Danger Dead Ahead

 I used to attempt to annoy/frighten the people with whom I was riding on most any carnival or amusement park attraction. Generally, my bit went something like this:

"Wow. Did you ever consider the potential of catastrophe on any one of these rides? How many people a day do you suppose get on one of these things without a care in the world, not knowing that there is a loose bolt or a faulty weld? Some sort of hidden defect that will eventually fail under the stress and strain of repeated use. The kind of breakdown that could only happen when a scheduled maintenance was skipped or a simple check was overlooked."

I would pause, for effect. Then after looking up toward the structure that would soon be hoisting us up and jostling us about, I would continue: "But that type of thing happens so infrequently." A sigh. "I guess that's why they call them 'accidents.'"

Inevitably this would lead to moans and groans from those trapped in the cattle chute that would eventually lead us to our destiny. I am sure that at some level this was a way that yours truly could deal with his own morbid fears and anxiety. Speaking them aloud, especially when the ride was located in one of those dodgy parking lot fairs that seemed to spring up in front of K-Marts, one step ahead of the state inspectors. 

Inspectors like the ones who uncovered maintenance issues, such as a train derailment, faulty restraint bars and guest injuries including dislocated joints and concussions. These concerns were not found in any traveling carnival, but rather at a dozen different Six Flags parks across three states. The latest "infraction" resulted in the death of forty-two-year-old Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem who fell to his death and several others were injured while riding the Goliath rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia. 

Additionally, the powers that be at Magic Mountain, a Six Flags park in Valencia, California permanently closed their X2 Hypercoaster after more than a hundred riders reported brain injuries after experiencing the flips and twists and high speed turbulent turns generated by this three hundred foot tall beast.  

Whee. Sounds like fun. 

I just like a little vertigo with mine. And when the actual effects of the ride turn out to be more perilous than the ones I used to spout in line, I guess the thrillmeisters have won the day. 

Impressions

 There are days like this past Tuesday when I realize I am making the correct decision to retire from teaching. 

The image I hold in my mind of a classroom filled with expectant upturned faces, hanging on my every word is a fantasy. I should know that this is precisely the reason for the gentleman who interviewed me for the credential program to laugh when he asked why I would make a good teacher and I replied, "Because I'm good with kids."

For the record, I maintain this opinion of myself. In groups smaller than five or six, or one on one, I am able to run rings around the average five to ten year old. These are the opportunities I have begun to anticipate over the course of what we are currently describing as my final days. 

Aside from the concern of being outnumbered, I have surrendered to the idea that my own experience has yet to prepare me for the children I encounter on the mean streets of Oakland. The life they have lead in their first decade of existence makes my own childhood look like a boring fantasy. 

You want complications? How about the looming threat of ICE descending on your neighborhood? How about food insecurity that makes every morning an opportunity for moms to stop by their kids' classroom to see if there is a little leftover breakfast that they can take home with them. It's not stealing. It's survival. How about housing insecurity? We have a large percentage of our students who either leave before a year is complete or show up at our school midway through a term because they had to move. 

Had to move. 

That one sticks with me. "Will I have my own room at the new house or will I still have to share with grandma?"

I am not making this up. 

So I have tried to make a safe and sane landing place for these families. A place where they can feel comfortable if only for six hours a day. Three more if they are enrolled in the after school program. With another meal tossed in for good measure. You don't often get families to come to events like Science Fair unless you promise to provide them with pizza. 

It has not taken me thirty years to come to all these revelations. When I started, after I was able to brush off the mild derision of being laughed at for being "good with kids," I truly believed that I could make a difference. 

Now I believe that anyone who steps into my place will make a difference. It's time to get some fresh blood. Someone who is good with kids. And the lives they lead. 

Frosty

 "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Those are the words of Robert Frost, of which there are many. These just happen to be the ones that struck me on this particular morning. 

Probably because the night before I had spent a good long while talking with a very good friend who is in the midst of having to pack up and sell the house in which she and her family have lived for the past thirty years. 

