The think pieces.

It appears I’m headed into another vortex of work for a few days, and maybe weeks, although it won’t be unrelenting. I’ve accepted an outside job doing proofreading on some marketing materials, the proceeds of which I’m throwing into our Iceland account. Did I mention we’re going to Iceland in June? WE ARE GOING TO ICELAND. I’ve always wanted to see the midnight sun and sit in steaming cauldrons of natural hot springs. The last time I did that was in Yellowstone, in a place deep in the backcountry, where a hot spring joined with a cold stream to make a perfect, and I do mean perfect, hot tub. You adjusted the temperature by moving around in the stream. ‘Twas wonderful. But this trip, like the last one, will require money, so I’m in selling/earning/saving mode.

A big pile of work has been promised for my blogging time tonight, so this may be a little dashed-off. Fortunately, I have some good links. Here’s Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone on Il Douche, but more important, the conditions that have allowed his remarkable run to take place:

What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the (National) Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.

It’s a really good piece. Long, but entertaining and absolutely worth your time.

As is this one, again by Jeb Lund, again in Rolling Stone. It’s about the other Jeb, the exclamation-point one. It’s not a slashing piece; Lund is a Floridian, and gives Jeb! credit for his competent handling of that state’s hurricanes, plural. (You’ll recall it only took one to send his brother into a tailspin.) But then he gets to the Terri Schiavo case, and, well, it’s hard for a thinking person to forgive the governor that.

Oddly enough, I’ve seen Jeb come in for abuse on that issue from the other side, some of whom honestly believed that he should have sent the Florida National Guard into her hospice, to protect her from her husband. Whom they would have loved to see arrested. There’s a noxious priest who was openly saying that Michael Schiavo abused his wife into a coma and, fearful she might wake up after 16 years and be able to point a trembling finger at him from a witness stand, just wanted to, y’know, finish the job. And in fact, Bush did ask the prosecutor to look over the original police and medical reports, for just that sort of evidence.

So let’s wrap up with something a little lighter — Hank, on the “Full House” reboot, “Fuller House.” It has a nice late-in-the-piece pivot point:

I could stop here and go home, having dutifully shot the fish in “Fuller House’s” barrel. But we haven’t done the part where you accuse me of telling the kids to get off my lawn. I feel we must.

“Full House” wasn’t my thing, so “Fuller House” certainly won’t be. But you younger folks, you enjoy.

Well, the snowstorm was a big nothing burger for my part of Michigan — all-day slush-rain, as the temperature hovered at 32.8, and yes, I checked. We still might get something overnight, but right now? I’m thinking I’m going to have to swim in the morning.

Good day, all.

Posted at 12:19 am in Current events | 81 Comments
 

Toxic guys.

I found myself nodding off at 9 p.m. last night, so alas. However, part of me wanted to see the Trumpian margin of victory in Nevada. And it’s impressive — he got 46 percent. If this guy isn’t Mr. Inevitable at this point, I don’t know who is. Like Neil Steinberg, who pointed out the candidate’s astonishing (and underreported) use of the Gen. Pershing/pig’s blood libel, I am no longer even darkly amused. But this is our country, isn’t it?

So just in case you’re a GOP voter, and you’re looking at the second option on the menu, here’s a rather brutal profile of the guy running that show:

“Jeff Roe does not know the difference between fact and fiction,” said Joe Brazil, a county councilman in Missouri who unsuccessfully sued Mr. Roe for defamation after a 2006 blog post days before Mr. Brazil’s primary in a State Senate race.

The item focused on a sad event from Mr. Brazil’s youth, when, at 17, he killed a classmate in a dump-truck accident. Mr. Roe’s post suggested Mr. Brazil had consumed “quite a few beers.” But Mr. Brazil had not been drinking, the police said, and was not charged.

After watching coverage of the Iowa caucuses from his home in Augusta, Mo., Mr. Brazil said, he tried to reach the Carson campaign, hoping to offer a history lesson. “How could they be surprised?” he asked.

