El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:
Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:
It’s that time of year again. The snowbanks in Maine have receded to a distant memory instead of a salty spring puddle, and have long since released their pent up cargo of urban jellyfish (plastic bags from convenient stores) to drift on the sultry, room temperature breezes. That means it’s Ironman time!
Well, I guess that’s what it means. I’m new to the city of Ogguster, our state’s capital. I’m pretty new to cities, period. Apparently, they have this sort of Bataan Death March of Fun every year, and they have it in a lot of places. It attracts contestants from all over the world, but it’s a very American idea to my eye. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” should be stamped on our currency and added to the National Anthem. The last three verses are really weird and you could slip it right in if you have a rhyming dictionary, and no one would notice.
I’m a stranger to Facebook, so I’m a stranger to most current happenings like these. It’s pointless to opine on such matters, but I shouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to look at a police department’s or any other government cabal’s information. But everyone assumes that’s where the squares go for their info, so that’s where they put said info. Oh well. But I honestly didn’t know that they held an Ironman competition in our city. Until I won it.
I’m so ill-informed about the topic that this morning I had to go to the Ironman website to verify exactly what the three portions of athletic misery technically consists of. Apparently, you’re supposed to swim for 1.2 miles in the Kennebec River, past a modest crop of signs that inform you of the wet weather sewer overflow discharge pipes that dot the shoreline. Then you’re required to haul your soggy bottom out of the river and plant it on a bicycle seat and pedal for 56 miles. After that thorough, but no doubt enjoyable chafing session, you’re supposed to trade your $10,000 carbon fiber streamlined bicycle for a wedge of orange to chew on and a cup of lukewarm water (about the same amount of water you still have in your shorts, I’ll bet). Then you run for 13.1 miles, which I noticed is exactly half the length of a marathon. I think they should totally call that a “half marathon.” I’m not on Facebook, so maybe they already do. In any case, I’m sure they all run the whole way while wondering if that guy they left their bike with actually had anything to do with event.
On a morning after basis, that sure sounds daunting. But in the heat of the moment, I just sort of got carried away with the zeitgeist and entered the contest without even trying. And get this, I did it in my pajamas, and my wife did it while naked. Of course this will require some explanation. Here goes:
You see, I don’t think it’s possible to “win” a contest that requires you to swim, bike, and run that far. Don’t get me wrong. In my younger days I was as foolish as the next guy, and ran around like a dog on the 4th of July, and biked like a Tour De France also-ran. Fitness freaks can’t just pull rank on me that easily. I came in 13th in a small town marathon once. I could average 20-25 miles per hour on a bike back in the day on a flat circuit. I’d be accused of cheating on the swimming portion, of course, because of the water wings. But other than that, pointless exertions like this event hold no terrors for me. I’m just not that interested.
Entering the event has many requirements I’m also not that interested in. First, it appears you have to buy all your garments at some kind of trapeze artist unitard store, and we don’t have one hereabouts. These Barnum and Bailey leotard onesies are covered with more slogans and logos than Don Draper’s desk, and I don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to get on that kind of gravy train. I think you have to drink Brawndo while skydiving with a GoPro on your helmet, then land in the bed of a vegan’s electric monster truck, or some other heroic deed, to catch the typical sponsor’s eye. I’m willing of course, but I can’t remember my YouTube login credentials, so the whole scheme would fall apart at the end there.
I would also apparently be required to purchase very elaborate running shoes in electrifying pink or lime green neon colors I haven’t seen since Cyndi Lauper stopped recording. I probably can’t afford those. Everyone was wearing those Randy Savage sunglasses, too, that looked like you could weld with them, or run through gamma rays or something. Maybe it was to protect you from going blind from the radioactive pink sneakers. I dunno. But while I used to own a welding helmet, I don’t remember where I put it. That’s another investment I don’t need to make, and I don’t think getting a beef jerky sponsorship logo on my unitard would impress the other contestants anyway.
