Tonight, on The Trump Channel!

April 7, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

A hard-and-fast rule around Ye Olde Dogge Haus is, “Disregard anything that follows the phrase ‘Trump says. …”

But rules are made to be broken. And while I had been planning a grocery trip, now I wonder whether digging a bunker in the back yard might be a better use of my time.

This fuckin’ guy. A mouth like a yawning hippo and the brains of a flea on the hippo’s arse.

And nary a zookeeper in sight.

A friend and I were chatting this morning and he wondered why we hadn’t been hearing anything lately about the whole “running out of ammo” thing that the press had been pushing not long ago, as the U.S. military pitched top-shelf armaments at bargain-basement threats.

So … what exactly will John Whine be packing for the showdown in this Western he’s produced, directed, and starring in?

A few of the lefty bloggers I read are thinking the Fat Man wants to go all — well, Fat Man, the bigger-and-better 2026 edition — on Iran. And here I sit reminiscing about the Good Old Days, taking cover under my desk at Randolph AFB Elementary.

That was one of those solid Air Force issue deals, not this cheapo Office Depot number I’ve been working at for the past couple decades. I’m not sure it’s up to the task of sparing Your Humble Narrator that difficult job interview down below, at The Lake O’ Fire Apocalypse-Intelligencer.

Notice how His Excremency pitches the “death of a civilization” as though it were just another shitty episode of reality TV: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” But first, this message from Mar-a-Lago-Mars!

What I’d like to find out — and what the legacy media is not telling me — is what the other nuclear powers think about this slobbering shit-gibbon swinging his ’shroom around like a Central Avenue tranq addict oscillating between peeing and jacking off.

We know where Congress stands: watching from a safe distance and doing fuck-all, as per usual. Waiting for the midterms, I expect.

Aren’t we all? ’Scuse me, got a hole to dig. …

Luna. See?

April 6, 2026April 6, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

I call this “Shitty iPhone 13 Mini Snapshot of the Moon Taken on Zoom While Setting Out the Trash and Recycling.”

What a great week to be offworld, hey?

I mean, sure, the Artemis II’s toilet keeps crapping out (har de har har). And then there’s that whole “hitching a ride home on the moon’s gravity” thing, which sounds kinda crucial, because nobody wants to ask the Vogons for a lift, what with the bad poetry and all.

But at least the astronauts don’t have to have one of those tiresome “the president would like a word” wankfests with War Piggy, a.k.a. Addled Shitler, because he’s too busy trying to see to it that they don’t have a world to return to.

Sigh. Have you noticed how we keep launching all the wrong people into space? I can think of one eejit — plus another 18 in the presidential line of succession — who would make an excellent audience for a Vogon poetry reading somewhere on the other side of the galaxy.

Tom Waits: Desert Oracle

April 4, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

Not Tom Waits. Or Ken Layne, for that matter.

My man Ken Layne says in his latest episode of “Desert Oracle Radio” that he got the idea for his podcast from (wait for it) Tom Waits.

Somehow this fails to surprise me. Mr. Waits casts a wide loop. Wasn’t that long ago that people thought he was Leon Redbone. Turns out he was Ken Layne. Frank Zappa was Leon Redbone.

Not really.

Here’s Ken Layne:

One of the initial inspirations for this radio show was a Tom Waits interview I read in an alt-weekly newspaper three decades ago.

So Tom Waits has these bits that he’s doing for the press tour so the reporters aren’t too annoying. They can’t keep up because he’s just rolling out these little stories, tall tales, routines. And one of them went something like this. He says, and I’m quoting incorrectly for memory:

‘Oh, I’ve got a radio show now, out in the desert, in a little desert town, it’s called ‘Strange and Unusual Facts.’ And then he’d say some oddball factoid about lemurs or the height of Big Ben or how many legs a centipede has, which is variable, turns out. Then, Tom Waits tells the music writer for the alt-weekly, ‘It’s a small station and the signal doesn’t get far, but people are enjoying the show, and, in fact, a number of people are moving to this desert town just to hear it.’

That always sort of stuck with me. Because somewhere up ahead would be this radio show in the little desert town of Joshua Tree.

And you know what? I’ve had a number of people tell me in person, to my face, that they moved here because of this radio show.

So, Tom, if you’re out there tonight, thanks for the idea.

I’ve taken a few ideas from Tom Waits myself, not all of them good. Never went with the soul patch, though. That was Frank Zappa. Or was it Leon Redbone?

Space oddity

April 3, 2026April 4, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

More than a few folks in the media have expressed surprise that NASA’s reboot of a flyby round the moon hasn’t engaged more eyeballs.

Huh. Well. …

It could have something to do with the fact that we are at wa … pardon, on “an excursion” … in the Middle East. Again.

Or that a third-tier reality-TV character put us there, when he wasn’t busy cheating at golf, stenciling his accursed name on everything, and/or lying through his false teeth.

Maybe the suckers that voted for him are too busy trying to squeeze their eyeballs back into their sockets after a glance at the latest gas prices, or a peek at his 2027 wish list for the Pentagon — $1.5 trillion, about a 40 percent jump from the last military-industrial goodie bag.

Can’t have guns and butter, of course, so better learn to like your toast dry. If you still have the bread to buy bread.

Me, I still like watching our tentative steps at space exploration. We caught the burn that took Artemis II — or Orion, Integrity, whatever the fuck this thing is called, Christ, no wonder nobody’s paying any attention to it — out of Earth’s orbit and toward the moon just before dinner last night. A missile launch that isn’t intended to kill someone, or a bunch of someones. Feature that, if you can.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how very unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.

Rocket, man

April 2, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder. … Photo courtesy NASA/Bill Ingalls

It was nice to take a break from the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus yesterday to watch NASA pitching a high hard one at the moon.

When my sis and I were sprouts we often got to catch NASA’s act. The old man was a big fan of the space program (three of the seven Mercury astronauts were Air Force flyboys like him). So I remember the Mercury and Gemini programs from our time at Randolph AFB at San Antone. And of course Apollo, which took off after we’d transferred to Bibleburg, with the first crewed flight in 1968.

The old man collected autographed pix of the astronauts, and I built models of the craft they flew, even got into model rocketry for a time. Also, and too, “Star Trek,” because of course “Star Trek.”

Apollo 11, the first time a human set foot on the moon, was the crowning achievement. Nothing NASA did afterward thrilled me in the same way, possibly because I was too busy being a space cowboy with Major Tom.

Too much science fiction, I suppose. No lunar colony, no base on Mars, no interstellar travel … did my old B-burg bro’ Robert A. Heinlein live in vain? Here it is 2026 and we’re still stuck down here with the eejits, murdering each other and crowing about doing a hot lap around the moon, samey same as in 1968, when we got the famous photo “Earthrise,” from Apollo 8’s William Anders.

Ah, well. I still like to watch. And dream.