Don’t miss this detail, either:

Mr. Roe, who declined to be interviewed, was quick to establish a distinctive culture at Mr. Cruz’s headquarters in Houston. Top aides were required to move there. (Mr. Roe brought along his wife, Missy, the 2010 winner of the Mrs. Missouri United States pageant; their baby, Remington, named in part for the gun maker; and Mrs. Roe’s parents.)

I imagine Missy will be found soon, clutching the wheel of her car alongside a racing freeway, muttering to herself. Or maybe not. Maybe he chose the perfect better half. In which case Houston is totally her kind of town.

How bad it is: This guy is the “decent” one in the race. Was.

Jeb Lund is one of my favorite columnists working today, and I think he nails it here.

OK, time to put nose to grindstone. Freezing rain is pouring from the sky, and I’m out of bread, too. Wednesday! WOO.

Posted at 8:50 am in Current events | 43 Comments
 

The list.

Jeb Bush’s campaign is over, and while we all know it was a big waste of money — the exclamation point alone was probably about $4 million — the actual semi-itemized list is sort of interesting.

Eighty-four million on advertising (and they still couldn’t figure out Donald Trump). Parking cost $15,800, $88,387 on “branding,” which will always sound to me like something you do to cattle. Pizza consumed $4,837, or rather, $4,837 was consumed in the form of pizza.

I love pizza, just like everybody else. Ate some today, in fact, but where is it written pizza is the only food for political campaigns? I’d like to start a third party, dedicated to eating Chinese food instead of pizza. Or maybe takeout fried chicken.

A tiring Monday with a long staff meeting, which always takes it out of me — all that sitting. Then pizza, then more meeting, then the drive home. Sitting, sitting, sitting. At the end of the month we’re moving to a co-working space, which has many standing-desk options, and I intend to take advantage of them. The booty will be the summer project.

And while we’re both a) tired; and b) below the belt, some good news from the health beat — the HPV vaccine is a smashing success:

A vaccine introduced a decade ago to combat the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer has already reduced the virus’s prevalence in teenage girls by almost two-thirds, federal researchers said Monday.

Even for women in their early 20s, a group with lower vaccination rates, the most dangerous strains of human papillomavirus, or HPV, have still been reduced by more than a third.

“We’re seeing the impact of the vaccine as it marches down the line for age groups, and that’s incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Amy B. Middleman, the chief of adolescent medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, who was not involved in the study. “A minority of females in this country have been immunized, but we’re seeing a public health impact that is quite expansive.”

Of course it’s still a hard sell to parents who never want to admit their children, boys and girls, might have sex lives some day. Science won’t change their minds, but it’s still a welcome improvement.

So, then, let’s close with a giggle: The Onion, nailing it yet again:

Warning that the flora in the immediate vicinity withers and turns black at an alarming rate, scientists from Cornell University alerted the public Monday that all plant life within a 30-yard radius of each of presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s campaign signs is rapidly dying off.

Blight. OK, then. Happy Tuesday.

Posted at 12:15 am in Current events | 30 Comments
 

The sword of truth.

After Friday’s excoriation of the poor shlub who wrote the Daniel Holtzclaw piece, I feel the need for some balance. Check out the first couple grafs of this Jeffrey Toobin piece on Antonin Scalia:

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

You know what I like about that? There’s not a whiff of equivocation in any part of it, just simple declarative sentences, dropping like truth bombs, ending with a long passage written by the deceased himself, and not that long ago, underlining just how retrograde his opinions were. Were. He’s dead. Let’s move forward. So many writers are afraid, of blowback, of Twitter, of whatever, that they can’t even express a clear opinion anymore. It’s not that I think this, but that I really think this — you can find that sentence in a dozen columns published today. If you’re good, no one would get confused in the first place.

The essay doesn’t lose steam — and isn’t that long, I should add — but if I may quote one more paragraph, or portion of it:

Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought.

And this man, I remind you, is considered a towering intellectual. He got his news from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al. Good luck with that level of intellectualism, guys.