That's a long time. A lifetime if you happen to be either of our sons who happened to be born almost as part of the exercise of their parents becoming grown-ups, real and true. The homes each of us built were on opposite ends of California. We have spent the last three decades making a nest for our brood, a place to settle down. 

An even longer time ago, we were teenagers fumbling through high school together. We had grown up in the same town. Our parents had gone to that same high school together. So many things brought us together that when, after we had both graduated, she decided to move away to the Golden State, it was a challenge to us both to imagine how life could ever be the same. 

And yet, once I settled into the idea of her visits and our connections over the phone lines, it seemed natural. Once had my own love affair that drew me west, we were able to renew our connection. It was at her home that I had my first California Thanksgiving. After dinner, we took a ride in her convertible to the movies. 

In November.

With the top down. 

Once she packed up again to head to the southern end of California, we had another in a series of fond farewells. We made promises to stay in touch. And we did. Our sons became fast friends. Our dogs never fully reconciled their relationship, but it was always nice to have a Canine American to visit on one end of our journey or the other. 

We listened and consoled one another as our parents aged and eventually passed on. We avoided imagining what the next chapter might be. 

Now that chapter has come, and while I sort out my own landing spot in retirement, she and her husband have become victims of an unforgiving economy and the realities of being "of a certain age." 

We are that. Now they are in the midst of downsizing and preparing to move to the other side of the country. Which makes me terribly sad. But I am heartened to know that we will always have a place where we have to let the other in. 

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

 "It's amazing when you stand up here. It's just, like, the love," he told the crowd. "I could say the stupidest things and you clap."

This, my friends, is not the worst thing the convicted felon has said in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections. It would be easy to paint this as desperate, but it seems to be all part of some glorious improvisation that began with a ride down an escalator more than ten years ago. 

Since then he has made a regular habit of taunting not just members of the press, most of them female, but visiting heads of state with whom he felt the need to disagree in front of that same press corps. Even as the legions of applauding MAGAts continues to shrink, he feels emboldened to stay "the stupidest things." He lies about the progress of the war he started and cannot end. He lies about the price of everything and insists that this will all go away after the midterms. He is now asking his red-caps to pretend that he is on the ballot. Because, he will tell you, if you don't then there will be no border and no tax cuts.

And if you don't vote for Republicans, he will be impeached. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, the votes needed to remove him from office might finally be there. 

If you don't vote for Republicans, all that "great work" that the worst "president" of our lifetime or anyone else's might end up in jail. 

That's not so stupid, is it?

I would applaud for that. 

Naturally

 It's artificial. It is a stew made of scrapings from Al Gore's Internet. There is nothing truly "super" about it. Are you ready for the weird part? I've been using something like it for the past twenty-some years to write this blog. 

When I sit down and start to expound on the little things that gnaw at me, or the big things that consume me, I oftentimes turn to the search function of the program most of us know called Google Chrome. For example, if I wanted to know how many gallons were in a ton of diesel fuel, I would do a search for the answer, rather than going to the set of encyclopedias I keep in my office. 

I don't keep encyclopedias in my office. I use Al Gore's Internet. You may remember the Internet. It was a "series of tubes" according to Senator Ted Stevens. When I ask Al Gore's Internet how many gallons in a ton of diesel, the network of computers all tied together in a series of tubes or "a net" gives me a whopping great list of responses, topped off by a summary of those responses labeled "AI Overview." A cursory peek at that paragraph lets me know not only the answer to my question, but keeps me from moving down the list to look for an answer I might have clicked on myself before 2024 when the engineers at Google decided that poring over a list of responses might be too tedious for users. Why bother checking on those thousands of potential links when you could have the answer handed to you on an artificial platter? 

Maybe because of my inherent distrust of machines, first introduced to my by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. The HAL 9000 on board the spaceship Discovery was not giving the best answers to astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole. Even though HAL kept saying that he had the utmost enthusiasm for the mission, the computer sends Frank out to fix the AE-35 unit only to ram him with a pod and send him spinning off into space. Then, when Dave goes out attempts to retrieve his fellow astronaut's body, HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. 

I didn't have to look that stuff up. 

It was in my brain from all those years ago. 

