Just after 6pm this evening I strolled past the Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station just as easy as you please & there was a big sheet cake sitting there just as easy as it pleases, maybe the biggest cake I’ve seen in all my millions of times strolling past Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station & let me tell you boy I seen 'em all; I paused to see what all the ruckus with the icing was about & it turned out to be a cake celebrating some Nursing Station's 118th anniversary. "How nice!" I patted myself on the back before bouncing off.
I just walked strolled past the Wegmans "pick your shit up here" station just as easy as you please again. It's 11:48pm. The earliest they could come pick it up now is 6am and I'm *guessing* that's not gonna happen so while I don't know much about these nurses I would give them a piece of advice if I could, and that advice is please don’t eat the fucking cake.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
State du Moi
You'd think fat people trying to lose weight would support each other but I think I may have sniffed out a guy doing my daily walking route so long story short hey hey hey guess who's fucking moving now? 😡 😡 😡 😡
Ghosts in the Silence
A few weeks ago I stumbled onto some Facebook page about high school football in Southwestern Virginia; immediately after getting sucked in I started to notice that even though the southwestern part of Virginia is seen as more Appalachia poor than most parts of the state, there seems to be an unending source of game footage all the way back into the 1960s & while I really couldn’t care less about those schools themselves, certainly not in, say, 1968, I find myself staring at the clips for minutes at a time; the black & white film’s absolute silence draws me in as if I’m looking not just at ghosts, but ghosts who may still be alive and stumble upon the footage as randomly/easy as I have, and I wonder what it’s like for them to watch themselves on film whose silence makes it seem as if they’re already long, long gone to the dustbin of time.
Monday, May 11, 2026
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:
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 unpaid 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! 😜
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Husker du Jour
Crazy amazing quality recording right before their absolute peak with Flip Your Wig later that year.
Saturday, May 09, 2026
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 playYOU’RE WELCOME, EARF!!
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.
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.”And of course in the end, Macca was McAmazing:
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.”
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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