- You probably never considered how awesome it would be to hear Rick Astley perform an acoustic cover of the Chappell Roan hit Pink Pony Club, did you? – via @jacksongagne.com
- The team at The Athletic put together a sweet Bluesky college football starter pack.
- Mustaaaaaaaaaard! – via kottke
- As a kid I only ever barely paid attention to Star Trek — we were a Star Wars family — but the way Chekov (Walter Koenig) repeats, “Botany Bay,” as he realizes his predicament is just phenomenal.
- Humor is vital to effective protest, and the Democrats suck at it. – via @kurtandersen.bsky.social
- I may have linked this already, but it’s worth a repost: “Wherever you get your podcasts,” is a radical statement.
- “If no laws have been broken, there should be nothing to hide.” – via @beyer.house.gov
I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought:
- The detention of Mahmoud Khalil means we are a hop, skip & jump away from political persecutions. It’s a steep, slippery slope from here to “speak out against [the administration] and go to jail.” – via @joycewhitevance.bsky.social
- I don’t even want to include the subject matter here, but these people are pure evil.
- McLaurine Pinover, the chief spokesperson at OPM and the current administration’s official tasked with defending “DOGE” personnel cuts, posted fashion influencer videos from her office.
- Listening to Chris Hayes interview Robert Garcia (D–CA) on his Why Is This Happening? podcast is not likely to make you feel any better about the future of our country, but it is pretty interesting.
- California, New York, and Maryland all confirmed their first cases of measles this week.
- EPA head says he’ll roll back dozens of environmental regulations, including rules on climate change
Twenty-five Years of Blogging
Happy birthday to this website!
- Oh, boy. This is just a fantastic response to being told you can’t teach DEI at a private university. – via @mjsdc.bsky.social
- If you grew up watching Schoolhouse Rock, you likely need a measles booster.
- I am irrationally upset that The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is ending its 54-year run. – via kottke
- The Last of Us returns for season 2 on April 13.
- I have always loved making paper airplanes.
- Some good news: From 2008-2022, cervical precancer rates dropped by a whopping 80% among women aged 20-24. – via YLE
- Sex, Drinking and Dementia: 25 Lawmakers Spill on What Congress Is Really Like is nowhere near as wild and crazy as the headline would have you believe. If anything, the whole piece reads more like, “Aw, shucks! These people are just plain old good regular folks like you n’ me!” Don’t bother.
In other news:
- This is how you become a Nazi bar.
- After Georgia banned abortion, its maternal mortality committee detailed the “preventable” deaths of two women, which led to the state… dismissing all thirty-four members.
- Democrats who censured Al Green are as clueless as they are feckless. Right now there’s too much appeasement and not enough fighting.
- I finally saw Captain America: Brave New World and will say that, at the end of the day, it was a fun movie. I think Anthony Mackie works as Captain America and he’s a fine actor. Harrison Ford is brilliant, of course. The plot is actually great. But — just like pretty much every MCU offering since Avengers: Endgame — I left feeling like I have no idea whether Disney and Kevin Feige have a plan or if they’re just pumping out movies.
- A Cheeto shaped like the Pokémon Charizard sold at auction for over $87,000.
- I cannot imagine a scenario in which Stephen A. Smith is worth $20,000,000.00 per year, but I also cannot imagine paying $87,000.00 for a Cheeto shaped like a Pokémon character, so I guess that’s why I am not in charge of contracts at ESPN.
- Two men were charged Wednesday in the deaths of three Kansas City Chiefs fans whose bodies were found in a backyard two days after they got together to watch the final game of the regular season in 2024.
- I am almost certain that I read Always Go To The Funeral when it was published (or aired on the radio) two decades ago, but it just popped up in a recent issue of Links You’ll Love and it’s worth sharing again.
- I one hundred percent did not see the sudden political twist coming in White Lotus S3E3 but I am f’ing here for it. Kudos to Mike White and HBO for going there. I can’t wait to see the next episode. (And, yes, I know it’s MAX now.)
In other news:
- POTUS signs executive order to establish government bitcoin reserve.
</bangs head on desk> - It’s Tax Season – The Perfect Time for POTUS to Sell This “Critical” IRS Computing Center: Last year, the IRS Martinsburg site was “viewed as a high priority.” Now it’s suddenly “functionally obsolete”?
- The CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive scientific research that has disproven or failed to find evidence of such links. – via @boghuma.bsky.social
- Maine officials said the Social Security Administration did not provide any explanation for the abrupt end of the decades old registration process, or for the sudden reversal. – via @crampell.bsky.social
- I really hope in a hundred years there will still be people left to cringe at this headline: Half the World’s CO2 Emissions Come from 36 Fossil Fuel Firms
- POTUS signs executive order to establish government bitcoin reserve.
- Steve Carell helped make sure high school students affected by LA wildfires wouldn’t have to worry about paying for prom tickets.
- For reasons I cannot explain, I have still not managed to watch A Knight’s Tale, even though I know it was one of my mom’s favorite movies.
- It doesn’t look like they’ve released their 2025 operating dates yet, but the Breathtaker Alpine Coaster is a must for anyone visiting Aspen in the summer.
- Take a moment to complete The Heritage Foundation DOGE Survey and give them a piece of your mind. (If you decide to use your real email address, you’ll have to unsubscribe from their garbage newsletter.)
- Friendly reminder: There’s seriously no sane reason to drill for oil in Alaska and anyone saying otherwise doesn’t understand math.
- I had no idea that watermarks were invented in Italy in the 13th century.