I also noticed that some of the female runners had a male trailing them on a bicycle, exhorting them to keep going, with encouragements like, “You can do it!” and, “Keep up the pace!”, and “You got this!”, mostly to women who manifestly couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep up, and didn’t got this, so to speak. I imagined how many stab wounds I’d wake up with the next day if I tried this with my wife. Besides, as I mentioned, she was naked, and being naked, there would be no place to display any logos of energy drinks or energy bars or energy potions, so there would be no point in her competing.
So as I mentioned, I feel as though I’m the only real winner of the Augusta Ironman competition. It’s just that the events in my version of the race varied slightly from the swim, cycle, and the “sorta run, sorta walk fast” final leg. My version of the competition did have three amazing portions of exertions, and I nailed them:
Get woken up at 3:30 in the morning by the neighbor across the hall pounding on our door. The air conditioning unit for our apartment is on the fritz, so my wife was sleeping naked. She woke me up and sent me to the door in my jammies, (gym shorts and a t-shirt). Luckily for me, I used to be a professional musician, so I was used to naked girls hanging around while people hammered on my door telling me the cops had arrived. It’s part of the job description, I think. At any rate, the neighbor told me the cops were towing everybody’s cars out of the parking lot, mine included. That’s where the Ironman race was starting, and we were supposed to move our cars out of there. We had it on our Facebook page, I don’t know how you could have missed it.
The second leg was going down three flights of stairs. I did it in seventeen seconds. I’m sure that record will stand for a while.
The third leg was the most difficult, and I believe my performance was one for the record books. There were about a dozen policemen and about the same number of tow trucks in the parking lot. One wrecker was backed up to our car, and the driver was standing there holding the hook. And get this: I somehow convinced a tow truck driver and several policemen to move the tow truck and let me drive out of there instead of being towed. I talked ragtime faster than Joe Isuzu on meth. I’m still not sure how I managed it. As far as I know, it’s never even been attempted, never mind accomplished. Everyone else got towed, and a $350 bill to get their car back.
So we sat in our living room and watched the cyclists and the runners pass by our front windows, serene in the knowledge that no matter how you tote up the results, we won the Augusta Ironman competition, going away. And we got a spray of flowers to commemorate the victory.
No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.
The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.
But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years
Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.
When I’m driving in my car And a man talks on the radio He’s telling me more and more About some useless information Supposed to fire my imagination
It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.
I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.
The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.
Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.
And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.
Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.
They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago. You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.
In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
Easy Rider (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Chinatown (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.
Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.
Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.
Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:
Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video. In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.
“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.
Well, we’ve been featuring lots of real estate shenanigans here at the cottage lately, so it’s only natural that our Tuesday Trash Day roundup of festering browser bookmarks should feature some good ol’ real estate info. Feel free to opine on the selections in the comments. And remember, no wagering.
The businesswoman, who became president of the popular fast-food chain in 2010 and now has an estimated net worth of $7.3 billion, explained during a new episode of Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast that it’s “not easy” living and working in California anymore.
Forgive me, but for a moment when I saw the headline about an in and out heiress, I mistakenly thought her mother was a very successful courtesan.
Many homeowners use the “1% rule.” This means you should save about 1% of your home’s value each year for maintenance. For example, if your home costs $300,000, aim to set aside $3,000 per year.
Older homes or homes in rough climates may need more care. In those cases, 2% of the home’s value might be more realistic. You can also track your yearly spending to see what amount works best for your situation.
At the very least, save enough money to afford home insurance, a pile of oily rags, and a carelessly discarded cigarette.
“Sellers are willing to make deals because in today’s buyer’s market, they don’t want to lose out on a sale once they have a buyer under contract,” said Van Welborn, a Redfin Premier agent in Phoenix. “A few years ago, when the market was more competitive, sellers were able to tell buyers to move on rather than pay for repairs found during the inspection period. Now, sellers are they’re doing whatever they can to close the deal. I have one buyer who discovered a septic issue on an ultra-luxury home and was able to talk the seller into reducing the price by $1 million.”
If you have a million dollar septic problem, I suggest you stop eating at Taco Bell.
Investor Ian Jacobs, a longtime protégé of Warren Buffett and a former Berkshire Hathaway executive, is doubling down on Union Square in downtown San Francisco, according to a July 1 report in the San Francisco Standard.
Jacobs, who leads the investment firm 402 Capital, has gone into escrow to buy 111 Ellis Street, an office building at the corner of Powell and Ellis streets. The building was once home to Blondie’s Pizza and sits near several still-vacant retail spaces.
Berkshire Hathaway has around one trillion dollars of assets under management. This guy bought a shuttered pizza joint. Bold, indeed.
To many in the industry, walk-in business is dead — and I’m unsure if natural causes or our failure to adapt as an industry dealt the final blow.
In the years following the pandemic, we “returned” to our downsized offices, but after a few weeks or months of tepid effort, many threw in the towel. Now, it’s a chicken and egg conundrum: Most agents don’t want to sit in an office alone when the only walk-in they’re likely to get is someone selling Girl Scout cookies, and potential clients aren’t inspired when they see a cubicle graveyard.
But walk-in business — when we get it — is superior to internet inquiries. It is every licensee’s goal to be belly-to-belly with a live human seeking an address change.
I’ve always preferred going belly to belly with a live human. Mortuaries kill the mood.
Best Places 2025-2026 Rank: 226
Population: 82,140
Median Home Value: $861,806
Median Household Income: $127,440
Just five miles from Boston is Somerville, a town known for its diversity and robust arts and entertainment scene. In fact, after New York City, Somerville has the most artists per capita than any other U.S. city, boasting over 20 city squares filled with markets, theaters and restaurants. Somerville notably ranks No. 21 in health care access and places in the top 15% in both air quality and the safest places to live in the U.S. Its walkable neighborhoods and connections to the green, orange and red metro lines make the Boston city center accessible to Somerville residents.
Starts right in with a tangled passive voice sentence. Beautiful. And Somerville? That Somerville? The one we used to call Slummerville? Well, things change. Maybe it’s perked up enough to make a list of places with a high quality of life. Let’s check how safe it is:
I’m unsure of what a “high quality of life” would entail, exactly. Polite muggers? Carjackers who put premium gas in your car while they’re driving it around? Inquiring minds want to know.
A burglar accused of murdering ‘American Idol’ executive Robin Kaye and her husband was a ‘junkie’ well known in the neighborhood with multiple previous arrests, including assault.
Raymond Boodarian, 22, lived just 13 minutes from the $4.5 million Encino home where 70-year-old Kaye and her husband, Thomas DeLuca were shot dead during a suspected break-in last week as the local man sought to rob the well to do couple.
It’s unclear how this will affect the “quality of life” rating of Encino.
Well, that’s it for the bookmarks roundup. I hope the quality of life where you are is just ducky today.
It’s in Harrington, Maine. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. It’s nearly as far Down East as you can get, a hamlet with less than 1,000 souls. It’s about halfway between Belfast and Eastport, which is where you either turn left, or end up in Snow Mexico after a short, brisk swim. At one time, Harrington had lots of industries like potato farming and sailmaking and shoemaking and shingle splitting and shipbuilding and various other manly arts, but now the only business of note around there is the company that weaves those Wreaths Across America decorations. Everybody else scratches out a living one way or t’other.
We visited Harrington a couple years back. We liked the little string of towns it’s surrounded by on the nether end of Route 1. Ellsworth, Gouldsboro, Columbia Falls, Machiasport, and Lubec. The town squats next to the delightfully named Narraguagus Bay. It’s fun to say Narraguagus. Go on, say it. Narraguagus!
The house backs up to a river that runs out to the sea, with a boatyard next door, in case you need to get some serious seafaring cred. And if you look at the picture closely, you’ll note that there’s a brand new roof on the place. That’s exhibit A on why you could buy this house and live in it, if you really wanted a house to live in. You keep saying you do, but I’m not sure I believe you. I keep showing them to you, but you don’t buy them.
Here’s where the new roof came in. The old roof must have leaked, and caused this and that problem. But there doesn’t seem to by any major structural damage from it. This house is from around 1930, so it has many typical Bungalow style details, like flared sidewall shingles, a curved front roofline, a big shed dormer, and patterned concrete block foundation, porch, and front facade. So being a textbook Bungalow style, this immediately prompts the realtor to call it a Cape, because realtors don’t go to architectural school, if they go to school at all after the fourth grade.
