And now, it’s time for ‘Kiddie Korner’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
When I was a kid it was all stuffed animals and special chairs. But the neighbor kid likes to play with Apple TV remotes, Magic Keyboards and mice.
When I was a kid it was all stuffed animals and special chairs. But the neighbor kid likes to play with Apple TV remotes, Magic Keyboards and mice.

The ‘hood is about to get a new resident. One of the neighbors is majorly preggers, as in due any second now, and since she and her husband already have one on the deck, Herself and I have become part of a small army of folks drafted into service as amateur anklebiter monitors in case the deal goes down in the wee small hours.

In loco parentis, as it were, with an emphasis on the “loco” part.

The one underfoot is a cute lil’ munchkin, freshly hatched when we first viewed the property that would become El Rancho Pendejo, and we’ve watched her go from wide-eyed newborn to astoundingly sentient being in two short years. She and mom pop round for regular visits, mostly so the kid can see Mister Boo and lay curious hands upon bits of technology that some careless person leaves lying around where pretty much anyone, no matter how short, can glom onto it.

In a couple months I expect she’ll be editing my columns, unless she gets distracted by her new little sister.

Elsewhere, my man Hal Walter is soliciting recommendations for a budget Windows laptop. His son, Harrison, is addicted to the game Minecraft, and I guess the PC world beats Apple at this sort of thing.

I know even less about Minecraft and Windows than I do about everything else, especially children and the care and feeding thereof, so if anyone out there has some suggestions for Hal, feel free to leave ’em in comments.

 

Snow cat

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
I don't think I need to break out the shovel for this one.
I don’t think I need to break out the shovel for this one.

It probably doesn’t qualify as the first snow of the year, but we finally got a dusting at El Rancho Pendejo.

The temp remains below freezing as of 9 a.m., and I’m having a very hard time getting excited about going grocery shopping. But we’re inching our way downward through the pantry toward the basics — beans, rice, chile, etc. — and something, as they say, must be done.

I could slap together a pretty interesting vegetarian combo platter with what I have on hand — bean burritos smothered in green and sprinkled with cheddar, sides of Mexican rice and posole — but that would just kick the ol’ can down the road.

Speaking of roads and cans that need kicking along same, some of us have been having an invigorating discussion in comments about the big bad feddle gummint and what to do about it. I don’t want the blog to devolve entirely into a civics course, but just for shits and giggles, let’s take it on faith that the government is too big and intrusive and our tax burden too onerous.

So how do we shrink the federal government to a manageable size? What would you cut? Whose ox gets gored?

And keep in mind that we are not just cutting functions here. We’re shitcanning people. Our fellow Americans. They enjoy their combo platters, too, as do the folks that sell and serve them, so spare them a thought in your calculations.

As of 2014 the U.S. government employed some 2.7 million people. Walmart only has 1.5 million or so on payroll in the United States; Amazon’s headcount is about 240,000 folks, or about twice as many as Apple.

So I don’t see all these sidelined federales landing cushy gigs moving boxes around an Amazon warehouse, greeting the penny-pinchers at Sam’s Club, or failing to fix my 2009 iMac at the Albuquerque Apple Store.

 

Cybrrrrrrrrrr Monday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Baby, it's cold outside.
Baby, it’s cold outside.

Still no snow here in the Duke City as the Thanksgiving weekend lurches to an overstuffed close. But it’s cold out there — 29 degrees as of java time — and there’s white stuff in the forecast, if not yet on the ground.

Elsewhere, things are heating up a tad. Having sold the rubes a bill of goods, the national media are now gleefully pointing out the dings, dents, leaks and creaks in the gold-plated machinery that is the Pestilence-Elect.

Seems he’s a liar, and a walking, tweeting conflict of interest with his short-fingered paws in some very questionable pockets. His chief adviser is a white-nationalist propagandist and political opportunist. And he’s larding up his administration with the sort of rich, connected honkies you’d expect from pretty much any ol’ rich, connected honky the GOP managed to shoehorn into the White House.

Huh. Who knew? Only anyone who’d been paying attention, is all.

Turns out that if you want to drain a swamp, it’s probably a bad idea to hire the guy who likes the swamp, knows everyone who lives there, and owns a fair chunk of it.

As another famous swamp-dweller once noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”