Comments gone wild!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Possessed by devils, are we?

A quick housekeeping note:

Some of you are seeing your comments on posts multiplying like parasites in a Taco Hell salad. I’m looking into it and will be tugging on the coat of some “Happiness Engineer” here directly.

I asked Herself to post a comment and she did so without issue, using an M1 Mac Mini rocking Big Sur (yeah, I know, OTBJ) and some equally aged edition of Safari. We didn’t get any duplicates, triplicates, or quadruplicates of the comment, nor was she presented with a “continue reading” button after posting, which Longtime Reader of the Blog Steve O’ suggests may be the trigger for comment duplication.

She was not posting as a subscriber to the blog, just using her email and a screenname.

That’s all the intel I have for the moment.

In the meantime, while we await Wisdom, maybe commenters should ignore any “continue reading” buttons after posting and hit their browser’s “back” button instead.

And please be patient while waiting for a comment to appear. I’ve noticed some sluggishness from WordPress lately and attributed it to our ridiculous Internet connection, for which we pay far too much in a town with a national lab, a university, and all manner of other outfits that require something with more git-up-and-go than dialup AOL.

Could be that all these bells and whistles WP has been adding lately has caused something to go awry.

• Addendum: Still waiting on MeatBased® support here. A.I. speculates that “theme-level behavior” may be our problem. This would not surprise me, as this is an old theme, to which I switched after the even older theme started showing some behaviors that would get it punched in some of the bars I used to frequent.

I may have to go to manual approval of comments for a while, so if anything you have to say seems to be a tad slow on the rebop, why, you can blame Your Humble Narrator.

Grasping at (red) straws

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Say, is that a commie under the bed? Nope, just Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

OK, lemme see if I have this straight. …

A fascist “leadership” that has installed felons, eejits, bullies, tools, and fools in positions of authority, unleashed a small army of masked, murderous thugs on the population, opened and filled gulags, started a needless, ill-considered, economy-strangling war it can’t seem to conclude, raised the cost of everything save labor while hoovering up gazillions for itself, its enablers, underwriters, and collaborators, insulted and/or shaken down nearly every international partner it has, revived dormant diseases, and constructed a convoluted, comical, rub-and-tug cult of personality, is suddenly clutching its stolen pearls and squealing about the perils of … communism?

Gloriosky, tovarisch! The capitalists have reached the bottom of their red-white-and-blue bag of tricks!*

You never saw Karl Marx tweeting shit like, “From each according to his ability, to … me.” But then this is the same crowd that was screeching about “tyranny” because a half-Black centrist was in the White House, mostly not fucking it up.

As we know, FreeDumb® is the most expensive kind.

An early Eighties Halloween in Oregon
Fido Castro, Chairman Bao Wao Wao, Che Chihuahua … a red-arsed mutt by any other name, and so on.

We’ve never come within a gnat’s whisker of communism, not even when the Party was in its heyday. Neither has anyone else. That derned ol’ State just keeps refusing to wither away.

But we’ve gotten a pretty good look at actual tyranny. So, excuse the hell out of me for proclaiming myself a proud Groucho Marxist.

*Made in China.

Another Saga unwritten

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
My Soma Saga touring bike (rim-brake edition).

Well, the good news is, I won’t need fenders and a rain jacket for the ride downtown to collect my Subie from the shop.

The better news is, it is raining.

Reincarnation (the shop, not my hope for higher rebirth) just texted to say the old bucket of bolts is still deep into its semiannual wellness check and won’t be ready to come home until tomorrow.

It should go without saying that I had just pulled a fendered Soma Saga off its hook, aired up the tires, and lubed the chain.

But no matter. That needed doing anyway. And I got a couple hours of saddle time in this morning when it was still windless, cool, and dry, noodling home from the shop on the fenderless Soma Double Cross.

Besides, I may need the Saga tomorrow. The weather wizards are calling for a 70 percent chance of rain.

FIngers crossed.

R.I.P., Pat Oliphant

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
My collection of Pat Oliphant cartoons.

It’s been a real Monday for the folks Down Under.

First we got word that the fine actor Sam Neill had gone west. And following in short order was editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

I never met Neill, born in Northern Ireland but raised in New Zealand, though I saw a ton of his films. The Aussie Oliphant I did meet, through the miracle of serendipity.

A brief chat with the pope.

Regulars here know the tale. It was 1978, and Your Humble Narrator was a reporter at what then was called the Gazette Telegraph in Bibleburg when Oliphant came to town for an exhibition of his cartoons and paintings at the Fine Arts Center.

I got to interview him over the phone for the paper, and then met him in person at the exhibition, where he was gent enough to hold still for an extremely unprofessional and extended Grilling by Ignoramus about how he did what he did so well. He was generous enough to provide a few tips of the trade without adding a kick up the hole by way of punctuation.

Oliphant was, simply, the best in the business. Imagine being a freshly minted priest from some dusty whistlestop having a chat with the pope. All these years later it reminds me of the time I saw Ned Overend at the Cactus Cup, chatting amiably with a father and son before finally excusing himself, saying he had to finish warming up for his race.

As Ned rolled away dad says to kid: “You know what just happened? We talked to God! And God talked to us!”

Pat Oliphant died on Monday in Santa Fe, according to his son, Grant Oliphant. He was 90. Peace to him, his family, friends, and many, many fans. And thanks, God, for talking to that dumbass kid. You know the one I mean.

One of my all-time favorite Oliphant cartoons, from his stint at The Denver Post. You can see more of his work here.

Lindsey Graham dies, goes to Hell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
A successful parasite, moving from one host to another.

Who would’ve imagined that Lindsey Graham would beat The Turtle to Hell?

Not me.

Of course, Mitch McConnell may already be down there waiting on him, with dibs on the top bunk at the Lake O’ Fire Lodge. The usually reliable sources remain as silent as the grave.

Above the sod we hear all of the usual chin music about Graham’s alleged statesmanship, independence, compromise, influence, bipartisanship, and so on.

But I think Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gets it just about right when he writes that “there’s another feature of his personality and political career that is key to understanding the man. He always needed a daddy. Or let’s say a political leader. A top dog.”

“That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” as HST would say. Say hello to the new boss, bitch. Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay.