I’m gonna level with y’all. I have a certain number of areas where my tastes are reasonably sophisticated and bougie (a nice dry artisanal cider… perfection), but in many ways I have the palate of a latchkey kid in 1993. I love a dozen kinds of fast food, sugary breakfast cereals, and yeah, while I prefer other recipes over it, I’m quite fond of regular Kraft Mac & Cheese/Kraft Dinner.

All of which is to tell you that I’m not sneering down from some Michelin-starred ivory tower when I say that Microwave bowls of Mac & Cheese are FUCKING DISGUSTING. Whatever combination of powdered milk and thickeners and Satan-snot they have to put into the bowls to make the process work at all is just nasty.

It’s an abomination before the Lord. That fork was just desperately trying to avoid being shoved into that slime bucket.

Head to your local gen aviation airfield. It’s like Whole Foods for gasoline aficionados!

One, flashbacks to being about four or five and deciding to try that teacup full of something my dad was using to clean a carburetor or similar. Do not recommend.

Two, in junior high I did a science project to see what would kill seedlings quickest: bleach, windex, or gasoline. Water was the control.

A Boxing Day Story: Revenge of the Bumpas Hounds.

(Yes, I know about It Runs in the Family. It’s not bad, but it’s not the same. Haven’t seen the others.)

I took one for the team and went to Fox News to read the user comments on the first story I could find about this. It’s pretty telling that even there, the overwhelming sense I got – in between the “Obamacare is why healthcare is so bad!” and the “where’s Hunter’s cocaine, Mister FBI?” and the “our so-called nation is secretly run by acolytes of a shady transnational world government” – is that they don’t understand why this is getting any more attention than any other random street crime in the big bad city.

Even MAGA doesn’t care; wrong kind of billionaire, I guess.

If it’s in the book, then point happily conceded. If not, I reckon it could work either way. Everybody hates depositions.

Yeah, the entire thing is all about “vibes” and trying to tell a light story that makes us feel how a bunch of minor nobles and and proto-middle-class people would have felt going to a tournament or reading one of the more ribald Canterbury tales, or listening to a Chretien de Troyes romance.

To specific choices to get you there are still kind of “fluff,” but no doubt they’re reasonably well done and “sticky” in a way that can be hard to articulate. There’s a lot going on, and I don’t think it comes together well enough to be a great movie, and maybe most unfortunately, its target audience probably includes both people who will have trouble suspending disbelief long enough to sink into the silliness and enjoy it, and people who will never give it a try because of the setting, but I can’t help but stop and watch a bit when I come across it.

It may not be a direct reference to the book, but I would just about bet that the author didn’t come up with the bon mot from scratch.

“Depose” in particular is interesting. It could certainly be a broader social comment about a perceived ruling class, but it also has a specific meaning in the context of civil litigation. I would imagine that some glib corporate attorneys have used those exact three words in sequence, in connection with UHC and others: Deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patients, where “depose” means conduct a lengthy and expensive and stressful set of questions, done outside the courtroom and with very little off limits because it’s expected the judge will rule on admissibility later. All of it wears out the claimant, who clearly needed the coverage and will almost by definition lack the same resources to pursue the lawsuit.

For repeated viewings? Probably just the old standby A Knight’s Tale. Not sure how “bad” it really is though, just a very specific type of fluff elevated by some charming performances.

For bad movies I watched once but enjoyed? Standards go WAY down. As a teenager, I saw Weekend at Bernie’s 2 with my mom in the theater and enjoyed it. Around 2015-2016 I also watched the first three installments in the “Mythica” microbudget epic fantasy series (words that generally don’t go together well, LOL) and found the earnestness (and the mercifully quick exit of creepo Kevin Sorbo in each one) made them oddly watchable, but they are by no means good and I never bothered with tracking down the last three.

I wouldn’t say the any of the two RH movies or the first Kingsmen movie is bad at all, though. Disney RH is a nice enough straightforward retelling that actually kind of nails the tone of the late-medieval romances, and the Roger Miller songs are perfection. Men in Tights is probably one of the stronger entries in Brooks’s later career. Kingsmen was a fun romp and a good send-up of James Bond, though admittedly it was on the edge and neither sequel is all that good.

Never saw The Quick and the Dead. Was that the Sharon Stone starring vehicle?

Well, this would track, since Trump himself, despite embodying virtually every other vice and bad character trait imaginable, has through some quirk of his toxic upbringing decided that being a drunk is completely unacceptable.

I’m still reading tea leaves of course, but while he may well have been completely right about literally everything, I sense that what changed was his tolerance for BS, combined how much the administration valued him.

Regardless, it’s still an absolute shame. Of course the personal tragedy for his family, and then professionally, either this poor guy was railroaded and mistreated, or else he missed a chance for a productive final act in his career.

What a sad situation. I googled around and went through some reddit threads and found my way to the final email. It was lengthy and one sided, and got off in the weeds towards the end, but the “ethics” complaints he felt it worthwhile to share were mostly centered around “lying, incompetence, hypocrisy, information hiding, etc.”

They boil down to, “They are taking my meeting space to give to a new professor and they waited until the last minute to tell me and fed me some BS about it,” and “the MechE department won’t be recommending my course for a certain requirement any more, and they didn’t tell me until long after they’d decided.” There were other grievances about the university not making lasting change after George Floyd, not taking his concerns about imminent environmental collapse (or the university’s role in preventing it) seriously, and a last-minute cancellation of a monorail proof of concept he wanted to do between two parking garages.

Honestly, it sounds like he was struggling and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and was no longer psychologically equipped to handle intense, but likely common, levels of office politics, academic fiefdoms, and baroque bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear his workplace saw the signs, and simply treated him as difficult but ensconced, an inconvenience to be avoided.

I have an iPhone. It’s pretty recent, but definitely not the most recent. No, I don’t know exactly what model it is. It’s an utterly boring glass brick that lets me find out stuff and say stuff and take pictures. It set itself up from my last iPhone like a clone emerging from a vat, and someday it will be fated to transfer its lifeforce to its brother-self-son. Such is the way of the iPhone.

It’s… fine. I got a red one.

Good point.

Eventually, some clerk or staffer is gonna spend a lot of time in jail but also become a folk hero.

Given Trump’s tendencies, I’m not sure I want us jumping in right away. He’d probably pick the worse side.

I kind of like the idea of impeaching Biden solely to allow Kamala to be president for a few days/weeks, meaning Trump has to toss all his “47” merch and have it re-made with “48.”

Oh, and also constitutional guide-rails I guess.

I did not, though admittedly there’s a world where Rian Johnson takes pointers from some of R1’s action sequences and TLJ is even more clearly the best SW movie of the last thirty years.