by bill | Oct 31, 2025 | Whatever Else |
I must admit to somewhat addictive behavior when it comes to the TV news. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself tuning in to see what insane and horrible thing has happened now. But I can’t actually watch it for very long, because, you know, insane and horrible.
So then I end up looking for other things to watch. Fortunately it’s basketball season now, and the Warriors look pretty good. I’ll throw on a football game if people on my Sports and Booze chat are talking about it. And this week I even watched a little baseball — a World Series game in which I became interested, then very interested, and suddenly not interested anymore when it dragged on into the, like, 13th inning. (It ended up going 18, by which time I had long since departed for dreamland.)
This being Halloween week, there have been a lot of seasonally appropriate movies on, so at times I’ve found myself flipping back and forth between the news and, say, Little Shop of Horrors, House of Wax , or The Thing. And what I’ve discovered is that there is no movie, however scary, that does not come across as light relief in comparison to the real things happening in the US of A in 2025.
Is it hysterical of me to say that the Fourth Reich has arrived? That we now have a secret police operating with impunity across the country, teargassing and terrorizing the populace? And that it’s only going to get worse, as the big budget increase recently given ICE kicks in, and That Fucking Guy follows through on his threats to invoke the insurrection act and send the military to our cities? They are sending federal monitors to oversee our election on Tuesday; why do that if you don’t intend to find fraud, whether it’s there or not, and try to overturn any unwanted result?
I don’t mean to be a bummer. I think — I hope — I pray that when push comes to shove, people don’t want this and won’t tolerate it. Unfortunately we’ve handed an enormous amount of power to evil people who won’t readily give it up.
Oh, and also:
https://newrepublic.com/post/202453/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-testing-china-russia
Boo!
by bill | Oct 9, 2025 | Dancing about architecture |
I’ve never had an Aperol spritz as far as I remember, but I’ve been semi-obsessed with this song since I first heard it last week on a playlist of stuff chosen by the New York Times. (That’s right, as 57-year-old man, I sometimes get tips on what’s new and hip on the music scene from a newspaper. Don’t hate.)
This is the next step in a logical sequence from That Chick Angel’s “Margarita Song,” which was song of the year in 2023. Whereas Angel at least demanded multiple margaritas before getting into the heavy stuff, all this girl asks for is one Aperol Spritz and it’s off to the races:
On the one hand, she sounds like she’s having fun, and who am I to judge?
And then my inner dad voice pipes up and says, “Young lady, that’s no way to live your life.”
On the third hand, that kind of boldness is certainly sexy. Then again it all seems very unsanitary. So I’m confused.
The tiebreaker, I guess, is the music, which I find almost maddeningly catchy. It’s sleek and relentless and just grating enough to be really memorable.
On further research I see that the group — the aptly named “deBasement” — is made up of two women, and that makes it OK, right? It’s empowering when they debase themselves, isn’t that what we say? I can’t quite make up my mind… let me hear it again.
by bill | Oct 8, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
I did a double-take when I ran across this passage from Wampeters, Foma & Granfaloons yesterday. I will present it here without comment; the relevance is obvious.
Mr. Nixon himself is a minor character in this book. He is the first President to hate the American people and all they stand for. He believes so vibrantly in his own purity, although he has committed crimes which are hideous….
He is a useful man in that he has shown us that our Constitution is a defective document, which makes a childlike assumption that we would never elect a President who dislikes us so. So we must amend the Constitution in order that we can more easily eject such a person from office and even put him in jail.
Well, one comment: Oh Kurt, if only, if only. The truth is so much worse. I’m glad you’re not here to see it, though I’m sure you would have had some good jokes to help us through. Thanks for trying, anyway.
by bill | Oct 7, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
It was a lovely weekend here in Humboldt, with music festivals and sun-kissed afternoons and a big dinner party at my house. Somehow in the midst of all that I missed that the second American Civil War started.
It’s not a shooting war yet, thank goodness. But if you’re a Democrat or live in a big, Democrat-led city, the President of the United States has declared war on you, like it or not. You’re the “enemy within” (as he said to the generals last week); you’re a “little gnat… on our shoulder” that needs to be swatted (as he said to the Navy Sunday). When ICE pulls up, zipties your naked children to each other, and detains everyone subject to having their citizenship verified (as happened in Chicago over the weekend), it’s no more than you deserve.
This may come as somewhat of a shock, though it’s not like we haven’t seen it coming. It’s sort of like when that drunk guy who’s been staring at you across the bar finally comes up and tells you to your face that he doesn’t like you. (If only Obi-Wan Kenobi were here.) You may not think you’ve done anything, but you have a problem now.
So how do you deal with this?
If you’re Patrick Swayze, you invite the guy to step outside and you beat the shit out of him. But what if you’re small, or a pacifist, or just don’t want to fight for whatever reason? Well, you can buy the guy a drink and try to make friends (not gonna work in this case); you can make a run for it; or you can try to get someone else in the middle.
I can’t say I know what’s the right thing to do this time. But one thing you should never, ever do is turn your back on the guy. Head on a swivel, people. That is all.
by bill | Oct 6, 2025 | Read it in books |
Books Acquired:
The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells
Books Offloaded:
Progress Made:
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
Fogtown, Peter Plate
The Wonder Effect, C.M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
A Soviet Heretic, Yevgeny Zamyatin
Books Finished:
Out on Blue Six, Ian McDonald
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
By coincidence, the two books that I finished this month were both disowned by their authors. Vonnegut was never happy with Breakfast of Champions; after much rewriting, he eventually decided to just be done with it and let it be published anyway. And Ian McDonald said of Out on Blue Six, “I wish I hadn’t written the damn thing… [it is] too forced, it tries too hard, everything is too artificial.”
I find myself thinking of the word “disenchantment.” Usually we think of it as a bad thing — to become disenchanted is to lose your love for something. But it can also mean that the scales fall from your eyes and you see things as they really are. This can hurt, but if you believe in the importance of truth, you’ll see it as progress.
When I first read Breakfast of Champions back in high school, all I saw was the comedy and irreverence, not to mention the drawings of wide-open beavers. Every time I’ve revisited it since, I’ve enjoyed it a little less. Underneath the jokes is a deep, bitter cynicism bordering on nihilism. At times Vonnegut seems to go out of his way to inflict pain on his reader; in particular the constant use of the n-word — though I’m sure intended to make a point about American racism — ends up feeling abusive.
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