Just Give Me Some Time, Dammit!
My Back, Unlike World Liberty Financial, Is In the Red
My back is no longer back in the black-- it's in the red, deep in the red . . . so I should NOT have played three hours of pickleball yesterday, nor should I have read the news-- as far as I understand it, Trump pushed out US attorney Erik Siebert because he refused to pursue "trumped up" charges on James Comey and replaced him with an inexperienced beauty queen named Lindsey Halligan AND Trump also essentially received a quid pro quo bribe from an Abu Dhabi investment fund, to the tune of a 2 billion dollar investment in World Liberty Financial, and then the Trump White House reversed restrictions on the export of Nvidia AI computer chips to the U.A.E.-- though I guess this deal hasn't gone through yet becuase of security concerns, but still WTF?-- and, worst of all, my classroom is especially dank and smelling of mold because it was so unseasonably hot and humid over the weekend . . . such a Monday.
My Back is Back in the Black
Back to School: Not Great For My F$#king Back
Sandy Hook, The Mule Barn, Idioms, Lanternflies, Always Sunny . . .
Malcolm Gladwell: Explaining the Big Picture, Anecdotally
New episode of We Defy Augury up-- "Malcolm F$%cking Gladwell" . . . my thoughts (loosely) inspired by his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point . . . and while I also delve into his other books and theories-- I try to keep it light and breezy, as would befit a podcast about the master of light and breezy non-fiction writing . . . but eventually I get stuck in the weeds (as one is wont to do when analyzing Gladwell's anecdotal evidence).
The Four Rings of Marriage?
I Am NOT Eating This Chicken! (of the Woods?) or Will I?
I Am Not Mechanical
I'm One in a Million, Baby (and less racist than Axl Rose, I hope)
Disney Chooses The Easy Way (Which Might Make Things Hard for the Rest of Us)
A few words on the Charlie Kirk shooting and the ensuing political consequences:
1. your thoughts and beliefs are your own and you are free to THINK whatever you want about the Charlie Kirk shooting-- you can be happy about it or sad about it or angry about it or any complex mix of these basic emotions . . . you could think it's a tragedy on par with the J.F.K assassination or you could think he had it coming-- or you could be like me . . . when someone informed me of the shooting, I said, "Huh? Who is that?" and no amount of explaining was going to make me care about him any more than any other victim of gun violence in our great and violent nation (and it's not like Kirk was an elected official who died in office, e.g. Melissa Hortman, the leader of the Minnesota state House Democratic caucus, who was killed alongside her husband, on the same day that a state senator, John Hoffman, and his wife were shot and injured . . . those are actual political assassinations) and I'm not going to pretend that lots of people didn't have lots of awful thoughts when Kirk was killed, but that is within their rights-- just as it is within my rights to root for the Jets only in certain circumstances-- because my friends are Jets fans-- and I will root wholeheartedly for them if the Giants are winning their game, but then if the Giants start losing, in my heart of heart, I hope the Jets lose too . . . because misery loves company-- this is awful and juvenile, but thoughts and beliefs are private and totally protected by the First Amendment, so you can root for whatever outcomes you like in your mind . . . and also realize that your thinking about them does not change anything in the physical world;
2. you are legally allowed to express your thoughts and beliefs abstractly-- in the proper place, at the proper time-- in order to try to change reality . . . now you can't drive around with a bullhorn in a quiet neighborhood at 3 AM and scream your political thoughts, that's not protected by the First Amendment, nor can you specifically call for violence-- you CAN'T say "in retribution for Kirk's death, I am going to release a horde of killer bees upon Jimmy Kimmel next Thursday at 4:00 PM . . . be there!"