The house has been seriously neglected, which is wonderful. It’s easy and rewarding to deal with neglect. It’s when people watch teevee and get ideas from raccoon-eyed harridans and men who sit down to pee that houses get really get wrecked. You can restore this house. You can’t if everything has been painted gray and covered in plastic.
There are four bedrooms and two bathrooms arranged inside a 2,400 ft2 footprint. As you can see, the roof leaked before it was fixed. I’ll bet that wallpaper is original equipment in the house. All the woodwork in the house is intact, and probably is the original shellac/varnish combo, easily refreshed. Almost all the floors could be refinished. There is some form of forced hot air heat ducting visible in the walls and floors, so you wouldn’t have to tear the place to pieces to update the heating system, probably just the furnace.
There are two bathrooms. One of them is a screech. It looks like it was added or updated in the fifties, and is quite an eyeful:
If you’ve never experienced it, there’s nothing quite like plastic tile. It was only popular for about ten minutes in the fifties, but somehow I’ve managed to be asked to renovate every bathroom that ever used it. The red sink and toilet is just a bonus. And I don’t know much, but I know that a roll of toilet paper placed in that holder will have more water in it than the river out back after the first shower, But I quibble. I’m not certain, but I imagine that the rag stuffed in the drain pipe conveys with the property, so you won’t have to bring your own.
Among all the other rooms, it’s got this bitchin’ den, complete with a bump out, a fireplace, Pickwick pine paneling, an inlaid floor, wall sconces, and even a piano.
Since the house was built in the 1930s, it’s even possible that the electrical wiring is safe-ish, instead of old knob and tube stuff, although good luck plugging in anything that needs a ground plug. The house needs plenty of plaster work, of course. But it’s not all that hard to patch in drywall, or simply demo large areas of failing plaster and drywall over the whole thing. And if you don’t need the space, you can close off the upstairs rooms and not heat them in the winter, or work on them one by one as you renovate the whole place.
So they wanted $129,000 in March, and woke up and smelled the coffee in May and dropped it by $4,100, and then got religion in July and knocked it down to $99,000. You could play chicken with the realtor, and wait for them to panic again, but sooner or later someone will bite, and a house for under a hunny will disappear.
So I’d love to buy this house, and put it to rights, and skip the gray walls/grayfloors/gray counters/gray cabinets/gray vinyl siding extravaganza this place is going to get. I’d like to put it to rights, more or less like it was when it was built. But I won’t, because no one much cares about stuff like that anymore. An American house is abused to destruction because it’s either a simple shelter to watch teevee in, or turned into a bland, expensive, plastic wasteland. And while I’d like to save every damsel in distress I meet while out skirmishing, they all seem to have nose rings and purple hair these days, and I’m no monument to justice.
No, I’m not talking about Bernard Purdie, shown here playing the drums with Vulfpeck, although it would be alright with him if I was. Bernard played on the original Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan minor masterpiece. I like how Bernard is wearing a Bernard Purdie tee-shirt. I think I’ll wear a Sippican Cottage t-shirt when I pick up my Nobel prize for literature. Or maybe a sweatshirt. I hear it gets cold in Stockholm. On further reflection, maybe they can just mail me the money and the bronze coaster with the dynamiter on it, and save me the trip.
Speaking of trips, in the title, I’m not referring to Bernard, or Becker or Fagen, or even Owlsley, the LSD king that Kid Charlemagne is written about. All that chemistry was in aid of the largest deliberate experiment in subverting the culture ever attempted: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Ken Kesey has had a larger influence on the United States than anyone going back to maybe Alexander Hamilton. And while it ultimately led by a very circuitous route to the wonderful agglomeration of Bernard Purdie and Vulfpeck playing Kid Charlemagne, it would be hard to come to any conclusion but one: That influence was all bad.
The Merry Pranksters, as they styled themselves, wouldn’t mind being called bad influences by the L7s, because they were rebelling against the squares. Many people thought the Pranksters were doing a good thing by telling people that drugs would expand their minds, and that these expanded minds would lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like whirled peas, face painting, and luxuriant armpit hair on women.
