Theme song redux

December 8, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments

A screenshot of what the new DogS(h)ite might look like.

Hear ye, hear ye: I’ve been experimenting with two newish WordPress themes on two unused blogs — Penscratch 2 on New Wheeled Order and Independent Publisher 2 on Town & Country — and I’m getting close to a verdict on which one might be best suited to serve our little coven of malcontents here.

Not knowing exactly how readers “interact” with this blog leaves me thinking I should probably focus on how it looks on a phone. I prefer working it on a laptop — and a laptop hooked to an external monitor when possible — but I am a confirmed Luddite and may be the lone exception.

With that in mind, Penscratch 2 looks cleaner to me. There’s a menu right at the top for easy navigation. In Independent Publisher 2 I seem to be restricted to parking items like search, archives, bio, and whatnot in a widget area, like a sidebar or footer. And to my amateur designer’s eye, which is deeply rooted in the Before-Time, it seems to waste a lot of space.

Penscratch 2 seems easier to work, too, even in the Block Editor (curse its name, yes). I spent some time with it yesterday and almost got to where I was feeling comfortable. Dropping a photo with caption into a post was nearly as simple as working in the Classic Editor. In the editing window a sidebar at right gave me the option of selecting a resolution, aspect ratio, and a custom width/height.

And really, that’s all I want from a new theme and editor, if I absolutely have to have them, which is coming to feel inevitable given the ongoing hiccups with the old setup. Publishing should be easy, because writing sometimes is not. Also, any changes should not blow up Ye Olde Blogge, which has muddled along for 15 years in its present incarnation.

I’ll spend some more time tinkering over the weekend, as the weather is forecast to be heavy on the suckee-suckee.

Meanwhile, if you can spare a moment, have a look at the two links up top and post any comments here (if you can). I’m starting to think I need to either embrace the Block Editor with a new theme or relocate the entire operation to Substack, Medium, or some other alternative, all of which is unknown country. Who knows what dragons might be there?

First Loser

December 7, 2023December 7, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Anybody remember who else was on Paul von Hindenburg’s shortlist to be named chancellor of Germany in January 1933?

Could’ve been Baron Hoodat von Votsizface for all we know.

In most competitions, political, sporting, or otherwise, the runner-up doesn’t get a lot of press, the main reason being that s/he is the First Loser.

The winner gets the trophy, a parade, the keys to the Republic; the First Loser gets a polite interview or two — “Them’s the breaks, hah?” — and then toddles on home to gnaw on his or her liver before hitting the rubber-chicken circuit.

And even this shabby treatment is predicated on there being an actual competition taking place.

So why is the goat rodeo the GOP is trying to pass off as a horse race to nominate its pestilential candidate still on the nation’s front pages?

“Hope is not a strategy,” Chris Christie, one of the aspirants for the First Loser’s tinfoil tiara with bottle-cap medallion, told Faux News on Monday. Especially when one has none. (He’s sticking around anyway.)

Exactly why remains a mystery. The Joisey Jagoff and his fellow aspirants for the glue factory are still whinnying at each other in the paddock while Multiple Felonies lumbers around turn three, farting and wheezing old Nazi marching arias.

Face it, Chris, Nikki, Ron, and Vivek. The only horse’s ass in this race that matters is the one you haven’t even seen since before the starter’s pistol fired. You’re racing for second against a fat Nazi.

Even Hindenburg beat Adolf Hitler, f’fucksake. Only once, and not for good. But still.

Squeakers gonna squeak

December 6, 2023December 6, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

“Cheese it,” as the Kool Kidz don’t say anymore.

Look, there goes former Squeaker of the House Charlie McCarthy, over the side, just like former Squeaker Pro Tem Patrick McBowtie before him.

What good news for the critical rubber-chicken sector of the nation’s economy. These hirelings spend years helping our corporate “citizens” turn the government into a $2 whorehouse, then travel the country proclaiming themselves* to be shocked — shocked! — that the government is a whorehouse.

And a cut-rate one, too. For them and their deep-pockets pals, of course. Not for you.

* A small fee applies, of course.

On the first day of Zappadan …

December 4, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

… I bought a fresh digital copy of “Over-Nite Sensation” to replace the one I had in college.

No, not the bigger-and-better, new-and-improved version. The original, you slime. Do I look like I’m wearing a Sears poncho?

Don’t worry — I got a little something for you, too: Daniel Felsenthal’s look back at Zappa and that album over at The Atlantic.

Felsenthal calls “Over-Nite Sensation” Zappa’s “most inviting listen, forging a muscular, funk-inflected sound that couches the denseness of his more avant-garde music in pop hooks. … The album’s lyrics made a cutting statement about the flimsy values of its time — and the songs themselves were a tightly wound coil of Zappa’s musical ideas.”

You gotta love anyone who posits that Zappa’s long hair and beard resembled a fermata. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with dirty love, you preverts — it’s a symbol of musical notation.

Just like cyclocross, only slower

December 3, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Big Red after we exited the Elena Gallegos trails.

Having grown weary of thumbing through heaps of dusty grimoires in my fruitless quest for the incantations through which I might impose my will upon the WordPress Block Editor (curse its name, yes), I stepped away from the Mac, climbed onto a bike, and pedaled out for an hour of rolling meditation with a heavy overlay of just not thinking about the fucking thing.

The bike was my red Steelman Eurocross, sporting a new seatpost; its predecessor, a RockShox suspension post, had begun showing its age, and for safety’s sake it’s worrying enough that the senile old fool in the saddle has been doing that for a few years now.

So I thought I’d get that minor gear change dialed in, and since the sun was out, I decided to take it off the pavement and onto the dirt at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

In case you’re wondering, yes, the dreaded Brown Stripe followed me home.

Except the dirt was mostly mud, except for where it was snow or ice or all three at the same time. Oh, yeah, right — we got a half-inch of precip’ on Thursday. Duh, etc.

The mildly sketchy conditions reminded me of the Good Old Days™, when that bike, its mango-colored older brother and I motored around Colorado in search of 45 frosty, filthy minutes plus a lap.

Nobody else in Elena Gallegos was rocking drop bars and 35mm rubber today, and a couple spectators at my one-man not-so-hot lap pronounced themselves impressed, which says less about me and my mad skillz than about the visibility of actual cyclocross in The Duck! City.

In truth, I shouldn’t have been on those trails, as wet as they were, and once I saw how soft the surface was with no improvement in sight I headed for the nearest exit and thence for home.