- Practically all of Spain’s population growth since the COVID-19 pandemic is due to immigration.
- Can confirm: “the democratic party leadership sorely underestimates how much young people fucking despise them” – via @junlper.beer
- Make It Stop:
- POTUS signs order designating English as the official language of the US
- This whole story is nuts: With its top lawyer placed on leave after less than one week in the role, a culture of fear has paralyzed FEMA. – via The Handbasket
- After the POTUS joint address to Congress earlier this week, Hayden Haynes, the chief of staff to House Speaker Mike Johnson and one of the most powerful aides on Capitol Hill, was arrested for driving drunk.
- Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) “[W]hat’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions.”
- The Iowa GOP advanced a bill making it a misdemeanor for a healthcare provider to administer a COVID vaccine. – via @piperformissouri.bsky.social
- Your Worst Is Not the Worst, the latest issue of Making It Work from Youngna Park, is powerfully relatable. Trying to explain to young children what’s happening in the world in 2025 is so, so hard.
- Behind the Collapse of Technicolor and Why Its Failure Is Sending Shockwaves Through the VFX Industry
- I quickly fell in love with the Hulu sci-fi series Paradise, starring Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden. Check it out.
- How Pop-Tarts turned an easy-to-forget bowl into one of the college football season’s best moments
- “There is not one Yeezy shoe left,” said Adidas chief financial officer. “It has all been sold and that episode is behind us.”
And now, the bad news:
- How “DOGE” Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save
- Marco Rubio is often the last to know when foreign policy decisions are made in the White House.
- A truly troubling read: “We believe this rush to comply is a sign that universities are willing to become an institutional wing of the new segregationists.”
- POTUS Signs Executive Order Handing U.S. Public Forests Over to Private Logging Industry
- The Strategic Crypto Swindle: A bitcoin reserve would be a government-backed grift.
- A leaked memo calls for VA to lay off as many as 83,000 employees this year.
- Some resistance leaders have created a Google Doc to track what members of Congress are doing during this March recess.
- A flooded quarry, a mysterious millionaire and the dream of a new Atlantis: An innovative mission on the Welsh border, funded by an anonymous private investor, has begun work to create a ‘permanent human settlement’ under the sea.
- What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. Gompertz Law is fascinating fun with statistics, even if it gets a little more terrifying to read every time.
- If your website’s “LOGIN” menu link opens a new window or browser tab, please know that every single person who clicks it hates you.
Make It Stop:
- Engineers and executives at the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries — sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting.
- A Timeline of the Politicization and Weaponization of the Justice Department – via kottke
- Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox that the solution to high egg prices is for people to raise chickens in their backyards. – via Today in Politics
- The Los Angeles Times removed its new AI-powered “insights” feature from a column after the tool tried to defend the Ku Klux Klan.
- With its ASMR videos of people being forced out of the country, the White House is turning suffering into entertainment. The administration is trying to showcase its program of “mass deportation” as reality-show style entertainment, through which voters will rationalize their cruelty.
- Fired federal employees – some with top security clearances – were not given exit briefings. That means, allegedly, their laptops, security badges, usernames and password, etc. were not collected either. I cannot fathom this level of government incompetence.
- Good news: Bill to ban trans athletes from team sports failed to advance in the Senate – via @erininthemorning.com
- Want to send a message to your representatives urging them to protect Social Security? AARP has a quick and simple form for that. Go!
- High-intensity exercise can significantly improve long-term memory, learning ability, and decision-making.
- Rolling Stone published a list of twenty “essential” Gene Hackman films but didn’t include The Birdcage?! Blasphemy. – via kottke
- My top five, in no particular order: The Birdcage, Superman: The Movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Firm, and Unforgiven
- The fastest and easiest way to cut methane emissions (as well as reduce water use and protect biodiversity) is simply to eat less beef. In the United States, half of all the beef is consumed by just 12% of the population, mostly men.
- See also: Climate Kids!
- Things That Suck:
- The Senate confirmed former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education as POTUS pushes to shut it down
- “In North Carolina, there has been a multi-year, hyper focused effort among political actors in the state to gain and keep control over the state supreme court.”
- FAA Officials Ordered Staff to “Find Funding” for Starlink – via @samhalpert.bsky.social
- I have several of these LEGO lighting kits and love them.
- Is it really true that no one buys books? According to the author, in 2020 only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96% of books sold less than a thousand copies. Big, if true.
- I’d never even considered combining an Arnold Palmer with a margarita.
- Was This Little-Known Standoff Between British Soldiers and Colonists the Real Start of the American Revolution? – via my dad
- One of the most surprising revelations in the Peacock comedy Mr. Throwback is that the Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry is a brilliant actor. (Oh, and he also dunked in a game for the first time in six years.)
- I really cannot decide if this article on testing push notifications on the iOS simulator was generated by AI or a human, but it’s got some helpful code that I was able to use.
Just… why?
- GOP blasted for gutting Medicaid to pay for $4.5 trillion tax cut
- Army Deleting Online Content Related to Women, Minorities – via @tyleraking.com
- In a strongly worded statement, Norwegian fuel company Haltbakk Bunkers has announced it will cease supplying fuel to U.S. military forces and criticized what happened when Ukraine president Zelensky visited the White House, referring to it as the “biggest shitshow ever presented live on TV.”
- If “DOGE” is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then its tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned. – via @propublica.org
- The inside story of mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff is pretty gross.
- When You’re MAGA, They Let You Do It
- Judge rules firing of federal workforce watchdog was illegal – via @browneyedsusan.bsky.social