Well, it didn’t.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face They’ve joined the human race Some things will never change
These are the Day-Glo freaks Becker and Fagen were talking about, and Kid Charlemagne was supplying with LSD:
Kesey is largely responsible for the two major problems currently haunting America. First, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That made him a pile of money, and earned him plenty of notoriety. It was the lever that started the big rock of “reform” rolling downhill for US mental hospitals. Of course Chesterton’s Fence wasn’t consulted, and the benighted denizens were simply turned out of doors instead of firing all the prototypical passive aggressive girlbosses like nurse Ratched and starting over. So mentally ill people get to live under bridges and yell at cars, courtesy of Ken Kesey.
Then Kesey started the sixties counterculture, nearly singlehanded, if Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is to be believed. Now that Wolfe is dead, I figured it was safe to read something written by him. My wife found a dogeared paperback copy of it for me in a used bookstore. If I’m still reading the frontispiece correctly, this paperback edition was printed in 1989, but was already the 31st edition of the thing. I’m always amazed at how well bad writing used to pay.
I’m exaggerating some. The book’s not bad, exactly. But the breathless praise for TEKAAT book seems a bit much to me. The author was trying way too hard, and ends up sounding like a stoned, short-bus James Joyce. But that was the spirit of the times. To a normal person, a species which of course has currently been hunted to extinction, hearing the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the bad rock music, you realize that it only sounds like something if you’re stoned.
But that was the other Kesey shoe that dropped. Giving people LSD, including giving it to them unawares, is just one act in his passion play. The whole idea that it is completely normal for everyone to be stoned on one thing or another, or everything all at once for that matter, was adumbrated by Kesey and his coterie of Day-Glo freaks. I found it interesting that in the book, Wolfe describes what the merry band used when LSD was hard to get. They’d smoke a lot of weed and take a lot of speed, and reported that it gave them almost the same sort of trip. I immediately thought of today’s kids, gobbling ritalin and other ADHD drugs, which are a kind of speed, and smoking now-legal marijuana. Everything old is new again, I guess.
Downstream of all that, Kesey’s idea that any productive behavior is strictly for the squares now reigns triumphant. Riding around, stoned out of your gourd, and annoying the locals while filming it, just like the Merry Pranksters, is the number one career choice for young people these days, at least according to various polls:
86% of young Americans say they’d try being an influencer; 12% already identify as one, according to a Morning Consult poll (ages 13–38)
57% of Gen Z teens (13–26) believe they can easily make a career as an influencer, with the same share saying they’d leave their current job to pursue it
40% of teenagers (13–18) are actively considering becoming social media influencers, per a Citizens Financial/Junior Achievement survey
16% of teens explicitly want to become a “social media influencer/content creator,” ranking just behind entrepreneurship in a Junior Achievement/EY study
It doesn’t matter that there are no more squares to outrage. Grandma’s got an ass-antler tattoo and grandpa is swinging at The Villages hot tub with his current girlfriend. Whatever. Today’s young girls make endless videos of themselves stuffing comped food in their faces at various vacation spots, or take off their tube tops on OnlyFans to make a few bucks. The guys record their video games and publish them on Twitch or suchlike, and mention that they might also acquiesce to being a pro athlete, but pretty much no one wants a real job. Kesey did that.
So Wolfe’s book accidentally shows what happens the day after tomorrow when you take Timothy Leary’s advice to: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Plenty of those Merry people ended up in mental, and other sorts of hospitals. An assortment ended up dead. Jail was pretty common. Eventually the hippie chicks learned that Merry Pranksters thought Hell’s Angels were just as merry, and invited them over for what sounds to me like a gang rape that Tom Wolfe should have called that. And the whole lovely worldview soldiered on through the decades until it reached its apotheosis in Fentanyldelphia, Pennsylvania:
It’s useful to recall that the original idea for giving Americans LSD was part of a CIA mind-control experiment called MKUltra. I guess you could call it a failed experiment, but then again, you’d have to know what they were really trying to accomplish to know if it was a failure, and almost every record of it was burned by the CIA. But a list of the known and likely participants in the “experiments,” some unwitting, sure is interesting. Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, James Whitey Bulger, Ted Kaczynski, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson. Nice bunch of people there. Very tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Jim Jones had his own Kool-Aid test down in Guyana, too, and while no one can positively say the CIA was in on it, it sure sounds fishy, and one is reminded that denying they’re in on it is right on their business cards.
