Radio Free Dogpatch

The Duck! City was smokin' the day after the State of the Union crashed and burned, reaching a high of 72 degrees — which was 18 degrees above average. It's nice to be above average in something . But still, damn. In any event, the roses are budding and so is everything else. The primates who call this desert home may view with alarm the federal knuckles being dragged into the Colorado River Compa...

With having a drop taken and/or a mind wandering being common along both branches of the family tree it behooves a fella from time to time to test-drive what remains of his wits, if any. It struck me recently that for perfectly sound (har de har har) reasons I hadn't done an episode of Radio Free Dogpatch since February 2025. But times pass and things change and people clearly aren't getting any s...

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 pi...

The ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations. Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. "Dr. Phil" even got in on the act in Chicago. Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don't take kindly to being shoved around. Soon even the...

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...

Another Jan. 6 has come and gone. This time we managed to skip the armed-insurrection part of the program, so yay for us. Turns out that when they win a presidential election, The System works. Who knew? Watching Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the 2024 election results this week sent me careening down Memory Lane, revisiting a night in the sneezer in 1977, a Louis C...

I always liked science fiction. Science, not so much. Science always seemed rigid and impersonal. But science fiction, or speculative fiction, if you prefer — especially of the apocalyptic variety — spoke to the gloomy bog-trotter in my DNA. So I studied the fiction instead of the science, with predictable results. When it came time for me to go to college, there was only one in the state that wou...

When the John Laws collared their suspect in the CEO assassination he was said to have had in his possession a ghost gun, some fake I.D., and a 262-word "manifesto." By the ghosts of Marx and Engels! That's what I call phoning it in. Except our man didn't use a phone to compose it. Or a laptop. It was handwritten . Whether on papyrus, stone tablets, or a shithouse wall was not made clear. What is...

At The Atlantic magazine,   Noah "Fargo" Hawley says too many reporters are writing fiction these days. Meanwhile, in a fund-raising email from Mother Jones magazine, David Corn warns that the legacy media's value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect's latest play constitutes a form of "sanewashing." Hey, our little purse pooch of a p...

The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel "Panama," by Thomas McGuane. And now it's the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, a unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. Sly and The Family Stone contributed a few s...

Wherever shalt thou see a man on horseback, there also shalt thou see a horse's ass. And sometimes more than one of them, too. That's Scripture, son! There would be less pearl-clutching in the national media over Orange Julius Caesar doing exactly what we all expected he would do had some button-down editors worn their family jewels to the Big Dance. Alas, they did not, and now they are shocked —...

There's nothing like getting the old one-two, a bacterial sock to the snotlocker followed by an electoral blow to the breadbasket. For treatment we visit the witch doctors of The Firesign Theatre , SNL's "Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber," and that sniffling eejit behind the mic at Infernal Hound Sound. The background music, "Abandoned," comes from Zapsplat.  

I'm not running away to Canada. I'm just running away from the news. There's lots of bad noise out there on the day after Election Day 2024. So naturally I felt compelled to add to the cacophony. You're welcome. Gunfire by Freesound. The rest of the racket was homemade.

The Not-So-Great Pumpkin is floating into Albuquerque this morning, a bit late for the International Balloon Fiesta, but just in time for Halloween. Nobody knows just why he's visiting a blue town in a blue county in a blue state in the final days of his campaign for The Big Gig. Maybe it's just a pit stop to pick up a bunch of burgers to carry him through until Election Day. For sure he's not pop...

"He is risen" is not a phrase we associate with Halloween. More of an Easter thing, actually. Unless we're discussing this podcast, which was last seen (heard) alive in Easter 2023. And now, with Halloween cackling on the horizon, the bloody thing has clawed its way out of its grave and is headed for your place with designs on your ears. Music is courtesy of Zapsplat. Crickets come to you from Fre...

Spring isn't a date on the calendar. It's more of a feeling. A warm one, if you're lucky. For me, the vernal equinox is rarely the starter's pistol. I don't hear that big bang until Herself asks whether her Soma Double Cross is ready to ride after a long winter's nap on its hook in the garage. By that reckoning, spring arrived in The Duck! City on April 9, Easter Sunday. It was a few degrees short...

Birthdays. Some of us get overserved, others get 86'd with the cork barely out of the bottle. Whoever's in charge of this party seems a bit random. Can't tell the top shelf from the well, the class from the dross. Proper ladies and gents given the shove while the most appalling tossers have the run o' the place. Herself is back east with family and friends to raise a belated parting glass to a lif...

The bitter economic headwinds prove too much for some in the peloton of cycling journalism. It's a rough old road, especially when you ride it on the rivet in the bloody gutter of vulture capitalism. The sport is pricey to do, and to cover. Advertising is a hard sell. Memberships and subscriptions can only take you so far. Old pros lose the wheel; newcomers hope to find some form. Above the course...

The Voices and I have been having a meeting of the minds as to exactly why we want to belly-flop back into this sonic kiddie pool, a shallow backwater that drains feebly and sporadically into the Great Audio River. But apparently we're at least one mind short. However, we do not lack for Voices. And they all have their own microphones because somebody around here got a little acquisitive a couple...

The zombie podcast Radio Free Dogpatch awakens after a two-year dirt nap, scuttles out from beneath its filthy blanket of mulch, litter, and snow, and shambles about looking for something (or someone) to eat. Or at least listen.

Patrick O'Grady used to wheelsuck the bike magazines to spring break in Arizona or California. Then the biz wised up and he had to stick his own snoot into the breeze. Until last year, when like many of us, he enjoyed all the travel of a rigid aluminum fork. And now, in Year Two of the Plague, he's stuck — because he hasn't been stuck.

When Texas sank back into the Ice Age, Patrick O'Grady was reminded of the good old days on a wind-scoured rockpile outside Weirdcliffe, Colorado, where the power shut off whenever it was most inconvenient, the candle lanterns and Coleman two-burner were close at hand, and a Lopi fireplace insert and a tall woodpile kept the toilets from exploding like a bottle of beer left overlong in the freezer...

Trucks with beds and friends with couches saw Patrick O'Grady through his rambling, gambling years, as he rolled the dice with one newspaper after another. He eventually came up winners by leaving the business altogether. Marrying well didn't hurt, either. The citizens of "Nomadland" have traveled a rougher road.  And they're still on it. This stray dog was struck by Jessica Bruder's book, and he...

There's something about February that's guaranteed to set a Mad Dog to howling. This time it's Impeachy the Clown as the opening act for our local bozos and their buses. Did everyone forget to lock their wigs before their moment of simulated exhilaration, or what?

Lockup got you down? Fortress of Solitude starting to smell like feet, fast food, and farts? Well, Clark, turn off that Zoom cam, take off the glasses, and see if you can still clear your top tube in a single bound.