again. Also like Bilbo, I ate and drank prodigiously afterward, and treated myself to a short nap. It was my fourth trip to the Morning Star and back, so I suppose you could say I’m making a hobbit of it.

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.

R.I.P., Tom Lehrer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“And this is what he said on / his way to Armageddon. …”

I have no idea where or when I made the acquaintance of Tom Lehrer, who has gone west on us at the ripe old age of 97.

But I was immediately enthralled. What a mind!

I couldn’t do math at gunpoint. What few resources I possessed were directed at trying (and often failing) to make people laugh.

But Tom Lehrer could do both, and seemingly with ease. Numbers and words alike danced to his merrily sardonic tunes.

In the end, he chose academia over comedy. I expect his GPA was a wee bit more impressive than mine. At the age of 18 he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard; at that age I was a freshman on drugs and academic probation at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo.

As Lehrer’s obit in The New York Times recounts:

His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

I never caught his mathematical act at those venues. But I saw him perform on TV a time or two, and heard him now and then on FM radio, both freeform and public. My faves were “Wernher von Braun,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “A Song for World War III,” which I suspect may have inspired Randy Newman’s “Political Science.”

And five years before he left us on Saturday, he remembered us in his will. Well, on his website, anyway, where he announced that:

[A]ll the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.

In other words, he relinquished the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of a few that used his words but someone else’s music.

The curtain may have rung down, but his satirical legacy survives. So long, Tom, you never dropped a bomb.

The Dullard Lame-o

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
“Blabble gabble Obama yammer stammer landslide gibber jabber treason. …”

Gautama H. Buddha on a flying zabuton, how does someone get this fucking stupid in just one lifetime?

Best argument for reincarnation I’ve ever seen.

We are in the moist and clammy paws of the Bizarro World Buddhists, and this slobbering eejit is their Dalai Lama. His Assholiness.

Speaking of the actual DL, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that His Holiness has declined reincarnation, saying, “If Yosemite Samsāra over there keeps coming back, I’m giving it a miss.”

R.I.P., Ozzy Osbourne

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
“The End.” For real, this time.

O, Lawd — can I say, “O, Lawd,” in this connection? — Ozzy and I made some powerful noise on South Loring Circle back in 1970.

I played “Paranoid” on the folks’ console stereo so loud, so many times, that they finally told me to take it with me when I left. It had been ruined as a stage for Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman. It had become the Devil’s Juke Box.

Don’t get me wrong — I liked the big bands. But I liked a big noise, too. Thus I rattled the windows with Led Zep’, Iron Butterfly, and of course, Black Sabbath.

I was born in 1954. We spent a lot of time under our desks, hiding from nuclear weapons and/or the Selective Service System. Some of us came out humming “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” Others shrieked about “War Pigs.”

Day of judgement, God is calling 
On their knees, the war pigs crawling 
Begging mercy for their sins 
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings 
Oh, Lord, yeah

Eventually I wound up somewhere in between, with John Prine and “Sam Stone.” But man, did I ever enjoy rattling those windows. Thanks, Ozzy. Peace to you and yours.

And if you happen to see Hunter S. Thompson on the Other Side, the two of yis stay the hell away from those goddamn bats.