But now I feel as though I need to check myself, to verify those tasty bits of infotainment for you, dear reader. I have to consult the oracle of intelligence because I really need to know that there are two hundred eighty gallons of diesel in a ton, and that the "deal" made by the self-proclaimed very stable genius with Russia provides the United States with three hundred thousand tons of the stuff. That ends up being eighty-four million gallons of diesel. Which seems like a lot. I used old-fashioned AI for that one: a calculator. Then I checked with the oracle once again to discover that the United States uses approximately one hundred thirty million gallons of diesel a day. That means that the deal the convicted felon and Russian asset trying to distract us all from the miserable job he's doing isn't going to cover one day's use of diesel fuel. 

I did that last bit in my head. The former game show host is trying to keep the pod bay door closed. Use your own intelligence. You don't need anything artificial or super. 

It's all natural. 

Shocked And Dismayed

 "I have not seen anything like this in my twenty-eight-plus years," Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah told a local news station. "I'm not sure that the city of Erie has ever seen the loss of life and the devastation that we just witnessed."

Why do we keep saying things like this? This statement comes from a guy who might consider himself a "peace officer" who goes to work each day with a gun strapped to his hip and wears a bulletproof vest as part of his uniform. 

Which is by no means a slight on Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah. I would guess that even the Sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina would expect his deputy to carry more than one bullet in this day and age. 

Meanwhile, back in Erie, the scene described by Chief Lorah was one in which eight people were shot and killed before the idiot with a gun turned it on himself, bringing the grand total to eight. Reports in some quadrants are noting that one of the victims was pregnant, so the math may need to be amended. Additionally, there were children aged one and five years old among the dead. According to reports, all of the victims were related. 

So here's my quandary: SWAT teams were dispatched to the scene after reports of gunfire were made. Authorities said that by the time the heavily armed "peace officers" arrived, all the killing had been done. I wonder what might have happened if an emergency call had gone out to that family for counseling in the days leading up to the shooting? What if unarmed social workers had made their presence felt in the runup to the murders? If a mental health check had been made and the guns in the house had been removed as a precaution?

I'm guessing that's not anything Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah has seen in his twenty-eight plus years. Because we tend to solve our problems with guns. Immigration. Diplomacy. And as an added bonus, we can livestream the firing squad death sentence being carried out after the fact. 

If we do, in fact, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness then maybe we should check in with the guys who wrote that Second Amendment and see how that squares with the Declaration of Independence. 

I hate to think that Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah might continue to witness mass shootings anywhere int he land of the free and the home of the moving targets. 

Worst Of The Worst

 Federal immigration officers opened fire on a Dominican man whom they were trying to arrest in New York because they believed their lives were in danger. Twenty-eight-year-old Oscar Belgal was shot in the neck last Thursday as he drove his car with a five-year-old boy inside. 

That's their story, including the part where Federal officers "were not aware" that the five-year-old was in the car. Oscar "was aware," according to the story that ICE goons issued, and yet he chose to evade officers, including the now familiar refrain about how officers used vehicles to block him in as he attempted to drive off,  then he accelerated his vehicle toward officers, smashing some of their vehicles. At which point the goons shot Mister Belgal "superficially" in the neck. 

Quick aside: I don't know if you've ever been shot "superficially," but I would expect if feels a lot like being shot profoundly. 

As this armed assault took place in New York City, Head ICE Goon Markwayne "Two First Names" Mullin took chose to remind everyone "Sanctuary politicians, they create an environment for criminal activity to thrive, not for the American citizens to be safe." 

Safe? Well, it seems like having plainclothes idiots with guns firing seven times into a vehicle on city streets does not seem to meet that distinction. I would categorize such an action as "unsafe."

No matter. The politician alluded to in "Two First Names" Mullin's statement was, most likely, New York City's mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mayor Mamdani's comments ran somewhat contradictory to the Goons of ICE: “There is no justification for what we have seen today." He also said the federal officers who surrounded the vehicle wore construction vests and masks, making it difficult to identify them as immigration officers.

