Tag: Alien

It never rains, but. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Crossing over I-40 near Winrock Town Center aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition).

We’ve been enjoying the occasional sprinkle in late July, all told about a half-inch of moisture in our dusty little corner of the sandbox.

Sure helps keep the mercury on the down-low. The air conditioning gets to take five, as does the irrigation system.

Why, a fella can even wait until 9 in the a.m. to get out for a bike ride without risking spontaneous combustion. Luxury!

I’ve been logging more miles lately — 131 last week, 123 the week before, 130 the week before that — not just because the weather has been delightful, but because it gets me away from the MacBook Pro, which seems to have visited Taco Bell without me and has been shitting all over my desk.

I’ll spare you the links. You’ve seen them all anyway.

Now, I could take a claw hammer to that laptop, make it shut up. But the MacBook Pro is not the news; it’s just a delivery system. It’s not the Beast; it’s not even letting it in. It’s just making it available in case I want a peek.

“And now, here’s Ash with the weather!”

Remember Parker beating the tar out of Ash in “Alien” and all the good that did him? Ash was a grinning, disembodied head in a puddle of goo — literally a talking head, still bringing the news and analysis, like some interstellar anchorman for “The Weyland-Yutani Newshour” — and before long everyone on the Nostromo was Purina Alien Chow except for Ripley, Jonesy the cat, and the alien.

And Ripley was still getting nothing but bad news. Especially when, just as she was getting ready to back the escape pod out of the garage, up pops the alien with a solid impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — and she had to have been thinking, “Goddamnit, all I wanted to do was take a little ride, get away from all this ‘Wet cleanup on Aisle 4’ shit for a while. …”

And Ripley didn’t even know about the next three movies in the queue. Talk about your long days in the office.

The bike is my escape pod. I check it for aliens before I hop aboard.

And while I bring a bot along, I keep that sumbitch locked down tight. If he manages to pop off somehow, well … he’s just a feeble old iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m pretty sure I can whup his ass in a fair fight.

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!

Trying to cough up some laughs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Tea time.

Whenever I skip the second cup of strong, black coffee for a tall, steaming mug of tea with honey, you may be certain that I am unwell.

Herself picked up a bug (not The Bug) about 10 days ago, one of those raspy coughers that keeps everyone in the house awake, and come Thursday I was quietly congratulating myself for having dodged it when I began to sense a disturbance in the Force during a short trail run.

By Friday it was me hacking away like a lunger with a three-pack-a-day habit, chain-smoking Luckies through the port in my windpipe. Kane didn’t make that much racket when the baby Alien did his “Heeeeeere’s Johnny!” number at dinner on the Nostromo.

I hit the couch early on and stayed there, and when that proved exhausting I went to bed, around 7:30. And I stayed there until 7:30 this morning.

The fun part about having a bad cough is trying to find a position in which you can grab a bit of shuteye between eruptions. I usually sleep on my left side, but that was right out. So was the right side.

The only position that worked for me was flat on my back, just like Kane on the galley table.

The good news is, there was no blood on the sheets this morning and no midget Aliens chasing Miss Mia Sopaipilla around the house.

The bad news is I don’t feel up to throwing out a few half-baked zingers like “Rudy the Mook should be tossed in the sneezer until he can remember his bank balance,” or “The U.S. House of Reprehensibles resembles a legitimate legislative body in the same way that a tank-town dog pound resembles the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show,” or maybe “How is it that we still care more about Matthew Perry than anybody in Gaza?”

A sinus of the times

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to have a Kleenex, would you?”

The local allergists must be making money hand over nose.

Between the wind and the drought my snout spent most of this week looking like an undercooked calzone. Or maybe it’s auditioning for the latest addition to the “Alien” canon in which the beast blasts out of its victims’ faces instead of their chests.

I have not sought medical attention for fear that the whitecoats would wish to keep me, to study. “Hm, maybe evolution is bullshit after all.” Instead I’ve been self-medicating with various pills and potions, irrigating the ol’ calzone with saline solution, and periodically steaming it like a pierogi.

Shit. Now I’m hungry for some reason. Maybe not.

Naturally, I’ve been trying to exercise through this, which is like drinking Sterno to quell that nasty ache in your liver. It’s not too bad while you’re barreling along, strafing buzzworms with snot rockets, getting the blood pumping, but back at the ranch it’s all Kleenex and Carmex, sniffling like a Trump capo getting done to a turn on Bob Mueller’s grill.

Night before last God decided He wanted to be John Bonham for a while and played the drum solo from “Moby Dick” on the neighborhood, all night long, using nothing but wind and whatever wasn’t solidly nailed down.

Cooler weather followed and thus I spent yesterday indoors, returning El Rancho Pendejo to a habitable state in anticipation of Herself’s triumphant return from a five-day confab in Virginia, because I know what’s good for me and an ass-whuppin’ isn’t it. God and John Bonham aren’t the only folks who know how to swing a stick.