Whew, that felt good to read.

So, we had ourselves a lovely weekend at my latitude, two days back-to-back with temperatures in the 60s. I ran errands on my bike, smelled the breeze, did some recreational reading, attended a dinner party and otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves. Of course, because I am a homeowner, I looked at the considerably colder forecast for the coming week and thought, “Good thing I got most of the dog poop picked up, because the snow’s going to cover it all back up again.” Lord Grantham never had this problem.

I hope I can be one of those people who looks forward as I get older. Endless nostalgia is a truly destructive attitude to carry into life. As anyone who reads Bob Greene could tell you.

The rest of the weekend was not so great in Michigan, as current events will demonstrate. My friend and former student Ryan had to roll out for K’zoo Sunday morning. As he was leaving, his girlfriend informed him he would be missing her breakfast tacos, “which only makes me hate this fucking loser even more,” he said.

But he filed a good story. Best detail:

Michael Arney, a local radio reporter, said he attended Comstock high school in Kalamazoo with Dalton, who was now, he said, the third murder suspect from his 1989 graduating class.

The delamination of the less-well-educated white American male? Or coincidence? You tell me.

Have a good weekend, all.

Posted at 12:22 am in Current events, Media | 41 Comments
 

Killed too late.

The cruel term for the sports desk within newspapers is, or used to be, the Toy Department. A cruel moniker and undeserved — a well-curated sports desk should have some of the best writers at the paper, because, when you think of it, they really have the sow’s ear/silk purse job at the paper, even more than the guy who covers the zoning board. After all, most people who are looking for zoning-board news don’t already know what the vote was. How long has it been since you opened a newspaper to find out who won a game or was the No. 1 draft pick?

But it wasn’t until I spent my much-whined-about time as a sports copy editor that I realized just how stinky those sows’ ears are. In Fort Wayne, there’s only pro hockey and one branch campus of two large universities, with a sports program most known for its great…volleyball program. The readers were mostly interested in high school programs, including that world-famous Hoosier Hysteria basketball thing. I’d read the Prep Sports copy and feel an unfamiliar emotion about the polo-shirted shlubs back in sports – empathy. And not a little pity. After all, they had to drag quotes out of 15-year-olds and try to make rivalries between high schools sound interesting.

But all that said, I had one thought when I finally staggered to the end this week’s journalism of infamy, i.e., “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw,” a 12,000-word piece about a mediocre college football player later convicted of raping eight different women in the course of his work as a police officer in Oklahoma. The story was published, then abruptly un-published by SB Nation, Vox’s sports site. And that thought was this: Toy department.

Of course the story is still out there, and if you have 12,000 words’ worth of tolerance for cliché, subordinate clauses and misplaced sympathy, you can read it here. It’s such a mess, it’s hard to imagine it was edited at all, much less the way a long-form narrative should be.

The immediate complaint was that it takes Holtzclaw’s side, and that it does – to read it, you’d think he was the victim of a terrible injustice, and not a man convicted by a jury of his peers. Deadspin’s summation is pretty on-point:

It starts off with expressions of full sympathy for Holtzclaw, hinting that perhaps there are two sides to this story. It tells only one. The side based in reality—that Holtzclaw violated and brutalized at least eight poor, black women and is in jail for the rest of his life—is never given more than cursory attention.

It presents an endless litany of character witnesses for Holtzclaw—his lawyer, his family, former teammates—all expressing their disbelief that Holtzclaw could be guilty, which is among other things a monotonously boring thing to hang a story of this length upon. Basically, this is the local news interviewing the shocked neighbors—“He always seemed like such a nice kid”—over and over again for 12,000 words.

And so on. And boy, does it waste a lot of words to get there. Take this sentence, just as one example. It’s by way of explaining Hoytzclaw’s enrollment at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti:

Unlike the University of Michigan, the perennial college football powerhouse seven miles up Washtenaw Avenue in the more affluent and more picturesque college town of Ann Arbor, Eastern Michigan, despite a student population of about 25,000, is a member of the Mid-American Conference, more “mid-major” than big-time.