This makes some sense, since in recent months New York City has been making an all-out effort to rid their streets not of dangerous immigrants, but potholes. The five-year-old in the car witnessing his father being shot by construction workers may flavor his perception of men wearing orange vests. Or the trauma suffered by the child may simply be slopped onto the shelf ICE likes to refer to as "collateral damage." 

You have the right to remain silent. In this case, I suggest we all go in a different direction. 

Gone

 Somewhere out there, baseball is being played. 

The major league playoffs are in, if you'll pardon the expression, full swing. 

I could care less.

A large and somewhat immovable chunk of this apathy can be traced from the hometown Oakland Athletics moving to (checks notes) a pasture somewhere near Sacramento. Another big piece of this mildly held disdain stems from the lack of having a team which I would root for when I was growing up. Colorado was without a major league franchise until 1993, the year after I moved to California. At that point, I was dropped into a decided wealth of baseball. I was just a BART ride away from the Oakland A's or a slightly longer BART ride and a couple transfers to various other public transit options to watch the San Francisco Giants play.

Seeing as how I had a slot open in my vicarious sports thrill menu, I latched onto the scrappy Athletics, winner of four World Series and tenants of one of the least attractive concrete bunkers in which any major sport was played. We made our way out to the ballpark on a number of occasions over the course of any given summer, with a keen eye toward which home games provided the best giveaways. This is how I collected a number of bobbleheads that now exist in basement boxes, waiting to be unearthed in those future days when we need to see what grandpa was up to all those years ago.

As a fan, I got to take the ride on the Moneyball express, those halcyon days that eventually starred Brad Pitt, and Oakland went on a twenty game tear back in 2002 winning twenty games straight. A modern day record that stood for fifteen years until it was bested by, of all teams, the Cleveland Guardians. For a couple of decades, I had a team. 

Then they moved away. Ostensibly to Las Vegas, but first a stop in that pasture outside of Sacramento. They never did win a World Series while we were together in Oakland. 

Now I hear that the playoffs are taking place again. Without Oakland. Without the Athletics. 

Without me. 

The Whole Shebang

 Homecoming. A time for celebration. A time for reflection. A time for senseless killing. 

Authorities in South Carolina are still looking for a suspect who shot and killed nineteen-year-old Jaliyah Butler. Eighteen-year-old Matthew Daniel McCoy was arrested and charged with Pointing and Presenting a Firearm at a Person, and Carrying a Weapon on School Property last year, but the other eleven people who were arrested for possession firearms on campus during the shooting did not net the killer. 

Fast forward a year, shifting focus a couple hundred miles to the south, we find two dead and thirty-five injured when gunfire erupted early this past Sunday morning over a four block radius of a neighborhood block party. A party celebrating the Dooly High School win in their big Homecoming Win. They beat the team from Wilcox County.

So there was a big party. 

Two twenty-year old men were killed. The injured ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-one. An incident like this might suggest that the twenty-somethings were the "targets" of all that gunfire, and the thirty-five others covering that wide range of age were collateral damage. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Celebrating homecoming. 

A time for reflection.

A time for senseless killing. 

“I’ve been doing this for forty-two years,” Dooly County Sheriff Craig Peavy told reporters. “I’ve had a lot of cases I’ve been on, a lot of bad situations, and I think by far this is the one that has caught me off guard.”

It could be that Sheriff Peavy's experience has not taken him far from his home, since Georgia has experienced one hundred fifty-five mass shootings since 2020, and guns continue to be the leading cause of death among children. 

The investigation, along with the mourning, continues. 

Ugly

 Speaking at a campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska the past week, the doddering old fool said, “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” This suggestion was met with applause from the assembled Cornhuskers, who had gathered in their red-hat frenzy to support whatever cockamamie notions that might leak from the slit just below the Dear Leader's nose. 

If, for some reason, it was unclear these are two cities in California that continue to be part of the United States. The convicted felon's handlers reminded us that the adjudicated rapist was "only kidding" when he mentioned these two cities in a deeply blue state. He did not offer up a target within the borders of the country that we are currently at war with, Iran. 

