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 Compact, which remains an insoluable dilemma to its signatories and will join the long list of issues about which His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered knows nothing and cares even less.

And Your Humble Narrator, who ordinarily yearns to toddle off to someplace toasty about this time of year, finds himself in the awkward position of grumbling about beautiful weather. At home. In February.

All of which means — yes, yes, yes — it's time for a Coconut Telegraph edition of Radio Free Dogpatch. Apologies to the late Jimmy Buffett, from whom I liberated the headline.

• Technical notes: RFD uses the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack; Apple's GarageBand, and Auphonic for a quick wash and brushup. The dog drinking from his dish and the car failing to start come from Freesound. The background music, "Easy Stroll," is from YouTube's audio library. All other barks, bleats, and belches are the work of the thirsty, sunburnt, untraveled Irish-American behind the bar at this non-alcoholic pub.

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 are so, dusting off what few of the mad skills I possessed only in theory not so very long ago and taking them for a spin around the old podcasting studio to see what falls off.

For openers, the 24-inch LG display that now supplements the 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro in my main office is no longer attached to the MacBook Pro in the studio, which is 10 years older and an inch smaller, displaywise, and I cannot recommend such a tiny stage for audio theater as senescence staggers forward, trying to remember where it left its spectacles (atop its head).

Auphonic is no longer a strictly free app, which failed to astonish me in this, the New Gilded Age, so creator and audience must deal with what they call a "Jingle" fore and aft. Jingle my bollocks, boys ... I'll be looking for some other way to give me chin music a tuneup before I next set it out on its street corner to busk for nothing.

Finally, Libsyn has gotten a makeover as well, but if you're reading this you can be sure that I managed to negotiate their tricksy little maze. An old ratoncito can still cut the cheese. Find the cheese! I meant find the cheese! Where the hell are my glasses? Oh ... never mind.

Could this be the start of something big? Probably not. Mostly I wanted to see if I could still get 'er done. Also, I was bored. Giving the old brain-box a wee scrape and a splash of paint is a fine way to stay out of the wind, which is full of allergens and other evil tidings.

• Technical notes: RFD uses the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack; Apple's GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. Sound byte from Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" lifted from YouTube. Booing crowd, kicked-in door, and Celtic tune from Freesound. "Out of Step," which you've heard here before, comes from Audio Hero via Zapsplat. Special guest appearance from Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who despite a screechy meow is healthy as a horse as she approaches her 19th (!) birthday.

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 rearranging the national furniture, to say nothing of the org chart, without so much as a "Just who the hell elected you to anything, anyway, Fisheyes?"

Raise a ruckus and you get frog-marched out the door, either to the breadline or maybe a gated beachfront community that doesn't feature in Beelzebozo's plans for the tourist trade. Meanwhile, our media watchdogs just keep licking their own nuts; chasing random brain farts down countless odiferous ratholes; and "fact-checking" the arsonists who are burning down the government faster and more thoroughly than the Brits did during the War of 1812.

But be of good cheer: There's plenty of bark and bite to be had in the latest edition of Radio Free Dogpatch!

• 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 wash and brushup. The Captain from "Cool Hand Luke" communicates to us from YouTube. The boot to the bollocks and subsequent heave-ho hail from Freesound. The French taunter you may recall from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Air travel to Gitmo, a newspaper's printing press running, and soldiers on the march courtesy of Freesound. "Twisted Clowns" honk at us from Zapsplat. And last, but far from least, that's Sam Cooke working the "Chain Gang." All the other gang violence is the fault of Your Humble Narrator.

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 admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus ("There's One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside the bad guys, citizens decline to take their jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, food processing and service industries, and goods and services get more expensive and/or harder to find.

But never fear. We'll be annexing Canada! And Greenland! And the Sudetenland (whoops, wrong fascists, never mind). The Circus will roll on a Road of Bones until the world is under One Big Red White and Blue Tent (handmade by skilled artisans in border internment camps)!

