The American Revolutionary War began 250 years ago today when Capt John Parker's Minutemen engaged a force of 700 British soldiers on the town green in Lexington, Mass. Just over a year later, England's North American colonies declared their independence from King George III with a document that you really ought to read again with particular focus on the King's acts that drove the colonists to break away. It was almost as if they believed having a temperamental monarch with worsening mental-health problems was a sub-optimal political situation.
Today is also the 30th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh's mass killing of Federal employees and their children in Oklahoma City. Any similarities between McVeigh's and the OAFPOTUS's politics are, I'm sure, coincidental.
As for me, and the gap in posting yesterday: I have a cold which seems entirely contained in my eyes and sinuses, so I didn't really feel creative. (Not that today's post is creative either, of course.) Somehow I got 9½ hours of sleep last night, according to my Garmin device, though I distinctly remember getting up to close windows when the temperature plummeted from 16°C to 9°C in less than an hour. And when the thunderstorms came through. And when Cassie poked me in the head. Both times.
It feels like the cold has mostly gone away, though. And with tomorrow's rainy forecast, it looks like I might get some writing done this weekend.
Cassie and I are taking a moment after a visit to Horner Park, where she met a bunch of new friends:
Note that the woman in the photo is not the beagle's human, which the beagle finds irrelevant if she can get her snoot deeper into that bag.
We have stopped for a moment to enjoy a beer (Hazy Sunday IPA) and crack-soaked popcorn at Burning Bush near the park. I feel no urgency about anything at the moment. It's a good day.
I'm absolutely bushed, so no Brews & Choos reviews from Milwaukee yet. If I get enough sleep tonight, and if I'm supremely effective in the morning, I'll start posting them tomorrow. There are four, after all, and only one of them is "eh."
I may have dodged a virus this week, though I'm not 100% sure yet. I have a lot more confidence in my health than the world has in the OAFPOTUS, however. And the news today doesn't change that at all:
- Radley Balko, tongue firmly in cheek, satirizes the Republican Party in a way I will not spoil for you. (His takedown of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, made me guffaw.)
- Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's irrational and malignantly stupid attack on the very things that made America great in service of his demented ego make it likely he'll do other malignantly stupid things in future.
- Anne Applebaum warns that "this is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like."
- Jennifer Rubin counters with a view of "when autocrats screw up."
- The Dispatch editorial board warns that the MAGA crowd's "foreign policy was ancient when Charlemagne was on the throne, and their economic philosophy was hatched in the 15th century."
- Conservative University of Chicago Law professor Aziz Huq offers up the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause as a possible avenue for defeating the OAFPOTUS's personal vendettas.
Tomorrow I'm taking advantage of a ridiculously full PTO bank and cheap train tickets to finally extend the Brews & Choos Project into Wisconsin, so you'll want to watch this space over the weekend for those posts.
My local dry cleaners burned down last Friday. Fortunately, no one got hurt, but the fire destroyed my concert tux and a very warm comforter. This morning I got off my butt and filed a claim with against my homeowner's policy, which I hold through Liberty Mutual.
I just got the settlement deposited into my bank account.
It's not a lot of money, since they applied 8 years of depreciation to what they consider 10-year property: only enough to replace the tux shirt and probably not much else. In fairness, I've worn the tux about 40 times over the years, almost entirely for performances, so I've gotten a lot out of it.
I am not looking forward to getting a new tux for the fall performance season. They ain't cheap.
Still, well done, Liberty Mutual! This is why I've been a member for about 30 years now.
Yesterday I had non-stop stuff from waking up until going to sleep. Today it's sunny and seasonably cool. In other words: as soon as I take a quick nap, I'm taking Cassie for a decent walk, then not doing anything productive until tomorrow.
Enjoy the weekend.
Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction:
Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever.
I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train:
It may be a really sad attempt to have real public transportation, but it's also a train station, meaning there are Brews & Choos-qualified breweries right by my hotel. I'm planning to visit one today. You'll have to wait until at least Friday for the reviews, though. And also for better photo editing.
Business travel on Sunday evening brings some good, some not so good. For starters, I got from the curb through security to the terminal in 12 minutes, because there aren't a lot of business travelers. On the other hand, getting to the G Concourse lounge involved a lot of near-collisions as the leisure travelers shuffled around without looking where they were going.
I'm impressed with what they've done to the lounge, though. I haven't been in G Concourse since August 2016, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Next report from Tennessee.
I've added a bunch of small but useful features to Weather Now:
- Users can now set their preferred measurement system (metric, Imperial, default) and time/date formats.
- On Nearby Weather and Nearby Places, users can double-click the map to re-center and load new info.
- Moved the Weather Score column on lists to increase usability.
- Tweaked the Weather Score formula.
- Several other bug fixes and feature tweaks.
So if you set up a profile, which you can do simply by logging in with any Microsoft ID, you can customize the app in a bunch of ways. (There's no cost, but I'd appreciate it if you'd subscribe on Patreon.)
Have fun with it. I'm probably going to slow down on Weather Now updates for a bit as I change focus to replacing BlogEngine.NET.
In just a few hours, though, I'm going to a work conference in Nashville, Tenn., where I will have the opportunity to visit at least three breweries. Stay tuned!
The Post's Monica Hesse watched the entire first season of "The Apprentice," now streaming on Amazon. Pray you never have to do this:
A refresher, since it’s been awhile since “The Apprentice” debuted in 2004. The show was a competition in which the prize was a vague job at the Trump Organization.
Upon this viewing, what surprised me the most is how much this show primed the country to think of Trump as imperial. I cannot stress this enough. Fanfares play when he enters the room. Contestants grovel for his attention. His properties, business deals and business acumen are all touted as “the best” and nobody fact-checks any of this.
But there were signs, I’m telling you. Bad signs....
Like Sam. There is a contestant named Sam, and he is terrible — he falls asleep in the middle of one challenge — and for two straight episodes everyone who works with him tells Trump that he is terrible and needs to be fired. But Sam talks a good suck-uppy game and he looks the part, so Trump keeps letting him stay, and anyway 21 years later Pete Hegseth is our defense secretary.
Or Omarosa. As soon as Sam is gone, Omarosa emerges as the next conniving, two-faced villain, single-handedly torpedoing her team’s success in multiple challenges. This time Trump sees it, too, but does he fire her? No. He fires the people he thought should have stood up to her better. Malevolence isn’t a sin, only weakness, and so here we are today watching Trump and JD Vance push around the Ukrainian president instead of the Ukrainian president’s bully.
“The Apprentice” was corporate cosplay, with decisions made based on what would play well with an audience rather than what would do best in a workplace.
Is there any reason, now, for DOGE to set completely arbitrary and legally contested deadlines for millions of federal workers to decide whether to quit their jobs? Any reason for Trump to fire the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center and appoint himself chair? Any reason for the United States to buy Greenland, which is not for sale, or annex Canada, which is not interested?
It’s government cosplay....
I've said it often: having spent the late 1980s and much of the '90s in New York, I have always considered the OAFPOTUS to be a boorish clown with horrible business skills and a schtick I found grating. It turns out, nothing has really changed except his platform.