So what did it all add up to, really? Driving around in a garishly decorated bus, dressing in clown motley, taking drugs, and annoying regular people while filming it? Let’s go back to Steely Dan for the answer.
While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light.
Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks we’ve been meaning to read, but never got around to. Pull up a seat, and stay awhile. But be careful where you sit.
Even though the TSA did not formally release a statement, multiple travelers across the U.S. are already reporting on social media that they were not required to take off their shoes. At some major airports, passengers reported that some non-PreCheck lines allowed customers to keep their shoes on while others still required that they take them off.
I flew on a plane for the first time in twenty years last year. The airports had all the charm of a bus station, and none of the efficiency.
The question is whether—with enough automation—one person could handle everything needed to build a sizable business: coming up with a product idea, building it end-to-end, selling it, supporting customers, and more. But there’s another, similarly important question within the first one: Would anyone actually want to do all of that work alone? And would they stay sane if they tried?
I’ve done it several times, and without much automation, too. Man up, Nancy.
As home sales have slowed, properties are taking longer to sell. That’s led to a sharply higher inventory of homes on the market, benefitting investors and other home shoppers who can afford to bypass current mortgage rates by paying in cash or tapping home equity gains.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has updated its chatbot Grok to adopt a more openly politically incorrect stance, sparking new controversy. Over the weekend, xAI publicly modified Grok’s system prompts, instructing it to view media-sourced viewpoints as biased and to embrace politically incorrect claims—provided they are well-supported. The new directives also tell Grok not to reference these instructions unless asked directly.
Phone (3)’s 6.67-inch flexible AMOLED display is one of the best I’ve used at this price, and it matters. For anyone working with visual content, whether that’s sketching UI ideas in Figma, finger painting in the best drawing apps for Android like Heavy Paint and ArtRage Vitae, reviewing photos, or editing images on the go, this screen delivers clarity, colour fidelity, and contrast.
There’s a lot of words on that page, but I didn’t notice any about whether you could use this device to make phone calls.
“Some people knowingly sell their kidneys due to extreme poverty, but a significant number are deceived,” said Shariful Hasan, associate director of the Migration Programme at BRAC, formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, one of the world’s largest nongovernmental development organisations. “A rich patient in India needs a kidney, a middleman either finds a poor Bangladeshi donor or lures someone in the name of employment, and the cycle continues.”
My local hospital was begging for kidney donations recently. I decided to help them out. They were pretty unreasonable about the whole thing, though, with lots of paperwork, and asking all sorts of impertinent questions like, “Whose kidney is this?”
Archaeologists excavating at Gantangqing (an archaeological site on the shore of Lake Fuxian in what’s now southwestern China) unearthed 35 wooden tools from layers of soil dating to around 300,000 years ago. According to Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology archaeologist Jian-Hui Liu and colleagues, all 35 tools seem to have been designed, crafted, and used to harvest plants—specifically, the rhizomes, bulb-like corms, and other underground organs that many plants use to store nutrients.
I’m a woodworker. And I can assure you that it would take me around 300,000 years to find my bevel square.
The giant beaver’s journey to becoming Minnesota’s state fossil has been a long and winding one. The saga dates back to at least 1988, when a group of third graders first proposed making the massive mammal the official state fossil, according to Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Jennifer Brooks. Since then, the proposal has come up again and again. Each time, lawmakers have said no—but that changed this year.
Bones are pretty good, but I’m going to have to see some more damming evidence before I believe in these rodents of unusual size.
Matter replicators, organic transporters, and warp drives are a little hazy on the timeline, but it seems like the holodeck and emergency medical hologram are just about here.
I’m disappointed that “Jumping a hot green chick’s bones” isn’t on the list.
