Books/Written Shit
The Paris Review
Shakespeare
Robert Caro’s LBJ books (when he finishes in the year 2088)
Music
XKris Kristofferson - currently in love with his debut albumLove - raved about their first album running circles around the much-too-acclaimed Forever Changes
TV
The Muppets
Jay Ward Productions (subversive funny shit!)
Last of the Summer WineThe Twilight Zone - zzzzzzzzzzz
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Speaking of My List Of Things To Learn About
I can officially cross a few of these off my list from 2024!
Fuck You Uber!
I'm incredibly stupid with money & generally have no idea what I’m paying for anything at any given moment and will never have any of it anyway but for some reason the line I refuse to ever cross is Uber's bullshit "gee so sorry your wait is so long but gee what do you know our super premium fuckwad much more expensive Uber driver is just around the corner from you right now!" and the other day I buckled down & refused to cave and WELL well well, what the hell do you know:
Baseball is Still Too @#$%ing Loud
Someone over at The Atlantic's bitching about how crazy stupid loud baseball games have become:
That night, like every other night this season, the stadium looked, sounded, and felt like a European nightclub on New Year’s Eve: flashing lights; booming music; an in-game announcer taking to a 17,400-square-foot screen and imploring fans to make some noise, with fans happily obliging.
I’m old enough to remember when live baseball was largely devoid of artificial sound. This was when you could hear an entire stadium go silent for a particularly high-stakes at-bat, when big crews of in-game producers did not take any spare moment as a chance to play a pop song or advertise some inscrutable financial-services company, when stadium screens displayed the score and not a series of vaguely baseball-related TikToks. These days, baseball is wall-to-wall stimulation, from before the game starts until well after it ends.
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "didn't you bitch about how crazy loud baseball games had become all the way back in 2006?
Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:
1) I went to Yankee Stadium the other night with Rrthur (yes ladies, THAT Rrthur). Is there anything better than going to a baseball game? Nyet. The food, the open air, the bright colors of the field, everything's perfect. EXCEPT. What the fuck is up with the between-innings ROARING sound system - I wanna kick back, relax, talk to my buddy while the teams switch on the field and I'm barraged with this sound system that is apparently powered by jet engines. Are they scared that if there's not constant action on the field, I'll leave? IT'S BASEBALL - nothing EVER happens on the field!!!!! And then during big moments I've got the scoreboard screaming at me to get up and MAKE SOME NOISE!! GET EXCITED!!!!!! Jesus. Dude, I'm fucking excited already; I'm at the damn game! I know the bases are loaded and Jeter's up, I'm not fucking reading The Bridges of Madison County in the goddam stands. I know you're trying to distract me from the fact that I just paid $9 for a fucking hot dog, but enough.
Questions and Ideas. I Have Them.
Moi Say Moi back in 2021:
Larry David claims to have never watched a single minute of Seinfeld after he left the show after Season 7. Aaron Sorkin claims the same thing about The West Wing after he left. Why can't these people have podcasts where they go through each episode after they left and talk about it?And so speaking of J.D. Salinger earlier today as I was, my nest questions is can AI please create holograms of Salinger and Harper Lee so the two of them could also do a podcast about their singularly American books and the lives they led afterwards?
Crummy Goddamit.
Like anyone, The Catcher in the Rye had a hold on me in my youth. But at the end of the day, Holden Caulfield is your average Williamsburg hipster in a nouveau-rock art fusion no-bass-included Japanese haiku band; Holden we're fairly certain will simply end up at another private school for fellow rich kids, and in a few years he will look back on his melo-dramatic teen years and laugh. - XMASTIME, 2010
The Catcher in the Rye is celebrating it's 75th anniversary:
Pour out a Scotch and soda — make that a malted milk — for this spry codger of a novel that’s stayed on the dance floor long past when might be expected, leaping over book bans from the right and dodging cancellation from the left. “Catcher” has somehow inspired artists as disparate as John Guare and Guns N’ Roses, its denunciation of phoniness presaging the social-media demand for “authenticity.It also inspired someone to murder John Lennon, but I don't wanna bring anybody down.
