Happy birthday to Herself the Elder

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Herself the Elder and Herself the Younger.

Herself the Elder celebrated a birthday today with two of three daughters and one son-in-law (not me).

I’d never tell a lady’s age, but rumor has it she first appeared on the scene in the same year as White Sands National Monument, Esquire magazine, and the Marx Brothers Movie “Duck Soup.”

“I didn’t come here to be insulted!”

“That’s what you think.”

Anyway, a delicious seafood luncheon was had, “Happy Birthday” was sung by a son-in-law not in attendance (me, via FaceTime), and now the birthday girl and her middle daughter are kickin’ it back at the crib.

Which will not be her crib much longer. With the Not-So-Great Pumpkin poised to become the apostheosis of Florida Man, Herself the Elder will be abandoning the Sunshine State and setting up shop in the Land of Enchantment. She’s not overly fussy as regards neighbors, but one must have some standards.

Herself the Elder should be in residence here in ’Burque by Thanksgiving. Seafood will not be on the menu. Once she realizes we’re all sand and no ocean she’ll probably join a club and beat me over the head with it.

Backdoored by Backcountry.com

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
The only backcountry that Backcountry.com cares about. Photo by Heidi Zumbrun

This week’s private-equity outrage comes to you courtesy of TSG Partners, the vile cock-knockers who own Backcountry.com, among other things.

These soulless fuckbubbles have been knuckling any and all small-business types who dare use the word “backcountry” while doing their little bits of business.

Never mind that the word has been in use since 1746, according to Merriam-Webster, which itself has only been around since 1828. Hell, Thomas McGuane deployed the word in 1969 for a piece in Sports Illustrated, “The Longest Silence,” about fly-fishing for permit in Florida.

It’s a good thing Captain Berserko was just selling a few thousand words about the joys of the sporting life, and never tried to market waders under the Backcountry Anglers label. The shysters at IPLA Legal Advisors would be trying to climb in there with him, bent on cutting off his nuts.

Good luck with that, by the way. The Captain don’t play that shit.

Anyway, here at Mad Dog Backcountry Media we support the little backcountry people in their backcountry attempts to wrest a meager backcountry living from the backcountry crumbs overlooked by private-equity pirates whose love for the “backcountry” is limited to the terrain immediately surrounding other people’s wallets, especially if said people are too small to put up any real fight against a button-down bandit.

And thus we propose that anyone who works for or with TSG Partners be dipped in honey, clad in pork-chop “lifestyle collection” garments, and air-dropped into the actual backcountry, where they may argue their case before a panel of backcountry grizzlies, backcountry wolves, and backcountry buzzards.

They might get some professional courtesy from the latter. But not if the griz gets ’em first.

Crashed in the feed zone

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Exhausted by a long morning spent waiting for breakfast, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) commandeers a sunny spot for purposes of R&R.

The cats are getting the old one-two this weekend.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla recovers from a nasty bout of Delayed Meal Syndrome atop the bedroom dresser.

First, Herself has flown off to Florida to visit her mom and eldest sis, which means that reveille and mess call have been bumped from 4 a.m. to a more reasonable hour dictated by the whims of the interim quartermaster, a renowned wastrel, sluggard, and layabout.

Second, Daylight Saving Time ends at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an additional hour of kip time for staff and more grumbling in the chow line for the cats.

“Unconstitutional! Due process! Coup!” they yowl, baring their fangs, spreading their claws, and hissing like the Devil’s teakettle on full boil.

No, wait, that’s the House Republicans. Another bunch of neutered housecats entirely.

 

R.I.P., Deadspin

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Deadspin’s writers conducted their own exit interviews.

Well, shit. Now I wish I’d been a Deadspin reader. The writers who, after being ordered to “stick to sports,” told their Great Hell overlords to eat a bag of dicks seem like my kind of people.

Nitwits who disliked the often-political tone of my columns, “Mad Dog Unleashed” and “Friday’s Foaming Rant,” often suggested that I likewise “stick to sports.” I did no such thing, because everything is political, and happily my editors and publishers never added their voices to the shut-the-fuck-up chorus, though like Deadspin we often found ourselves owned and/or licensed by eejits.

It’s a dire state of affairs and regrettably far from uncommon. Over at The Nation, Dave Zirin tugged on Deadspin‘s founding editor’s coat, and Will Leitch spake thusly:

“I will say that craven dopes like these people buy media companies all the time, and they slowly suck the life and vigor out of them until they are shades of their former selves. Usually, people who work there have no choice but to stomach it and make tiny but real compromises because they have families or mortgages or medical bills or real-life stresses. It is to the ultimate credit of everyone at Deadspin that they did not roll over to ridiculous and incompetent non-plans and brainless edicts out of self-preservation.”

And at The New Republic, Alex Shephard grabbed Deadspin‘s media-bro mismanagement by the plums and squeezed, with a nod to Gawker’s “How Things Work,” observing:

“It is tempting to see the demise of Deadspin as another depressing instance of how things work: a private equity firm full of almost comically idiotic media bros blunders into a successful media property and destroys it because the only thing it knows how to do is juice ad impressions. But the collapse of Deadspin is so spectacularly stupid, so clearly self-inflicted, that it has an epochal quality. If there were any justice in the world, the site’s absurd decline, which could not better contrast the integrity and talent of Deadspin’s staffers on one side and the craven shit-eating of their corporate masters on the other, would serve as a wake-up call to the powers that be. Since there isn’t, it’s almost certainly a harbinger of much worse to come.”

Much worse to come, indeed. I’ve never been a sports fan, but I’ve been a fan of good sports writing, especially when it didn’t have much to do with sports.

And I wish I’d caught Deadspin‘s act before it turned into a vulture capitalist’s turd.

Boo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
Naw, that ain’t Orange You-Know-Who. His bulb ain’t that bright.

Nothing says Halloween like a plastic Chinese jack-o’-lantern wearing a Schwinn cap, backlit by Cygolite tail lights.

What appears to be the Ghost of Tariffs Present flapping around in the background is a blanket folded across the back of my office rocker.

Boogity boogity boogity.