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“MAGA has worked to impose the ideology of evangelical religion on America. In the military, [Nick Mordowanec of Military dot com] notes, Hegseth has pushed Christian theocracy through extremist Christian-based prayers services with a Christian nationalist preacher who has said women’s suffrage was a bad idea and has defended slavery, and has described Trump’s war on Iran as a holy war. Michelle Boorstein and Sammy Westfall of the Washington Post add that Hegseth has urged chaplains to focus on scripture rather than psychology and has said those who disagree with him are God’s enemies.” — Heather Cox Richardson

We are living in the Clear Channel internet, writes Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day…

… where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. … And there are really on two outcomes here. One possibility is we just slowly accept that nothing we see online anymore is genuine and accept that social media is just a new worse version of TV now. The other, much more interesting possibility, is that people realize the internet is infinitely big and you can always just make a new version of it.

I see this most prominently on Facebook, where 90% of my feed seems to be AI slop and ads for male incontinence products.

Also: Ryan and Panic World producer Grant Irving are going to the UFC White House fight. That should be insane and fun to read.

Sitthroughable

Growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, I loved reading the capsule movie reviews that ran in the television guide for the daily newspaper, Newsday. The reviewer, who worked anonymously for much of his career, wrote little jewels, often deliciously snarky, just a few words or a couple of sentences long, that summed up the movie and his opinions of it.

His trademark was the word “sitthroughable,” which is self-explanatory. He also had other catchphrases, including: “Buy the premise, buy the flick,” to describe horror movies and other genre oddities.

Examples of his reviews:

⁠The Americanization of Emily (1964) “The political ethics of the military are stomped in this wartime morality story written by Paddy Chayefsky. It concerns some Navy brass maneuvers and a running love/hate affair between James Garner and Julie Andrews. Cynical, witty and wise.”

⁠⁠Blood on the Arrow (1964) “If you don’t think an attempt to rescue a small child from a band of Apaches can be dull, try this.”

⁠⁠Cleopatra (1963) “The best and the worst that can be said about this celebrated expenditure of money, time, effort and talent is that it is dull. And, despite what you’ve heard, it’s Rex Harrison’s picture, if he wants it. Elizabeth Taylor is beautiful. Richard Burton too often acts like a man who can’t find the men’s room. The pomp and circumstance is there, but for the other two hours it drags.”

⁠Creatures of Destruction (1968) “A hypnotist seems to have mystic powers. There is no doubt that he can put you to sleep.“⁠

The Dark Angel (1935) “Merle Oberon loves both Herbert Marshall and Fredric March, who both love her. WWI arrives to further complicate things. Top grade soap.“⁠⁠

The Devil’s Rain (1975) “Concerns a group of devil worshipers (Ernest Borgnine plays the head devil’s disciple) somewhere in the Southwest who have traded their souls for wax bodies and tar-filled eye sockets, which melt and gurgle at the slightest provocation. The best that can be said is that it is not quite the worst movie ever made.”

And so on and so on.

A blogger has painstakingly assembled more than 900 of these reviews, along with a few scans of the actual TV guides in which they appeared, and I have read and enjoyed every one. The blog is called, appropriately enough, “Sitthroughable.”

The author of the Sitthroughable blog is apparently anonymous — if he gives his name, I can’t find it.

And like the blogger, the Newsday movie reviewer worked in anonymity for much of his career. But he eventually de-cloaked and revealed himself to be John Cashman, who previously worked for Newsday as Nassau County day editor, wrote four books, had written more than 4,000 reviews for the TV Book as of 1974, and kept going for years after that. He was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1964 for a piece titled “Negroes Without Schools,” owned a bookstore, taught school and died in 1985.

The artist who illustrated many of these reviews was named Gary A. Viskupic, and he did a fantastic job.

The author of the Sitthroughable blog notes correctly that these reviews are evocative of a bygone era in mass media, where you had a half-dozen channels of TV (fewer than that in smaller markets), no streaming, no movie rentals, so if you wanted to watch TV, you turned on the box and took your pick of the meager offerings available. Sometimes you found a jewel like “The Maltese Falcon.” Sometimes it was a mediocre, sitthroughable bit of cinema that passed the time and maybe had one or two great scenes or snatches of dialogue.

In addition to the Cashman blog, the Sitthroughable author hosts another blog, with the excellent name “Don’t Parade on My Rain,”where he posts scans from his collection of Newsday TV Books from 1974-83. The design of those books was outstanding, evocative of the 70s without being kitschy. He has a Facebook page too.

The two blogs are are artifacts of the good old web — still surviving and going strong but easily lost in the shadow of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and the other big social silos — where you could build a website, maybe about some weird niche interest, and that site would not get buried in the constantly updated feed, but would instead hang in there for 20 years until somebody like me came along to appreciate it.

And Chapman’s career is an artifact of the good old days of newspaper journalism, when a writer could master an idiosyncratic form of short-form writing comparable to haiku, sonnets — or today’s microblogging — and share it with local readers.

