Young Man's Game

 "Hope I die before I get old." 

I have quoted these words here in this spot more times than I can count. Which is probably connected to some sort of early onset memory decline on my part, but it points to the way that youth is wasted on the youth. When Roger Daltry first started singing those lyrics, he was twenty-one years of age. That's a pretty snarky bit of angry young man angst to be hurling about, but to be fair it they were written by a much younger man (checks notes), Pete Townshend. Pete was a mere twenty years old when he wrote My Generation. If I have done my math correctly, at least three more generations have piled up behind these gentlemen while they have staunchly refused to "f-f-f-fade away." 

I bring this up because the remaining half of the band that claimed they would not get fooled again continue to tour. The last time they performed the anthem in question was just a few months back, and they are setting about to tour "one more time." Without a trace of irony, they have named this "farewell tour" after yet another one of their hits: The Song Is Over. 

Now seems like as good a time as any to mention that the boys of Spinal Tap are preparing a sequel to their mockumentary, slated for release around the time Roger and Pete will be appearing on The Budweiser Stage in Ontario, Canada. All of which is fine with me, since the surviving members of DEVO and the B-52s will be taking that same stage a few days after the remaining members of The Who bring their show to the Great White North. 

All of this is fine with me as a fan of the somewhat overstuffed category called "classic rock," but I feel like it bears mention that the most recent iteration of the touring band called The Who will be going on the road without their replacement drummer. Zak Starkey, son of Classic Rock legend Ringo Starr, was fired not once but twice from The Who in recent months, bringing the total number of percussionists for the group to four, pending the hiring of a new drummer for this most recent jaunt across North America. Mister Starkey, a sprightly fifty-nine years old, was sacked for his "overplaying" at a pair of charity shows back in March. At the time, Roger complained to the crowd, “To sing that song I do need to hear the key, and I can’t. All I’ve got is drums going boom, boom, boom. I can’t sing to that. I’m sorry guys.”

Apparently this did not live up to the very high standards set for the group. Which must have been set sometime after Keith Moon's time behind the kit, since he once died during a gig in San Francisco back in 1973, and had to be replaced by a member of the audience to finish out the set. Keith was revived and managed to stick with the group for another five years before his chaotic life really did catch up to him. He was joined in rock and roll heaven by bassist John Entwhistle in 2002. Kudos to Pete and Roger for not buying the clue set out in front of them. 

In a time when the Piano Man Billy Joel is cancelling dates because of a brain disorder, and even The Cure can only muster up one original member to go on tour, who can blame the guys left in The Who for showing off their continued relative vitality? Though I do think the next Farewell Tour should be called The "You Kids Get Off Of My Lawn Tour." 

Did I mention Neil Young is on tour this summer? Irony can be so ironic sometimes. 

The Look

“A man who Photoshops his picture is a woman." - Jesse "Holdyer" Watters

Last Wednesday, Bill O'Reilly Lite used his post on Faux News to reference a picture of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that appeared to have been altered. Altered in such a way as to make it appear that Hakeem was taller, or his hips were thinner, or maybe it wasn't "fixed" in any way and he just happened to be leaning up against a peculiarly warped park bench. 

Please understand that I am not above ridiculing anyone for their vanity. This would include things like comb-overs and fake tans. Or someone who insists that they are six foot three inches tall and weigh two hundred twenty-four pounds when rumors of his booking information in New York City had him shorter and wider than that. Should we be judging a man by the size of his jeans or by the content of his character?

But what makes it all the more galling is that Jesse "Shallow" Watters seems quite comfortable in 2025 ascribing certain affectations to women and not to men. Understandably this comes from a "man" who works for a company that has made a practice of denigrating women, he probably feels he is simply upholding the standard set by his predecessors. Like so many of his male brethren, he has scars that are aggravated by his daily return to the makeup chair before he goes on the air, preforming a job that a whole host of women do without ever questioning outwardly his own masculinity. 

It's more than a little absurd that this denizen of the infotainment business feels so free to assign gender roles to situations that are so obviously native to his own livelihood. Image is everything, and appearing hale and hearty while lambasting others who seek to do the same is hypocritical in the extreme. Rules, it should be remembered, were made to be broken. 

The Past Should Stay Buried

 I woke up with this word in my head: capitulation. 

If you are a fan of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, I might suggest you look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls. If you are not privileged enough to have lived long enough to internalize that catchphrase, then I would simply ask you to Google it. If you are not prone to breaking the spell of this wondrous moment of literary engagement, then I will tell you that capitulation means to succumb or yeild to an opponent. 

Surrender. 