3. while you can legally express your thoughts and beliefs and you will not be jailed for them-- with many caveats: as long as you are not slandering or libelling someone or revealing government secrets (nuclear codes, etcetera) or blackmailing or threatening an individual or corporation or soliciting someone to commit a crime or propagating child pornography or engaging in extreme obscenity-- BUT even if you are not doing one of these things that is not protected by the First Amendment, you could still suffer real world consequences for your opinions-- and this is what the MAGA crew is pushing-- cancel anyone who says or does anything defamatory about Kirk and his legacy;
4. the government is not allowed to control the content of the media, nor is blackmail protected by the First Amendment, so when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said, about cancelling Kimmel, "We can either do this the easy way or the hard way," this was illegal and unconstitutional and, honestly, quite frightening-- and, the fact that Disney caved to this threat is even more frightening (but not as frightening as the fact that Amazon paid 40 million for a Melania Trump vanity doc) and hopefully this will be parsed out in a court of law and Samuel Alito-- as he always does-- will side with Freedom of Speech and realize that sometimes it protects "thought that we hate"
5. the right believes that this autocratic backlash from the Trump administration is a comeuppance for the left, who limited free speech about vaccines during COVID and whose "woke" ideology got people like Dave Chapelle, Kevin Hart, and J.K. Rowling in hot water-- and the threat by the Trump administration to take away tax-exempt status from left-leaning organizations (because they support radical leftist terrorism) is revenge for when the Obama administration used the IRS to target organizations afffiliated with the Tea Party;
6. this bullshit is totally typical . . . when a party is NOT in power and they are the underdog, they usually want unlimited free speech so they can criticize the powers that be-- but once a party takes power, then they squelch free speech and expression and want everyone to tow the party line-- and the Trump administration is going beyond the pale in how they execute this-- more transactional than any recent administration, more bullying, more use of leverage, more blatant blackmail and unconstitional rhetoric . . . it's shameful to use Kirk's death like this, but it's also perfectly normal in politics to "never let a good crisis go to waste."
Harvest Moon: Making Fairly Shitty Beer for Nearly Thirty Years
That Would Be in the Ass, Jalen
Bald-Faced Hornet = Elephant
It's my 31st year teaching high school and my lessons just keep getting better and smarter and funnier and more relevant and more brilliant-- case in point, yesterday I'm teaching the Orwell masterpiece "Shooting an Elephant" and the main thrust of the story is that Orwell does NOT want to shoot this elephant, but the crowd expects him to shoot the elephant-- he's the colonialist MP with the gun and while the Burmese despise him, he is the authority figure and the elephant, while in heat, did kill a man-- but then the elephants calms down and Orwell does not want to shoot a large, valuable intelligent working beast of burden-- but, as Orwell describes it, the expectation that the elephant was to be shot "was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides, they wanted the meat"-- so Orwell has to live up to their expectations of the imperaliast despot and shoot the elephant-- and it is tragic and horrible . . . and while the students were in groups figuring this out, a girl came up to me and said, unironically, "There's a bee, can you kill it?" and I went over to their group, and there was indeed a bee on the wall (actually a yellowjacket, which is a wasp) and I said to the group-- which was very distracted by the wasp-- "I don't really want to kill this animal, I'm not allergic-- but I guess I'm going to have to kill it so you people can concentrate" and then I killed the wasp and I asked the class how this incident was like the story and they were able to make the connection and then I told them that sometimes-- especially if you have read lots of literature like myself and are very very smart and know how the world works-- you can resist the pressure of the crowd and the pressure to live up to the generic expectations of an authority figure and transcend commonplace thought and so I told them the story of the bald-faced hornet nest above my driveway and how, at first, at the urging of my family and friends, I felt like I had to attack and destroy the nest-- and the hornet's nest is the elephant in this analogy-- and my son and I even made one attempt to destroy the nest but the hornets were unruffled by our attack (see the above video, which my class enjoyed) and then I told them about how my friends continued to pressure me to annihilate this nest, suggesting wilder and wilder methods-- dousing the nest with gasoline and incinerating it; attacking it with a drone; getting up on a ladder and sawing the branch off with a chainsaw and dropping the nest into a garbage pail; etcetera-- they wanted to see more videos, they wanted a bit of fun, just like the Burmese-- and while I thought about doing something radical and violent to the nest, I then realized I was being pressured into something that did NOT need to occur-- something I did NOT want to do: bald-faced hornets eat mosquitoes and flies, and-- even though Ian and I attacked them-- the hornets forgave us and did not seek vengeance, so instead of destroying the nest, I learned to live with it-- it's been up in the tree for months now-- and I think this is a better path, to try to live in some kind of peaceable detente with dangerous creatures, just as we might need to learn to live with (and occasionally suffer attacks from) megafauna, if we actually value animals such as elephants and tigers and bears-- if we truly value all the creatures great and small on this earth, then we're going to have to learn to live with them-- even though we might occasionally suffer a sting or a trampling-- because we've invaded every nook and cranny of their habitats.