Perhaps because as those overtaxed frontal lobes continue to deteriorate, more of the "truth" seeps out of that tiny little brain. He sent American troops in the form of National Guard units to California back in June of 2025 to "keep the peace." Never mind that their presence violated the Posse Comitatus Act and cost more than one hundred million dollars. It all falls into the category of "a small price to pay," a phrase he used to describe the high cost of putting gas in our tanks and groceries on our tables during yet another endless slog in the Middle East. 

The pile of angry misstatements and poorly imagined plans for the country he claims he wants to be "great again" continues to grow. Fact checking has become a fool's errand these days since the fool in charge seems completely comfortable saying whatever pops into his tiny mind. At another recent rally he claimed that his IQ was 1775.  Again, the people behind the podium rushed to spin that their boss was trying to riff on the amount of the checks he was hoping to give to America's service members, a "warrior dividend" of one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six dollars. 

"A small price to pay."

And the beat goes on. No day passes without some level of affrontery to the country that incomprehensibly elected him "president." Twice. Just a few days ago he worried that the frat-boy rapists at Cornell might not get "a fair shake" from prosecutors and that he felt "badly" for their predicament. 

A small price to pay for living during these unprecedented times. 

I agree with my son, who suggested some time ago now that he would like to start living in precedented times again. 

Don't forget to vote.

Olden Days

I lost interest in the evening's football game, so I decided to travel up the dial to see what might be showing on Turner Classic Movies. Lo and behold, the 1976 Classic Movie, All The President's Men, was just beginning. I saw it first when I was an impressionable fourteen year old all those years ago. I have come back to it over and over again, but I confess that I have not given it my full attention in the past decade. 

Because it seems so incredibly quaint now. A group of burglars who broke into the Watergate Hotel back in the summer of 1972 getting caught while attempting to bug the Democratic National Headquarters feels like a bit out of the Keystone Cops. Except this one didn't end in a pie fight, but rather the resignation of the President of the United States. Following the trail of bread crumbs in a world that did not include Al Gore's Internet, cell phones or word processors, these two young reporters helped topple a corrupt regime that was attempting to stay in power at any cost. Woodward and Bernstein exposed the links between the bungling burglars and the Oval Office and brought down a sitting United States chief executive. No gunfire. No special effects. No love interest. Just journalism.  For me, this was as close as I tend to get to a "feel-good movie."

When it was all over, and those clever programmers at TCM began unspooling The Manchurian Candidate, I decided to head off to bed, where on my dresser sat my most recent nighttime read: Regime Change. Written by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, it tells the tale of the second Trumpreich, contrasting it to the somewhat more benign version that ended just four years prior. It would be nothing short of an understatement to say that these two had an easier row to hoe than their Washington Post predecessors. Except that the Washington Post is now owned by one of the Chief MAGAts, while Haberman and Swan's reporting is still supported by their left-leaning publishers. Woodward and Bernstein worked feverishly back in their day to stay ahead of The Times. And TV News. And all the other ships at sea. 

These days, all the dirty dealings are laid out for everyone to see, and it is left up to anyone with half a brain to connect the dots. Haberman and Swan were able to put out a book in a matter of months encapsulating just the first year and a half of dirty tricks and dealings by all the convicted felon's men. As a point of timing, I should point out that the publication of Woodward and Bernstein's book was followed by the resignation of the Head CREEP, Richard Nixon, by two months. Haberman and Swan's book came out this past June. 

So my question is this: Why is it taking so long? 

Super Intelligent

 "Say, do you remember that crazy cartoon you guys did a while back that had me dropping poop on those protesters?"

"Yes sir, the 'No Kings' protesters."

"And you had me wearing a crown and all that with that Kenny Loggins tune in the background."

"Danger Zone. Yes sir." 

"And those ducks? That was hysterical."

"They were geese, sir. Canadian geese." 

"But you called them ducks."

"Yes sir. Donald ducks."

"Heh. Priceless."

"Yes sir."

"Which brings me to the reason I called you in here. How much are you getting paid?"

"Me personally? Just under two hundred."

"Two hundred dollars?"

"No sir . Two hundred thousand dollars. A year."

"Hmm. Well how would you like to double that?"