And that’s a fairly lean one. There are many more far worse.

This Slate piece gives you “the worst parts,” by their reckoning. My favorite:

Holtzclaw chose to go to Eastern Michigan as a means to not only play football and pursue his dream of playing in the NFL, but to keep his parents from having to foot the bill for his college education. To act so unselfishly, say those who know him best, was just who Holtzclaw was.

Messes are something of a theme today.

How is it possible to hold these competing thoughts in one’s mind — that police are tough enough to protect us and yet so, so sensitive, too? Ask Beyoncé:

At first, Sheriff Robert Arnold said he had no explanation for why shots were fired outside his home in Rutherford County, Tenn., on Monday night — except perhaps for an undercurrent of anti-police sentiment in America.

“You do make people mad when you do your job; so that’s the only thing I could think of,” Arnold said at a news conference Tuesday, according to edited video of his comments posted by the Daily News Journal.

But then another possibility came to mind, and Arnold blamed Beyoncé.

“With everything that happened since the Super Bowl… that’s what I’m thinking: Here’s another target on law enforcement,” he said.

He went on: “You have Beyoncé’s video and that’s kind of bled over into other things, it seems.”

Yes, that’s the most likely explanation, don’t you think? I mean, I felt incited to dance; why shouldn’t another be driven to anti-police violence?

Which brings us into the weekend. When it will be warm! Above 40, anyway. Enjoy yours.

Posted at 12:28 am in Media | 68 Comments
 

More desk-clearing.

So it turns out the good Justice Scalia was the featured entertainment at a rich-guy’s retreat in Texas. I wish I could be surprised. I’m also not surprised by this:

He pointed to perhaps the most famous case involving a justice and recusal, which involved Scalia himself. Scalia joined then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney on a hunting trip while Cheney was the subject of a lawsuit over his energy task force, and in response to calls that he sit out the case, Scalia issued a highly unusual 21-page argument explaining why he refused to do so.

This is one area where there is no false equivalency. This is Washington. But this is also the Supreme Court. No wonder Trump and Sanders are doing so well.

Sorry, I’m still in a sort of all-links/clear-the-desk phase. Ridiculous week at work, empty tank creatively. So here you go:

While we’re on the subject, a little remembrance of the deceased Nino. Not a particularly flattering one.

I love Roy’s blog, but never more than when he points with the sword of truth on wing nut whining about culture. As he does here.

Great New York story here:

One Lower East Side man received what some have called “the most New York note imaginable” after losing his wallet at a concert.

Reilly Flaherty found out after a Wilco concert at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn earlier this month that his personal effects were missing, and later got a letter that was a metropolitan mixture of brash, surprising, honest and mean.

“I found your wallet and your drivers license and your address so here’s your credit cards and other important stuff,” read a note, later posted on Instagram, that arrived in a plain white envelope.

“I kept the cash because I needed weed, the metrocard because well the fare’s $2.75 now, and the wallet cause it’s kinda cool. enjoy the rest of your day. Toodles, Anonymous.”

Now into Thursday. Ugh.

Posted at 12:12 am in Current events | 44 Comments
 

Clearing the desk.

A few stray notes and scraps I’ve been saving. Sorry, but we all have to empty drawers from time to time.

** Every time I think about the Supreme Court, I get irritated, thinking about one of the most preposterously obnoxious trolls of recent years — the time the National Review bitched about Sonia Sotomayor daring to pronounce her name the way she feels like pronouncing it. Why can’t she be more ‘murrican? A few of the viler blogs referred to her thereafter as Sodameyer.

I know it was just baiting, but keep that in mind when some winger whines about whoever the president ends up nominating.

** Kate had a friend over when she was home a few weekends ago, and they made a nest on the couch to watch “Six Feet Under.” Kate got up to make popcorn, and her friend popped up behind her. “In a popcorn popper? I have to see this!” she said. Nineteen years, and she’d never seen popcorn prepared in a home popper. And so another generation got to see this in action:

popcornpopper

My siblings are in their 60s now. This was a gift from our Aunt Charlene when they were preschoolers.

