Tag: Beelzebozo

To the BikeCave!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
The BikeSignal appears in the foothills of the Gotham Mountains.

Always the Joker, hey?

Well, it can’t be politics 24/7 around here, even after a rare November blizzard of good news that nevertheless was not quite good enough to exorcise Beelzebozo from the body politic.

Denied the explosive hemorrhagic stroke of our dreams — well, mine, anyway, especially if it takes place on live TV — the Republic remains possessed. I’m surprised he’s not trying to grab the Beaver Moon with his stubby little fingers. We’re gonna need a bigger priest.

Happily, the weather has been spectacular for the distracting bikey ridey, with highs in the 70s and hardly any wind, which is unheard of in New Mexico. Shucks, it’s already just two degrees short of 60 at 9 in the a.m.

While we wait for winter to set in, if it ever does, I’ve been dialing back the weekly mileage and airing out some dusty machinery. Getting the callup in the past couple weeks: Rivendell’s Sam Hillborne, both Steelman Eurocrosses (it is cyclocross season), the Jones, DBR Axis TT, and New Albion Privateer.

The black sheep in my velo-family.

Today may see the Voodoo Wazoo getting a little dirt on its knobs. Or p’raps the Bianchi Zurigo Disc, which as the only alloy-framed, carbon-forked, SRAM-controlled steed in the shed is definitely the odd man out, especially when it’s sporting 32mm Conti slicks, as it is at the moment.

Whenever I wander off into these seasonal inspection tours, in the back of my mind I’m thinking idly about thinning the velo-herd. But I notice that despite my best intentions there remains nary a hook unburdened in the garage with a few more two-wheelers parked on the deck.

N+1, baby; n+1.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
“Does that mean new pope or new SecDef?”

I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.

That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.

Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.

White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.

Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.

Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”

And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.

If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.

A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.

“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”

“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”

And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.

Midnight train to Gitmo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
Cool Hand Luke goes off the rails.

You think we’re shipping the wrong people to Guantanamo?

I’m old enough to remember a time when, if some civilian loudmouth waltzed through your front door barking orders, you could kick him in the plums, give him the old heave and also the ho, and get back to whatever it was you were doing before all the bad noise started.

Yet somehow, in the Year of Our Lard 2025, we’ve allowed this porcelain pissant from South Africa to start rearranging the national furniture, to say nothing of the org chart, without so much as a “Just who the hell elected you to anything, anyway, Fisheyes?”

Raise a ruckus and you get frog-marched out the door, either to the breadline or maybe a gated beachfront community that doesn’t feature in Beelzebozo’s plans for the tourist trade. Meanwhile, our media watchdogs just keep licking their own nuts; chasing random brain farts down countless odiferous ratholes; and “fact-checking” the arsonists who are burning down the government faster and more thoroughly than the Brits did during the War of 1812.

But be of good cheer: There’s plenty of bark and bite to be had in the latest edition of Radio Free Dogpatch!

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The Captain from “Cool Hand Luke” and Yosemite “The Little Drummer Boy” Sam communicate to us from YouTube. The boot to the bollocks and subsequent heave-ho hail from Freesound. The French taunter you may recall from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Air travel to Gitmo, a newspaper’s printing press running, and soldiers on the march courtesy of Freesound. “Twisted Clowns” honk at us from Zapsplat. Charles P. Pierce does his barking from the Esquire Politics kennel. And last, but far from least, that’s Sam Cooke working the “Chain Gang.” All the other gang violence is the fault of Your Humble Narrator.

Howling at an orange moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
And you thought the moon was made of green cheese. Sorry, losers and haters!

Blame the Wolf Moon. A vacationing wife. An acid flashback. Whatever.

But when I blinked myself awake in the dark on Tuesday morning I had no idea where I was.

If dementia runs in your family, as it does in mine, this can freak you right the hell out. But I found it oddly exhilarating.

“Where am I? Who knows? Who cares? This is great!”

And then I remembered.

“Aw, shit. Trumpsylvania.”

We’re just a few all-too-short days away from the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. “Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington” should’ve been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a franchise now. When the Joker started getting top billing we should’ve known what was coming. It’s just one evil clown after another.

But hey: It’s an excuse for another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, in which I make it all about me. I tell ya, it’s evil clowns all the way down.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. The wolf howls from Freesound, as do the sad trombones and the vinyl scratching. “Morning Mood” is from “Peer Gynt” by Edvard Grieg. Arthur, King of the Britons, and an anarcho-syndicalist peasant come from “Monty Python and The Holy Grail.” You’ll catch a snippet of the “Grapes of Wrath” theme in there (almost went with “Death Valley Days.”). The ass-kissing is by Your Humble Narrator. The sound effect, not the actual, y’know, like, obesiance. And the classic “There Stands the Glass” is courtesy of Ted Hawkins via YouTube. As usual, all the other raving can be pinned on the landlord of this dump.