I listened to some Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner 2000-Year-Old Man routines this morning and now I’m going to be talking in a Mel Brooks Old Jewish Man voice the rest of the day.
“On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh.” – Heather Cox Richardson
Here’s something I saw while I was walking the dog: This fairy village, which we pass by every few days. They’ve arranged it nicely since the last time I stopped to take a close look.
They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus.’
Natasha Dangoor at The Wall Street Jourrnal:
When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding.
There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.
Social media has credited a divine intervention for this sudden return to mobility. An enigmatic “Jetway Jesus” is curing these passengers by the time they land, and the remarkable recovery acts have been dubbed “miracle flights.”
This year I traveled with someone who legitimately used a cane to walk, and it occurred to me that if I simply carried a foldable cane with me in my travel kit, I could get VIP treatment. But I only gave it a second’s thought and decided that would be a terrible idea, because I am not a psycho.
What It Takes to Pilot a War Drone in Ukraine
For this multimedia report, The New York Times joined a Ukrainian drone team at the front to understand how cheap drones have changed combat as we know it. The equipment is hacked together — the explosive looks like it’s contained in a plastic soda bottle. By Mauricio Lima, Andrew E. Kramer and Josh Holder.
This drone team, part of the 34th marine brigade, works in two rooms. One is cluttered with wires, antennas, zip ties, duct tape and soldering irons to modify the drones. The other holds the explosives. A wood stove provides comfort in cold weather.
The ingenuity is wonderful and the butcher’s bill (to use an old-fashioned phrase) is horrible.
Why we can’t get enough of Bohemian Rhapsody
Gwilym Mumford at The Guardian::
Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”
"Don't fuck with me fellas! This ain't my first time at the rodeo"
The phrase “this ain’t my first rodeo” goes back at least as far as the 1981 movie “Mommie Dearest,” where Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford proclaims, “Don’t fuck with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to a room of high-powered male executives trying to get the better of her in a business deal. A Way With Words: “Earlier forms of this expression involve such activities as a goat roping, a goat race, pumpkin picking, or a frog race.” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo” was also the title of a 1990 country song.
Rob Reiner said he was 'never, ever too busy' for his son
Fresh Air rebroadcasts its September interview with Rob Reiner, which includes a previously-unaired segment where Reiner talks about “Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences. Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.”
"... a giant robot with a chainsaw penis"
I clicked on this linkbait headline: “5 Forgotten ’90s Sci-Fi Movies That Still Hold Up Today” and was pleased to see the list includes “Robot Jox,” with a screenplay co-written by our friend Joe Haldeman.
The premise is that nations have replaced war with one-on-one combat between champions piloting five-story weaponized robot suits. “It’s a silly conceit, of course, but it’s no less absurd than the current war model. Why bomb out cities and murder thousands when you can build a giant robot with a chainsaw penis?”
Spotify Wrapped has proven hugely popular, and now everybody is doing it. I’m getting year-in-review notifications from many of the apps and services I use. I hope my urologist doesn’t want to get in on the action.
Rob Reiner, RIP
… very few people, much less filmmakers, had the sort of career run that he had as a director between 1984 and 1992: This is Spinal Tap. The Sure Thing. Stand by Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.
I mean, come on. With the exception of The Sure Thing, every single one of those is a stone classic, and The Sure Thing is still pretty good! It made a star out of John Cusack! There are things we still say because Rob Reiner directed the film those words were in: “This one goes to 11.” “As you wish.” “You can’t handle the truth,” and so on. You could go a whole day talking to people by only quoting Rob Reiner films and you could absolutely get away with it.
“[Rob Reiner’s] films have a certain comedy style … a sweetness and toughness…. Stand by Me is not just about four kids coming of age before junior high school — they’re going to see a corpse. If John Hughes had made Stand by Me — and I’m not knocking Hughes — they would have been searching for a convertible.”
RIP Rob Reiner and his wife in an apparent homicide. How terrible. He was a great talent and a mensch.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.
Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.
…
There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon).
— John Scalzi, “The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twelve: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
I liked but did not love “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I loved “The Breakfast Club,” and am a little abashed at that because I saw it when I was 25 years old — well older than the target demo. Y
es, I did come to sympathize with Principal Rooney over time; yes, he’s a loser, but he’s also a civil servant, almost certainly underpaid, trying to do his job, and undermined by a privileged teenage punk. And, as Scalzi alludes to in a comment, Jeffrey Jones, who played Principal Rooney, is a registered sex offender, which colors my view of Principal Rooney and his other roles. Notwithstanding Jones’s personal choices, he’s a talented character actor.
Principal Vernon, on the other hand, is a petty little bully. No sympathy. What kind of loser threatens a high school kid with, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns?” On the other hand, Paul Gleason, the talented character actor who played Vernon, seems to have been an all right guy, who praised his teenaged “Breakfast Club” costars.
Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the “new legal challenges” raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.
— Federal Wallet Inspectors, by Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr
John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.
In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His “Eight Worlds” stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.
We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or “Air Raid,” which made air travel terrifying again.
His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.
Briefly–for almost a decade–John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.
And then, alas, he went to Hollywood.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.
— National Smiles, The New York Times
Question for my micro.blog chums: How do you find old posts about a topic? Imagine you are a fan of the TV show “Severance,” and you write about it occasionally over a few years. One day you want to find all your “Severance” posts — how? Search?