** Jeb! has a monogrammed gun. I am not in the least surprised.

** Tonight may be the first night since we cut the cable cord that I regret it, because it’s… the Westminster Dog Show! Someone tell me how it went.

Everyone else, get through your Wednesday however you can.

Posted at 12:17 am in Same ol' same ol' | 56 Comments
 

Why does health taste so boring?

I ate a ton of vegetables today. Spinach and mushrooms for breakfast, cauliflower soup for lunch, broccoli and a li’l salad at dinner. Of course, now what I really want is a bologna sandwich and a mess of potato chips on the side.

Bologna, mayo and a bunch of crunchy iceberg lettuce on white bread — this is a secret shame of mine that I indulge maybe once a year. I haven’t done it for a while; maybe this weekend. I ask you, though — if vegetables are so uniformly great for us, why don’t we crave them more? Why is it a chore to eat them consistently? Why aren’t our bodies more adapted to a plant-based diet?

Why do we want to put cheese on everything? Why is sugar so great? Why is whipped cream (with lots of sugar) something you want to dive into, but broccoli, meh?

I’m thinking some dessert is in order, but I made Alan take the dark-chocolate sea-salt caramels I bought at Costco for Valentine’s weekend to his office, so I wouldn’t eat them all. Sigh. February. It just never gets better.

But there’s less of it to live through than we already have. March starts spring and spring-like activities. And by this weekend it’ll be in the 40s.

So how was your Presidents Day? I worked on one thing that became the only thing, and tomorrow it’ll be a big thing. That seems to sum it up. My hard-working boss is on vacation this week, which means a shifting of duties, and, today, three emails from him. The last one was replied to by one of my colleagues to the effect that we didn’t want any more emails from him. They weren’t bad emails, just the can’t-help-yourself sort. Beaches aren’t all that great, at least when you have iPhones.

Which seems like a good transition — beaches, reading, food stress — into the bloggage, an essay about Oprah and forgiving oneself for not having a perfect body:

My epiphany was this: Oprah is one of the most accomplished, admired, able people in the world. She has an Oscar to keep all her Emmy Awards company. She creates magic for other people and herself on the regular. So if Oprah can’t do permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be done. Oprah is also crazy rich. If Oprah can’t buy permanent lifelong weight loss, maybe it can’t be bought. And that sucks.

Sure does. But maybe it’s OK, too. There’s a size 16 woman on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Relax. Eat the bologna.

What else? Vanity is dead. Now there was a lovely young woman, if at little untalented at being a pop star. And she died of an inflammation of her small intestine, begging for money on GoFundMe. Life’s not all it’s cracked up to be for anyone.

Think I’ll turn in early. Happy Tuesday, all.

Posted at 12:11 am in Popculch | 45 Comments
 

The way of all flesh.

I’m pretty good at holding my tongue when public figures I don’t care for die. The Ronald Reagan death orgy went on for days and days and reached a level of hysteria close to that of Princess Diana’s. I finally cracked when his daughter, Patti, took time from her grieving to publish some awful thing in People magazine about how her father emerged from his Alzheimer’s in his final moments to gaze in to Nancy’s eyes and…something. I forget. It seemed to cross a line to the point that I no longer felt the need to hold my tongue, although at that point, what is there to say? Everyone’s going where Scalia is now, and in the end, all will be revealed.

Anyway, I can’t keep up and have no special insight. To my mind, Scalia was a retrograde Catholic, unworried about the rights and lives of anyone who wasn’t. But his kind is going away, the way old ways yield to new ones. The next week will be difficult, and once he’s planted after his Mass of Christian burial, the nomination will happen and the rest of it will be an e-ticket to Crazytown. We live in interesting times.