A cutting-edge gene therapy has significantly restored hearing in children and adults with congenital deafness, showing dramatic results just one month after a single injection. Researchers used a virus to deliver a healthy copy of the OTOF gene into the inner ear, improving auditory function across all ten participants in the study. The therapy worked best in young children but still benefited adults, with one 7-year-old girl regaining almost full hearing.
This sounds promising, but it’s likely to ruin a lot of perfectly good marriages, too.
Well, that was confusing. I had a Three Stooges flashback, and thought Saturday was always bath day. But we went to Bath, Maine, on a whim on Sunday, and it was Bath Day all over again. It was lots of laughs, even without the eye-gouges.
It was plenty hot. Around 90F. But while Bath isn’t technically oceanfront, it’s on the Kennebec River, which wends its way down from where we live in Ogguster, and then continues on past Bath out to the Atlantic. So there was a nice almost-ocean breeze, and 90 felt downright pleasant, at least if you stayed on the shady side of the street. Like this:
The picture is somewhat deceiving. We had just walked up Center Street, and were banging a left onto Front Street. That was where the action was, primarily, but it looks sparsely thronged in the photo. But there were a lot of people out. Perhaps they got a good look at us, and kept their distance while I took the picture.
You get a good feel for the place in that picture. Bath is a paean to brick. Real bricks, too, not awful concrete simulacrums. The sidewalks and the buildings and even the alleys are all bricks. Maine towns had a habit of burning down from time to time, and eventually the locals got tired of it and built the whole town over again with bricks. Portland is like that, too. Sometimes it was Indians, and sometimes it was Canadians or Brits, and occasionally, it was just the Know Nothing Partyburning Catholic churches. They got their comeuppance eventually. Besides barbecuing Catholic churches, I gather they were also big into women’s rights. As soon as women got the vote, they outlawed liquor. Imagine 200 shipyards and zero grogshops. Fate worse than death, that.
When we crossed the street to get our ration of un-awninged July solar radiation, which resembles Venus a bit, I took a snap that shows the brick-y facades of the shops to better effect. As you can espy in the next picture, the street has remained mostly unchanged during the last 100 years, except for the Great Awning Blight of 1937:
There are plenty of relatively monumental brick buildings mixed in with the wee shop-downstairs-a-few-floors-of-apartments-above. Like this gem:
Even the more modest bank buildings are pretty elegant:
Bath has a nice mixture of federal, Greek revival, and Italianate buildings. It’s got a hell of a city hall for a burg with fewer than 9,000 people in it:
The town has been known for shipbuilding since they chased the Abenaki Indians out. At one point, there were something like 200 companies making boats in Bath and environs. There’s still one big one, hulking over everything in the town: Bath Iron Works. They make destroyers for the navy:
Well, Prohibition is over, and Bath has numerous places with liquor licenses, and they even serve guys that went to Catholic school. We went in one, the Bath Brewing Company, and had some pale ale to go with their back deck river view:
Food was good, too. We watched over the railing as all the regular folks walked along the riverfront and got fried dough and fried skin in the afternoon sun as they sauntered on the road by the park, where a carnival had set up shop:
The park had one hell of a view of the mighty Kennebec, and the new Sagadahoc Bridge, which helps you continue on Route 1 without getting your feet wet. The old railroad bridge is behind it.
Bath was pretty normal, all in all, which is anything but normal these days. The park was filled with families, and a bandstand where yacht rock covers were served. The local wildmen was just mildly off-beat:
So we had a good time in Bath. I think I could live in Bath, and like it, although whether Bath would like me back is another story. I know it’s dangerous to judge a place on a single, out of the ordinary day, but all I needed to see was three good bookstores on two blocks of Front Street. Case closed.
And the monkey chased the weasel ’round the flagpole.
Not really. I’d have loved to see marching bands in uniforms, desecrating some Sousa while trying to remember straw foot, hay foot, but it was not to be. No matter. It was a very Maine parade. The Augusta July 4th just passed by my window, and refreshed my opinion of my fellow man a bit, even if they couldn’t hunt up any baton twirlers.
