Tag: George Carlin

April pool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
No foolin’.

¡Agua free-, ahhh!”

They said it might rain. But then they say a lot of things, don’t they?

I don’t see any mention of precip’ in my 2026 training log since a bit of snow on Jan. 25. This morning, our weather widget reports 0.08 inch of rain overnight, and we will take it, with gratitude.

Maybe some of this will fall on War Piggy’s parade this evening, when he is expected to either declare victory in his oil-burning Excursion and then run away with his armor all soiled like Sir Robin, or go full Curtis LeMay on Iran, bombing it “back to the Stone Ages,” which I suppose is where he thinks Fred and Wilma live.

Either way, the goal is getting back to the important stuff: turning the White House into a whorehouse with casino attached; flushing our health care down his golden loo to pay for all his impeachable offenses; and slapping his punk-ass name on everything, including the money he’s stealing from us.

The only good part about having this pendejo as president is that it frees up a lot of time you might otherwise waste listening to, reading about, or watching anything he has to say. If you see his name followed by a verb like “says,” well, you can just go about your business. Because whatever he says will be (a) incomprehensible without Mr. Spock’s Universal Translator, and (2) what George Carlin described in “40 Years of Comedy” as “bullshit” — top to bottom, stem to stern, inside and out.

Of course, George was speaking back in 1997, when American presidents cared enough to put some thought into the tales they told, a soupçon of savoir-faire, delivering what he called “high-quality bullshit, world-class designer bullshit, to be sure. Hospital-tested, clinically proven bullshit.”

War Piggy just brings the stink, and it’s hard to tell which end of him smells worse.

Pontificating from the rectumry

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Barking mad and talking out his arsehole as per usual.

His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered will be farting higher than his ass this evening during what the legacy media insists upon calling “the State of the Union address” but will almost certainly be more along the lines of the late George Carlin’s “Complaints and Grievances,” only not funny.

I will not be watching for mental-health reasons. Not his mental health; that leaky vessel has sailed, caught fire, exploded, and sunk. My mental health. What with the tariffs and inflation and whatnot, new TVs are way too pricey for me to be shooting ours in a fit of rage.

What say we all give it a miss this time around? If the senile old toad doesn’t stroke out tonight in what he promises will be a long airing of Crimes Against Him, he might just get ferried across the Styx tomorrow by the sort of ratings you might expect from a live goat fuck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

’13 means shit and bad luck’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Glass don’t be even half full, yo.

You can read all 13 pages of the document, “Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need for Immediate Action,” or cut to the chase at John Fleck’s blog.

Either way, your reaction is likely to be, “Oh, shit.”

Water consumption in the [Colorado River] Basin continues to outpace the natural supply, further drawing down reservoir levels. While Basin State representatives pursue the elusive goal of a workable and mutually acceptable set of post-2026 operating rules, our review of the latest Bureau of Reclamation data shows that the gap between ongoing water use and the reality of how much water actually flows in the Colorado River poses a serious near-term threat. Another year like the one we just had on the Colorado River would nearly exhaust our dwindling reserves. …

A solution can’t wait for a long-term agreement among the states. It may be difficult, if not impossible, for the Basin States to take such short term action. That reality puts the onus on the Department of the Interior to act.

The Department of the Interior? Led by former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, a fossil-fuelish kind of fella who briefly ran against the Pestilence, then kowtowed to it, and worked with his former rival’s campaign to develop its energy policy?

Talk about shit and bad luck. Oh, god … oh, shit. …

Complaints and grievances revisited

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Where’s George Carlin when we need him?

Scanning The New York Times today I recalled the words of the late, great George Carlin of Manhattan: “Here’s another pack of jagoffs who ought to be strangled in front of their children.”

First up for a vigorous and final throttling: Whoever coined the abominable “polyworking,” which sounds vaguely sexy, like “polyamory,” but actually describes the need for more than one job to cover the payments on the used Ford Focus in which one sleeps between shifts in the barrel(s).