The cuck Internet theory asserts that social media is built on bots spewing algorithmically generated content for the consumption of algorithms, with flesh-and-blood people as incidental bystanders.

Facebook is now showing me frequent ads for male incontinence underwear and pull-up cargo pants for seniors.

RIP Anthony Stewart Head, who played Rupert Giles on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Rupert Mannion, the villainous ex-husband of Hannah Waddingham’s character Rebecca, in “Ted Lasso.”

Head said that his rise to global fame taught him “not to get caught up in the hype. [Co-stars] Alyson Hannigan and Sarah Michelle Gellar would talk about magazine covers, and I’d think: where’s mine? They were competing, but ultimately it’s a game that only lasts so long. It’s better to just get on with the job.”

Newsletter stickage

If you subscribe to this blog as a newsletter, you received two updates Sunday evening and nothing Saturday or Sunday morning. Or something like that; reading a calendar is hard. What happened is that the newsletters got stuck in the pipes and the support team at Micro.blog had to go down there with chainsaws and dynamite and get them unstuck. And then I had to give the mechanism a kick to get it started again. Metaphorically speaking. Anyway, newsletter production should continue as normal.

My Bluesky timeline is all politics, all the time. Is that a representative picture of Bluesky?

I have reached the ear-embiggening stage of the male aging process.

I haven’t accomplished enough to have imposter syndrome.

Overheard: “Every marriage has one person who reports whenever a celebrity dies and one person who says, ‘Oh.'” via

Here’s something I saw one day in 2012, at a neighbor’s house a few doors down from ours — a pet pot-bellied pig.

I ran into the woman who owns the pig this morning — I think it was the first time we’ve seen each other in all the intervening years — and she seems to be doing fine. She did not have the pig with her but she says the pig is fine too.

Overheard: “the white supremacists and misogynists who froth at the mouth about replacement theory don’t make a good case for why they shouldn’t be replaced”

Here’s my view when walking the dog past Lake Murray one morning late last month.

I’ve been relatively quiet on political issues lately, but don’t mistake that for apathy. Trump is a vile toad and he and his gang of thieves, pedophiles and morons are the greatest threat to the United States since the Revolution.

But I don’t feel like my ranting about it online does any good. So I don’t do it much anymore.

However, sometimes I feel the need to speak out, even though I know speaking out doesn’t accomplish much.

Now is one of those times.

Donald Trump is a rapist who is now using police authority to bully his 82-year-old victim.

Heather Cox Richardson: “Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.” Inmates at Delaney Hall have complied with US laws, but they have been denied due justice, and are kept in filth; denied medical care, including to the elderly and medically vulnerable; and denied due process.

“Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.

“Kim concluded: ‘Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.'”

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog yesterday: I’ve posted photos of this fairy village occasionally over the years, but I like to check on its progress now and then.

It’s growing. The Fairy Planning and Zoning Department is hard at work.

Here’s something I saw while walking with Julie a few weeks ago: This car, parked just around the corner from our house.

The bumper sticker on the right reads in full: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

My keen deductive powers tell me that the owner of this car is a practitioner of sapphic love.

We watched “Logan” last night, a movie in which an estranged father and daughter go on a road trip and learn they have much in common, including adamantium claws and anger management issues. Wholesome family fun. Watch it with your Dad on Father’s Day.

“When they divide up the pie in Washington, do you ever wonder who gets the biggest slice?” This 1971 anti-Vietnam ad still hits hard. Via

There are plenty of reasons to hate the 1963 John Wayne romcom "McLintock." But instead I liked it.

“McLintock” is a retelling of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Arizona Territory in 1895, starring Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in a celebration of sexism, ethnic stereotypes, domestic violence and right-wing politics. And yet I enjoyed the movie for its performances of Wayne, O’Hara and an ensemble of talented comedic character actors, as well as the look of the film and its joyful energy.

“McLintock” features Yvonne DeCarlo, aka Lily Munster; Stefanie Powers, before she had red hair and did “Hart to Hart;” Edgar Buchanan as the town drunk; Jerry Van Dyke; Patrick Wayne and Strother Martin, who later became famous for saying “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

I don’t plan to ever watch this again but it was enjoyable for one go-round.

"Clue" review: Sitthroughable

We watched Clue, a 1985 mystery-comedy based on a board game in which a half-dozen people are summoned to a creepy Gothic mansion. Murder happens. More than one. The movie has three endings — the idea when it was released was that people would go to theaters three times to see each of the three endings. The movie bombed at the box office but it became a cult classic at home where people could see all three endings back-to-back.

Tim Curry chews the scenery as only Tim Curry can; Lesley Ann Warren is gorgeous and sexy and tough; Madeline Kahn is wasted except for one brief monologue where she is allowed to be maximally weird; Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, Howard Hesseman and Christopher Lloyd are themselves, which are fine things to be; Michael McKean is maybe homophobic idk; and Colleen Camp is a French maid in a dress that is a marvel of engineering.

People love this movie. I guess I liked it. It was sitthroughable (AFAIK that word was coined by Newsday’s movie reviewer in the 1970s.)