You may be unfamiliar with such a concept because it is very much not in vogue right now, nor has it been for many decades. We can trace the death of this idea back to around 1968 when Richard Nixon, a truly awful human being who happened to become President in spite of how awful a human being he was. One of the ways he countered this public perception was to go on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In to show what a regular guy he was. This was not capitulation. This was manipulation, which was much more in line with the way Dick Nixon did business. When it became apparent to the rest of the planet that America's involvement in the Vietnam War was essentially unwinnable, the notion of "peace with honor" was floated out as a stopgap between escalation of the conflict to straight up admitting that we should surrender. This strategy stayed in place through the election of 1972, which allowed Dick and his administration to avoid actually admitting that defeat. For you students of history, specifically those who come here to learn about the distant past, Nixon won that election in a landslide, and in January of 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an end to one of the longest and bloodiest wars in America's history. Three days after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. The one that didn't end so well for Dick. A little thing called Watergate? 

And why am I bringing all of this up right now? 

Look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls. 

You Just Made The List, Pal

 The question to everyone's answer is usually asked from within: If there is no Epstein Client List, what is Ghislaine Maxwell doing in prison? Twenty years for something that suddenly does not exist? 

Ms. Maxwell was tried and found guilty, a verdict that was upheld on appeal, of sex trafficking in 2021. A jury determined that she was involved in helping to procure minors to be sexually abused by Jeffery Epstein. The guy who may or may not have killed himself in jail back in 2019 while he awaited trial for, you guessed it, sex trafficking of minors. Not everyone remembers that "Mister" Epstein had already pled guilty to charges of procuring a child for prostitution way back in 2008. Back then he served thirteen months of a sentence that included a great deal of work release. 

Those thirteen months are, by an overwhelming margin, longer than any of the "clients" that he and Ms. Maxwell spent in jail for solicitation of the teenaged girls that were procured by them. According to reports dating back to 2006 there was extensive video records made by Epstein and his staff for "insurance purposes." This is TV cop lingo for keeping evidence on hand for blackmail in case there was ever anyone who wanted to poke around in the billionaire's affairs. Video evidence of many of the high and mighty who might be brought low for their part in such activity along with their pal Jeffery. 

So how about this client list? With all that investigation going on for all those years, someone must have access to documents that could be used to uncover the rest of all this unsavory business. Back in February of this year, the "president's" lawyer Alina Habba told TV "personality" Piers Morgan that,  'We have flight logs, we have information, names that will come out."  When reminded of this issue a short time later, Attorney General Pam Bondi assured us that those files were, "sitting on my desk right now to review.”

That was back in February, when Presidental Pal Elongated Mush was hacking and slashing with his DOGE posse, and tariffs were just a threat just like our bunker buster bombs in the Middle East. 

Then things blew up. When the billionaire bros broke up, Mush suggested that he would deliver on the accusations connecting the adjudicated rapist to the ugly goings-on in Epstein-land. A claim he has reiterated as part of the ongoing feud between boys with too much money and not enough self-restraint. 

Meanwhile, those files and lists seem to have gotten misplaced at the Department of Justice. There's nothing to see here, move along. Nothing but a convicted felon hiding his tracks with the aid of a system rigged in his favor. 

But I will leave you with this: Given the way the former game show host has spoken of his own daughters, don't you think that's evidence enough? 

Little Victories

 As someone who periodically suffers from insomnia, I can say that I am eternally grateful for the evolution of television.

When I was a mere slip of a lad going to bed on a Sunday night, I carried with me the troubles of the world. My world, anyway. With a head full of anxietiy about what might happen the following day at school, I would often lay in my bed, alternately staring at the ceiling of my room or closing my eyes tight to force sleep to come. Neither of these strategies worked very effectively. 

Then there was the "sleep" function the clock radio at my bedside provided. Twisting that nob to the left allowed me to have sixty minutes of soothing music from a distant station fill my room with distraction. For fifty-nine minutes. Fifty eight minutes. I was far too clever to let the passage of time go unnoticed and if I was still awake as that switch went off I knew that I had just lost another hour long battle with the voices in my head. 

That's when I called my parents. At the time this seemed like a reasonable request. Hollering from my room down the hall from theirs, my expectation was that one of them would hear my plaintive cries and come swiftly to my rescue. It was their job to bring me calm reassurance that would help me settle into dreamland. But not without listening to a flurry of my circular arguments for why I would never fall asleep again. Sometimes it only took one of these mildly exasperated visits from my father, who apparently felt responsible or was not as good at rock, paper, scissors as my mother. If I pushed it past a second or third intervention, I knew I was going to be on my own. 

What I hadn't reckoned was that I had fallen asleep every night for more than a decade, albeit with some difficulty, but I had made that transition to Dreamland eventually. It was the eventual part that continued to confound me. 

Fast forward fifty years. I continue to wrestle at times with the occasional sleepless night. I have lived through being the parent to a child who reminded me of those struggles with his own sleep challenges. Many times those visits to his bedroom would set off a similar wave of late-night agitation in my own head. Which is why I am grateful that we had a television in our room. 

