Radio Free Dogpatch

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 smarter, especially me.

So here we a...

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 pissant from South Africa to start re...

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 fanboys will find the price of admi...

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 few all-too-short days away from t...

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.K. dramedy from 2016, and the last...

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 would accept me with my miserable GPA....

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 abundantly clear, however, is that 2...

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 po...

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 seconds of "Family Affair" from the...

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 —...

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 popping round to pay us the $200K he o...

"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 Freesound. All the rotten racket is th...

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 of ideal — I like to think of spri...

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 lifelong friend felled by COVID last f...

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 floats the vulture capitalist, rid...

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 years back. If we don't pipe them i...