A king-size turd

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
O, for the days when kings didn’t have shit all over them.

What a perfect lead-in for next weekend’s No Kings rallies.

The Marquis of Mar-a-Lago is definitely not a king, by the standards of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Shit all over him. Plenty of it his own.

James Fallows has a few thoughts about how the Marquis chose to note the passing of former FBI director Robert Mueller, who died Friday at 81. Quoth His Excremency:

Good, I’m glad that he is dead.

Ouf! Dude sure knows how to set the tone, que no?

Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way, not least because I have a penchant for short and not-so-sweet obits myself, some of them with a callback to the old National Lampoon headline — “Franco Dies, Goes to Hell” — and I’m very much looking forward to writing his.

Fallows gives a shout-out to the upcoming No Kings rallies and suggests that we call/write the Orange House, plus our senators and representatives, to deliver “messages of outrage.” Great idea, and I’m all for it.

But that old Yippie-wannabe streak of mine, as always, yearns to take the response just a wee bit further. …

What about sending His Excremency a roll of industrial-grade toilet paper, the kind of 220-grit sandpaper you find in roadside rest areas, hot-sheet motels, and jails, with a note suggesting that he use it to wipe his all-too-public asshole, the one just below his nose?

Or perhaps a single long pubic hair taped to a postcard, with instructions to use it as dental floss after shitting through his face like this? Which he wouldn’t, of course. You know His Excremency never flosses; just tosses his dentures to a minion, who dunks them in the thundermug and then shoehorns them back in through that wrinkled, puckered orifice.

No, not that one. We’re talking the attic here, not the basement.

In the meantime, we can attend our local No Kings events and wait for that glorious, long-overdue day when we can all breathe a sigh of relief and say:

Good, I’m glad that he is dead.

Call me an optimist, but I like to think that this non-king will rest under a blanket of shit for eternity. His should be the only tombstone in the boneyard with a toilet-paper dispenser.

Sprung

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The lilacs have been doing the business for the better part of quite some time.

“First day of spring” me bollocks.

The toppling temperature records and soaring pollen counts tell me otherwise.

The Duck! City croaked another mark yesterday with a high of 88°. And our earliest day of 90° or better — May 3, 1947 — looks like an endangered species as well.

This is a small platter of fried spuds to anyone living in Tucson (101°), Phoenix (105°), or Palm Springs (107°). All records, set yesterday. Helluva note when St. Me Day comes with a chaser of heat stroke. If MarkWayne BillyBob JimmyJoe Knucklegobbler and his ICEholes come looking for you in any of those ZIP codes all you need is a parabolic reflector and hey presto! Instant Death Ray.

Speaking of cookery, the hot soups and stews and anything involving the oven have long since been 86ed from the menu here at Chez Dog. Last night we dined on Martha Rose Shulman’s shrimp and mango tacos with a side of rice and green salad. As “spring” scampers into summer, this ol’ dog needs his wok.

Fuelishness 3: Dimed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Speedway: $3.99
DK: $3.99

Half-stepping: checked only two gas stations instead of four today.

Can you feel the savings? The economy roaring?

During my errands this morning I noticed a gas station on Montgomery rocking the $3.99, so when I slipped out for a short bike ride later in the day I checked half of my usual suspects and they were as you see — up a dime since March 14, and up 40 cents or better since March 10.

I’d expect to see some even steeper prices at 7-Eleven directly. 7-Eleven Inc. may have its headquarters in Irvine, Texas, but it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Seven-Eleven Japan, and I can’t imagine Corporate found Cadet Bonespurs’ little jape about Pearl Harbor a real knee-slapper.

R.I.P., Gregg Bagni

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
The Bagman cometh. And he bringeth … cheerleaders?

Gregg Bagni was too much for this world. Possibly because he was not of this world.

Or so he said, anyway. Ack ack ack.

The former Schwinn pitchman and Dispenser of Alien Truth has returned to the Mothership after a snowboarding accident in British Columbia, according to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. He may have been 72, but it’s so hard to tell with these extraterrestrial types. I mean, just look at Doctor Who.

Like the Doctor, Bagni had been known to get around and about. In November 2009 he emailed to mention, among other things, being fresh off a little spin through the Dolomites — 650 miles with nearly 68,000 (!) feet of climbing — in the company of Clif Bar’s Gary Erickson.

I had skipped Interbike that year, so I don’t know what Bagni might’ve been up to in Sin City. But if he had been there, it would’ve been something. That was the one sure thing at Interbike, year in and year out. The Bagman would be up to something, and his act was always worth the price of admission.

For Schwinn’s 100th anniversary he hired 100 Elvis impersonators to march down the Strip, led by Fr. Guido Sarducci.

In 2003 he was stalking the show with what I described in BRAIN as “a large, garishly painted wrestler who will be delighted to tie you into a granny knot while the Bagman snaps away with his Polaroid.”

And way back in 1999 — I think it was 1999, anyway — he drove a herd of cheerleaders to the VeloPress booth, where I was to be signing copies of my freshly minted collection of VeloNews cartoons, “The Season Starts When?”

I have no idea whether I was on his schedule. I do know that I didn’t want to be doing any goddamn book-signing, in public, unarmed, where all my many enemies could relish my humiliation, because I was certain that precisely nobody would want the book, especially if they had to deal with me to get one.

But I wound up signing a ton of books and people were pleasant and appreciative and I can only attribute it to extraterrestrial intervention.

Bagni was a prolific correspondent, and wrote in the manner of Archy from Don Marquis’s column in the New York Sun of the 1900s. Archy was a defunct vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach who borrowed the columnist’s typewriter from time to time. He had to dive head-first onto the keys to work them, but couldn’t operate the shift key, and thus Archy’s works were all sans capital letters.

In April 2021 Bagni wrote on Medium, in lowercase, about a few “great lessons” he’d learned and been able to put into play after having had a gun shoved in his face— twice — deciding he would not live past the age of 30, and “living [his] life accordingly.”

“frankly … been pretty lucky being able to ride this crazy blue ball this long.

If you read it you’ll get a good idea of how he turned out. And if you never met him, you’ll wish you had.

Peace to Gregg Bagni, his family, friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. Ack ack ack.