Tag: Mother Jones

The winter of our dissed content

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Extry, extry, read all about it … or not.

At The Atlantic, Noah “Fargo” Hawley advises us that too many reporters are writing fiction.

In a fund-raising email from Mother Jones, David Corn warns us (with one hand casually searching our wallet pockets and purses) that the legacy media’s value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect’s latest play are a form of “sanewashing.’

And at Radio Free Dogpatch, well — our little purse pooch of a podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. Why not squeak in a little squirt of our own?

So lend an ear to the latest, massively hydrated edition of Radio Free Dogpatch, even though it may be, as The Bard had Richard declaim:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before [its] time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. …

Shit, now that I think of it, the title may be the best part of the whole damn thing. …

• 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 sonic colonic. The music, “Black Fedora” and “On the Job,” and the people networking and chanting all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Fort Apache

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

Finally, a taste of actual fall weather.
Finally, a taste of actual fall weather.

I’m in Albuquerque, working on a bike review and watching it rain. Herself is bound for Mesa Verde on the next leg of her Gal Pals Getaway Tour.

And somewhere in the southern Arizona desert, the Three Percent United Patriots are making headlines, if only in Mother Jones magazine.

Anyone who has ever lived out where the hoot owls date the chickens has met at least one of these dudes. In Weirdcliffe it was the cowboy who claimed to have edibles and weaponry cached all over the Sangre de Cristos and inquired whether we would be “ready to kill” when it all went sideways and the “Mexicans” came boiling up Hardscrabble Canyon to … to … well, get the hell out of Pueblo, I suppose. And who could blame them?

I got the hell out of Pueblo. I also got the hell out of Weirdcliffe. And I’ve spent a little time in the Threepers’ AO, though I never saw one. (“If you saw them, sir, they weren’t Threepers.”)

Just once I would love to read about the lefty variation on these dudes. There has to be one, amirite? The Sedona Extremely Irregulars? The 69th Berkeley Berserkers? The 420th Humboldt County Doobie Brethren?

Or maybe that particular ship has sailed, or sunk.

Back in the Seventies, when I thought I was Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the October League’s Denver chapter had just wrapped up another successful evening of smashing the State via withering rhetoric when a couple comrades mentioned that they used to be professional wrestlers.

“Bullshit,” someone said. And then they showed us, right there in the dark Denver alley. They were slamming each other into cars and up against walls, pounding each other with forearm smashes and trash-can lids, the works. It was entertaining as hell and absolutely nobody got hurt.

Then a window slammed open and someone advised us to shut the fuck up and we did. Shortly thereafter the revolution failed to materialize.