Half-assed Internet research:

  • Carrie Fisher was originally supposed to play Miss Scarlet, but she went to rehab for drug addiction four days before filming started. Fisher wanted to appear in the film anyway on work-release, but the movie’s production insurance company vetoed her and Lesley Ann Warren was cast as a last-minute replacement.
  • Between takes, some of the actors played pool in the billiards-room set. But not Lesley Ann Warren, who was stuffed into a tight corset and used her break times to lean on things.
  • The secret passages in the movie lead between the same rooms as in the board game.
  • The singing telegram girl was played by Jane Wiedlin, rhythm guitarist for the Go-Gos.
  • Lee Ving, who played Mr. Boddy, is (or was) frontman for the punk band Fear.

Meanwhile, on Letterboxd

“My dad got in so much trouble for showing me this as a kid because I started saying ‘I’m gonna go home and sleep with my wife’ at school.”

“colleen camp doing that french accent is me after one duolingo lesson” 🍿

Gentleman unintentionally crashes a beach fashion show and usurps the spot of lead model. “I wouldn’t have had double dessert the night before — or the lunch before that — if I was going to be baring my belly to the world,” he said.

The lead photo on this article isn’t the show-crasher — it’s a model. Bad choice, NYTimes.

The Democrats finally released the 2024 election autopsy

Party chair Ken Martin saying the report is rubbish and he only released it to shut people up. That’s basically the upshot of this write-upby Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein on Axios.

The report doesn’t actually conclude what went wrong for the Democrats, and does not interview Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and many of their top aides.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has $124 million cash on hand and the DNC has negative $3 million with $17 million in debt.

Ironically, the election autopsy report, by its very incompetency, demonstrates how the Democrats lost the 2024 election — the DNC is a bunch of buffoons who couldn’t even manage to win an election against the soft-handed depo-baby Nazis that constitute the national GOP, and the Democrats also proved incompetent to produce a report about their failure.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: These stickers on the back window of a minivan at the park. The operator of this vehicle was nowhere in the vicinity but using my keen deductive powers, I deduce they are a woman, attorney, Mexican-American and a Pedro Pascal fan.

Finished reading: The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb 📚1967 space opera about an interstellar drifter searching for the lost world he was born on, a mythical planet called “Earth.” A light, easy read with clever gimmicks. I guess I’ll read the next book in the series one day.

The hero’s full name is Earl Dumarest, which is a funny name for a two-fisted noir space opera adventurer.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one afternoon in February 2019.

I don’t use dictation on my desktop. I have spent a lot of time typing every day for my entire adult life and much of my teens. I am as comfortable typing as I am speaking — maybe more comfortable.

But that’s only when I have a full-size keyboard and a flat surface to put it on. On my iPhone, I dictate, rather than type, half the time or more. I use Siri for that; I haven’t tried any other voice-to-text apps.

In the 1970s, writer John Varley wrote a series of science fiction stories where the characters communicate with their wearable computers using “subvocalization” — whispering inaudibly. Sensors at the throat detect throat and mouth movements and convert that to speech for the computer to read. That still seems workable, and would solve the problem of making offices sound like call-centers.

“I was on a call with investors who asked why there are so many protests about data centers. I told them something they didn’t want to hear. The public looks at what hyperscalers are doing and sees this: tech gets rich; you pay more for water and electricity; your kids may not have jobs. And you’re surprised that 85% of the public doesn’t like that deal? They’re not wrong.”

My colleague Steve Saunders interviews Blair Levin, policy analyst with New Street Research and chief architect of the 2010 National Broadband Plan on AI, infrastructure and why the U.S. is falling behind.

Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction — The Iran war is reducing demand for fossil fuels and driving the world toward renewables for everybody but the US, writes Rebecca Solnit. “This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran’s) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony.” (Via Cory)

My old friend Dr. Marc Gorelick, who is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine, writes about the skewed incentives in medical care that make a hair transplant more valuable than resuscitating a newborn infant.

According to the metrics used by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the American Medical Association, the hair transplant is 31-84% more valuable than resuscitating a newborn.

Marc mentions circumcision without making any jokes about it, which shows greater willpower than I’m capable of, and which explains why he is a respected elder statesman of pediatric medicine and I type for a living.

Nathan Lane on Fresh Air: “Nathan Lane says Broadway actors sometimes joke that their job is to keep 1,600 audience members from coughing.” He’s appearing on Broadway as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”

Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? Anil Dash: “The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades.”

I like Florida very much every time I visit, which surprises me, because the news makes it look like they’re setting up the Republic of Gilead. My one complaint is the flagrant air conditioning abuse. It’s 86 degrees out, heading to 92, and I’m sitting here getting frostbite in my fingers and toes.

This mini brownie was tasty, and its resemblance to the poop emoji made it even more delicious. #enshittification

I’m here at the Extreme Connect conference in Orlando, where the company unveiled its full-stack vision for AI networking, a new Wi-Fi 7 lineup, and more. My latest on Fierce Network.