Erin Hatton, a sociology prof at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market, told the NYT that the practice can be “a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer.”

But Hatton conceded that not being identified “by one job, one employer,” is … not always optional.

“There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” she said.

Will this be on the final exam? Doesn’t matter, I’ll be working that day, and all of the others, too.

Next: Come on down, Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree!

Matt told the NYT — in a story about people who have to finance their groceries — ““If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you’re on a tight budget and you have several of these loans out at one time, it can be very easy to get over your skis here.”

“Over your skis?” You need a short-term loan to buy your Hot Pockets and you’re over the skis you don’t have? I mean, shit, dude, read the room. The room that looks a lot like a Ford Focus without a (duh) rooftop ski rack.

And as George reminds us: “Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.” It probably won’t help you understand the kids on TikTok, but at least you’ll be able to read your job(s) application(s) and the fine print on that buy-now-pay-later deal.

Spare (me the) change

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Funny-looking reindeer around here.

When I was a greedy and impatient young pup my parents granted the opening of one present each on Christmas Eve.

Now I’m a grizzled old mutt and there is just one present under the tree, period. And it’s for the both of us, Your Humble Narrator and Herself.

Opening it this evening seems silly, especially since we already know what’s inside: an Apple TV HD. It is to replace our Apple TV (3rd generation), which no longer pulls down HBO Now, Now having been rechristened Max, as in Mad, which I am.

We generally enjoy an hour of TV with our dinner. But should there be anything worth watching on HBO Max, which lately seems as unlikely as finding a sense of honor and duty in government, we have to bypass our old Apple TV — though, oddly, it seems to work just fine with everything save HBO Max (happy holidays, AT&T, you miserable pricks).

Dig that crazy midget Xmas tree, daddy-o. And the cool wrapping on the lone gift.

The workaround involves booting up the even older Mac Mini, lighting a candle to the shade of Steve Jobs, chanting our Video Mantra (“TV Input, HDMI-1, Receiver Input, AV-1”), switching inputs on both TV and receiver, launching a browser (Which one? I never remember), and finally shrieking, “Goddamnit all to hell anyway!” and running right back to the loving tentacles of Netflix, sister of Cthulhu.

Tomorrow we will have the new Apple TV, so, yay, etc. Herself’s gift will be watching it. Mine will be setting it up.

This is less enthralling than it might have been long ago, in the Before Time. After 30 years of providing my own tech support for personal and professional gadgetry I’m having trouble working up any enthusiasm for wrangling a new comosellama just in case HBO, against all odds, comes up with another “The Sopranos,” “High Maintenance,” or “The Wire.”

I’m for sure not holding my breath while waiting for a new George Carlin special. Neither is George.

Who might ask: Is newer always better?

When it comes to bicycles I’m much more interested in friction shifting, rim brakes, and the nine-speed drivetrain than I am in the latest shiny object making the registers ring, when customers and product can be found in the same place at the same time.

I have an Apple Pencil for my iPad Pro, but when I sat down yesterday to draw a holiday card for the neighbors, I used my old analog A.W. Faber 3H pencil, a fistful of Sakura Pigma Micron pens, and a sheet of Strathmore 300 Series Bristol paper. And yes, the card was in good old black and white. (I thought of making a quick trip to the art-supply store for colored pencils, and then I thought again.)

Speaking of iPads, there’s a metric shit-ton of e-books on mine, but I notice I’m mostly reading real books lately. The kind you don’t have to plug into the wall.

This is just the yelping of an old dog who’s tired of learning new tricks, pining for a day when he not only didn’t have to keep stuff running, he didn’t even have to buy the stuff. It just sorta, like, grew there, under the tree.

But time passes and things change.

“Nothing endures but change,” as Heraclitus observed.

Izzat so? Well, spare me the change, you one-scroll wonder. And gimme some George, goddamnit. I already got too much stuff.