Local Sportsball...

The Indiana University Hoosiers took on the hapless Purdue Boilermakers in the annual Old Oaken Bucket cross-state rivalry game and dismantled them 66-0, to wind up with an 11-1 record. First time they won the contest since 2019.

This apparently might not be enough to get them into the playoffs, despite the fact that they beat Michigan at home, which Ohio State was unable to do...

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Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Going off half-cocked...

*rubs temples*

He was charged with the misdemeanor crime of Battery against the woman, as well as the misdemeanor crime of Assault on an Unborn Child.

The headline and article are poorly and unclearly written, but for heaven’s sake, people, would it kill you to do a little journalism of your own before setting your hair on fire and running in circles?

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Celebrities are supposed to be role models, right?

Sean "Diddy" Combs knows the score: A dry carbine is a malfunction-prone carbine...

There are two kinds of people: Those who were horrified by this article, and those who were horrified by this article but wish with every fiber of their being that they could have sent this screen shot to Uncle Pat.

(Note for the humorless: By all accounts this guy is a real dirtbag, one of those sorts of dude who uses clout and success as tools to victimize women for his personal jollies, and they're apparently still writing books to throw at him... but any gun nerd chuckled at the plain text of that headline.)

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ELL OH ELL

Watching Trump implode at the NABJ conference in Chicago, faced with a huge audience laughing in his face and causing grievous narcissistic injury is just hilarious.

Super lulzy.

I have no idea why he thought his reception there would be any different…

Tab Clearing...

• "Zombie" alt-weekly newspapers are stuffed with AI-generated slop about OnlyFans.


• Why Chinese state propaganda outlets love foreign travel bloggers.


• Shenanigans with the "Public File".

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Argh.

Oh, gawd, NBC has some pasture pool tourney in Scotland on this morning, which probably means that half of my usual Sunday morning yelling at senators entertainment is going to be preempted.

Hopefully ABC isn't covering croquet championships or anything. At least I'll have Stephanopolopolopolous.

"If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press... unless we're preempting it for golf, or motor racing, or the Brightinghamshire Stoats are playing the Twarfton-by-Blight Tea Cozies in the English Premier League."

Okay, this is cool...

The original cast of The Avengers assembled again... to dub their lines in the Lakota language.

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Does not work that way!

The nice man on the TV news said “Paris may have the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe, but the most unique spot in France might be on the Normandy coast...”

I yelled at the TV “There aren’t degrees of uniqueness! That’s literally what it means!”

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Star War

So, I watched original gangsta Star Wars and Empire on Tuesday night. Then I watched Return of the Jedi yesterday afternoon. I tried watching The Phantom Menace last night and fell asleep. That's the third time that's happened when trying to watch it.

This morning I cued up Phantom Menace again over breakfast and finally managed to watch it to the end.

If you had asked me to bet everything I owned on the length of Episode I versus the original, I’d have lost it all. The original feels like a brisk 90-minuter while Ep.1 feels like a three hour slog, but Wikipedia says they’re a bit over 120 and 130 minutes, respectively.

When the Boomers have all died off and the GenX-versus-Millennial war kicks off in earnest, the Star Wars prequels are going to be the Fort Sumter of the conflict.

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Meme Dump...

Sports Fan Alignment Chart

It's a plague upon the land...

I’m half expecting Maher, Seinfeld, and Dennis Miller to merge, forming some nightmarish Cranky Late Boomer Formerly Funny Voltron and go on a rampage across the late night talk show stages of America.

“He’s 27 feet tall, has laser eyes, hasn’t told a funny joke since 2002, and he can’t take a hint: He’s Overstayed His Welcome Man!”

It's like this formulaic attempt at a career reboot with a "Didja ever notice they won't let you tell jokes about fat people, chicks, and Asians anymore?" routine is being circulated in some private Telegram channel for past their best-by-date comedians.

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Moves Like Jagger

Here are a couple of fact bombs you can drop into a conversation if you need to blow some minds...

• With their July 13th tour date in Inglewood, California this year, The Rolling Stones' first concert will be closer to the 19th Century than it is to their latest concert.


• Mick Jagger's youngest son is younger than his great-grandson.

Gives a whole new vibe to "moves like Jagger".
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You gotta love it...

"Caitlin Clark couldn't play for a Division One NCAA men's team!" -Joel in IT, 5'8" 240lbs

I LOL’ed

I saw someone online refer to Candace Owens as “Canned Ass Owens” and it caused me to express mirth audibly.

Look, you don’t pick messy public feuds with the boss, and no single employee is more important than the organization. Start thinking like that and next thing you know you’ll be doing “documentaries” about testicle-tanning on Xitter.

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Make your answer in the form of a question.

You know, in retrospect I'm kinda sad that we didn't get more Aaron Rodgers as a host on Jeopardy!, especially as his orbit has gotten increasingly far out there.

Can you imagine this?

Contestant: "I'll take 'People Who've Walked on the Moon' for $400, Aaron."

Aaron: "It's a hoax, you sheeple!"

Contestant: "Okay, then, give me 'Famous Vaccine Inventors' for $200?"

Aaron: "AAAARGH!!!" *rips up note cards*

Later:

Aaron: "And for Final Jeopardy, 'The water is turning the frogs' this. You have thirty seconds." 

Music: 🎶 Doo-do-doo-do... 🎶

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Tab Clearing...

• Russian GPS jamming out of Kaliningrad messes with Western commercial and government aircraft operating into and out of the eastern end of the Baltic.


• When heterodoxy runs amok. (Might be paywalled.)


• The surreal experience of being a guest speaker for the CIA's creative writing group.

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I LOL'ed.

The Atlantic titled a story about the social media theories swirling around Kate Middleton as "QAnon for Wine Moms" and I just want to recognize greatness in title-writing when I see it.

Well played.

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Fingers crossed...

Looks like it's time to reread Neuromancer. (Just kidding. It's always time to reread Neuromancer.)

Why you need a quarter (to call someone who cares.)

Ubiquitous (adj.) : existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : WIDESPREAD

Sam Waterston just appeared on his final episode of Law & Order last Thursday night. Do you know how long he'd been playing the character of Jack McCoy? Well, when he first appeared on the show in the mid-Nineties, detectives Briscoe and Logan still had to pull over and use pay phones to call the precinct.

Pay phones were everywhere, just a part of the landscape. There were banks of them at the airport, and you'd use them to call home to let them know your flight had arrived and you needed a ride. If you were broke and had a bit of larceny in your heart, you'd place a person-to-person collect call to "Homer" and they'd know you were ready to be picked up, saving you that crucial twenty-five cents.

The neighborhood weed dealer would be loitering by the pay phone out in front of the Majik Market waiting for calls from customers so he wouldn't have to talk about that stuff on his own phone line.

Once, when out for a late night walk with a friend, we were drawn to one whose kiosk was glowing hypnotically blue in the muggy Georgia summer night. On jiggling the coin return handle experimentally, it disgorged several bucks worth of silver like a slot machine that had just come up jackpot. We bought sodas and Slim Jims with our windfall and continued our stroll.

Nowadays? They're practically gone. It's an oddity to see a free-standing payphone these days. It's probably safe to say that the majority of Americans under thirty have never used one. I can't remember the last time I did, but it was almost certainly before I finally gave in and got my first cell phone in '03.

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