Tail-gating?
Yesterday afternoon, I was walking our dog back from the dog park, and just before I reached my block, I noticed that a dude was walking a white poodle up ahead of me, maybe twenty yards in front of me-- and my block only has sidewalk on one side of the road, so I was forced to trail behind him but I figured as long as he kept up the pace, it wouldn't be a problem-- I keep an appropriate distance behind him until I got to my house . . . but his dog sensed my dog and turned and looked at her, and then the guy just stopped and stared at me, all pissed off and he yelled at me for "coming up behind him" and told me that wasn't cool and so I said, "this is my block, my house is right up there . . . I have to go this way" and he was all distraught and hot and bothered and so I attempted to walk around him-- but I wasn't taking my dog all the way out on the road becuase I never take her out on the road because I don't want her to think that's ever an option and-- of course, because regular dogs hate poodles-- the two dogs growled and barked at each other while I passed him and the guy, all vindicated, yelled "SEE!" and at that point I wanted to beat the fuck out of him but I was the bigger person and said nothing and just kept on walking, listening to him yell "INCONSIDERATE!" at the back of me-- and my wife said I should have made more of an effort to go around him and that I ought to have taken Lola into the street, but fuck that, this is Jersey and if you can't deal with a little tail-gating, then keep up your speed and if you want everyone to remain fifty-paces away from you then move to Wyoming, don't walk down a road with only one sidewalk in the most densely populated state in the union-- don't stop all miffed and block traffic . . . hopefully this douche will never walk his magisterial white poodle on our block again.
Put the Cell in the Cell
That's Entertainment?
You Sure That's Bob Dylan?
Even More Revision of the Eternally Entertaining Willie Nelson Joke
My wife and I are taking my mom to see Willie Nelson tonight-- yes, he is still alive! he is 92 years young-- and if you combine his age with his opening act, Bob Dylan, then you've got 176 years of gritty and nasal vocal expertise . . . Catherine and I are more excited for the artists going on a bit earlier-- Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee-- but I was also excited to tell the infamous "Willie Nelson joke"-- which I told several times today (what's the last thing you want to hear when you're giving Willie Nelson a blow-job? that's not Willie Nelson!) but I think there might be a better, more cerebral punch-line . . . "are you sure that's Willie Nelson?"
Confusing Possibly Drug Addled Mindfuckery
Seth Harp, in his book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, mentions four Army wives who were murdered in 2002 by their husbands in Fayetteville and how these deaths were first attributed to the drug Lariam (or mefloquine) because all the soldiers took this anti-malarial medicine while in Afghanistan and the possible side-effects of the medicine are hallucinations, psychosis, aggression, anxiety, and paranoia but Seth Harp believes that this attribution to Lariam is a cover-up and that these soldiers were experiencing PTSD and they were also doing all kinds of other (illegal) drugs such as cocaine, meth, molly and bath salts . . . but to make this more confusing, Lariam was pronounced very dangerous by the FDA in 2013-- the issued a "Black Box" warning and notified users that they could experience permanent neurological damage, suicidal thoughts and psychosis from the drug-- and to make this even MORE confusing, your narrator himself might be compromised and unable to write this sentence-- because my wife and I took Lariam in 1999 when we went to the Cuyabeno jungle basin in Ecuador-- a well-meaning doctor in Metuchen prescribed it to us and once we started taking it, we experienced paranoia, technicolor dreams of giant spiders, and lots of anxiety-- but when stopped taking it, at the advice of some Germans out in the jungle with us-- when I asked them what they were taking for malaria, they said, "vee take nothink"-- so once we stopped taking the pills, these chaotic feelings subsided and we had a much better time (except when my wife went to the outhouse, put her flashlight down, sat to pee, and something shot out of the darkness and attached itself to her chest-- she shrieked, flung the creature, and ran out of the outhouse with her pants at her ankles-- and upon inspection, we found that a giant tree frog, maybe a foot long, had suction cupped itself to her shirt . . . good times) and so now I don't know what to think about this drug and the murders but I still believe it fucked us up mentally and possibly could have done the same to these soldiers.