Couple of pieces here, first Charles Pierce, stating the obvious:

In 2012, the “American people” decided that Barack Obama should appoint justices to the Supreme Court to fill any vacancies that occurred between January of 2013 and January of 2017. Period. Just because Mitch McConnell is a complete chickenshit in the face of his caucus doesn’t obviate that fact. The 36 percent of eligible voters who showed up for the 2014 midterms, the lowest percentage in 72 years, don’t get to cancel out the expressed wishes of the majority of the 57.5 percent of eligible voters who turned out to re-elect the president in 2012. And before this meme really picks up steam, 17 justices have been confirmed during election years, including Roger Taney, which sucks, in 1836, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist, who were appointed in 1972, and Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed in 1988.

(And it should not be necessary to point out that any argument made by this Congress on the basis of political tradition or legislative politesse inevitably will cause Irony to shoot itself in the head.)

That whole piece is good. Read.

One of our locals, Stephen Henderson:

In 2003, when the court ruled that sodomy laws – long used to persecute gay Americans — were unconstitutional, Scalia penned one of the most fiery and petulant dissents in court history. It turned, rather cruelly, on the notion that gay equality could not be lawfully embraced by the court because the founders had not envisioned it, and the people had not voted to make it so.

The court, he said, had signed on to the “homosexual agenda” aimed at overturning the “moral opprobrium attached to homosexual conduct.”

That happened at the end of my first term covering the high court. Like many others, I sat in the courtroom, listening in disbelief and disgust as Scalia angrily read his dissent. In the four subsequent court terms I spent in Washington, I never again looked at him, listened to him thunder in court, or read his decisions without that day in my mind.

Hell, there are probably a million smart Scalia pieces out there. Post your own.

I leave you with this bit of sparkling genius from Ben Carson. It seems an appropriate way to start the week.

Posted at 12:15 am in Current events | 23 Comments
 

His list of grievances.

I was working on a task that needed to be laid aside for a few minutes for the sake of my sanity, so I checked out the livestream of the surrender in Oregon. The last holdout was, I’d be willing to bet, a client of our own MMJeff at one time. (Jeff’s taking an internet fast for Lent, so I don’t know if he can stop in to illuminate us.) After all, he’s a Buckeye:

“I’m actually feeling suicidal right now,” said Mr. Fry, 27, who lives in Ohio. “It’s liberty or death. I will not go another day as a slave to this system.” He railed against taxpayer money being used for abortions and drone strikes in Pakistan, said bankers were to blame for the world wars, complained of being unable to obtain medical marijuana in his home state, and accused the government of suppressing breakthrough inventions, concealing U.F.O.’s, and “chemically castrating everybody.”

I heard a little of this before I turned it off; he was complaining that a cop once suggested he, Fry, might be a Rand Paul voter, and when Fry said he was, the cop said, “I voted for Obama.” “And this is the kind of crap I have to put up with!” Fry moaned. Imagine.

Of course this isn’t funny, even though Fry surrendered without making good on his threat. Fry is only a nuttier version of the people I’m thinking of whenever I say, What the hell are we going to do with these people? Young Mr. Fry had a place in the world of 40 or 50 years ago, but he doesn’t anymore, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Neither does anyone else. So he heads off to Oregon to join up with this ridiculous bunch of pissed-off grifters.

Well, at least we dispersed this group without a Waco-like level of bloodshed. Tidy up the mess, unfuck the road they cut and see if we can get the birdies and critters their refuge back.

Watching the debate now, and I can’t take my eyes off Hillary’s resplendent golden garment. She wears a lot of yellow, and I’m not sure it’s her color — I like her best in jewel tones like cobalt and emerald. The rest of the event appeared to be measured policy discussion, conducted with mutual respect and sobriety. No wonder this thing is on PBS.

A bit o’ bloggage:

Today is the 25th anniversary of the death of Gary on “thirtysomething.” Hank does a story. If you didn’t watch it, don’t tell me. It meant a lot to me, back then.

And justlikethat, the weekend is here. Enjoy yours.

Posted at 12:20 am in Current events, Television | 109 Comments