"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), "didn't you drop the single greatest truthbomb about Holden Caulfield all the way back in 2016?"
Sigh. Yes I did, faithful reader
Can someone please write the movie in which we find out Holden Caulfield grows up to be Pete Campbell so I don't have to thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks.
I Will Now Solve the MLB All-Star Game, Thank You Very Much.
The score of this year's game was 4-0.
Yawn.
No players wanna play the game.
They spent years & years trying to make the game mean something, anything, and it was exactly as worthless an idea as you'd expect.
The romanticism of AL vs. NL has been dead since interleague play began almost 30- years ago.
All that pitchers know how to do anymore is completely unload their arms with every pitch-counted pitch, so they hafta be worried about injuries with every pitch they throw at what is nothing more than an exhibition game.
MEANWHILE
More & more, managers are having position players finish pitching games that have gotten out of control.
It's a signal that the rest of the game doesn't matter and lightens things up while reducing needless pitching injuries.
Here's my all-time favorite instance of this!
SO
They should have position players pitch the All-Star Game.
Set a scoring cap at 20 runs and the winner's whoever gets there first, or stop at 6 innings, whatever; my rather brilliant idea in my rather humble opinion will make the game purely about joyous fun while reducing injuries YOU ARE WELCOME, MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL AND MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL FANS!!
This One's for Marley! 🤗🕺
Watching people keep giving Trump a pass because they still think he'll eventually do the right thing is like watching someone the first time they watch Whitney Cummings do stand-up.
Monday, July 20, 2026
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Friday, July 17, 2026
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Wonderful, Wonderful Worlds Colliding 🤗🇬🇧
Moi Say Moi back when I was making a few connections between the brilliant Extras and the brilliant Only Fools and Horses, and rather brilliantly mused as I do about Stephen Merchant, a very-much avowed superfan of OFAH:
I can't find a clip of it but I distinctly remember Merchant pretty much re-creating the Del Boy bar scene at a fitness center vending machine in a scene from his HBO series Hello Ladies.
SWEET, HORRIBLE VINDICATION people, via Stephen Merchant himself! Enjoy! And yes, you ARE welcome, Earf!!
In America.
We live in an absurdly & terrifyingly over-policed state whose authoritarian thirst for cruelty will be pushed to its bounds by Trump so I generally don’t love bringing up the police in the first place but I would like to live in world that doesn’t include our having to chain down the rocking chairs outside Cracker Barrel.
A Note on Our President
One of Trump's many, many infantile Achilles heels is that even after being handed all of the cookies at the table but one, no matter how underserving he is in the first place, he can’t let that one go & inevitably that’s what unspools everything in the end, drowned out by his endless bitching & screeching about how unfair everything is except that instead of him at some point being taught a lesson to just shut the fuck up and enjoy the cookies he was handed for no fucking reason, eventually someone gets tired of the whining & gives him the last cookie, therein setting off the same toddler Olympic game for the next time.
RIP Hal Williams
Hal Williams died yesterday; I don’t think I could’ve pulled his name out of my own head, but I also feel like when I was a kid the odds of him turning up on whatever tv show I was watching was always pretty high. You’d always feel good whenever he’d show up onscreen, and it’s a credit to him that someone like me could feel even a tiny bit of loss upon hearing of his death, which certainly makes him deserving of my generation in particular taking a minute to say thanks for always being such a positive presence in all our lives, even if from so far away.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026
A Few Thoughts After Finally Watching the First Episode of the Final Season of THE BEAR
Damn I forgot how much I love Richie
Can I trust a show about chefs that fetishizes the McGriddle?
Do people really stand around under umbrellas in the pouring rain just chatting? In this century?
Can I trust a show about chefs that fetishizes the McGriddle?
Do people really stand around under umbrellas in the pouring rain just chatting? In this century?
Questions. I Have Them.
Why don't we have assembly lines in water tanks so workers can float in warm water instead of standing on concrete all day, which would surely be much less punishing on their bodies over the years & therefore make them more productive?
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