CenturyStink

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
When a modem becomes a no-dem.

Our Innertubes punctured at 11 a.m. Friday, a flat that that didn’t get fixed until 8 p.m. So that was … fun.

Actually, it was hardly an annoyance at all, barring the dealing with CenturyLink “customer service,” a maze of domestic bots and overseas humans whose basic American is much better than my Hindi but still something of a guessing game, tech-support-wise.

Herself wrangled the bots with her iPhone while I dealt with the Subcontinent on mine, and as per usual she brought home the bacon. So I got to tell my guy, “James,” that yes, there was an outage in our area and it would not be resolved until 11 p.m. Ever the newsman, even in retirement. I should’ve sent him a bill.

Anyway, even when it works, we have shit Innertubes in our little corner of The Duck! City (“Gateway to Los Lunas”).

We pay top dollar for bottom-of-the-barrel DSL, same price as in Bibleburg for half the speed, and it inches ever higher from month to month because of course it does.

Our Actiontec C1000A modem-router dates to 2012, making it two years older than the MacBook Pro I’m using to write this. It is of course “retired” — the Actiontec, not my Mac — and I don’t see any point in replacing either device because El Rancho Pendejo apparently isn’t wired for the zoom-zoom all you fiber-optic types take for granted.

When the place was built in 1970 the telephone pedestal box was installed at the east end of the property, as far from the house itself as it is possible to get without actually being in the arroyo. The wiring to said box may have been upgraded over the past five decades; the wiring to the house has not.

Thus we limp along with download speeds ranging from 6 to 12 mbps, and uploads under 1 mbps.

So, when we lose our DSL, well — ain’t no thang. Because our iPhones — with maybe two bars from Verizon down here at the bottom of the cul-de-sac — turn into personal hotspots that work just as well as our DSL router-modem. When it works.

So, winning? I guess. In a losing sort of way.

Exceptin’ Alice. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
Alice and Arlo, lifted from the latter’s Facebook page.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.

WBUR has a remembrance, and so does The New York Times. Arlo Guthrie, of course, weighed in as well, on Facebook.

Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.

We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.

R.I.P., Peter Sinfield

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Peter Sinfield, the lyricist for King Crimson’s first four albums, has toddled off to the Court of the Crimson King. He was 80.

Progressive rockers like King Crimson and Pink Floyd were big on my personal hit parade in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Probably the upshot of taking piano and flute lessons, playing in school orchestras, digging the big-band music my parents loved, and like that there. A “more-is-more sensibility,” as The New York Times obit puts it.

The single “21st Century Schizoid Man” was killer, you should pardon the expression, since it took actual killers to task with lyrics like “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire. …”

Eventually my musical tastes became less grandiose, more stripped down. Even so, I still prefer bombast to bombs.

Orange Julius Seizure

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
What, you haven’t heard they have a National Mall in DeeCee?

Wherever shalt thou see a man on horseback, there also shalt thou see a horse’s ass. And sometimes more than one of them, too.

The endless pearl-clutching in the national media over Orange Julius Caesar doing exactly what we all expected he would do has me longing to grab some button-down editor a little lower — by the family jewels — and drag him around the room, growling like a mad dog.

Which of course is what I am.

But that would be wrong. Fun, but wrong.

So I’ll just leave you with that improbable visual and this all-too-probable audio — yes, yes, yes, it’s time for a Shakespearean edition of Radio Free Dogpatch.

• Technical notes: Still loving the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. If it ain’t broke, etc. The gibbons and fanfare are courtesy of Freesound. Wrestling action comes to you from an old clip on YouTube. The cartoon tune, “Out of Step,” comes from Zapsplat. All the other bad noise is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Free delivery

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Hot takes? No, cold trash.

Monday is trash day here in the cul-de-sac.

Stalking around El Rancho Pendejo, muttering to myself as I ticked off the morning chores one by one, I got to thinking how nice it would be if somebody came around regularly to haul off all the garbage stinking up my skull.

Wouldn’t that be convenient? Just flip my lid, yank out the sack full of bad news, worse ideas, outdated references, and pointless distractions, heave it into a black plastic cart, and roll it down the driveway where someone else has to deal with it.

Hm. Wait a sec. We’ve already got something like that. They call it “blogging.”