Speaking of THE NEW YORKER...

...nice to see Xmastime Hall of Famer Laurie Metcalf getting some love this week; I started out wanting to hate it because I assumed they'd skip over her Roseanne work (work that landed her in my all-time top 10 sitcom characters!) as quickly as they could but no no I was, as Fonzie himself wasn't a big enough man to say, wrong:

Goodman said, “As many difficulties as we had on the show, Laurie was my lodestar. She was solid gravity. She just rode the waves during a lot of that shit.” As the seasons went on, the writers played to Metcalf’s strengths, including physical comedy. But the show made a point of tackling real problems—mortgage payments, birth control, and a subplot in which Jackie has an abusive boyfriend. Sara Gilbert, who played Metcalf’s niece, said, “She can be completely absurd, but you don’t stop believing her.” 

Oh Come On, THE NEW YORKER

One day I’m gonna read Doonesbury from start (10/26/72) to finish (?). - XMASTIME, 2014

Just as I'm usually left shaking my head at their cartoon winners I don't think I've ever once found their weekly "funny" article to be at all funny; upon seeing the name Garry Trudeau I was excited to give this one a chance aaaaaaaaaaaaand the streak continues.

 

More Things I Think

There's been a well-worn meme for generations about the noble, poor Southerners who took up arms to defend the Southern way of living during the Civil War that's always used as a "you can’t blame the Civil War on slavery" talking point; we're supposed to see these people as brave warriors fighting for something bigger than themselves who, while coming up short in the end militarily, are held in an even more glorious sort of esteem with their own righteous maker.

We're not allowed to question the intelligence of these people - theirs of course is from a higher calling than some nerd with a book - and so nobody ever feels the need to explain why, if YOU'RE poor as dirt, would you fight FOR the side that is actively trying to keep the labor market you’re in remarkably uncompetitive – why would you so bravely fight & die for the ultimate goal of continuing unpaid labor in your area while you & your family starve? NONE of these noble patriots thought you know what, no slavery = we won’t have to compete in a job market against people – willing or not – currently getting $0/hr. for their efforts?

I’ve learned over the years that there is a particular strain of American for whom while the term racist is not a slur to them questioning their intelligence is a bridge too far, and yet I *have a feeling* there’s a connection between the dirt-poor Southerner fighting for the Confederacy and their descendants:

I think it’s kind of funny that in 1861 poor white Southerners by the millions went to war so that plantation labor could continue to be monopolized by slaves and the same people in 2026 think that if we just got rid of all the brown people then poor white people would pick strawberries 12 hours a day. 🤔🤷‍♂️

Current Events

Ever since he started the dumbest possible war ever in human history Trump's go-to line has been that for 47 years now every sitting president was too stupid to bomb Iran until he did 2 months ago & no matter how many times he repeats this line over & over not a single reporter ever asks "what about those four years when YOU were president?" and even with today’s media generally being too pathetic to challenge Trump because they’re terrified he’ll do a mean girl Tweet I really don’t understand why not.

F This, Fitzy

The other day as I was posting this little gem I noticed my final sentence reminded me of the final sentence of The Great Gatsby; rather than just doing my usual "who the fuck do you think you are, do you even hear yourself you fucking idiot?" I asked my bff ChatGPT (hi ChatGPT! 👋👋👋👋) about it and WELL WELL WELL! 😜

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Husker du Jour

Crazy amazing quality recording right before their absolute peak with Flip Your Wig later that year.

Xmastime "WELL, Well Well..." du Jour

Just Me Over Here Solving Basketball Forever

I don't wanna be the old man yelling at those goddam kids to get the hell off my lawn, but I think it's a fairly universal feeling that today's NBA misses a certain balletic feel of ball movement from decades long past due to it pretty much being all 3s/dunks all the time now, and I guess I don’t have a more workable solution but if I was the richest person in the world I'd pay everybody 4x their normal salary to play without the 3-point line for one year, after which a decision could be made about whether or not to continue playing that way based on the preferences of both the players & fans.

According to my bff ChatGPT (hi ChatGPT! 👋👋👋👋): 

Without the 3-point line, you’d probably immediately get: way more midrange play
more post-ups
more cuts/screens/ball movement
fewer “drive-and-kick endlessly until someone’s open”
different body types becoming valuable again
defenses collapsing inward, which could actually create prettier passing sequences

And the biggest thing: players would stop spacing the floor 28 feet from the hoop all the time, which absolutely would create a more compact, choreographed-looking game. “Balletic” is honestly the right word. 