"Well, certainly, sir. What would I have to do?"

"Nothing that different. We would just have to come up with some clever name for your new job."

"Like AI Commander?"

"I like that, but it's not grand enough."

"How about Commander of Artificial Intelligence?"

"I'm not sure I like the 'artificial' part. It sounds so..."

"Fake?"

"Yes. That was what I was thinking. Why don't we call it something more intimidating?"

"How about 'Super Intelligence?'"

"Oooo. I like that!"

"So I get the raise and I get to be in charge of Super Intelligence?"

"Yes! Yes! I'm so glad I though of it!"

"Yes sir."

"Now can you get me one of those videos of me blowing up the refineries in Iran?"

"With or without poop, sir?"

Danny

 When I showed up to my freshman dorm, I had a number of DEVO albums in my record collection along with an Elvis Costello record and a couple by the Cars. Little did I know that I was on my way to earning my sobriquet, New Wave Dave. 

The year was 1982, and the world was just beginning to embrace punk's nerdy cousin, which they referred to as New Wave. It was into this world that I found myself plunged via a hallway full of nerdy young men whose own music tastes spurred my own record renaissance. Across the hall I heard Talking Heads. Four doors down someone else was playing The Pretenders. Most of us laughed at the idea of Flock of Seagulls, whom we referred to as "that haircut band," but that didn't keep us from listening to "I Ran" over and over again. I found myself in a time and place where I could find the new Thomas Dolby album being played right after Def Leppard. It was magic. 

Somewhere in there, I encountered the kid at the end of the hall brandishing an album whose cover art was enough to pique my interest: Only A Lad. It was the first full-length release from a band called Oingo Boingo. Listening to it was its own special treat for me. It was fast, and dark, and witty, and you could dance to it. My fascination with this new entry into sounds I needed to hear was confirmed when I purchased my own copy of the album and proceeded to wear it out. Imagine my excitement when that summer rolled around and their second release, Nothing To Fear, appeared in my local record shop. If you can't imagine it, just substitute your appreciation of a musical birthday cake that you could play over and over. 

Thus began a love affair that would continue through the 1980s, highlighted by the release of Dead Man's Party in 1985. I have written before of the eerie confluence of events that surrounded the appearance of this record in my life. The songs from this record will forever be linked to my personal introduction to tragedy, and that connection continues to this day. 

This past Friday, my wife and I went out to San Francisco to see the lead singer and composer of all those songs from the eighties: Danny Elfman. Some forty years after the events I have described here I was sitting in a crowd, listening to the seventy-three year incarnation of this man who continues to go by the possibly diminutive "Danny." I was pleased at how well he and his music had aged, and glad that there were some new tunes to round out the evening. It wasn't just an "oldies" show. 

Not that I wouldn't have enjoyed that. I'm a bit of an oldie myself, these days. 

It was fast, and it was loud, and I felt like dancing and singing along. I did more of the latter than the former, and for me it was over far too quickly. Would I have to wait another forty years?

New Wave Dave hopes not. 

Toxic

 While the Secretary of War is prattling on about testosterone levels and the essential manliness of killing people abroad and here at home, he also wanted to insert the importance of faith: the newly minted  Office of Religious Affairs will have “a direct line to the secretary.” Pistol Pete insisted that, “Decisions about faith and religion were made by secular careerists in cubicles and lawyers running around with red tape.” Further more, during his speech last Wednesday he appointed Elon Musk to help develop the next generation of weapons and said he wanted to staff the US military with “patriotic cowboys. No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors,” he said.

The ultra macho surge continues in our nation's capital. while a few hundred miles up the road the ugly reflection of all this hyper-toxic masculinity is on display for all to see. At Cornell University, the investigation continues into the case of a woman who was drugged and then raped by a group of fraternity boys at Cornell University. It seems that back in 2024 Jane Doe was visiting a friend at the Chi Phi fraternity and was already intoxicated. The members then plied her with more liquor and a dose of what they said was Ketamine. From there, two of the frat boys proceeded to rape her, then sent out messages on social media that suggested that there was a girl upstairs who was "ready." Over the next few hours, five more males made their way up to continue the assault. Once the initial report was made, the university acted: two of the fraternity members were expelled, while five others received lesser sanctions including suspensions, workshops and writing essays.