Since we’re living the vida loca in the city, we get certain perqs to go along with the lack of peace and quiet. We were smack dab on the parade route. I got to sit on my couch and watch it roll by. I was expecting a perfunctory affair, but it took a full hour to traipse past me and my cup of coffee. It was gratifying to see the street lined with families to see the parade. Children are, after all, humanity’s opinion that life should go on. There were lots of them along the sidewalk under our windows, doing toddler things and generally wearing out their parents in amusing ways.
The parades of my youth are long gone. I think that’s because parades used to be more crypto-military. It was never one of those soviet things with missiles rolling by a bandstand filled with guys about to get airbrushed out of photos or anything, but the vague outlines of the military were always there. Uniforms, marching in step, playing martial music, and waving flags. The pennants of the various marching groups were like battalion identifiers in the army. But that was because our parents generation still had world wars and police actions on their resumes. It was familiar to anyone who had marched in step, but completely devoid of any menace. The military used to be general. Now it’s niche.
So the parade was more like a giant, charming paramecium blobbing its way down the main drag than phalanxes on the march. It consisted of quite the agglomeration of the local gentry, and a heaping helping of just plain stuff, somewhat festooned with bunting and flags, and suitable for waving from, and waving at.
I don’t keep up with the Marvel Comics scene, but even to my eye, Captain America has let himself go a bit.
It was pleasant that the parade hadn’t devolved entirely into off-topic scene-stealing by the usual suspects. Here’s a nice bunch of folks on their way to sew flags or shoot a redcoat from behind a tree or sign a document in florid cursive.
I’ve performed in Fourth of July parades, and been dragged through the streets on a giant flatbed trailer, so I won’t make any mordant remarks about marching bands that don’t march.
The various dance studios from the area made appearances, and the gaggles of young girls certainly added to the festive and un-martial air of the proceedings. Here’s one set, performing their patented synchronized handstand maneuver, which was synchronized about as well as a helicopter evacuation from a fallen ally’s roof, but much more charming.
Holy cow, Shriners! They had Shriners like Nigeria has princes. They came in drove after drove, and drove little motorcycles in figure eights like madmen. They had oversized gas-powered big wheels, and drifted in crazy loops. Then there were little NASCAR wildmen bombing around, and even spicing things up by occasionally turning right, too. I have no idea how I got tilt-shift to happen on my wife’s phone, but I did:
The Shriners had an awesome bunch of antique cars and trucks, too.
You’re officially old when cars you once rode in while new are currently antiques. Dad! He’s looking at me!
After the legions of Shriners wore us out with their frivolity, some regular old commerce reared its head a little. It’s very Maine, though, to parade things like logging trucks. The little boys wander out to the edge of the parking lane, and make the international mime motion for yanking down on a cable, and the drivers cooperate nicely and blow their air horns. And honestly, is it really an Independence Day celebration until someone cruises by towing a Japanese excavator? I think not.
The parade lasted over an hour. it finished up with every fire engine from five towns around filing majestically in a line, and sending the toddlers behind moms’ skirts with their sirens. Lots of people threw candy to the kids, and someone even had a trolley full of free children’s books they handed out as they passed along the route. I noticed them on the way back, completely wiped out of books.
And this being Maine, when it was all over, and everyone had gone home to get properly sunburned and full of hot dogs and craft beer, there wasn’t so much as a candy wrapper left along the parade route.
You have to understand, right up front, that I’ve always hated this song.
You’ll have to imagine the various unpleasant bodily excretions I substituted for blood, sweat, and tears when I mentioned the name of the originators of Spinning Wheel. It’s a fat slice of 1968 flower power horsehockey in the lyric department. That was stapled onto jazz/rock/fusion sturm and drang that always gave me the hives.
It was plenty popular when it came out, but Henry Mancini kept Spinning Wheel out of the Number One slot on the charts for a while by the supposedly romantic but mostly depressing Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet. Considering the subject, it wasn’t depressing enough to convince people that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a romance, it’s a tragedy, but Henry tried. That was followed by another musical obstruction, the red-hot knitting needle for earwax removal and instant channel changing In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. So Spinning Wheel never made it to the top, but it hung around on the musical Hillary Step for a good long while.
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