YOU’RE WELCOME, EARF!!

Oh Dear du Jour

Due to the fact that I rarely ever see other human beings in my building despite it having like a hundred apartments and the fact that it’s about 10 minutes from the airport, longtime Xmastime buddy Marley has a theory that the building's actually a layover station for professional assassins, an idea we all had fun chuckling at until I saw this shit outside earlier today.

 

Me!

I don't have clinical depression but I do have a penchant to attach melancholy onto unearned nostalgia, but much like people talk about being able to recognize the onset of depression I'm able to recognize it and laugh at myself about it, so.

Know Thyself

Because I have crappy long-distance vision I was moseying around Wegmans wondering if the scenario ever presented itself wherein I found myself walking toward someone with a deformity & appeared to be gawking at them would I have what it takes in that moment to pretend I was blind?

"It was for everybody, not just Paul"

Like a lot of documentaries this one could've been cut in half, but the story itself about the half-century journey by the most famous musical instrument in the world is amazing and you know you'll sit through anything to see him get his bass back: 

One evening in 1972, Horne was with Wings in the studio until late. Afterwards he dropped off his brother-in-law in Notting Hill, in his van full of equipment. “You couldn’t park outside his house, so I parked close by on the corner of Cambridge Gardens. Then I went back to his house and spent the night. That area was all squats.”

The next day Horne returned to the van to find the padlock broken. “My heart sank. Somebody had taken two AC30 amps, another acoustic guitar in its case — and Paul McCartney’s original Höfner in its case.”

And of course in the end, Macca was McAmazing:

McCartney doesn’t blame George Glenister much, telling the documentary that his “petty thievery” was not unlike what he and the Beatles might have got up to, growing up poor in Liverpool. “We got out of that pretty quickly, luckily. The Beatles took over and we found an honest profession. But I can sympathise with people who don’t have that kind of luck.”

Something I Learned Today

"Lovely Jubbly!" is always near the top of any Greatest BBC Catchphrases of All Time list, and yet Del Boy never actually said it until Season 6's Yuppy Love, the 41st episode out of 64.

Which seems crazy to me? 😲🤯🇬🇧

 

Buy 9 Get the 10th for Free Wow He Really is a Genius

ALSO: I suddenly find myself available to consider sponsorship from Subway. Eat fresh, losers!  

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Podcast Moment du Jour

Here's Obama talking about the current situation and by that I mean here's Obama talking about what a shitshow disaster fuckwad Trump is: 

You know, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing, working with younger leaders, is refuting the notion that things have never been worse. I say, no, no, you know what, Civil War, really bad.

Jim Crow, tough. And I say that not to try to pull rank on them, but rather to pull them out of any kind of sense of hopelessness about the situation.

I know when people say this they think they’re being reassuring, but if they’re right wouldn’t that just prove that since people did something once before they can do it again? How can “people have been exactly that capable of being terrible to each other so recently in our history that there’s plenty of video footage of it” possibly be more reassuring than “nobody’s ever done that before”?

Also, when was the last time I mentioned Obama here? I MISS YOU BUDDY 😭😭😭😭 

I'm Sorry John Sullivan I Still Love You!!!! 🤗😜🇬🇧

What's the German word for when a fan base things the exact opposite about something as you do; exempla gratia, the Only Fools and Horses episode To Hull and Back is not only near the top of every episode ranking I’ve ever seen but usually it’s at THE top and yet – as you nice people remember from my own rankings that I posted a coupla weeks ago – the Only Fools and Horses episode To Hull and Back is not only around the bottom of my own rankings but it’s at THE bottom…how can this be? And it’s not like how I don’t put Rubber Soul anywhere nearly as high as most Beatles fans do, MANY of whom put it at #1, but I still give it an A-; To Hull and Back gets a C- from me & the only reason it doesn’t get a D is that with its 90-minute runtime & no laugh track et al I like its ambition...putting me miles off from pretty much every other Only Fools and Horses fan, which is kind of a bummer.

 

 

Quite a Friday Night I'm Putting Together Here.

I'll Just Sit Here Waiting for MLB to Ask Me to Save It, That's Fine

Just one day after rather brilliantly suggesting Major League Baseball should make their outfields more expansive because the players just keep getting bigger & bigger, and now what do you know, the Yankees are about to become the first team to ever have two 6'7" position players on a roster, so.

And yes, they're both outfielders.

NOTE: if the masses demand I be made MLB commissioner, I must be honest: I would seriously think about it.