No criminal charges were filed. 

I can't help but imagine that the two boys who were expelled would be right at home in Pistol Pete's new Armed Forces. Shoot first, ask questions never. I don't expect that those who were stuck writing essays would be considered manly enough to be a part of the future of the secretary's over-fertilized imagination. These are just the kind of "patriotic cowboys" he's looking for. "We need students of Western civilization and the pillars of our republic. Leaders who understand the faith of Jerusalem, the philosophy of anthems—Athens. The power of Rome, and the freedom of Philadelphia circa 1776." In case you missed it, Pete was trying to invoke the capital of Greece - Athens - somewhere in there. All the more reason to believe these frat boys might stand a chance in the recruitment office. 

Unless they've got beards.

Generation Execute

 Jello Biafra once questioned, "How do we teach 'Thou Shalt Not Kill?'"

Well, twenty-seven of our current fifty states have a death penalty on their books. As of mid-2026, there were nearly two thousand prisoners on death row here in these United States. States such as California have capital punishment, but the governor has placed a moratorium on carrying out any executions. 

As you may expect, the majority of the states that continue to kill their convicted felons can be found in the south. Tennessee would be one of those states. That is where, this past Wednesday night, authorities attempted to kill convicted murderer Christa Pike. The only woman on The Volunteer State's death row was injected, not once but twice, with a supposedly lethal dose of pentobarbital. These two injections came after the execution was initially paused as a stay was issued by an appeals court, only to be overturned a few hours later by the "Supreme" Court. 

At this point, I do not feel compelled to defend Ms. Pike, who never disputed her part in the 1995 murder of a classmate when she was eighteen. As part of the lengthy conviction and appeals process, Christa spend the next thirty-two years waiting for her punishment. At the age of fifty, she was scheduled to be the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in two hundred years. I do feel the need to question how, after the first dose of drugs only succeeded in making her arm "feel funny," why officials didn't back up and try to figure out what went wrong before attempting a second dose. 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, for his part, expects "a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred." It might have been a bad or degraded batch of pentobarbital. Or maybe Christa's veins were blown and unable to accept the injection. This was enough to get Tennessee state Senator Marsha Blackburn up off her chair, insisting a return to the electric chair, a method that had not been in use for the past six years. Since 1998, your standard Tennessee execution shifted to that of lethal injection, but "Old Sparky" has been available.

Just in case. 

In the meantime, Christa Pike has been taken to a medical facility to try and get her healthy enough so that she can be strapped to another device in hopes of finishing the job. 

I dunno. Sounds a little cruel, and if I may, not so unusual. 

Birds Of A Feather

 It's a little trifle of a trivia quiz. I use it to pep up a conversation when I am stuck waiting for something else to begin. I ask, "What teams have mascots that are not animals?" This tends to get a ball rolling that includes such "easy" answers as The Yankees, The Reds, The Phillies, The Mariners, and so on. There are plenty of examples outside Major League Baseball, but it provides even those without an encyclopedic knowledge of sports an opportunity to stretch their memory. 

I will pause for a moment while you begin your own search function.

I hope that was satisfying. Now, the next time I encounter this situation, I change the parameters of the question. Instead of asking for non-animal examples, one of the other participants asked if we might try and come up with as many bird teams as possible. Orioles, Blue Jays, Cardinals, top the list if you start with baseball, but you might have found yourself discovering the bird thread available in Atlanta. The Falcons and the Hawks both call the ATL home.

My guess is that this is where Senator Eric Schmitt stopped in his inquiry cycle, Which might explain why he went to all the trouble to head on over to Kinko's to get a big poster printed up for his chance to humiliate former prosecutor Jack Smith. The Missouri Republican attempted to put Mister Smith not in Washington but in Atlanta on the night of February 3, 2024 when the NBA franchise Hawks were hosting the Golden State Warriors, who qualify for the non-animal category. 