While you await your own personal invitation to assist the authorities with this project (and their inquiries) you might as well listen to the latest All-American Episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. Could be the last one. You never know who's lending us an ear, or why.

• 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 wash and brushup.

The trailer theme from "Fort Apache" comes from YouTube, as do Rick's conversations with Major Strasser and Sam in "Casablanca." Bob and Doug McKenzie say "Good day" from SCTV's YouTube page. The drum-heavy martial music (by Gregor Quendel) and "Out of Step" are both courtesy of Zapsplat. The Mescalero Apache tribe's take on a member's run-in with an ICE agent can be found here. The Guardian reports on a Navajo experience. The Associated Press covered immigration raids in Chicago. At The Atlantic Mark Leibovich had some fun visiting Greenland, soon to be our 52nd state. And at the New Republic Matt Ford shredded the pestilential ordure dropped on birthright citizenship.

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 the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. "Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington" should've been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a franchise now.

When the Joker started getting top billing we should've known what was coming. It's just one evil clown after another.

• 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 wash and brushup. The wolf howls from Freesound, as do the sad trombones and the vinyl scratching. "Morning Mood" is from "Peer Gynt" by Edvard Grieg. Arthur, King of the Britons, chatting with an anarcho-syndicalist peasant come from "Monty Python and The Holy Grail." You'll catch a snippet of the "Grapes of Wrath" theme in there too (almost went with "Death Valley Days."). The ass-kissing is by Your Humble Narrator. The sound effect, not the actual, y'know, like, obesiance. And the classic "There Stands the Glass" is courtesy of Ted Hawkins via YouTube. As usual, all the other raving can be pinned on the landlord of this dump.

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 three pestilential erections.

Background music comes from Danny O'Keefe, AC/DC, The Cars, and Billy Joe Shaver, all thanks to YouTube. The 2016 dramedy "Horace and Pete" remains available on Louis C.K.'s website. Audio of the 2024 election-results certification courtesy C-SPAN. Dana Carvey as Ross Perot on "SNL" was lifted from YouTube. Bill Clinton comes (har de har har) from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The Walk of Shame is from HBO's "Game of Thrones." The headline is a riff on Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," not incidentally in honor of RFD's 61st episode. Finally, ask not for whom the clown horn honks; it honks for thee (from Freesound). All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

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. However, I was excused from freshman comp because I was a fool for words, as long as there were no equations to solve.

SF seems best to me when the future isn't pretty, but people manage to muddle through somehow. "A Clockwork Orange." "Alas, Babylon." Or "Station Eleven."

We watched the "Station Eleven" TV series on Max, recently watched it again, and afterward I finally got around to reading the book, which as usual is considerably different. Author Emily St. John Mandel was gracious about the changes, though, saying she thought the series "deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways."

I doubt that I'm adding any significant depth with this latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, but the notions contained therein have been taking up space in my head for a while now and the Voices would like them to leave. They're your problem now.

• 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 wash and brushup. NASA noises, starship flyby, countryside ambience and appreciative audience come from Zapsplat. "Wernher von Braun" is the work of the inimitable Tom Lehrer The Celtic tune is from Freesound. And the outro clip is from The Firesign Theatre's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus," which remains all too relevant. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

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 262 words do not a manifesto make. And let me tell you why.

"The Internationale (Traditional)" and "The Internationale (Death Metal Edition)" both come from YouTube. The typewriter comes from Freesound. The police siren, screeching tires, ballpoint scribbling, and game-show buzzer come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

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 podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the journalistical block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. While the big dogs go high we'll squeak in a little squirt down low.

The music, "Black Fedora" and "On the Job," and the droning sounds of networking and chanting all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

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 their YouTube channel. Freesound kicked in a dog whining, a power failure, an internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. And Judge Dredd issued his ruling from YouTube.

All the other racket comes courtesy of The Proprietor.

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 — shocked! — that a circus needs clowns.

Fanfare and gibbons from Freesound. "Out of Step" from Zapsplat. Folding chair to the skull from YouTube. Everything else is the fault of the proprietor.