When I said the week would be a whirl, I wasn’t kidding. The work I do for a local nonprofit is coming to a crescendo, and I don’t have a lot of time to do anything. However, I gots me some links for you. I’ll be back on Tuesday.
So.
Did you think it was impossible for the state of Florida’s slurpy MAGA community to get even worse? It is not. Behold the case of the Pulse nightclub crosswalk. You may recall Pulse as the site of a particularly grisly mass shooting in 2016 — 49 killed, 53 injured. As a memorial, or part of one, a crosswalk near the club was painted in rainbow colors.
Can’t have that in Ron DeSantis’ Florida, not when you-know-who is president. So earlier this month, workers painted over the rainbow in black and white. The club’s partisans painted the rainbow back, and state of Florida workers re-painted it black, sometime after 11 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy decided the rainbow was a safety hazard, I guess. But wait, there’s more!
A Florida state trooper is now parked at the scene, making sure those colors don’t come back. Someone went into police work, and is paid a state police officer’s wages, to watch over a crosswalk.
Moving on. As per our discussion of Jon Carroll a while back, a poignant piece about his wife, Tracy Johnston, who has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. He’s calling it a pre-obit, and it’s lovely:
We were backpacking in the Sierra, sometime in the late 1970s. The day had been spectacular, and the twilight was glorious, and fading fast. Here’s a great campsite, I said, about a lovely piece of flat earth right beside a lake. Tracy looked at it. Nope, she said. We trudged on. Two more times I found lovely campsites, with trees and views and birds twittering, and Tracy said, nope. And we finally, near total darkness, found a campsite near a stream and a lake. It was in fact the best campsite.
Tracy’s handling of cancer has been like that. There is always more life to be lived, more books to read, more people to hug. Here’s the good news: She ain’t dead yet.
Finally, one of those daffy McSweeney’s pieces that people pass around: I’m the abandoned new Cracker Barrell logo, and you can all go fuck yourselves:
Oh, I guess you’re also mad that they revamped the inside of the restaurants. Heaven forbid they rearrange their collection of Americana garbage to make it look less like the hoarder house you lost your virginity in. Jesus hates a coherent aesthetic, I suppose. A touch of care when placing items on a wall is a DEI dog-whistle, according to the bozos losing their minds on X. Not sure what it is about white space on a wall that makes you think a business hates white people, but okay. I hope they didn’t put all that stuff in the actual garbage, because with what they spent on this rebrand, they’re never gonna be able to buy it all again. On the other hand, if they just scrounged it back out of the trash, who’d know the difference?
Always good to end on a high note, eh?
Like I said, back after the weekend. Enjoy yours.
Mark P said on August 28, 2025 at 4:43 pm
My wife and I took one of our stray cats to a veterinary emergency clinic last night. It turns out that emergency vet clinics are a lot like human emergency rooms: you spend hours waiting in a room that’s too cold, and then pay a lot of money to get out. In this case, a little stray female cat that we feed was having problems walking. She would just fall over. They took her back (for hours), did some diagnostic testing, and found absolutely nothing. They suggested that we might want to take her to a speciality clinic for an MRI, which would cost thousands of dollars. We declined. But we were still $700 poorer when we left. We took home some liquid antibiotic and prednisone that we are supposed to give the cat. That’s going to be a struggle. But, hey, that’s a very valuable cat.
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Dave said on August 28, 2025 at 5:02 pm
Nothing to do with the topic but a real sign of what’s to come for more newspapers, I suspect, the Atlanta Journal Constitution will print its last newspaper on December 31 and will be entirely digital from then on.
The Cracker Barrel demographic is dying off and that was part of their reasoning. Why do we have an idiot in office who sticks his nose in everything that shouldn’t matter to him in the least and everything he does is so much foolishness.
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Sherri said on August 28, 2025 at 5:10 pm
I doubt those people complaining about the Cracker Barrel logo have eaten in a Cracker Barrel in years. If they had, they would have already noticed that the menu had changed to be less Southern traditional, to try to appeal to new people. When we were in Tennessee earlier this summer, we took my husband’s aunt out to eat at Cracker Barrel, and to my husband’s dismay, country ham was no longer available. Beans and greens, a longtime favorite of mine, also gone from the menu, though you at least still can get turnip greens as a side.
Once upon a time, there was always a wait for a table at Cracker Barrel, but that hasn’t been true for some time. If the people trying to turn the logo into a culture war had actually been eating there, the logo wouldn’t have changed.
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Sherri said on August 28, 2025 at 5:17 pm
This administration thinks that arresting possible undocumented people is more important than fighting wildfires.
At least, wildfires in a blue state.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/federal-agents-arrest-firefighters-working-on-wa-wildfire/
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basset said on August 28, 2025 at 6:28 pm
We probably eat at CB more often than most, and it sure seems to us that the quality of the food has gone down. Not only do we agree with Sherri’s take on the menu selections, selling beer and wine, as much as I consume of both, at CB just doesn’t feel right. Haven’t been in a remodeled one yet, just going by pics we’ve seen that’s no improvement either.
Last time we were in a CB one of the featured menu items was pot roast and vegetables cooked in a plastic bag. Now, that’s country.
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Julie Robinson said on August 28, 2025 at 6:39 pm
Good to know, Sherri. I’ve never crossed the threshhold of a Cracker Barrel, but sometimes travel makes you desperate.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the shooting in Minneapolis yesterday. I can’t say that I have any new thoughts or ideas, but it’s been preoccupying me all day.
CVS says they have the new Covid shots available, but not yet in Orlando. It wouldn’t hurt to check where you live.
The state of Florida is a jackass, who runs contests for school children to design bike lane art in the spring, and paints it over in the late summer. The Pulse crosswalk is being rechalked everyday and repainted every night. Too bad we don’t have any real issues here.
One cynically might think it’s an effort to draw attention away from the legal morass created by building the so-called Alligator Alcatrez. If one was cynical, that is.
In the meantime, rainbows are appearing all over town, and a local restaurant owner is turning her parking lot over to artists. Each one will paint a space in honor of one of our angels, 49 in all. Sunday night our church will join in the search for the missing rainbows, and create a few new ones around the property. We’re not going quietly.
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Mark P said on August 28, 2025 at 7:26 pm
I can’t believe the AJC is stopping print publication. My parents took the Constitution for years, along with the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune. About 15 years ago we tried to get the AJC at home just outside town, but there was no home delivery out here. I wonder how many will lose their jobs, and I wonder if the “paper” will make a go of it online.
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Sherri said on August 28, 2025 at 8:30 pm
I usually end up at a Cracker Barrel when I travel in the South, because they’re convenient. By design, they are located on interstate exits, they have large parking lots, clean bath rooms, and breakfast all day. That makes them perfect for meeting up with people who are driving to meet me halfway. The biscuits aren’t as good as they once were, but I like grits, and it’s hard to mess up eggs. Like Waffle House, it serves a purpose.
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