“So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024. Is that correct? What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors-Hawks game on Feb. 2, 2024?” The hope was to catch Mister Smith lying about being in the Big Peach at the same time that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was facing scrutiny for her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special state prosecutor she hired for the county’s election-interference case against a certain convicted felon. 

There was some head-scratching moments as the connection was finally made: Jack Smith had attended a women's basketball game in Maryland. In that collegiate contest, the hometown Terrapins hosted the Iowa Hawkeyes, featuring the phenomenal Kaitlan Clark. This game was taking place some six hundred fifty miles from the location suggested by Senator Schmitt's posterboard allegation. 

Hawks. Hawkeyes. Easy mistake to make. Especially if you're in a rush while standing at the Kinko's "Gotcha" Counter, waiting for your order to be completed. 

But he won't be invited to play in any of my trivia time-sinks. 

Bought And Paid For

 "I just don't think it's right to be using taxpayer money in that way, particularly if it's tied to political campaigns," says South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds. "I think they need to rethink that strategy."

Is he talking about the Reflecting Pool? The Triupmal Arch? The Ballroom Bunker?

Nope. Senator Mike, who happens to be a Republican, is referring to the advertisements that ran during college and pro football games over the weekend, as well as in their native habitat, Faux News Sunday. If you happened to be fortunate enough to have missed these bits of cinema triste. The feature the lumbering bulk of the convicted felon shambling down a hallway, along with this audio taken from a campaign speech he gave back in 2024: "This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists." All capped  off by the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: Paid For By The U.S. Government.

Hey, wait a gosh-darned minute. We are the U.S. Government. Our tax dollars at work and all that. Had this been an actual campaign ad, it would have been captioned differently: Paid for by the front for tiny-handed former game show hosts. Or maybe: This message made possible from a grant from the Epstein Foundation for human trafficking. 

Or perhaps you'd like to spend a few moments reading the Hatch Act, a 1939 federal law which bars government employees from participating in partisan political activities while on the job. I'm not sure if there is additional legislation that bars government employees from sleeping through meetings, but I would expect he would be found guilty of that on several occasions. 

The bottom line for me, however, is that first and foremost, the Orange Worst is not running for any office currently, nor would he be allowed to pay for that sort of advertisement with taxpayer funds. What's even more egregious is that he could write a check for those TV spots out of his insider trading slush fund he has amassed in the first two years of this term. But why do that when the people's money is sitting right there on the collection plate? 

So now we have yet another instance of members of his own party tsking the adjudicated rapist with "harsh words" for his conduct. Illegal conduct. And that bar that he continues to slide under and repeatedly clang his soft skull against seems to have little or no effect. We are all shocked and dismayed by his behavior. His illegal behavior. Senators from his own party acknowledge that he is committing crimes and the best we can hope for is a strongly worded letter and another round of hand wringing. 

Arrest him. Impeach him. Remove him. Let him walk the dimly lit hallways of Mar-A-Lago until the authorities come for him. 

I would gladly watch that. 

Know Your Rights

 What if we started calling it The Bill Of Privileges? 

You have the privilege of Free Speech.

You have the privilege to keep and bear arms. 

You have the privilege to deny the quartering of soldiers in private homes without your consent.

You have the privilege to avoid unreasonable searches and seizures and requires warrants to be based on probable cause.

You have the privilege of due process, protection against self-incrimination and double jeopardy, and requirement of grand juries for capital crimes.

You have the privilege of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury, along with the right to legal counsel and confronting witnesses.

You have the privilege of a jury trial in certain civil law cases.

You have the privilege of avoiding excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments.

You have the privilege of other unlisted privileges not explicitly written in the Constitution.

You have the privilege of knowing that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people.

Kind of changes the whole tenor of the discussion, doesn't it? Well let me tell you something: I've seen the actual thing, this Bill of Rights, behind its protective glass case in the National Archives. Written by James Madison and eventually approved by the First Congress of the United States. Back when Congress used to vote on things and pass laws. 

These chuckleheads who want to drive around the parts of the law of the land that doesn't suit them need to go. Election Day is a month away. Vote. It is your privilege. And your right.