Boom times

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Miss Mia in the sack.

A thunderclap yesterday afternoon startled Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who was curled up in her favorite sack, enjoying her eleventy-seventh nap of the day.

I did not tell her, as did Johnny Lundgren’s dad in Jim Harrison’s “Warlock,” “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”

No, I reassured her that it wasn’t God, probably, or even the work of a (much) lesser (would-be) deity — say, Felonious Punk, commanding a few of his masked ICEholes to shock-and-awe us back to wherever we came from, or didn’t, whatever.

Even if fascism were to come a-calling at El Rancho Pendejo, Miss Mia should have nothing to fear. She’s a Russian blue, and since the Punk just blew a Russian, she should be A-OK with him and his goons. Cream for all my apparatchiks!

Now, me, I’m an Irish-American Red, so who knows where I’d wind up? Where would a Adderall-snorting asshat send a sober Mick scribbler with a bicycle fetish? A Boston pub to pull pints on St. Patrick’s Day? The International Space Station, to chronicle its “retirement,” slated for 2030? Couldn’t log much saddle time up there over the next five years, but I’d get to rip one helluva descent when NASA — if it’s still around — pulls the plug.

And Herself? Conscripted into the Punk’s platoon of librarians, I expect. Condemned to catalog the pestilential archives of fuck books, Truth Social screeds, and unpaid bills.

And she wouldn’t be allowed to shush any of his minions, who never ever give their festering gobs a nanosecond’s respite from telling the FreeDummies that Making America Great Again requires chop-shopping it into a Dollar Store knockoff of Pooty-poot’s Russia.

Troops to Ukraine? Hell no! But troops to DeeCee? That’s the real global trouble spot, amirite?

The best intel I can muster tells me that the enemy is bunkered up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Careful with the arty and airstrikes, lads, and try to avoid damage to the facility if it’s feasible — it is a National Heritage Site, but may have been desecrated beyond resurrection.

I mean, have you seen what these terrorists have done to the Rose Garden?

Full metal jagoffs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“HQ says there’s a woke art exhibit at the Smithsonian. Cover me … I’m going in.”

“Tin soldiers and dipshits coming.”

Thus spake Charles P. Pierce about the governors of Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia sending National Guardspersons to “help police” the crime-ridden hellhole that is* Washington, D.C., which escalates the performative bullshit to DUMBCON 3.

Charlie further notes that Philip Bump, late of The Bezos Post, has assembled an interactive map “illustrating all the places in Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina that are actually more crime-ridden than Washington,” yet somehow muddle along with nothing heavier than the local coppers.

Parody throws its arthritic paws in the air and says, “Chieu hoi! I give.”

* Or is not.

    Red dawn

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
    Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doooo. …

    While we await reports from the Thunder in the Tundra, at which Vlad the Impaler will punk The Goldbug at one of our own Air Force bases, we’re enjoying a colorful sunrise behind the Sandias and some spirited aerial combat over the backyard hummingbird feeder.

    It’s a good thing rufous hummingbirds don’t weigh 300 pounds. They’d rule us all.

    Actually, now that I think about it, it just might be an improvement over what we have now.

    Alien nation

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
    A Wall won’t stop him. Her. It. They. Whatevs.

    Ordinarily I’d be mildly excited about “Alien: Earth,” Noah “Fargo” Hawley’s take on Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial horror franchise come home to roost.

    But don’t we have enough real monsters down here already?

    A handful of corporations battling over the remains of a dying planet? Check. Gazillionaire techlords acting on their every whim without let or hindrance? Roger that. The nice robot is your friend? Oh, hell, yeah.

    Same goes for “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s vision of the spooky daughter from “The Addams Family.” Steve Buscemi joins the cast this season as an educator with a whole Edgar Allen Poe thing going on. And while I love me some Tim Burton, Steve Buscemi, E.A. Poe and Charles Addams, not necessarily in that order, well … see paragraph no. 2 above.

    Our real-life spooks are hellbent on robbing me of my sweet girlish laughter, is what. The sonsabitches will do that to us, if we let them. I’ve had to add some old Dan O’Neill comics to my bathroom library to remind me ’twas ever thus.

    Dan O’Neill in the dock, unrepentant.

    Corporate swine, gazillionaire techlords, and the politicians who serve them deserve all the mockery we can muster and then some. Just ask O’Neill, who went to war with Walt Disney Productions Back in the Day®. Disney proved a remarkably humorless and implacable foe, for an outfit that made bank on the antics of a cartoon rodent and his pals, but O’Neill kept on slugging, a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.

    He lost, of course. But it wasn’t a knockout; the judges had to turn themselves inside out to declare Disney the champeen. And even in victory the Mouse was left coughing up a couple mil’ in legal-fee corpuscles.

    Forty-five years later, thanks to the Innertubes, parody, satire — and yes, outright mockery — can spread a whole lot further and faster than a handful of underground comic books, if we’re not all too busy clutching our pearls on our fainting couches. Follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and “South Park.” Hit ’em where it hurts with the ol’ one-two — the hee and the haw.

    I don’t think Dan will be sprawled on his couch watching “Alien: Earth,” if only because it’s streaming on FX/Hulu, which is owned by — wait for it — Disney.

    Between you and me, I hope O’Neill and the other surviving Air Pirates are busy working up a fresh parody of our modern monsters. Are you ready for Mickey Xenomorph? Game over, man … game over!

    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.