No longer does the broadcasting day cease at midnight, leaving snowy static in its wake. Now there are hundreds of channels to wash over me as I attempt to calm my brain into rest. I do this without the sound turned on, so as not to wake my wife who has her own stirrings to consider. I lay there, flipping about the channels until I find something that takes me away from the anxious moments before dawn. Something without a plot to distract me, or one with a familiar story that allows me to get lost in the tide that will lead me to rest. Infomercials will also do, in a pinch. 

In my memory, I can hear my father's tired voice reminding me of the inevitability of sleep. I try and let go of the problems of the day and those waiting just over the horizon. At some point, I feel my head sink further into my pillow as my thumb pushes the power button on the remote control. I have done it again. 

Little victories. 

Whither Weather

 Sometimes when you arrive here at Entropical Paradise, I give you a body count. Mass casualty events are something, sadly, to which I feel drawn. People die every day, after all. Accidents, old age, disease. There are a myriad of ways to meet one's maker, but the ones that end up feeling unjust are the ones that move me to speak my mind. 

This wasn't a crazed lone gunman acting alone with a manifesto on his laptop. This one was what some might refer to as "an act of god." If your suggestion is that God, or a god has a particular score to settle with the people of central Texas then I'm not sure what sort of belief system to which you are connected. 

Instead, you might join up with the real nutjobs who believe that human beings are at the heart of this weather conspiracy. Kandiss Taylor, who is running to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives, posted on the outlet formerly known as Twitter last Saturday: “Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake.” This was her response to torrential rains and flooding in Kerr County, Texas that took the lives of more than eighty people. Dozens more were killed by storms in neighboring counties. What does Ms. Taylor believe? “This isn’t just ‘climate change.’ It’s cloud seeding, geoengineering, & manipulation. If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder. Pray. Prepare. Question the narrative.”

Thank, Kandiss, but I'll be over here questioning something else. 

Meanwhile, Georgia seems to be a hotbed for weather conspriacy. You might remember Large Marge and the Space Lasers from way back in 2018. That was one of the bells she clanged to become a member of the House of Representatives way back then. Not to be outdone by the new shining light of the Republican Party in Ms. Kandiss, Marjorie Taylor Greene Is introducing a bill that will track "weather modification." Florida, feel free to make your joke here, has already passed state legislation prohibiting anybody messing with the weather of the Sunshine State. 

Would it make any kind of difference to take a half-step back from this problem and say that I agree with the ladies from Georgia? Human beings can and have affected the weather patterns, causing more severe storms and drought. It's a little piece of science called "climate change," and it isn't practice on some island lab by Democrats with machinery invented to disrupt "real weather." The flood in Texas are brought to you by more than a century of industrial gunk, to use a scientific word, that has resulted in an atmoshpere that has warmed to a point of being capable of carrying more moisture and therefore creating meteorological nightmares like the one in Central Texas. 

It's not fake. It's completely real. And it's our fault. Everyone's. Republicans and Democrats. Christians, Jews and Muslims. We are in this together. So go ahead and make climate change illegal. 

I dare you. 

Social Studies

 It is difficult to feel bad for Elongated Mush. He spent three hundred million dollars on electing a convicted felon and all he got was that "Dark Maga Hat." Well, the hat and he briefly gained access to every American's personal data. Now that he's on the outs with the Dear Leader, he'll have to go back to blowing up rockets and trying to sell them fancy electric cars that nobody wants. Which will probably be fine, unless Dear Leader follows through on his threats to deport him. 

The late, great Martin Mull once suggested that, "Hollywood is like high school with money." If this is true, taking this notion and stretching it to fit over the thunderdome called Washington D.C. might suggest that our nation's capital is like Ridgemont High. This might explain the extreme cliquishness and the seemingly impossible depravity that goes on during the business of trying to run a country. Leaving aside for a moment the plight of the poor little rich boy who couldn't buy himself a president, we find Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick.  If you don't recognize those names, they should be remembered as the two Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted against the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill." Laura Loomer, the crazy girl who would really like to be the First Mistress was quick to throw out the threat: “Good luck against President Trump’s wrath and his current $1.4 billion 2026 war chest,” she posted without any sense of irony on the site formerly known as Twitter. 

And good luck getting a date to the prom. 

Even though the bill passed and was signed into law, these two gentlemen will most likely lose their jobs for voting the way they felt their constituents would want them to. That's the "representative" part. Unfortunately that is not how things are getting done in Washington D.C. these days. The big fat version of James Spader in Pretty In Pink runs things and he won't have anyone messing up his version of the way things would be. 

Especially not public opinion. Two thirds of those polled had an unfavorable view of the "BBB," in spite of all the lies and obfuscation surrounding its contents. 

All of which makes you think that maybe it's a time for a change in Washington. Which is exactly what (checks notes) a certain South African billionaire is suggesting. Yes, Elongated Mush is now suggesting that he will spend his next hundred million dollars creating a new party. His newly minted "America Party" is his answer to the bully who kicked him to the curb. So, will it be the pasty nerd with exploding rockets or the adjudicated rapist? The Democrats had better find their own billionaire sociopath to front their party if they want to keep up.